EIGHT

MEANING FOR A MEANINGLESS WORLD

If the world we see is defective and unreal, what is the meaning of life? For that matter, is there a meaning to life?

Life in this context almost always means human life (as opposed to, say, biological life as a whole). Meaning, in its customary sense, always points to something beyond, something else. In the language of twentieth-century critical theory, which harks back to Saussure, meaning necessarily involves a signifier and a signified. The signifier points to the signified. The word dog points to a certain familiar domestic animal; thus it means more or less the same thing as chien or Hund or sobaka to speakers of other languages. The word nfaaraa points to nothing and so has no meaning in English, or, so far as I know, in any language. To someone who does not know German, Hund does not mean anything either.

In that case, if there is such a thing as a meaning to life, life must point to something beyond itself. Not for all, perhaps. There are those for whom life has no meaning beyond itself; it presents itself simply and directly, with all its joy and suffering. One cannot help loving such people; literature has immortalized them in Falstaff, Sancho Panza, Zorba the Greek, and the characters in Aristophanes. They may well be happier than the common run of mortals, but theological or philosophical questions generally do not occur to them.

Others, after ransacking the schools of human thought and going away disappointed from all of them, come up with a similar answer. As FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat puts it:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument

About it and about: but evermore

Came out by the same Door as in I went.¹

Sometimes people who have lost faith in explanation try to return to a primitive simplicity. This does not seem to work very well; the whiff of disappointment does not go away. I have this impression, for example, with Tolstoy, whose overbearing embrace of Christian humility and simplicity toward the end of his life often sounds forced.

For some, the meaning of life points to something within life. Frequently the answer is some form of excellence or dominance. For the Homeric heroes it was glory and future renown. They had nothing else, because the Homeric concept of the afterlife as a miserable evanescence did not give them much to look forward to. Other common answers are wealth or power. Certainly there are many who view life in these terms, but the emptiness and impermanence of these aims have been stressed by almost all of the wisest individuals in history—many of whom learned this truth from grim experience. Ecclesiastes is one of its greatest expressions.

If most people were asked what gives meaning and purpose to their lives, they would no doubt answer in terms of family: it is for my spouse and children and kin that I live. No one could condemn them, but like all attempts to find meaning within life, it is treacherous. Loved ones leave or die just like everyone else. Few families, no matter how solid, would not be convulsed by a desertion, an accident, a medical diagnosis. It is common to see people who have been irreparably damaged by the loss of a spouse, or especially a child. If you live for your child and your child is taken away, what do you have left?

Let us turn then to the next possibility: that life neither means itself nor anything contained within its own sphere; it has no meaning at all. Many have reached this conclusion, notably the existentialists. Because there is no God and man has no innate essence, they argue, life is meaningless and therefore man is totally free. But the consequences of this daring proclamation are not what you might expect. Discarding the Christian God with his double-entry moral accounting ought to be exhilarating: someone who does this should feel like a child who has been let out of school. But this is almost never the case. The existentialist sees the meaninglessness of life not as a permanent vacation, but as a curse that is more bitter than slavery.

Some say the desire for a meaning to life is merely wishful thinking, a belief in a Santa Claus that the mature adult has to set aside. But if there were no meaning to be desired, why would we desire it? Desire, like meaning, always refers to something beyond itself—the desire itself is evidence that the thing desired must exist. It is never directed toward a nonexistent object, even when this is far beyond reach. A man wants to be rich; he is lazy and stupid, so he has no chance of attaining his goal. But that does not make the goal nonexistent: it is possible to be rich. Similarly, you may desire world peace, even though world peace does not exist. And yet peace exists—and world peace is thinkable even if it seems very remote.

In short, you would never feel thirsty if there were no such thing as water. Our very desire for a meaning to life strongly suggests that there is such a meaning.

Some may say that the idea that life has a meaning is erroneous because it assumes that life is a signifier like a noun or a verb. Life is no such thing, they would say; it is not a word; therefore it is nonsensical to ask about the meaning of life. But I have used the expression meaning of life because it is ubiquitous. That in itself suggests that the question is valid. If it really were nonsensical, no one would have asked it for long, just as nobody asks, “Why is green?” The question of life’s meaning, however, is asked, continually and relentlessly, and there is something in the human mind that will not let go of it. If I were to replace the phrase with something similar, such as the purpose of life, it would come to the same thing, because purpose too points to something beyond itself.

We are then driven to conclude that life must have a meaning beyond itself, beyond what Christianity calls “the world.”

A Course in Miracles begins its Workbook lessons with meaninglessness: “I am upset because I see a meaningless world. . . . A meaningless world engenders fear” (W, 19, 21). This “meaningless world” is described as “the world I see”: “The world I see holds nothing I want” (W, 233).

If we were left at this step, the only result could be nihilism and despair. But, the Course continues, “you cannot stop with the idea that the world is worthless, for unless you see that there is something else to hope for, you will only be depressed” (W, 235). Thus the next lesson says, “Beyond this world there is a world I want” (W, 235).

But the Course’s stance differs from the gloomy and pessimistic world denial that theologians criticize (usually in someone else’s theology).

The world is nothing in itself. Your mind must give it meaning. And what you behold upon it are your wishes, acted out so that you can look at them and think they are real. Perhaps you think that you did not make the world, but came unwillingly to what was made already. . . . Yet in truth you found exactly what you looked for when you came.

There is no world apart from what you wish, and herein lies your ultimate release.

Change but your mind on what you want to see, and all the world must change accordingly. Ideas leave not their source. (W, 242)

The ego has arisen from the “tiny, mad idea” that the Son of God could exist apart from his Father, or could create a reality that is not in accordance with his Father’s, or indeed his own, wishes. This idea gives rise to fear; in essence, the ego is fear. It is frightened by its imagined revolt against God and retreats further into fear. It cannot accept itself as the source of the fear, because that would call its own existence into question. So it projects its fear onto an imagined outside world, “the world I see” (W, 34), the result of “attack thoughts” (W, 40).

The ego sees this revolt as killing God. The killing of the god is a common if not universal theme in many religions. One example is a myth found in the Karadjeri tribe of Australian aborigines. It tells of a pair of brothers, the Bagadjimbiri, who in the Dreamtime came out of the ground in the form first of dingoes and then of giants. They taught many valuable skills to the Karadjeri, including the rites of initiation. But at some point a man killed them with a lance. Resuscitated by their mother’s milk, they were transformed into water serpents. Their spirits ascended to the sky, where they took form of the Magellanic Clouds. The Karadjeri meticulously imitate their actions, especially the initiatory rites.²

This myth rests upon a profound ambivalence: worship and imitation of the divine brothers, along with an implied guilt because they were killed by the tribe. We can see this as a reflection of the process of which the Course speaks. The ego “revolts” against God, and, in its guilt, imagines that it has killed him. But it is able neither to destroy him nor forget him.

Christianity plays out this dynamic by portraying the murdered god in the form of Jesus. There is much guilt surrounding this act, and it is manifested in a split fashion. On the one hand, Jesus died for the sins of all of us, so in this sense all of us have killed him, and we cling to the consequent guilt. On the other hand, there is an equally powerful urge to get rid of this guilt by projecting it onto the putative culprits—usually the Jews. I do not think it is possible to fully understand anti-Semitism without acknowledging this fact.

This imagined murder of God may illuminate other psychological facts as well. In Totem and Taboo, one of Freud’s strangest but most evocative books, he proposes that the Oedipus complex and its associated guilt goes back to an incident that took place in the “primal horde” of humans (a concept postulated by Darwin). This was a tribe that was led by the father, who dominated the clan and kept all the women for himself. Jealous of his sons, he expelled them from the tribe. “The expelled sons joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde.”³ Their guilt, echoed down through the generations, manifests in the incest taboo and the Oedipus complex.

It is not clear how seriously Freud took his own theory. One early critic mocked it as a “just-so story,” and Freud was amused; as a joke, he said, it was “really not bad.”⁴ In any case, I am suggesting that the just-so story in Totem and Taboo is functionally similar to the Karadjeri myth and countless others, and that the Course casts some light upon it. The ego revolts against God the Father. Again, it interprets this revolt as “killing” God, leaving a guilt that is both profound and deeply hidden. Of course the ego cannot kill God. God cannot be killed, and the ego does not really exist. But it imagines it has committed this crime, and cannot let go of this belief. The fear is played out symbolically through repetition in the initiation ritual of Karadjeris (which must carried out exactly as the brothers did it), and in similar rites in other religions, such as the Christian Eucharist. These considerations may explain the highly obsessive-compulsive nature of ritual as a whole.

This is the world we inhabit. We project our fears onto an imagined world and feel guilt that, having revolted against God, we will be punished by him. Like Cain skulking away from the sight of the Lord, we take refuge in this world, while populating it with innumerable threats—germs, disease, natural disaster, other people.

We are like the man in the box of mirrors. If he acknowledged his own madness, he would grow still more fearful, because he would realize that he is his own worst, indeed only, enemy. So he must protect himself from this fact by projecting his fear outward, onto all the grimacing faces that he sees in the mirrors. He believes that they are other people, some of them friendly, others menacing.

But, you may reply, we do not live in a box of mirrors. We live in a cold, hard, all-too-factual world, where threats are real and real damage can be done. So it would appear. But all this damage, all these threats, can only affect one thing—the body. For the Course, the body is the concretization of the ego’s fears—the “‘hero’ of the dream” of separation (T, 585). “The body is the ego’s home by its own election. It is the only identification with which the ego feels safe, since the body’s vulnerability is its own best argument that you cannot be of God” (T, 66).

According to the Course, the body, like all things, is produced by thought. Thought is the cause; physical reality is the effect. “Thoughts can represent the lower or bodily level of experience, or the higher or spiritual level of experience. One makes the physical, and the other creates the spiritual” (T, 3).

The physical body, says the Course, cannot be the creation of an all-good God. If it were, it would not be a source of suffering, pain, and treacherous pleasures. Here the Course differs from conventional Christian theology. But in so doing, it evades many of the difficulties that ensue from believing that the body, which for all of its intricacy is far from perfect, is the creation of the perfect God. Instead, the Course says, the body was made by the ego. In terms of the first half of this book, the Fall takes place with the construction of a five-dimensional reality, whose outermost shell is the organs of the body.

But this does not mean that the body should be hated or punished. Instead it is to be regarded as a completely neutral thing (W, 445). “The body, valueless and hardly worth the least defense, need merely be perceived as quite apart from you, and it becomes a healthy, serviceable instrument through which the mind can operate until its [i.e., the body’s] usefulness is over” (W, 253). There is no need for austerities or abstinences. The body’s sole value is to communicate the Holy Spirit’s message of love.

If the body is the work of the ego, what is the ego? The Course uses the term the ego in a radically unusual manner.^*9 Usually the term refers to the conscious, street-level self that is ostensibly in control of an individual’s mind during the waking state. This is not the way the Course uses the word. The ego, in the Course’s system, is not the street-level self. It is a primordial disassociation, one that is prior to waking existence and indeed to the physical world. The ego gave rise to the cloud of oblivion, out of which in turn our sense of five-dimensional reality arises. The ego, then, is not ordinary consciousness but a loss of consciousness at a level so deep that we do not recognize it has happened.

The Course is designed to strike at this cloud of unknowing. (For an exercise from the Workbook illustrating this point, see here.) From its point of view, the clouds are your grievances—the things you hold against other people, against the world, against yourself. These grievances, the products of the ego, serve as cognitive blocks to your perception of what the Course calls the real world.

It follows, then, that the way past this cloud of oblivion is letting go of your grievances—in a word, forgiveness. The Course posits forgiveness as the sole possibility of escape for us, the sole hope of escaping from the meaningless “world I see”: “Forgiveness is the key to happiness. . . . Forgiveness offers everything I want ” (W, 214, 217).

But this is not forgiveness of the conventional kind, which a supplement to the Course calls “forgiveness-to-destroy,” contending, “No gift of Heaven has been more misunderstood than has forgiveness. It has, in fact, become a scourge; a curse where it was meant to bless, a cruel mockery of grace, a parody upon the holy peace of God.”⁵

“Forgiveness-to-destroy” includes nearly all of what passes for forgiveness in this world.⁶ Often it involves a lordly disdain, “in which a ‘better’ person deigns to stoop to save a ‘baser’ one from what he truly is.” In another form, ostensibly more humble, “the one who would forgive the other does not claim to be better. Now he says instead that here is one whose sinfulness he shares, since both have been unworthy and deserve the retribution of the wrath of God. This can appear to be a humble thought, and may indeed induce a rivalry in sinfulness and guilt.”

Still another version of forgiveness-to-destroy takes the form of bargaining: “‘I will forgive you if you meet my needs, for in your slavery is your release.’ Say this to anyone and you are slave.”

Much of what the world calls forgiveness falls into these categories.

True forgiveness, or “forgiveness-for-salvation,” is the opposite. It follows rigorously from the premises that the Course sets out. If this world is a fiction concocted by a mad belief in separation, then only one sane response is possible: to recognize that, whatever form sin appears to take, it is part of the “meaningless world” and therefore simply does not exist—in anyone, ourselves as well as everyone else. “Forgiveness . . . is an illusion, but because of its purpose, which is the Holy Spirit’s, it has one difference. Unlike all other illusions it leads away from error and not towards it. Forgiveness might be called a happy fiction; a way in which the unknowing can bridge the gap between their perceptions and the truth” (M, 83).

Forgiveness, then, is the principal means of Atonement.

To a mind oriented toward the world we know, this sounds ridiculous—sweet, maybe, noble, maybe, but quite naive. But it may be otherwise. In my book The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, I have argued how, even from a conventional point of view, forgiveness is not only more powerful but more advantageous than many believe. Grievances are enormous obstacles to happiness and success. Even apart from any spiritual element, forgiving grievances can provide an enormous boost for anyone who attempts it sincerely. It also follows naturally from the premises that the Course sets out.

The Matrix shows a dystopian future in which humans are kept submerged in a trance while their energy is siphoned off to power a race of automatons. To keep the humans in their stupor, the automatons have created a virtual reality—the Matrix—in which the humans appear to have ordinary existences. (Significantly, the automatons first attempted to create a paradisal Matrix, but the humans would not accept it and obnoxiously kept waking up, so a second version, replicating the relatively sustainable misery of late twentieth-century America, was fabricated.) Nearly everyone submerged in this fictitious reality accepts it as the truth. Only the tiniest remnant are capable of awakening from it.

Everyone in this Matrix accepts it as reality. There are friendships, quarrels, rivalries, just as in the world we know. But all of it is fictitious. What could you say about “injustices” and “crimes” here? They are all equally illusory. Should you hold a grievance against someone who harmed you in this nonexistent world? At the very least it will not improve your chances of waking up.

The world we live in is equally fictitious. There is no point in holding grievances against people for what they are doing here, any more than you ought to be angry at someone who has hurt you in a dream. Holding grievances will only “make error real” (T, 215) and hinder you from awakening.

That is what the Course is trying to say. “The full awareness of the Atonement, then, is the recognition that the separation never occurred. The ego cannot prevail against this because it is an explicit statement that the ego never occurred” (T, 98; emphasis in the original).