May Angels Lead You To Willingness: Dialogues with "Man's Search for Meaning"

I recently came across the idea of logotherapy in Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”  I briefly nerded out big time: I initially intended this post to be a wholesale endorsement of Frankl’s thought.  It proposed good concepts such as “Nouogenic Neuroses”—those resulting not from conflict with the basic human drives (the freudian definition) but from “existential problems and existential frustration.”  It talked about “paradoxical intention” as a way of tackling neuroses, and that resonated with my experience that the first step of recovery was to label your situation unmanageable.  So “I’m an alcoholic” is the first verbalization necessary to render one’s alcoholism dormant and live more healthily.  Frankl’s book says that man’s search for meaning is his basic human drive, and that the “will to meaning” was his fundamental freedom, which can never be taken from him.

It was a tempting intellectual morsel for an author who, since June sixth’s first “Kairos, Koans and Conversion” post, has been claiming that “Logos is Mu.”  Sharing the divinity of Christ who emptied himself to share our humanity is too big a theme here to expect otherwise. My zeal has flagged some, in the changing winds of nuance.  Still, if Frankl’s book were a woman, I would be kneeling with a decoder ring fished out of a Cracker-Jack box, saying “You are at least 70 percent of what I’ve been looking for my whole life, and I sorta want to spend most of the rest of my life with you. Kinda.” Frankl himself got at the core of my difficulty: if the “existential frustration” with which one deals comes from outside of us, we deal with it by paradoxical intention—fully admitting it’s there—and work with it by embracing it.  If our existential frustration is actually a tension of our own making, it’s best to stop fooling ourselves, lay off the self-sabotage, and go forward from there.  But I’ve too often confused what I can change and what I can’t, and I haven’t bothered to seek differentiating wisdom.  I don’t feel I have the skill or conceptual tools, the wielding of which might prove Frankl’s philosophy personally accurate.

If philosophies are like women, consider this a singles ad, a statement of the kind of girl the walls at Under the Influence were made to bear posters of.  Meaning, for me, has been (too often) egotistically created and enforced, so I’m wary of Frankl’s “will to meaning” from the word “go.”  Before the metaphor overextends into long walks on the beach, let’s get down to it.

Under the Influence believes that the basic human drive is the search for willingness, and that the ability to accept the waxing and waning of meaning constitutes the fundamental human freedom.  I may sometimes have a "healthy sense of self." That will endure until it's time for me to look at my flaws.  I may sometimes have a coherent sense of life's meaning, but spiritual progress entails a scrambling of that meaning.  Accepting both meaning and the lack thereof, send of self and lack thereof--this is how I take my place on the Great Mandala.  Everyone's gotta take their turn on the downside of the wheel.  With this kind of set up, meaning’s a party bonus of finding willingness, not an object of potentially egotistical striving.

It is process, not product, that’s important here.  Furthermore, we don’t start out willing.  We start out willful and clinging to whatever will leave our desires for affection, security and power fulfilled.  If “spiritual materialism” is a trip we’ve laid on ourselves, we attempt to fulfill those egotistical desires and pass the whole thing off as holiness.  So “becoming willing” is important wording: it smacks of passive volition, of learning to be present to reality when we find ignoring it all too easy.

If a willful preoccupation with unreality is our starting point, then we come to grief in finding what is.  Egotism projects a stubborn false self, and it’s got to die daily if we’re to live more deeply.  Quite literally, we find willingness, in part, by moving through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of dying. Those are, in order: Denial, Anger, Sadness, Depression and Acceptance.

To the monastic version of my earlier self, the “Stages of Dying” were a revelation.  I’d let go of my old life, of possessions, of the many ways society grabs for power, affection and security, but it never struck me that those renunciations saddled me with a grieving process.  Sensitivity to the constant and healthy role of grief in letting go explains, in large part, the depression that found me in my high school years and occasionally visits me still.

For a moment, let’s detail something.  In the first place, let’s talk about he “Stages of Reparenting” my own guideline for coming to terms with my past.  Then lets take a look at the passions by which we misuse things, emotions, others and self.   The Steps of Reparenting can be used to grieve our attachments to the passions as well.  Life is more full of good grief than we realize, and the processes are more similar than we think.  Not only are the stages similar, a few typical egoic avoidance maneuvers mark each process.  When they arise, if a person has their head about them, they will not be surprised.  

The Stages of Dying, referenced here because the other sets of stages echo them, are  Denial, Anger, Sadness, Depression, and Acceptance.  I won’t examine these in detail.  It was a blessing to have seen the Stages of Dying as personally applicable.  However, for a younger version of myself, emotional choreographies from my family of origin governed my present interactions.  This was a real thing, and even more pressing than coming to terms with mortality.

The Stages of Reparenting are lifelong tools, not one-time emotional tricks.  They are: Denial, Self-observation, Sensation, Transmutation of Energies, and Acceptance of the Past.  When we go from denial to self observation, family influence on present choreographies are laid bare.  A middle child might see that he often mediates disputes in his adult life because he grew up running interference between parents.  He might see that a facial expression or gesture by a colleague causes disproportionate anxiety, simply because similar expressions and gestures meant trouble growing up. 

After Self-observation, all of the truths about “the body being the unconscious” come into play.  Old trauma is stored as pain in the body, and isn’t released until we face it.  So the next phase is “Sensation.”  We reclaim the body from the emotional numbness unreconciled trauma imposed. We release old pain.  On the level of discursive thought, this looks like "reparenting."  I have, in my psyche, voices that represent different responses to trauma: my inner wounded child does a lot of raging and screaming, my inner unhealthy adult would drink his pain away and manipulate people ad nauseum if I let him.  It's possible to hear these aspects of the psyche, without doing their bidding.  And when they feel heard and empathized with, they don't tear through my choices like bulls through a china shop. The "Healthy Adult" and the "Original Child" are free to hold sway over my actions.

The fact is, though, the energies that undergird that understanding will need to be contended with whether I've become aware of the need to reparent or not.  If I can't quite wrap my head around "inner child language" it's possible just to work with the different bodily vibrations involved.

“Transmutation of Energies” is a term borrowed from Tantric Yoga.  In Tantra, it smacks of dualism to say that suffering is a problem in need of a solution.  Instead, Tantra sees suffering as pain we have not yet faced.  It’s famous for seeing lust as sexual passions we’ve not yet used for connection.  As in physics, the body’s energy is changed, not destroyed so another can be created to replace it.  Once we recognize stored trauma, we can then “inhabit it,” transforming the pain by full acceptance of it.  This involves an ability to recognize the pain, but make no attempt to manipulate it.  In particular, people raised in dysfunctional families may have a hard time with this: a childhood of being manipulated will inevitably have taught them to manipulate themselves.

There’s a quote, that is attributed (and misattributed) to a dozen people, but it came to me through the slam poet Buddy Wakefield.  In his poem “Gentleman Practice,” Wakefield says “forgiveness is letting go of all hope for a better past.”  This sunk in for me: when I let go of the hope for a better past, I can forgive.  Wakefield also, quite beautify, says “this is an apology letter to the both of us for how long it took me to let things go.”  I have often taken too long to let things go, especially if the hurt was prolonged.  But when I’ve been able let go, I’ve had a chance at reaching acceptance, the last stage of the grieving process, where the past can be the past, and its pain doesn’t have to be my present.  

My past created my ego, and letting go of that false self wholesale and all at once would most likely lead to nervous breakdown.  We have to allow life to highlight the presence of—and begin to deconstruct—each of the eight evil thoughts—which in the Catholic Tradition act together to form the ego.  Some of the thoughts—gluttony and greed—are about misuse of things.  Some of them—sloth and sorrow—are about misuse of emotions.  A third variety—specifically lust and wrath—are objectifying others and a fourth variety—vanity and pride—objectifies Self. 

The “Stages of Reparenting" can be used to deal with the passions as well.  All of the passions are about something good, at their core.  Food is awesome, gluttony is not.  I am freaking amazing, and vanity does me no favors.  Self-reliance is sometimes necessary, but pride makes me an isolated, sad white man.  So with our capacity for abuse laid bare, we’re simply left with the thing itself: Lust leaves us, and leaves us with love.  Sloth ambles off (anxiously, with disinterest) and leaves us with the ability, here to work diligently, there to take the rest we’re given.

It’s important to note that, when I’m grieving the false self, there are a few constant features to working through the steps. In the first place, as the post "Trust God: Steps 1-3 of ACA" claimed as it ended, I don't work the steps, the steps work on me.  At best, I am present to a work my Higher Power is doing in me. Additionally, right before the energy of Ego begins transmuting, it suggests suicide as a way to free ourselves.  Egoic thinking is un-nuanced, and is apt to throw life—the baby—out with the egoic bath water.  But that thought is just an event, and if I can let it go as spontaneously as it arose, then what comes next is an opportunity indeed: I hit rock bottom.  And as surrender became, quite suddenly, a possibility for Bill W., so it becomes for me as well.  Sometimes it’s sudden, sometimes gradual, but there is always a “giving up” that frees us from Ego’s grip.

If only that were the end of the story.  But the ego reasserts itself, this time wearing the garb of holiness.  In this regard, as funky as I feel about Frankl’s “will to meaning,” the flesh he puts on those bones is helpful in one respect.  He says that Love and Work are reasons to live, and I believe him.  As bad a rap as “spiritual materialism” gets at Under the Influence,  I have to say at least one thing in its defense.  Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz.  He mentions several things on which the “will to live” might rest, in the absence of which, he said anecdotally, he’d seen too many perish.  People survived who had, for instance, the Love of a Spouse to return to.  He survived by rewriting a book whose only surviving copy was taken from him on arrival.  

I perpetually feel as if I’m only beginning to be aware of the purgatorial predicament my vocation’s designed to work out, to say nothing of creating enough self-love for my girlfriend’s generous affection to find sympathetic resonance.  All of this is to say, when my youthful self confronted the possibility of suicide, a perceived abundance of grace kept me alive.  But it came with no real self knowledge whatsoever.  The “commissioning” that such a life saving event could have been was severely stunted by not knowing what I’d been kept alive for.

Frankl speaks of a disillusionment among holocaust survivors.  He says that, after the War, people were liberated, but that didn’t mean they were happy.  The fact took prisoners by surprise, and caused no small amount of disorientation.  It was the same with me.  Avoiding suicide was a liberation, but no sense of purpose steered me safely through the deconstruction that ensued.  Conjuring a life and identity around religion kept me emotionally together while life haphazardly dismantled my former self.

The Porisover Rebbe, a Jewish teacher in the Hasidic tradition, said “If God sends sadness, we ought to feel it.”  Certainly that’s part of it.  But the responsibility goes even deeper. Bernard Malamud, in his book, The Mourners talks about Gruber, a well-nigh destitute Jewish tenant, who’s being evicted by Kessler, a Jewish Landlord.  Gruber delays moving out to such an extent that Kessler breaks into the apartment, only to find Gruber, now faced with homelessness and potential death, is praying the Kaddish, the classic Jewish prayer memorializing the dead, for himself.

“Saying the Kaddish for oneself” is important and instructive.  If we all, as St. Paul says, “die daily”—if the egotistical self is daily ceasing to be, then a certain quantity of grief will be ours to bear consistently.  If we can take nothing with us, then we have to work through the emotional choreographies of letting go.  In the end, it’s Jacob’s Ladder all over again: like our teacher, we bear our burdens, become like Jesus was, a crosswalk for the cherubim.  The Catholic Funeral prayer will be easily self-applied.  At the end, no one will need to say “may angels lead you to paradise” because we’ll have been their well lit path the whole time.