Meaning derives from suffering, pain, hardship, struggle, exhaustion, as does happiness - from working through these states. We cannot be happy or have meaning in our lives without this expense of energy, without giving ourselves and strugging and suffering for something, for an achievment. Part of this is also knowing the difference between types of sufferings, between how and why they exist. We suffer for all the wrong reasons. Learning how to suffer “in the right way” is essential - what it means to work, struggle, suffer, sacrifice, achieve, overcome, create, grow. To become, to be.
Happiness is what can happen when we have a brief absence from these mental states, when we experience fulfillment of our efforts and strivings. Meaning is what happens when we associate things and people with these states of happiness or completeness. And meaning and happiness feed into and off of each other, one leading to the other when we are immersed within the moment, when we let go and just live carefree and spontaneously, letting go of the need for control and the anxiety of separation. We are not separate, separation exists only in our minds.
Kids are not nihilists, because they live in the moment, completely connected to reality in innumerable deep and intimate ways. We need to re-learn what this is like. As adults we forget what it means to be alive.
If we talk about nihilism as a dissatisfaction with life, in an emotional as well as cognitive sense, it stems from the lack of meaning and happiness, which, in turn, these lacks stem from the lack of struggle and suffering in our lives. Life is too easy, too simple, too repetitive, too unchallenging.
I would call the state of happiness and meaning “being whole”, just being in the moment, satisfied, connected to yourself and the world around you, at peace and stability.
Novelty is another important factor to happiness and meaning, to being whole. We need new experiences because having the same experiences over and over again deadens the receptors in the mind and body, the experience cannot generate the same responses within us. No one can remain vigilant forever. At some point laziness and apathy and unfocus set in, we drift our attention, we disconnecte from the repetitive experience because it is not stimulating enough. We know it, so the mind moves on. In general modern life is very repetitive. So this leads to a state of disconnection from that life.
When we are a kid we experience immediate ecstatic happiness from the simplest experiences - standing outside underneath a tree, running in a field, playing with a new toy, building a tower of blocks, a bowl of ice-cream, a baseball game, getting up early to watch saturday morning cartoons. These things can cause so much simple and overwhelming happiness in a kid because they are new experiences; they are fresh, unknown, exciting, unexpected, riveting, infinite and expansive (they are infinite, from the perspective of the kid). As adults we lose the sense of infinite expanse in reality, we measure and define everything. Labels and concepts close off reality from us, our words take the place of immediate conscious experience of being immersed in the present moment. Happiness and meaning can have as little to do with this sense of being in the moment, of being infinite, of being expansive, of being spontaneous and undefined, of being liberated and free.
And along with this comes striving, working, putting in effort - this is what is meant by suffering. Suffering is not about being in pain, it is about working and striving for something, something hard, something that takes input of energy. As organisms we are constructed to create, interact, experience. When we are in a pure state of being immersed within an environment, new and exciting and unknown, and then in this environment when we are engaged in tasks which require the expense of energy, of our time and focus, and we can observe the results of this input, we feel natural, complete. Kids live their lives like this completely, but somewhere in growing up we lose this feeling. We dont want to put in effort, we want to be in control of everything and thus we kill the unknown and spontaneous in our lives. The need for control defines the neurotic, precisely because he has this need while at the same time feeling out of control. We are all of us neurotics - in a way, growing up is a growing-neurotic.
Most of us push this away, repress it inside. Drown in work or leisure such as philosophy. Escapism becomes one of the central tenants of our lives. But what are we escaping from? The world? Our lives? Yet we are the ones who create our world, in a personal way - we are the ones who give rise to our lives. If we are seeking escape from the world, from life, then it is only ourselves that we desire escape from.
Nihilism is a symptom of neurosis more so than psychosis, but it can be symptomatic of both - the neurotic has far more need for nihilism than the psychotic. Psychosis is the state of over-stimulation, over-immergence within the environment and within one’s own mind and body, a state of over-connectivity; neurosis, on the other hand, is a state of under-connectivity. In many ways these mirror each other, but they are fundamentally different. Yet both are negative states, they are harmful and wasteful of our potential, they represent loss of self and of ‘being whole’. Nihilism is one way that the cognitive thinking mind copes with and generates solutions for this pervasive state of neurosis - either state of loss will need to be dealt with by the organism (you) and thus your mind tries to think up solutions. . . yet these take the form of controls, of definitions, of theories, not of practical solutions or deep connected syntheses with your inner nature and true problems. Thinking is used here as an escapism, as a drug to patch the problem temporarily - and when the patch fails, more thinking is employed to make a new patch.
The same problems that lead us away from happiness and meaning in our lives (disconnection, neurosis or psychosis, or both, as the case may be) are the same things which lead our thinking mind to slip away from actually addressing the problems themselves - our cognition and consciousness do not want to fix the problem, because that would mean identifying it, and that is too hard, would be a contradiction of the very conditions which give rise to the problems themselves. Nihilism is one of these thinking-escapes, a conceptual patch. It doesnt work very well, because it causes its own problems. Nihilism only reinforces neurosis and psychosis because it defines them and gives justification to them, legitimizes them in the mind. Of course we know intuitively that they are still problems, that they still represent pathologies, but we train ourselves to be in constant denial. Nothing gets fixes, nothing gets solved and we are left floating in a disconnected world of loneliness and misery.
Nihilism will only make it worse. Nihilism is only a reaction of the thinking mind trying to cope with the underlying problems of neurosis and psychosis. Mental anguish, cognitive dissonance, emotional instability, denial and repression, self-doubt and confusion, these plague the mind and body, sap its energies, turn consciousness and being alive into a prison and a Hell. If nihilism helps alieviate this temporarily, as it will do, then that can be a good thing in terms of escaping from suffering - but it is precisely the need to escape suffering that causes these problems in the first place.
Life is a place of uncertainty, struggle, chaos, infinite distances, unending possibilities - when we shut these away we are only creating a false reality within our minds, at the expense of contact with genuine reality itself. Our neurotic need for control does not generate a new reality, it does not change the nature of life and reality itself, it only separates us from these.
Getting back to a child-like state of wonder, being immersed within reality, sensing the infinite expanse and unending possibilities, being spontaneous, being free, being in the moment, suffering in the moment, finding solutions, expanding ourselves into our activities and becoming one with the world and things and people around us, are the answers to nihilism, depression, disconnection, neurosis, psychosis. The answers are to return consciousness to its rightful place, to its natural state, and this requires working to remove the artificial barriers that we put up within our minds and lives.
We need to learn to let go - to be kids again. To experience the wonder and awe of being in the moment, of having new and exciting experiences of an unknown and uncertain nature - of sensing the infinity of the world around us. Free yourself from definitions, from closed boxes of concepts, from the chains of paradigms and beliefs. . . these are merely your thinking mind constantly trying to control everything. Let go of your need for control. Identity can be one of these manifestations of this need - if your identity is the product of your need for control, let it go. Be something else, be nothing, be in the moment, be alive without names or words or beliefs. Just BE.
Remember the feeling of being a child. We each have those memories, the pure bright wonder of being alive, pure genuine happiness and perfection with the world. Recall that state, re-create it in your mind. Seek the conditions of that state within your consciousness, bring it forth.
Be simple and carefree and light. For myself this feeling of pure happiness, pure being-alive is captured by a memory of me and my friend Trevor running through knee-high grass just after dark, the large moon hanging over our heads, the grass wet with dew, running through the field behind my house through a small park and to a playground with swings and slides. Having come from my house, where my parents were throwing a party, I had the music and feeling of connection and mirth welling up within me - I was so in the moment, carefree and joyous, the night was a mysterious place around me, the sensations and cool air energizing. Running full speed, music and joy in my mind, I felt alive, pure happiness of being in the moment, joy of being alive. This sort of feeling can be recaptured if we re-learn what it means to be conscious, to be alive in the first place. Find your own such memory, and go there. Be quiet, be simple, be sincere. Just close your eyes and go there.
Sometimes healing can be about nothing more simple than just being. Stop doing, stop thinking, and just be.
