Why would I ask such a big question? Am I seeking to enter into a philosophical discourse? No, here I am seeking a practical way to address the issue of what one wants to achieve out of Life Coaching.
Many people seek to better their lives through Life Coaching, but then we must ask the question “what does a better life look like?” In order to begin to answer this question we must question what is the meaning of life. Without a sense of why it is hard to evaluate what is “better”. What is better varies from one person to another.
I hope that through abstract discourse we might be able to arrive at a conclusion that works for everyone. The thing is that the meaning of life might be different for different people. Often it is dictated by our religion or philosophy or just our experiences so far in life.
In the process of exploring we might arrive at some unusual conclusions. You might look at one person who spends their life blissed out on various narcotics and never needing to face reality and another person who has an accomplished career and assume that the accomplished career is a “better life”, but if you were to decide that the meaning of life was achieving happiness then perhaps the person who was regularly in states of bliss and had minimal stresses in their lives experienced longer lasting happiness. What about a person who had thousands of friends in comparison to someone who had just 2? Is one more valid than the other? Well if we decided that the meaning of life was to be loved and maybe the person with thousands of friends did not have the quality and depth of relationship with them that the person with 2 friends did. So as we can see this a nuanced and complicated topic. It is also a very personal topic. What brings me meaning in my life might be very different to what brings you meaning.
Values
Let’s just look at some of the things that people value high than other things and how they might affect a person’s Life Coaching.
Happiness
For most people achieving a sense of happiness is their main goal of life. What would be the point of living if we cannot enjoy it? It is common for people to learn that happiness is selfish and so they become obsessed with denying themselves happiness. Learning to be a bit more selfish so we can be happy is a very worthwhile goal. Even, if your goals in life are not your own happiness then you can still benefit from making yourself happier so you can do more for other people without it taking as much of a tole.
Could this be the meaning of life for you? How would you identify the things which are contributing to your happiness? How can you identify the things which are inhibiting your happiness?
Love
For many people, life is mean to be shared. For those who choose this as the meaning of their life, I ask them to focus on the act of loving another person or loving themself rather than obtaining love. If we depend on someone else taking an action (loving us) to achieve our goals they are no longer within our power. We can only provide the right circumstances for that to grow, we cannot make it happen.
I also ask people to question whether they want to be loved because they believe it will bring them happiness and then really their meaning of life is actually happiness itself rather than love.
Is loving others a meaning of life for you? How can you spend your time so you are maximising on the connections you do have? What is preventing your connections getting deeper? Do you want to arrange your life so you can have more love in it?
Respect / Pride
Many of us, particularly gay men, have experienced love from a young age, but without much respect and it has come across as hollow. This then leaves us with a feeling that love is not of value unless it comes with a form of respect. We are drawn to fulfil a life of perceived value. Again if we place the emphasis on other people, this takes this matter out of our control. If instead we can define a life we would be proud of whether or not we have the respect of others then we can work toward our own pride. If however we achieve this because of the hole left in us when we feel loved, then we are simply looking for a complete form of Love as our goal and that itself might also be to fulfil happiness.
Achieving a sense of pride and self worth is often a reactionary motivation from things like low self worth and despair, but its results are often forbidable. If this is you, can you find a way to avoid the neurosis, but still achieve the goal? This means seeking out things which you would be proud of yourself if you invested your time in, but also recognising that perfectionism is not a reasonable goal and priorities are important.
Charity and Service
For many life is the opportunity to serve others particularly those less fortunate than you. This is a fantastic and seemingly selfless motivation, but when people are honest with themselves, often their motivations for this come from things like a sense of pride and purpose. So they too can be subject to selfish motivations. It is better that we identify those and accept our demons yet still achieve the charity and service we want to achieve, just without the neurosis that might motivate it. Often with clients for whom this is a genuine highly held value and
Art and Creation
For many people life is the opportunity to create art or things. Could this be the meaning of life for you? Often the art we make leaves behind an immortality we could never achieve corporeally.
Freedom and Power
Often individuals are draw to levels of freedom and power. Living without much freedom or power can be a very difficult thing with a severe emotional impact. This is particularly common when individual experience a low sense of power in their youth and try to compensate for it in adulthood. Often due to the illusory nature of control this can seem to be a neverending battle. This can manifest as a focus on career and money to achieve the seeming safety that this provides. Sometimes this involves working on personal power in relationships.
Religion
Many people derive their sense of meaning from their religious teaching. You might not adhere to any religions, particularly not those below, but it might be worth skimming them to recognise what they can do to help you discover your sense of meaning.
I do not have the time to explore all faiths in the world and have focused on these because they provide 3 very different points of view.
Abrahamic
The Abrahamic religions often begin their texts with a story which holds more information about the meaning of life then it appears to on first glance. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.
Most people do not realise that this is a retelling of what was once a pagan story. In the pagan story adam seeks the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil central to the Abrahamic story is not mentioned once! The snake, who can shead its old wrinkly skin for new younger looking skin and seems to live forever, knows of the Tree of Life and man goes on a search for this immortality. In the Abrahamic story however when it comes time to mention the tree, we hear not about a Tree of Life, but about a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil suggesting that under the leadership of this new Abrahamic god, mankind no longer needs to seek for immortality, but instead should concern himself with morality.
The meaning of life in the Judaic, Christian and Islamic faiths is to live a moral life. However in these world views the morals we live by are imposed by a moral god and we should surrender to his will. The very name of the Islamic faith means to surrender to god.
For many deists whether Abrahamic or otherwise they find meaning in their lives in service. They devote their lives to something bigger, more important and more powerful than them. In serving, they are fulfilled.
Daoist
Daoism is a religion often associated with China. In fact many people do not recognise its name, but recognise one of the symbols it gave birth to: the taiji (t’aichi) symbol often just called Yin and Yang.
In Daoism the force that resulted in reality and maintains it, is simply called the Dao or the way. It is said that any attempt to conceive of what the dao is, is fruitless because, like God, it is beyond any conception man can conceive of. Mankind need not worry about god.
Instead mankind should live a humble balanced life without extremes and go with the flow. This is similar to the idea of surrender explored before. One should live ones lift with minimal resistance or “Wuwei”.
So for the Daoist the meaning of life is to live without resistance, not worrying about the nature of god. This role is often represented in media with characters such as Master Ooogwai, Yoda, Uncle Iro and many more old Wizards.
Buddhist
The Buddhist on the other hand view reality as a form of sufferring and an illusion. For the Buddhist, the rarity of a human life means that we should take this opportunity to strive to free ourselves from this painful existence and illusion. Living with attachments, attaches us to this samsaric (hell-like) existence and results in pain. The meaning of life is to relinquish attachments and experience the serenity and peace of not existing, or at least not existing as we are currently existing.
It is believed that the ego is an illusion and if we free ourselves from this then we transcend the pain and sufferring. So the meaning of life is to free ourselves from this sufferring.
Philosophy
For many the approach to defining the meaning of life is not a matter of cosmic concern, but man’s concern. So we build a level of philosophy and psychology that enable us to proceed.
Nihilism
For many philosophers thinking about this subject, there is no meaning to life at all. But then, do we need a meaning? Frequently when people go through lives they feel as though they achieved nothing with their lives and this gives rise to feelings of worthlessness, no direction and despair. For many this sends us on mental journeys to discover the meaning of life, but sadly some simply remain in this dark night of the soul.
In reality however what these philosophers are talking about, is that there is no innate meaning of life in their perspective. They don’t believe in god, heaven or something in the universe to impose its divine will on man and give him meaning. But really do we want a divine purpose imposed on us. What if I told you, that the meaning of your life was to sell all your possessions, move to a tribal village in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere and send your life treating the sick and farming your own food? The universe was going to pick where you were going and you just need to always do what it said. Might sound like a simple life and many people might think oh the simplicity of this life might make me happier. But many people would not like this grand imposition of the universe in their personal life. We often gravitate towards freedom and picking our own trials. If the universe is not imposing a meaning of life on us… that frees us to choose our own meaning of life and our own values.
Nihilism gives us a blank canvas over which we can write our own meaning of life. We can base it on the things which are important to us and not need some meaning given to us from the outside world.
Freud – the Will to Pleasure
For Freud, much like happiness, the will to pleasure is recognising that there should be nothing stopping you from enjoying yourself. No condemning god, no universal doctrine. Freeing yourself from these repressive teachings so you can maximise on your own happiness is the meaning of life.
This often lacks a universe given raison d’etre, but that can be seen to free up the individual to choose their own power. The individual seeks their sexual freedom and those willing to fulfil it. Sometimes this can be guided by the Life Coach, but the focus is usually on things which inhibit sexual freedom and their alleviation.
Adler – The Will to Power
Adler believe that a client often has a will to power inspired by Nietzche. Often a child grows in a society dependent on the community in which it is raised. As a child the client had no power they needed the mother’s milk for a few years, comfort from people in the community and the father to provide food for the child later.
The child is later draw to be more powerful so that it can provide for the society rather than consume from it. In some cases where the child lost parents or the parents fail to fulfil safety provider roles sufficiently the child is traumatised and will seek self-sufficience so that it has not need for community or society again. As the individual can rarely live entirely without society they will often seek positions of power within society such as highly paid positions and jobs so they never experience the vulnerability again.
This can be positively and negatively motivated but it can be an all consuming need. No Life Goals is complete without some idea of the levels of personal power to which the client should aim, but it is also important to consider at what point this can be relaxed so the client does not continually aim forever.
Post Nihilists
Victor Frankl – the Will to Purpose
Following surviving in a Nazi concentration camp Victor Frankl had a number of comments about the meaning of life and wrote and often reference book called the search for meaning.
Frankl criticised the Nihilists who came before him because they proposed that the universe had no innate meaning. They concluded that the meaning that many men found was put in place as a defence mechanism against the worthlessness, lack of direction and despair. It simply arose out of their need to find a socially acceptable (sublimated) expression of the despair. Frankl however observed that man was willing to die by his convictions and if they were merely sublimated reactions against despair then we wouldn’t die for it.
The are some authors that content that “meanings” and values are nothing but defence mechanisms, reaction formations and sublimations.
I would not be willing to live merely for the sake of my “defence mechanisms”, nor would I be willing to die merely for the sake of my “reaction formations”. Man however is willing to live and even die for the sake of his ideals and values.
Viktor Frankl
Frankly points out that maybe there is some innate meaning to the universe and it relates to the stuff we would die for. He felt that the progress of science was conditioning us to see ourselves as a victim of our circumstances which means that we would not achieve any kind of life change.
Side note: I often think this mindset has gone further as we explore villains in movies and give them tragic backstories that lend them justification for being evil. Cruella is not evil she’s just reacting to the difficulties of achieving in the fashion world. The Joker doesn’t mean to hurt people he’s just suffering from mental illness. Maleficent is simply hurt from when she was drugged had her body subject to mutilation. It would be wonderful if we sought to understand our enemies before we condemn them, but it leads to this fatalistic view where people are no longer responsible for their own actions. They are just the product of their upbringing and genetics? Are you just going to let yourself be such a victim or rise above a universe telling you what you are limited to be.
Frankl believed there should be a tension between what one is and what one should become. It is through this tension we gain a sense of purpose.
No a tensionless state, but the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal or a freely chosen task.
Frankl
Frankl felt that the loss of animal instinct and the loss of tradition mean that we are left with an existential vacuum which is what leads us to feel empty.
Jung
For Jung the meaning of life was most important. He viewed man as struggling in a world that does not offer meaning freely. He believed that this lack of meaning was the cause for much of the mental illness suggesting about a third of his cases had no other cause.
Man cannot stand a meaningless life. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest things without it. Man woke up in a world that he doesn’t understand, and that is why he tries to interpret it. About a third of my cases are suffering from a case of no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senseless and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.
Carl G Jung
Jung sought meaning through individuation. The individual tries to get closer and closer to the true self through a process called individuation. This where a person circumambulates their true identity, recognising the forces that pull their current self away from their true identity and seeks to embody the forces that pull the individual off track until such a time as the individual discovers the true self.
In one particular doctrine of Jung, called Shadow work, Jung seeks to identify the aspect of the self which are so repulsive to the client that the client fails to recognise them as aspects of the self and pushes them away from the metaphorical light into the shadow. In shadow work the individual seeks to identify the aspects of the shadow which we have hidden from ourselves and bring them back into the light and learn to embrace them.
The only meaningful life is a life that strives for individual realization – absolute and unconditional – of its own particular law. To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his own being, he has failed to realise his own life’s meaning.
Carl G Jung
To summarise Jung tells us that the meaning of life for him, is to learn to be truer and truer representations of ourself. Is this of high importance for you?
Crowley – The Will
After mentioning all these Wills, it seems inevitable that we talk about Crowley. For him all these “Wills” are the self-deterministic power of the individual. As he wrote “Every man is a star” so each individual is his own galaxy manifesting its own reality without a need to worry about how he impacts other people because should be in tune with his divine Will, then it will be synchonised with other people’s.
For Crowley the great work is the pursuit of one’s own destiny that they have laid out in front of them. Seeking their destiny and figuring out how to pursue it. When achieved the individual will find everything fits together.
Conclusion
The meaning of life is a complicated and nuanced topic. Many of the philosophies I have presented here are simplified somewhat beyond recognition, but they should play a small part in determining our goals for any form of Life Coaching that we pursue because understanding our values and how we live our live is a crucial part of making sure the goals we set are catered to the client.