Hello,
Understanding life’s deeper meaning is especially important in today’s times because we have so many options to choose from. Just as it’s possible to spend a whole day surfing superficially on the net looking at this picture or that movie or that news without learning anything worthwhile or even enjoying anything substantially, so too can we spend our whole life surfing superficially, doing this and that, without ever connecting with our essence, without understanding what it is that makes us us, without manifesting that which we are meant to contribute during our life-journey.
The importance of meaning in life is higlighted by classic books such as Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankyl. Based on the author’s survival amidst the horrors of the Holocaust, it explains how without a purpose for life, we lose the drive to live. A lack of a sense of overall meaning and purpose of life is the cause of the many mental health problems facing society nowadays ranging from depression to suicidal urges. They all have their specific, complex triggers, but they also originate in a universal malaise: the alienation and disorientation coming from meaninglessness and purposelessness.
Psychologist William Sheldon of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons echoes, “Deeper and more fundamental than sexuality, deeper than the craving for social power, deeper even than the desire for possessions, there is a still more generalized and universal craving in the human makeup. It is the craving for knowledge of the right direction—for orientation.”
This need for orientation is addressed by the world’s great spiritual wisdom-traditions, if we just open ourselves to them.