Dignity: Frankl and the grounding of meaning

Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" is worth reading for many reasons, but its most durable contribution is the observation, and recognition, that dignity is not a luxury. It is fundamental to being human, and, in extreme situations, essential to human survival. He saw meaning as the route to building and preserving that dignity. In less extreme situations, a less survival-based life may be adequate to flourish as a human.

Frankl writes: "Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognise that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Tempting as it is to read this as a prescription, Frankl is describing, not dictating. Taking his observation as a starting point, the answer each of us arrives at is up to us. If hedonism is our answer, so be it. If Epicurean friendship and ataraxia is your answer, equally fine. The Protestant Work Ethic cast of mind, which tends to disapprove of pleasure as a candidate for deep meaning, has no authority. Meaning is discovered, not awarded, certainly not by others.

The contingent nature of meaning does not make dignity arbitrary too, they are distinct. Meaning is linguistic, framing experience. Dignity is fundamental, prelinguistic, part of our evolved constitution as social animals. A person can choose any meaning and still possess dignity, or forfeit dignity.

Frankl's observation was that those who held most fiercely to what they took as a reason to live survived the concentration camps at higher rates than those who did not. This is not a proof that deep meaning is universally necessary, but a powerful argument for developing deep meaning if survival under extreme conditions matters to you. You do not need to see that survival, as Frankl does, as demanded by your humanity.

If you prefer to live lightly and accept that, should horror arrive, it will take you early, that's a reasonable decision. The gadfly who dies in the first winter of a catastrophe has not necessarily lived less well, and has, to his inclination, avoided the rigours of surviving.

The real question is not what meaning you choose but whether the meaning you choose preserves dignity, your own and that of others.

A meaning entailing the humiliation or domination of others, destroys your own dignity.

We can choose whatever meaning we like, as long as it does not compromise the dignity of others.

Default Mode Network and objectless awareness

Objectless awareness practices from Buddhist (zazen, shikantaza, objectless shamatha), Christian apophatic (Centring Prayer, hesychasm), Kabbalist (hitbodedut, devekut, ayin meditation), Hindu (nirvikalpa samādhi), entheogenic (shamanic psilocybin, ayahuasca, and related dissociative traditions), and Sufi (muraqaba) traditions act as reconfigurations of attractor landscapes as dynamical systems within the Default Mode Network; resonating quasi-stable intrinsic 'harmonic' modes.

Mysticism is ubiquitous, and appears to manifest in very different ways. Often difficult to tell, because of the cryptic, esoteric language.I thing the commonly obscure.

Words like 'bliss', 'awe','ineffable' and 'numinous' tend to be used to include implications of divinity, but, since they are used to gesture towards (the brain states themselves are not easy for anybody to describe) the experience, and are used in describing experiences with psilocybin, they seem universal attempts to describe the same thing. I think the synaesthesia is one part of the reason they are indescribable or 'ineffable', without the synaesthesia present, it's impossible to remember it, only the after-echoes.

This is an hypothesis, or, rather, a starting point for discussion, on how these various traditions work through similar activation of DMN modes. It's how I'm trying to think it through, rather than an arrival at a destination.

What's interested me is three things:

The first is the convergence of different flavours of mysticism, which all seem to be describing very much the same thing - and all having difficulty describing it, because it is a very non-verbal experience.

The second is the oparation and function of the Default Mode Network, the DMN, in the brain, and how it is related to various types of activity, and which neuroscience appears to be coming to grips with.

Thirdly, the fractal nature of our brains (many things, including our hearts, are also fractal), which means that its mode of operation includes fractal artefacts like strang-attractors that can lead to quasi-stable states.

My hypothesis comes from thinking about what I've read and how these three things are connected. Before this, the confluence of different mystical experiences was not a clear result of brain structure, which you'd expect it to be, so there weren't the tools to consider the mechanisms (despite pointers like, as I said Persingers 'god helmet', which created mystical states) might have worked by stimulating the DMN into one of these fractal attractor mode

 I didn't include the Jesuitical practices, because, St. Ignatius Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises" are very specificaly object directed. However, in 'The Doors of Perception', Aldous Huxley suggested that festering wounds from self-flagelation might be their route to mystical experience, which makes sense, since you can get a similar experience simply from a very high fever.