What is the meaning of "meaning of life"?

I’m sorry that some (or many) people ask what is the meaning of life. The question is depressing because the impulse to ask it generally means the asker is depressed and feels empty but may not know it. If you heard a six-year-old child ask, seriously or sadly (it’s hard to picture her asking in a happy mood), “What is the meaning of life?”, you should be worried.

I sometimes lie in telling clients that “life meaning” from a religious or spiritual place has one nature, while from the psychological perspective, meaning is feeling, pure and simple. This is a lie because meaning is feeling, positive feeling, pure and simple. There are no other useful definitions of it.

Let’s eliminate the false ones.

Obviously, there is utilitarian “meaning.” Your job is meaningful to you if it keeps you from starving or being homeless. But what if you are very depressed or suicidal? Blocked to all emotion but pain, feeling no value to your life? Your work will be meaningless. People say God gives their life meaning. They mean that belief in God is their sense of meaningfulness. But belief without some ardor is empty. When I picture God, I believe he would feel horribly trapped in a universe the exact size of himself. He would be bored at the most fundamental level: Everything is himself, and how much solipsistic self-indulgence can One take? And he would be nagging himself constantly: “Where did I come from?” These beliefs don’t give my life any meaning. The lucky, though possibly delusional, people whose sense of God was founded upon true happiness in childhood: They have meaning in a supreme being. Any other spiritual feeling that people call meaningful would deflate in time.*

Those for whom God is fear (and who may also believe in the devil) do not have meaning. A negative baseline feeling points to an empty or painful place beneath it – a place of no meaning.

People who follow the word “meaning” with “of life” are not asking a question as much as they are describing loss of self. Feeling-centered depth therapy should help the person reach this loss, grieve it – but only if there is some substrate of positive feeling beneath it. This could be in early childhood, or even at birth or pre-birth. Which is to say we can’t know in advance if it is there. I have not learned whether the Primal (“Scream”) therapists acknowledge this bleak question in their drive to expel all defenses and bring the client to his emotionally starved infant.

My work must therefore be selective and careful.

To find out if we have meaning, go beneath our thoughts which we are invested in, and just sense our molecular layers of body feeling. Beneath what is likely to be an unreadable mess, you might sink down to one or two molecules on the ground. Are they “good,” or some feeling of positive? You have meaning in life.

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* Do you doubt this? Look at the immorality and hypocrisy of so many Christian fundamentalists, priests, prime ministers of Israel, etc., etc.