In search of meaning

Oasis

So, what is the meaning of life? We are not debating absolute truth, as religious seers claim, or the profound cosmic space-time theories of scientists, but rather the simple meaning of life without saintly sermons or scientific lessons. According to the Japanese, Ikigai is your life’s purpose or bliss. During visits to Siemens in Nuremberg and Deutsche Bahn in Munich, I once detoured to the nearby Dachau concentration camp, one of many such locations where the Nazis murdered six million people during the Holocaust. For some inexplicable reason, the depicted human suffering drew so much of my attention that I went on to visit other concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Belsen, and Sauchenhausen, as well as read books about the Second World War and the plight of innocent people, children, the elderly, gypsies, and physically challenged people.

One subject kept on repeating in my mind: the mental process of the inhabitants of such camps who were starved, humiliated, and gassed to death. And that of the sadistic SS and COPS (a few of the inmates themselves) who delighted in inflicting mental and physical suffering on inmates. No books helped, including the ones on Eichmann the master butcher or Mengele, the doctor who decided who in the truck load of arrivals will go for gas chamber, or for work till death by under-nourishment, or still worse, for experiments on their live bodies.

The answer came much later, on reading “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Victor Frakl, a Holocaust survivor. As a psychoanalyst, he focuses on his own and fellow inhabitants’ mental frame on being subjected to physical and mental degradation. Worse was the humiliation of being treated like an animal. They’d become immune to hundreds of deaths—not heroic deaths like in war, but deaths from exhaustion and starvation. How does one still survive?

He figures those who could transform their minds from present suffering or insult to higher planes like love, God, or the beauty of nature had the highest survival rate. Frankl was hanging on to his own scientific work on psychoanalysis. He quotes, “Everything can be taken from a man but the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”