The Power of Meaning: The true route to happiness

by Emily Esfahani Smith

“One conclusion,” he said, “was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”

In other words, awe challenges the mental models that we use to make sense of the world. Our mind must then update those models to accommodate what we have just experienced.

This is the paradox of transcendence. It simultaneously makes individuals feel insignificant and yet connected to something massive and meaningful.

But by the time he graduated in 2012, he wanted to do something more with his life—and so he traveled to a monastery in Burma, where he was ordained as a Buddhist monk. During his six months there, Cory meditated for fourteen to twenty hours daily, slept on a thin mattress on a wooden plank, and ate two simple meals a day, one at 5:30 a.m. and one at 10:30 a.m. There was no talking, no music, and no reading—just an ascetic regimen meant to break down the walls of the self.

“Mindfulness,” as one of its most famous teachers, Jon Kabat-Zinn, has put it, “means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present

moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

In Buddhism, mindfulness meditation is a path toward enlightenment, or the realization that the self is an illusion.

Now it was all “oneness, non-duality, communion,” he said. He felt himself surrendering to all that was around him.

“I saw clearly that the idea of the self—of distinction, of me, of an inner and outer—is just an illusion,” he said, “something created by the mind.

It was like wisps of smoke from a pipe. The idea evaporates as soon as yo...

“When you become nothing,” he explained, “you realize that you are one with everything.”

When neuronal inputs to the orientation association area from our senses decrease precipitously, as was the case with the meditators, the brain can no longer separate the self from the surrounding environment. Individuals feel connected with everyone and everything—they feel a sense of unity.

If the frontal lobe has dramatically less neuronal inputs than usual, then the logical, controlling part of our mind shuts down, and we feel a sense of surrender.

Scientists have dubbed this dramatic shift in perspective the Overview Effect.

Institute of Noetic Sciences,

For Emerson, the beauty we find in nature is a reflection of divine beauty; nature itself is a manifestation of and portal to God.

The awe-inspired people, researchers found, felt a diminished sense of their own importance compared to others, and that likely led them to be more generous.

THE SELF-LOSS FELT during a transcendent experience is sometimes called “ego death,” and it prepares us for the final loss of self we will all experience: death itself.

Psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, can facilitate mystical experiences and feelings of awe and rapture in users, and like many hallucinogens, it has a long history of religious use.

She felt time stop; she felt connected to something vast that lay beyond the realm of ordinary experience; feelings of awe flooded her. “There was not one atom of myself that did not merge with the divine,” she said of the experience. “You think about these things, you have some experiences that are transcendent, but then the big one comes along, and it’s like oh—my—fucking—god.”

“If you hold the strong materialistic worldview that everything ends with the body’s death, with no meaning or

hope beyond that,” Griffiths explained, “then death seems like a pretty dismal prospect.” But, he added, if “you have an experience of transcendence, when one has a sense of the interconnectedness of all things and a stunning appreciation of life and consciousness, whether or not you come out believing in heaven or karma or an afterlife, you can recognize the depth of our ignorance in the astounding mystery of what it is to be alive and aware.” In Janeen’s case, that experience with mystery allowed her to make peace with the fact that she would die.

Traumatic experiences can leave deep, sometimes permanent, wounds. Yet struggling through them can also push us to grow in ways that ultimately make us wiser and our lives more fulfilling.

“I can’t undo time, but I can make a difference, and that’s what drives me forward.

After a traumatic experience, many people feel a strong drive to help those who have suffered as they have. Psychologists and psychiatrists sometimes call this drive “survivor mission.” A survivor, in the words of the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, “is one who has been exposed to the possibility of dying or has witnessed the death of others yet remained alive.”8 Survivors, Lifton continues, feel “a sense of debt to the dead, a need to placate them or carry out their wishes in order to justify their own survival.”

Today, the term “survivor” has been expanded to include victims of nonfatal traumas, too, and their mission is often tied to making sure others don’t have to go through what they’ve endured.

When people who have suffered help others, they report less depression, anxiety, and anger, and more optimism, hope, and meaning in life.11

Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte are two of the leading experts on post-traumatic growth, which they define as “positive change that occurs as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life crises.”

Maybe these people, they reasoned, learned something from their adversity that made them see the world in a new way.

After speaking to many trauma survivors, Tedeschi and Calhoun found that suffering could help people transform in fundamentally positive ways—and that these transformations were both more profound and more common than either of them expected.

priorities in life.” After studying a wide array of survivors, Tedeschi and Cal-houn identified five specific ways that people can grow after a crisis.

First, their relationships strengthen.

Second, they discover new paths and purposes in life.

Third, the trauma allows them to find their inner strength.

Fourth, their spiritual life deepens.

Finally, they feel a renewed appreciation for life.

Tedeschi and Calhoun use the metaphor of an earthquake to explain how we grow in the wake of crisis. Just as a city has a certain structure before a major earthquake, so too do we have certain fundamental beliefs about our lives and the world. Trauma shatters those assumptions.23 But out of the rubble comes an opportunity to rebuild. In the aftermath of an earthquake, cities aim to erect buildings and infrastructure that are stronger and more resilient than what now lies in ruins. Similarly, those who are able to rebuild psychologically, spiritually, and otherwise after a crisis are better equipped to deal with future adversity, and they ultimately lead more meaningful lives.

According to another researcher who has studied post-traumatic growth, “It is not the actual trauma that is causing the change. It is how people interpret what happens, how what they believe about themselves and life and the world gets shaken up, not the trauma itself, that forces people to experience growth.”

When Tedeschi and Calhoun probed more deeply into their data, they found that the difference between the two groups lay in what they call “deliberate rumination,” or introspection. The participants whom Tedeschi and Calhoun studied spent a lot of time trying to make sense of their painful experience, reflecting on how the event changed them. Doing so helped them make the life changes associated with post-traumatic growth.

Pennebaker found that those in the expressive writing condition didn’t just recount what happened to them during the trauma or use the exercise to blow off steam and vent their emotions. Rather, they were actively working to make sense of what had happened to them—and that search for meaning helped them overcome the traumatic experience both physically and emotionally.

The writing exercise helped Pennebaker’s subjects forge meaning in several ways.

First, by probing into the causes and consequences of the adversity, the subjects eventually grew wiser about it. They used more of what Pennebaker calls “in-sight words”—words and phrases like “realize,” “I know,” “because,” “work through,” and “understand”—in their narratives. A father might realize, for example, that his...

Second, over the course of the three or four days, they showed a shift in perspective, which Pennebaker measured through their pronoun use. Instead of writing about what happened to me and what I am going through, they started writing about why he abused me or why she divorced me. In other words, they stepped away from their own emotional turmoil and tried to get inside the head of another person. The ability to look at the trauma from different perspectives, Pennebaker said, indicates tha...

The third characteristic that set the sense-makers apart was their ability to find a positive meaning ...

Other research has shown that those who find some good that resulted from their trauma, though they continue to have intrusive thoughts about the experience, are less depressed and report higher well-being.26

When children experience severe and unpredictable stress, their brains and bodies rewire in a way that makes them hypersensitive to other stressors later in life and more susceptible to disease.

After extensive interviews with such individuals, Southwick and Charney found ten characteristics that distinguish the resilient from the rest.

One was purpose,

Research has shown that some people naturally resist adversity better than others; scientists now know that our capacity for resilience is determined, in part, by our genetic makeup and early life experiences.

The naturally resilient people, the researchers found, took a different attitude toward the speech task. They did not view it as a threat the way the nonresilient participants did; they saw it as a challenge.