Once, when I was 15 years old, I heard a sermon from a village priest. He began it with the question: «Where to look for God, where to find him?» I did not remember the continuation and later often regretted it …
Now I think that behind this centuries-old concept of «finding God» is our desire to find meaning in our lives — one that will enrich it. Neuroscientists have added a new word to this topic: a full-blooded sensation of life, they say, depends not so much on understanding its meaning as such, but on the balance of the limbic system — our emotional brain. What does he need? First of all, connections, relationships. And he finds them in four areas.
Body
If we do not allow ourselves to focus on momentary sensations — on touch, taste, what we see, if we cannot have fun, indulge in joy or (more difficult) sadness, then we have no connection with our body, we do not we are present in ourselves. One of the ways to find a lost connection is through sports, which require us to focus, flexibility and strength at the same time. When we meditate or listen attentively to another person (without losing touch with the feelings that his story evokes in us), we also connect to this first – bodily – source of sensations: the body reacts to the world around it, waves seem to diverge from this contact to which we can turn our attention.
inner circle
Our emotional brain is primarily connected with the body, but it is also responsible for our attachments, relationships with loved ones. Of course, an extremely effective way to find the meaning of life is Love with a capital letter. When we look into the eyes of a loved one with a beating heart, we do not ask any existential questions … And in general, the emergence of any close relationship binds us more tightly to life. We are not looking for the meaning of life when we first lead our child by the hand to school or watch him proudly sing among other children in the choir. Not only loved ones and children, but also all those who are close to us, all to whom we are ready to give a part of ourselves, bind us to life and give it meaning.
commonality
One of my patients, a 30-year-old electrician, had an incurable disease and had months to live. He lived somehow: he drank, he cursed with his relatives. And now he was terribly lonely. He no longer worked and, drowning out the dreary fear of death, spent all his days watching TV. Once, unable to stand it, he came to the community center of his quarter and offered to fix the air conditioning system for free. Spending several hours a day there, he met many people, they greeted him by name, and when he worked on the roof, food and drink were brought to him … After a few weeks, his anxiety disappeared, although the disease progressed. He found the meaning that he had been terribly lacking all his life. It turned out that it is enough to start doing something for other people, for society, in order to feel that you are needed, that you are appreciated. We are all the same as him. Even if our life has developed more prosperously, we have a need to be useful to people outside the circle of our loved ones. We need to feel that we are contributing to society and then it will pass to our children.
Spirituality
We can feel our connection with some other dimension that exists outside of our body, society and the world of living beings in general. There are people for whom the main source of meaning is here — in the feeling of the presence of this boundless, incomprehensible essence. This presence is often called God (or Yahweh, or Allah), but we feel it just being in nature or in special places, landscapes that remind us that we are just a grain of sand in the Universe and in infinity of time. It is strange, but at the very moment when we feel how insignificant we are, our life at the same time seems to us full of meaning.