Facing an Existential Vacuum Today

Sam peers at me from behind his dark-framed glasses. The lanky young man with bleached hair and interesting tattoos on his left arm is a graduate student at a nearby university. He sees me weekly, and mostly we talk about his anxiety. Recently he worried aloud, “Why do I keep studying for this job that will just make money for a boss who already has it all? It doesn’t make sense.” Sean is studying to be a programmer in a software company. He continues, “We just build algorithms that make people even more addicted to their devices. I want to put my energy into something that gives meaning to my life!”

This is not an easy time in which to find meaning for ourselves.

I listen to friends and clients who experience their lives as empty, purposeless, and who feel aimless or adrift. There are plenty of reasons for people to hide, hibernate, stop working, experience anxiety and depression, or feel numb to the affairs of our world. Psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Victor Frankl told us 50 years ago that we live in a “vacuum of meaning,” but the “existential crisis” he described then seems even more widespread than ever before.

Sisyphus

Like Sam, many of my young clients worry about finding a sense of meaning and about what their future will be. For me, the image of the Greek hero Sisyphus comes up.

While Sisyphus is often seen as a symbol of futility—condemned by the gods of Mount Olympus to ceaselessly roll a heavy stone up the mountain, only to see it roll down again—the French existentialist Albert Camus had a different view. In Camus’s interpretation, Sisyphus pushes his stone forward with an attitude of knowing and dignity. Knowing that he has no say about whether or not to complete his arduous task over and over again, he uses what choice remains to him, and decides to replace sorrow with joy.

I have come to see Sisyphus as a bodhisattva. In the Buddhist tradition, the bodhisattva is an enlightened being who chooses to forgo entry into Nirvana until the last suffering being is saved. The bodhisattva understands that everything in life is interdependent and constantly co-arising. This insight that we are all connected, that we are all relatives, gives rise to a deep, loving care. She makes her choice out of love and without regard for the immediate outcome.

Victor Frankl quotes Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Having the purpose of relieving suffering gives us the why. And an exquisite presence, akin to what Sisyphus experiences while rolling the stone up the hill, gives us the how.

A Higher Meaning

Doctor Tsetan Dorje, His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s personal doctor, told us that we humans need a higher meaning. “Just any meaning-making is not enough,” he says. Higher meaning, in Doctor Tsetan’s book, includes altruism, an understanding of all our interdependence, and a deep rootedness in the “groundless ground,” the sacredness of being.

Much of our suffering comes from what Tara Brach calls “The delusion of separateness,” meaning our misperception of seeing ourselves as separate and isolated from others instead of interconnected. “Inter-being-ness,” as the late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh called it, is our true nature, and the deeper reality of our world. We are all part of the web of life, interdependent and interconnected, and the current challenges in our world are largely due to our “delusion of separateness.” We readily see another person or group of people as separate, as a “them” that stands in opposition to “us.”

But when we see ourselves as modern versions of Sisyphus rolling not only our personal stone but also the stone of humankind up the hill, when we go further still and see Sisyphus as a whole community of “planet people” rolling the stone of the human condition up the mountain, we can feel our heartfelt connection to others. Even though we don’t know what the outcome will be, as a “community of bodhisattvas” we support each other so we don’t burn out.

The bodhisattva knows that she is connected to the field of awareness, the groundless ground of being, to the sacred, whatever name it might have. With roots rooted deep and with branches reaching out wide, the bodhisattva can sustain herself.

Meaning emerges for the bodhisattva from connection, joining with others, and touching the field of being. The bodhisattva relates to the stone as sacred, as also the stone is part of the interdependent web of life.

By going beyond our identity as a separate self and by beginning to understand our identity as part of a much larger whole, the burden of having to fix things alone subsides. Touching and being touched by the groundless ground, we are protected from burning out. We are the ocean, and we are the wave, both being water, non-dual. Sisyphus as community, and community as part of a much bigger interdependent web of life, allows us to care. Being fully engaged for the sake of us all allows us to grow into a new opportunity for living a meaningful life.