The Power of Meaning

by Emily Esfahani Smith

  After the constellation tour, we were left to wander around to the telescopes, which were each focused on a particular point of interest, like Saturn, Mars, or the Swan Nebula, where, thousands of light-years from Earth, new stars are being born. Another telescope focused on Messier 51, two colliding galaxies 25 million light-years away. To look through that telescope was to look back to a moment when early horses and the first elephants with trunks were beginning to appear on Earth. Modern human beings were still another 24.9 million years away.

  The line for Saturn wound all the way around the amphitheater, so I got in line to see the Cosmic Cheerio. When our sun reaches the same stage in its evolution as the Ring Nebula, it will have long before destroyed life on our blue planet. Standing in line next to me, a five-year-old boy asked his mom, “Mommy, is this what’s going to happen to the sun?”

  “Yes, baby,” she said, taking a deep breath in, “but not for billions of years, long after you and me and Daddy are all gone.”

  The boy wrapped his arm around his mother’s leg and looked up to the sky with wide eyes. “Wow.”

  —

  Astronomers come to the McDonald Observatory from around the world. They stay in the Astronomers Lodge on the mountain, where they maintain a nocturnal schedule. During the day, they sleep in the lodge, where heavy curtains block the sun from entering their rooms; at night, when it is dark enough to observe the sky, they spend hour after hour in the telescope domes.

  I arrived at the Astronomers Lodge in the afternoon, tiptoeing around the building so that I wouldn’t disturb the researchers’ slumber. Around three, I made my way to the cafeteria, where the astronomers were eating their first meal of the day. One of them—William Cochran, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin—invited me to join him up in the Harlan J. Smith Telescope. That night, using a small flashlight, I found my way through the observation dome to a cramped, quiet room full of old computers, in front of which Bill sat listening to music and patiently taking down data.

  Bill researches exoplanets—planets orbiting stars other than our sun. Because planets don’t produce their own light, they’re very difficult to detect, and the search for exoplanets is still an emerging field of astronomy: the first confirmed discoveries of planets orbiting other stars came in the 1990s. Today, scientists believe that they’ve confirmed the existence of around 2,000 such bodies, a tiny fraction of the billions of planets that probably exist throughout the universe. Bill himself, in collaboration with other researchers, has been involved in the discovery of around 1,000 exoplanets.

  Bill uses the Kepler spacecraft to track light emissions from distant stars over time and feeds his observations into a database shared with a group of other planet-searchers, who can then examine the data for patterns that might indicate the presence of an exoplanet. In the long run, Bill and others are looking for the kinds of planets—small, rocky, and with an appropriate distance from their star—that would, like Earth, sustain intelligent life. The odds that such a planet exists are “pretty good,” Bill said. “There are one hundred billion other galaxies out there, each with hundreds of billions of stars. There are billions, if not trillions, of other solar systems. So I don’t think we’re the only ones here in this universe. But as of now, we don’t know. There is so much that we just don’t know.”

  A few hours later, Bill led me outside to a catwalk that circled the base of the dome. The moon had set and it was pitch black all around. The only noise in the air was the wind. I looked out straight ahead and saw a sky dotted with thousands of stars. One shooting star after another flared into and out of view. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

  When we went back inside, Bill pulled up a picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The image zooms in on a tiny portion of the universe—a pinprick in a sliver—known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. It shows 10,000 distant galaxies, some of them the oldest that are known to exist.

  The universe began 13.8 billion years ago, and some of the galaxies in this image existed just 400 to 800 million years after that. If you compress the entire 13.8 billion years of the universe’s existence into one hour, the galaxies we see in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field came into existence just a few minutes after the Big Bang. When we look at this picture, then, we are really looking back to the beginning of time—the beginning of the universe itself.

  “This,” Bill said, “this to me is awe.”

  —

  Since the dawn of human consciousness, men and women have looked up to the night sky, marveling at the stars, wondering what they were and what they represented. Studying the celestial spheres, they sought answers to the biggest questions of human existence. How did the world begin? Will it end? What else is out there? They sought omens, wisdom, and hints of ancestors past. But what they really sought was meaning.

  The same is true today. When we look up at night, we do not see random balls of fire or scattered dots in the sky. We see bears and warriors. We see hunters and swans. We see the powder white band of the Milky Way, and, if we are religious, we think “heaven.” We may know more about the stars than our ancestors did, but they still represent some of the most impenetrable mysteries of human existence. Though we invest so much into building our lives, the few decades we are on this earth amount to very little compared with the billions of years that the universe has existed before us and will continue to exist long after we are gone.

  You might expect the insignificance we feel in the face of this knowledge to highlight the absurdity and meaninglessness of our lives. But it in fact does the opposite. The abject humility we experience when we realize that we are nothing but tiny flecks in a vast and incomprehensible universe paradoxically fills us with a deep and powerful sense of meaning. A brush with mystery—whether underneath the stars, before a gorgeous work of art, during a religious ritual, or in the hospital delivery room—can transform us.

  This is the power of transcendence. The word “transcend” means “to go beyond” or “to climb.” A transcendent, or mystical, experience is one in which we feel that we have risen above the everyday world to experience a higher reality. In Buddhism, transcendence is sometimes described through the metaphor of flight. The seeker begins on earth, but then flies upward, “breaking the roof.” Then, writes the religious scholar Mircea Eliade, he “flies away through the air [and] shows figuratively that he has transcended the cosmos and attained a paradoxical and even inconceivable mode of being.” The metaphor of “breaking the roof” captures the key element of the mystical experience, whether religious or secular. You break out of the profane world of checking email and eating breakfast, and yield to the desire to commune, however briefly, with a higher and more sacred order. Many people have had transcendent experiences, and they consider them among the most meaningful and important events in their lives.

  Such was the case with William James, the great American psychologist of the nineteenth century. James was so interested in transcendence that he inhaled nitrous oxide—laughing gas—on several occasions to “stimulate the mystical consciousness.” Though a meticulous scientist and philosophical pragmatist, even James admitted feeling “the strongest emotion” he had ever had under the influence of the drug. Some time later, he described his experience to an audience in Edinburgh. “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 his masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, James argues that mystical experiences share four qualities. First, they are passive. Though we can do certain activities to increase the likelihood that we will have a mystical experience—like meditating, fa
sting, or taking mind-altering drugs—the mystical feeling seems to descend as some sort of external force. The mystic, writes James, feels “as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” Second, they are transient. The mystical experience rarely lasts more than a few hours, and is often much shorter than that. The characteristic feeling of depth and importance—or of the divine, as the case may be—flows into and out of the person.

  James suggests that the next two characteristics are particularly important. Mystical states, he points out, are ineffable. It is difficult if not impossible to capture the subjective feeling in words and fully do it justice. “It follows from this,” James writes, “that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.” Finally, they are noetic—that is, they impart knowledge and wisdom. “They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect,” as James writes: “They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.” The meaning we derive from the experience stays with us, often for our entire lives.

  —

  During transcendent states, two remarkable things happen. According to psychologist David Yaden of the University of Pennsylvania, an expert on transcendence, first, our sense of self washes away along with all of its petty concerns and desires. We then feel deeply connected to other people and everything else that exists in the world. The result is that our anxieties about existence and death evaporate, and life finally seems, for a moment, to make sense—which leaves us with a sense of peace and well-being.

  In recent years, scientists have begun to study the emotional response to mystery, which they refer to as awe. We feel awe when we perceive something so grand and vast that we cannot comprehend it, like a magnificent vista, an exquisite piece of music, an act of extraordinary generosity, or the divine. As the eighteenth-century philosopher Adam Smith wrote, awe occurs “when something quite new and singular is presented” and “memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance.” 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 helps explain why encounters with mystery and transcendence are so transformative—they change the way we understand the universe and our place in it.

  In 2007, researcher Michelle Shiota and her colleagues Dacher Keltner and Amanda Mossman published some of the very first empirical studies to examine how awe affects our sense of self. They recruited 50 undergraduates for an experiment. When the students arrived, rather than attempting the nearly impossible feat of awaking wonderment in the fluorescent glow of their sterile psych lab, the researchers guided the participants to a different building on Berkeley’s campus. An awe-inspiring sight awaited them there: in the main hall of the Valley Life Sciences Building was an enormous replica of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. The replica was overwhelming. It was 25 feet long and 12 feet high, and it weighed about 5,000 pounds. In the presence of the massive skeleton, the students were instructed to respond to the question “Who am I?” by writing twenty sentences, each beginning with “I am.”

  When they analyzed the statements, the psychologists found that they fell into four broad categories. There were physical responses, like “I am tall” or “I am thin.” There were character trait responses, like “I am funny” or “I am smart.” There were relationship descriptions, like “I am dating John” or “I am a brother.” And finally, there were responses that belonged to an “oceanic universal category.” In these responses, people defined themselves in terms of something far larger than themselves. They wrote statements like “I am part of the universe” and “I am part of humanity.”

  It turns out that people in the awe condition saw themselves very differently from their peers in a control condition. In an earlier study, the researchers had found that awe-inspired subjects were far more likely to say that they felt “small or insignificant” and “unaware of my day-to-day concerns,” and that they experienced “the presence of something greater than myself.” In the dinosaur experiment, the participants’ decreased self-focus translated into a feeling of connection with the broader world and all of those in it. This is the paradox of transcendence. It simultaneously makes individuals feel insignificant and yet connected to something massive and meaningful. How can this paradox be explained?

  The experiences of practiced meditators, who describe similar phenomena, may offer a clue. At the peak mystical moment, they sense the boundaries of their selves dissolve and, as a result, feel no more separation between themselves and the world around them. They experience, as a meditator in one study put it, “a sense of timelessness and infinity. It feels like I am part of everyone and everything in existence.” Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Franciscan nun, described the feeling perfectly: “I possessed God so fully that I was no longer in my previous customary state but was led to find a peace in which I was united with God and was content with everything.”

  Cory Muscara has been there, too. Cory, originally from the South Shore of Long Island, entered college with the intention of going into finance. 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.

  When Cory set off for the monastery, he was looking forward to an adventure. “I was wide-eyed and bushy-tailed,” he said, “and excited about severing myself from everything that brought me comfort in my sheltered life.” When he got to the monastery, situated on 100 acres of rolling hills, he found that his room, no bigger than a prison cell, was full of ants. “This is exactly what I want,” he thought. Twelve hours later, he was not so sure: he was crying in his bed, questioning his reasons for coming to Burma.

  The situation did not improve. Within days of practicing the strict meditation program, which began each morning at 3:30 a.m., Cory was in excruciating pain from sitting cross-legged on the floor of the meditation hall for most of the day. The “sheet of pain” started at his neck and went down his back and around to his abdomen, which would cramp up if he breathed too deeply. His pain interfered with his meditation: he couldn’t distance himself from his thoughts. All he thought about was how much his body hurt. Five days after his arrival, Cory decided he couldn’t live like this for six months; he was going to go home. But on the day he was scheduled to leave, Cory revisited the original reason for coming to the monastery—which was to understand suffering more deeply. He decided to stay and face suffering rather than to run away from the very thing he was seeking to know.

  During those long and painful days, Cory was practicing, or supposed to be practicing, mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is meant to inspire a state of heightened awareness. Rather than repeating a mantra, as in other forms of meditation, the practitioner focuses on everything that is happening to him and around him, like the rising and falling of his breath or the subtle sensations of his body as he moves. “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.”

  Ultimately, the individual is supposed to realize that he can step away from his thoughts, feelings, sensations, and experiences and observe them neutrally, rather than allowing them to define him. In Buddhism, mindfulness meditation is a path toward enlightenment, or the realization that the self is an illusion. As the layers of the self are peeled away through meditation, all that is left is the individual’s raw experience of the world as it really is—a reality defi
ned by unity and interconnectedness rather than by the natterings of the ego.

  Cory returned to the meditation hall hoping to gain some wisdom about suffering. Every time he focused on his pain, he noticed that his mind would race with thoughts: “Why are you doing this? You’re not getting anything out of this experience. How can anyone meditate in this heat? There are way too many mosquitoes here. You should go to a different monastery. You should be out right now dating women, not sitting in silence all day long.” Those thoughts, which triggered anger, compounded his physical pain. But, in time, Cory realized he had the power to break that negative cycle by distancing himself from his thoughts and emotions. He could “just be with the pain itself,” as he put it—he could sit on the riverbank and watch the water flow by, to use a mindfulness metaphor, rather than be caught up in the current. Though his body still hurt, the “secondary pain” of emotional suffering no longer made it worse. Once he understood that he had control over his experience of pain, he knew that he could stay at the monastery for the full six months.

  As the weeks passed, Cory had some days when his meditations were serene, and others when his mind was a turbulent mess. Every time a good feeling like tranquillity emerged, Cory would tell himself, “This is what you want, try to hold on to this.” But the feeling would pass away. Every time he felt pain, he would tell himself, “This is bad, try to resist this.” But then that feeling, too, would pass away.

  “Eventually, I said, ‘Screw it. Stop trying to hold on to the experiences you want and let go of experiences you don’t want. In life there will be good things and bad things,’ ” he realized, “ ‘and you can try to pull in all of the good things and push away all of the bad things, but everything will change anyway, so just let go.’ Once I did, there was no pushing or pulling anymore. I could just be with my experience, and that left me with a deep sense of equanimity.”