We are exploring what “happiness scientist” Arthur Brooks has to say about why “sadness and anxiety are exploding”—especially among young adults in our culture today. He insists that meaning and happiness are related and technology cannot give us meaning. That’s not how the brain works. All the gadgets in the world do not give us meaning.
Yesterday we meditated on how he identified the right brain as important for a life of meaning and love and relationships, thus happiness. He talks about our left brains as “the how to, the engineering side, the analysis side, the sort out the problem side.” Education that ignores the right or intuitive/mystical brain fails us.
Larry Dossey, MD, responded to my most recent book on Meister Eckhart this way: Whether our species has a future on Earth does not depend on the development of more gee-whiz technologies, but on whether we are willing to move into the psycho-spiritual dimension proclaimed by Meister Eckhart and elucidated by Matthew Fox in this important book.
Brooks concurs when he says, “every philosophical and religious tradition [is] supposed to help us find meaning in our lives.” He says, “I have a real religion” and comes out of the closet as a practicing Roman Catholic who attends Mass daily. Why? To “transcend myself. I need to get away from myself” and “peace and perspective” follow.
We have to attend to our right brains, because neuroscience instructs us that “you can’t solve the right brain’s problems by getting more left-brain solutions.” When we try that, we make a mess of things. We should not “over-engineer” the parts of our lives that don’t need over-engineering. We should exercise the right hemisphere of our brains where mystery, meaning, love and happiness occur and not “pollute” them with left-hemispheric solutions.
This has everything to do with the passion I have for the mystics. I remember years ago teaching students my book, Meditations with Meister Eckhart. One student spoke up and said she had been sexually abused by her clergyman father, underwent many years of therapy and became a therapist herself. But reading Eckhart as we were doing accomplished a whole new level of healing!
Mystics heal. The mystic in us heals—heals self and heals others. The prophet “is the mystic in action” after all. The mystics heal and help us articulate our deep love experiences. The Four Paths of Creation Spirituality spell that out. There is meaning and love to be tasted in the Via Positiva, the Via Negativa (including silence as well as loss and grief), the Via Creativa and the Via Transformativa.
A life lived at the depths of the Four Paths is a life of meaning.
Brooks appreciates how many spiritual traditions speak in paradox and pose questions that cannot be answered—and for a reason—because this triggers the right brain. “To understand the nature of not knowing and how it actually is a kind of knowing which doesn’t make sense.” Yet “the right hemisphere of your brain says there is something in not knowing that it’s a deep form of knowing.”
This is part of the Via Negativa, of course, and Meister Eckhart (and other mystics including Estelle Frankel) speak in exactly those terms. So Brooks is bringing in the mystics, though he does not label them as such.
He confesses: I’ve been married 35 years. I will never solve my marriage. I never will. Which is why I love my marriage….There’s no algorithm. There’s no app for that. And that’s the thing with these big why questions of life. They’re complex. They’re mysterious. And that’s what makes them meaningful. And “scary and frustrating.” And demanding of the Via Creativa.
~To be continued next week.
Banner image: Arthur C. Brooks speaking at an event in Phoenix, Arizona titled “The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America.” Photo by Gage Skidmore on Flickr
Queries for Contemplation
How do you transcend yourself, get away from yourself and find peace and perspective? How do you resist overengineering your brain?
Related Reading by Matthew Fox
Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Meditations with Meister Eckhart
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint For Our Times
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times
Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic…and Beyond
Confessions: The Making of a Post-denominational Priest
