Uncovering the threads of meaning
I am watching episode 7 of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, where John Vervaeke discusses mindfulness as a psychotechnology that helps us uncover the threads of meaning in our lives.
He discusses India’s emergence during the Axial Age and highlights Siddharta as a central figure in that period.
He then discusses the two modes of being. What Martin Buber refers to as the I-It and I-Thou modes, Erich Fromm describes as "having needs" and "being needs." Interestingly, Fromm sees nothing inherently wrong with the having mode where I shape the world around me to satisfy my needs. For example, I need water to live, so I modify my environment for easy and sustained access to water.
Vervaeke goes on to say that being needs are fulfilled not through possession, but through becoming. These are needs of the mind. Love, for example, is a being need.
Having vs. Being
Categorical vs. Expressive
I-It vs. I-Thou
Intelligence vs. Reason
Having sex vs. Making love
Problem solving vs. Meaning makingVervaeke illustrates his point with the example of a cup: it reminds him of all other cups, something he can use, manipulate to meet his needs, discard, or replace without much thought. However, he emphasizes that if he were to relate to his wife in this same way he would pretty much destroy the relationship.
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I came across a post by @yassoma on X, discussing the recent trend of replacing verbs with nouns in our language.
In that post, @yassoma shares a quote from Erich Fromm’s book To Have or To Be:
During the two hundred years since Du Marais, this trend of the substitution of nouns for verbs has grown to proportions that even he could hardly have imagined. Here is a typical, if slightly exaggerated, example of today’s language. Assume that a person seeking a psychoanalyst’s help opens the conversation with the following sentence: “Doctor, I have a problem; I have insomnia. Although I have a beautiful house, nice children, and a happy marriage, I have many worries.” Some decades ago, instead of “I have a problem,” the patient probably would have said, “I am troubled”; instead of “I have insomnia,” “I cannot sleep”; instead of “I have a happy marriage,” “I am happily married.”
The more recent speech style indicates the prevailing high degree of alienation. By saying “I have a problem” instead of “I am troubled,” subjective experience is eliminated: the I of experience is replaced by the it of possession. I have transformed my feeling into something I possess: the problem. But “problem” is an abstract expression for all kinds of difficulties. I cannot have a problem, because it is not a thing that can be owned; it, however, can have me. That is to say, I have transformed myself into “a problem” and am now owned by my creation. This way of speaking betrays a hidden, unconscious alienation.
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This is also related to my having-oriented understanding of wisdom
