Meaning and Values

My mind has been recently been caught up in some pretty deep thought about meaning of life and value systems. It started when I watched a marathon of "Psychic Detectives" and similar shows on TV, which recounted stories of self-proclaimed psychics who have helped the police in finding evidence for their murder cases. I was utterly engaged with how sensational it sounded. If the stories were true, it seemed these psychics were able to recount for the things that have passed, but I wondered if their abilities were limited just to that.

Psychic abilities and acute intuition are similar attributes, and almost everyone has intuition. I started to research over the Internet articles on how the brain works in terms of psychic abilities, and ran across a most interesting website that explained neurology in these phenomena. The author of the website had done many years of research on brain activity during human experiences such as Out-of-body, Near-death, epilepsy, psychic visions, deja vu, and spirituality. He even explained what must have been happening in the brain of Buddha when he became enlightened. He explained how the human brain structure has two parts. The dominant side is responsible for positive feelings, while the other more subordinate side held all the negative and depressed feelings. Humans have tenancy to constantly get input from both sides, and the brain is always restructuring to compensate for the natural anxiety that they get when thinking about death and the end of our sense of self. He goes on to explain that we subconciously try so hard to ensure that we don't panic about death that our brains gives us certain experiences to calm ourselves when we think we're losing our sense of self. Our sense of self is who we identify our selves to be, which is derived by the sum of how we related to the other people and things in the world. Spirituality and finding meaning in life are very well connected to our perception of we think we are.

It was pretty good reading, so I had to tell Pam all about it at coffee yesterday. Like a good therapist she listened, but I wasn't quite sure if she found it as fascinating. But she did offer some good insight as to why I might be so intrigued by all this. She suggested that perhaps I was still figuring out my core values, which would give me a strong sense of self. She suspected that I was struggling with so many conflicting sets of values from my family, husband, and friends. I think she's right in that I am still trying to find what is important to me. People, things, and situations are all temporal things that are constantly changing. In the past, I was easily led to believe that the values of others' was my own. Being told what to think was restricting, but made life easy and seemingly productive. I am now struggling with my own identity, taking heavily into account how I perceive my effect in the world.

I guess life is like cooking. It's easy to follow a recipe, and perhaps rewarding to have followed the recipe well and achieve the same results. But it could be multiple times more rewarding, albeit more difficult, to be the recipe's creator.