Man's Search for Meaning

Today's INSPIRATIONAL offering comes from one of my favorite books, Victor E. Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning".

Frankl was an Eastern European Jew born in 1905, who not only survived persecution in a Nazi concentration camp, but went on to become a doctor.  His message is that life is not a quest for pleasure or power, but rather MEANING..........

Dostoevski said once, "There is only one thing I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings." These words frequently came to my mind after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose suffering and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost. It can be said that they were worthy of the their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful. 

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. 

A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth-that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which a man can aspire. 

Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of human is through love and in love. 

I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for the brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when a man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way-an honorable way-in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. 

For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words,"The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.” 
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Ultimate Meaning

Nerdmaste,

Jeffrey Louis Martinez