BARRY'S INITIAL TASK is to recognize that a meaning crisis is precipitating his depression and that he has the job of actively working at meaning restoration. He already knows that he must work at meaning restoration in some way other than by forcing a sequel into existence since forcing a particular book to exist before it is ready appears impossible. Therefore, a reasonable first question for Barry to ask himself is, "How can I make some meaning while I wait for the meaning of my sequel to arrive?" If Barry is willing to think about this question, he will see that he is not looking for a short answer like "Just do it!" but rather a full conversation about meaning.

Not only does he have to figure out where to invest meaning while he waits for the arrival of his sequel but he also has to determine how life can be made to feel meaningful now that his primary meaning mode, writing, has become a leaky vessel. This is one terrific problem. Additional meaning containers into which he might pour new meaning are not yet in place, which is a second terrific problem. As to how many other meaning problems also exist, only Barry, chatting with himself in this strange territory, can calculate.

This conversation is anything but pleasant and Barry may want to avoid undertaking it. Most people hate thinking about meaning or conversing with themselves about meaning. But there is no other way to arrive at self-awareness. Once meaning problems exist, there is nothing to do but address them. A "good book" will not provide Barry with answers about what his life should mean. Neither a secular book like this one nor a religious book will ultimately impress him since he doesn't put stock in received wisdom. A postmodern agnostic, Barry doubts that people are doing anything but spinning illusions when they announce that this, that, or the other thing is the essential truth. His own belief system has been essentially an inarticulate humanism, and he has to wonder whether that humanism will hold water if he shines a light on it. Quite possibly it won't, which is precisely the fear that prevents Barry from launching into a conversation about meaning.

The fear, simply put, is that if he investigates meaning, he will be forced to recognize that meaning does not exist. He will be forced to conclude that all meanings are illusions and that there are no compelling reasons to do anything. He is afraid that he will discover that he has pushed himself up against what Albert Camus deemed the only question of real interest to a contemporary person: "Why not commit suicide?" Barry fears that any conversation about meaning will bring him either to a dangerous place (utter meaninglessness) or a wicked place (to a belief system he concocts that is a rationalization). He fears the first destination and loathes the second. If he could picture a third destination, he might make the trip.

Betty, for her part, is a believer. Because she believes in a god or a spiritual universe, she may have an easier task than Barry - or she may have a harder task. If there is a god or spiritual universe of the sort she believes in, if she can make sense of how to live in relation to real spiritual laws, and if living in relation to such laws doesn't violate her own principles - which they shouldn't, presumably, but who can say? - then she will find comfort in her beliefs and sustainable meaning. In this scenario, she will have an easier time of it than Barry.

By the same token, if there is no God or spiritual universe of the sort Betty believes in but she cobbles together a belief system that, despite her claims of belief in God, really rests on a set of cherished principles that hold meaning for her - if, say, she believes in truth, beauty, and goodness but feels compelled to call that triumvirate "God" - she will have created a powerful functional illusion for herself. She will probably have a much easier time of it than Barry will, so long as she doesn;t doubt her own beliefs and puncture her own illusions. If there is a god and Betty can align with that entity, or if there is no god but a god-illusion helps Betty make and maintain meaning and she never comes to doubt her invention, then she is likely to be able to arrive at a creed that will sustain her.

But it is unlikely that any modern person can avoid doubt. By doubting, Betty may dismiss a reality, the actual existence of gods, or puncture a functional illusion and suddenly suspect that the useful gods she previously believed in are just inventions. In either case, she will end up where any unbeliever ends up, not knowing what to believe. This result is typical and naturally causes meaning crises, but it still is a better result than another very typical outcome, where a believer denies her doubts and refuses to reflect on meaning for fear that she will learn something she dreads discovering. If Betty denies her doubts, which in fact has been her consistent pattern, she will be prevented from making meaning and will be left with a never-ending case of the blues. Doubt alone makes meaning-making difficult, but denial of doubt when one actually doubts makes it impossible.

This denial of doubt may have been van Gogh's precise problem and predicament. He loved Christianity enough to choose preaching the Gospel as his first profession, and had he not been fired from the pulpit for preaching radical ideas about love and brotherhood - ideas that his flock and his superiors found unacceptable - he might have gone on making meaning in that fashion. But the question is, could he have really? Did he believe seamlessly or did he doubt and deny his doubt? Van Gogh often sounds like Alyosha, the innocent believer in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, but acts more like Ivan, Dostoyevsky's fevered unbeliever.

At 30, van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo:

That God of the clergymen, He is for me as dead as a doornail. But am I an atheist for all that? The clergymen consider me as such - be it so; but still there is something mysterious in life. Now call that God, or human nature or whatever you like, but there is something which I cannot define systematically, though it is very much alive and very real, that is God, or as good as God.

Van Gogh's phrase "as good as God" is as significant as Barton's phrase "as lives go" in Barton's suicide note. That something exists which is "as good as God" is not at all the same state of affairs as something existing that is God. Van Gogh never wills himself to examine his doubts, restricting himself instead to a bitter indictment of religion. A few months after the previous letter, he confided to Theo:

At Christmas I had a violent scene with Father, and it went so far that Father told me I had better leave the house. Well, he said it so decidedly that I actually left the same day. The reason was that I did not go to church, and I also said that if I was forced to go, I certainly should never go again out of consideration, as I had done rather regularly all the time I was in Etten. I told him that I thought their whole system of religion horrible, and just because during a miserable time in my life I had gone so far into those questions, I did not want to think of them any more.

Unfortunately, he needed to think about exactly those questions. Like every contemporary person, van Gogh needed to choose a camp, according to his best understanding of the universe, and work out the conclusions of his choice so that he might truly know what he intended to force his life to mean. If you believe in gods, that must mean something. If you do not believe in gods, that must mean something. If you do not know, one way or the other, but have leanings, that must mean something. If you do not know, one way or the other, and have no clue, that must mean something. To deny that you have something to work out is a path to depression.

Whose meaning tasks are harder: those of the unbeliever who finds the universe meaningless or those of the believer who doubts but clings to belief? Who can say? What we know is that both have grave meaning problems, as evidenced by clerics turning to atheism on their deathbeds and atheists asking for church funerals as their final requests. Both Barry and Betty are in this together, the one hating the idol-making tricks of human beings but recoiling at the emptiness left after the god-ideas have been exorcised, the other experiencing some feeling she wants to call spirit but not knowing what it really signifies or whether she ought to trust it.

What is clear is that neither the modern believer nor the modern unbeliever is excited to have this meaning conversation. Both suspect that they will end up discouraged and doubly depressed, at a place of more doubt and less understanding. Maybe meaning will even go missing entirely. No one has expressed the terror of meaning-gone-missing more eloquently than the playwright Eugene Ionesco, who described his struggles in Fragments of a Journal:

Which is the right way? Indifference, perhaps. That's not possible; since we are here, we can't help participating; we can't be detached from the manifest world since we are immersed in it. We cannot reject the world. Then let's take everything seriously; that's equally ridiculous. Or can I be like a tree: but I'm not a tree. Or can I follow the drift of history, in the direction of cosmic evolution? But nobody knows quite what that means. I don't know the basic elements of the game. One ought at least to feel at ease; I cannot, because living is the source of my unease. Anxiety is ignorance. Non-anxiety is also ignorance. I seem to be going around in a circle. Perhaps I'm not going around in a circle. Perhaps there is no circle. I cannot laugh, nor weep, nor sit down, nor lie down, nor get up, nor desire, nor not desire. I am paralyzed.

This is the conversation about meaning that contemporary people fear they will have and expect they will have once they admit that meaning is a problem. They recognize that, like Ionesco, they are victims of the righteous demise of blind faith, the installation of materialism as the world's reigning philosophy, and the widespread meta-analysis of belief that casts all belief into doubt. They recognize that they are victims of increased knowledge, increased awareness, and a paucity of meaning options. To the question, "Why not have a little conversation about meaning?" they are inclined to answer, "No, thanks! I know where I'll end up, which is more depressed than I am right now."

Forcing Life to Mean
We must investigate meaning even though we wish we didn't have to, even though we pray that meaning would just stay put, and even though we dream of a time when life might simply mean. The good news - the great news - is that having this unwanted conversation about meaning may lead to liberation and not to deeper depression. What a creative person may learn from her inquiry is that, despite the fact that she has no choice but to experience pain and suffering, on the one hand because she is alive and on the other hand because she is determined to create, she can nevertheless make sense of her time on Earth by deciding to take life seriously.

This option, which Ionesco dismissed as just as ridiculous as any other option, may indeed look ridiculous to the eyes of an indifferent universe, which casts its cold eye on all attempts at meaning-making. But it need not feel ridiculous to any given individual, who can opt independently to take life seriously. This life-affirming conclusion is a bet against the odds, as it were - a bet made ironically, perhaps, but nevertheless made. At the end of this conversation about meaning, the one that she dreaded having, a creative person may smile and declare, "I am opting to matter and to take life seriously."

I am previewing the conclusion that I am recommending. But it is impossible to arrive at this conclusion if your meaning investigation operates as a mere defense against any actual investigation. Some trials are just for show, the verdict a foregone conclusion, and some blue ribbon panels already have their final report written before the evidence is heard. We so dread actually investigating meaning, even when we know that we must, that we can launch into an investigation in which nothing is ventured and nothing is gained. If you investigate meaning defensively, if you do not look reality and your own doubts and dreams squarely in the eye, you will return to the exact spot where you began.

Rollo May, the existential writer, warned that thinking about meaning can - and often does - serve as a defense against really thinking about meaning. He expressed his cautionary note in the following way:

It must also be added that the tendency to use existential concepts in the service of intellectualizing is especially to be guarded against. The terms, concepts and principles we have discussed can be used as a defense against confronting existential reality, just as readily as any other concepts. Perhaps, because these concepts refer to things which have to do with personal reality, they can the more seductively be used to give the illusion of reality. It helps always to come back to the existential touchstone of authenticity.

So it is time to add an adjective to our formulation: You will want to engage in an authentic conversation about meaning, one in which everything is risked. You risk learning that you must actually listen to gods or that there are no gods. If you have this conversation, you can begin to force life to mean. The German novelist Hermann Hesse described the idea of forcing life to mean in the following way:

To suppose that man in particular is a whim or cruel game of nature is a fallacy that man himself has thought up because he takes himself too seriously. Life concerns itself with man no more than with the earthworm. We must take the cruelty of life and the inexorability of death into ourselves, not by moaning, but by experiencing our despair to the fullest. Only then, only when we have taken all the cruelty or meaninglessness of nature into ourselves, can we begin to confront this brutal meaninglessness and force a meaning on it.

Our Starting Point
To heal your depression, you must force life to mean. You force life to mean by sitting down and deciding what you want your life to mean. When you are satisfied with your answer, and if you have been truthful with yourself, you will have stripped away false meanings and motives and arrived at your best understanding of how you intend to shape your life. By providing yourself with personal reasons for taking your own life seriously, you begin to build a shield against meaninglessness.

These reasons must be personal. The hunt for ultimate reasons will prove a waste of time, even for believers, since we are built to dispute anything, even putative pronouncements from gods. No ultimate reason takes precedence over a righteous human reason for taking action and making meaning. Anaïs Nin echoed this idea when she suggested, "The personal life, deeply lived, becomes universal." If the laws of the universe are not directly within us, where are they? If they are within us, what could make them more purely or more powerfully manifest than living according to our own best reasons for living?

You must tap into your ethical self as well as your egoistic self when you construct your personal creed so that the reasons you arrive at encompass your principles as well as your desires. Why shouldn't you force life to mean that you get expensive cars and two homes or that you study whatever you like, even if your research harms others? Why become a saint or even a decent person, since it is your decision how you will force life to mean? Because by ignoring your own ethical principles, you are bound to experience the emptiness that comes with denying your conscience.

To find your path, you begin with a core question like one of the following:

• "How can I force life to have meaning?"
• "How can I make life feel meaningful to me?"
• "How can I justify my life?"
• What is at the center of a creed I might live by?"
• "On what operating principles can I base a meaningful life?"
• "What is my truth?"

Have a fireside chat with yourself with a question of this sort as your starting point. Remember that the question you ask yourself should not be the abstract question, "What is the meaning of life?" In that direction is idle metaphysical speculation. Rather, you create a question that is a variation of "What do I want my life to mean?" or "How do I choose to live?" What you are really asking is the more elaborate question, "Given my limited understanding of the nature of the universe, how shall I organize what I believe to be true into a personal creed that provides me with a sturdy rationale for living?"

Barry, embarking on this conversation, chooses as his starting question, "On what core operating principles can I base a meaningful life?" As he thinks about this question, he is surprised to realize that writing has not actually lost any of its former luster or importance. It is still the place where he intends to make meaning, the place where he can be most human, articulate, and alive. But he sees that he must also force the rest of his life to mean, and he must do so in ways compatible with his core principles. But what are those core principles? The question makes him a little light headed, but he manages to jot down a few notes:

• Generally speaking, it is better to be kind than to be mean.
• I can decide to be good rather than bad.
• I can perhaps be a little helpful, rather than another miserable drag on the universe.
• I can aim to do excellent work, to live my life doing excellent work, even though many projects will fail miserably.
• I can somehow change my minute-by-minute attitude to a more philosophical one, whatever that means exactly.
• I can somehow accept this culture while at the same time refusing to accept it. I can be something like a friendly witness.
• I can be less frightened of meaninglessness and just let it be when it hits, maybe with the ironclad rule that I will only permit two or three hours of meaninglessness before I fight to restore meaning. But what would a fight against meaninglessness look like?

He stops because something odd strikes him. He is feeling calm and not, as he has felt so often recently, manic and hysterical. It occurs to him that he has been fleeing some danger or chasing some elusive salvation ever since his novel became a bestseller. What has this mania been all about? Is it just the expression of his genes, some biological racing that has been causing him to crazily rush from one meaningless thing to the next? He finds it impossible to say. But he senses that this calmness is very different from emptiness, entirely different from the terrible calmness that van Gogh described in the days before his suicide.

Barry has arrived at a starting point. While it is only a starting point, it is a significant moment in any creator's life to quiet his nerves, look questions of meaning in the eye, and begin to articulate a personal creed that will help him negotiate meaning crises. In the ensuing chapters, we'll examine other elements of a creator's plan that combine to armor him in his battle against meaninglessness. But the first task is to stop everything, announce in the mirror to a reluctant self that you are embarking on an investigation of meaning, pose a provocative first question, and stay put as you try to answer your own question.

Betty, for her part, posits a supernatural reality, though how tarot cards, astrology, chi energy, the Taoist way, elements of Catholicism, angels, ho­me­op­a­thy, Jungian psychology, psychic phenomena, and her other beliefs make for a coherent whole is an open question. She also recognizes, however, that she has been depressed many times before, is depressed again, and that her usual answers have proven insufficient. So she wills herself to pose and answer a core question about meaning. She chooses as her question "What is my truth?" and jots down certain words and phrases in response to this question:

Reflecting on her list, Betty has the following thought: "I'm not sure I have to articulate a philosophy of life in order to know how to live. I think I can hold each moment up in some intuitive way to a vision I have of what makes for a meaningful life, even though I can't clearly spell out its design. In fact, I think I can let go of some of my need to reproduce that design. I've tried to reproduce that design by weaving mandalas, using symbols from indigenous peoples, and so on, but there's something static and insufficient about that approach. I believe I need to create my own iconography in accordance with this unseen but tangible vision."

Betty has her starting point. To begin with, she will measure her life not against a set of principles but against an intuitive sense of what she wants her life to mean. She will articulate this sense in as few words as possible, in a single phrase or "life plan sentence" that serves as a reminder of her central conclusion - that meaning can be reckoned intuitively on the spot, as she goes about living her life. All she needs to do is pay attention and remember that every moment - whether at her loom, in her garden, with her children, or at a crafts fair - is a potential meaning opportunity.

Now it's your turn, if you like. Calm your nerves a little and begin to engage in self-reflection. Ask yourself a single large question about the meaning of your life: what you want to stand for, what you want to embody, what you want your life to mean. Gingerly and gently, arrive at your real intentions. Discard the easy answers, the ones supplied by your ego, your culture, your parents, your mythology. Discard incomplete answers like "I just need to paint" and "All I need to do is write." The answer you are searching for embodies your principles and your goals and is burning red hot, just beneath the surface of consciousness, like lava beneath the Earth's crust.

If you manage to engage in this self-reflection, you are likely to notice that your answers begin to separate themselves into three categories: what it means to live a meaningful life, what it means to engage in meaningful work, and what it means to spend time in a meaningful way. Each of these categories presents its own meaning problems. Worse, forcing meaning in one category can cause meaning to leak away in another. We need to examine these added difficulties as we strive for a true understanding of the task in front of you: forcing life to mean.

© 2008, Eric Maisel, All Rights Reserved

Excerpted from the book The Van Gogh Blues: A Creative Person's Path Through Depression © 2008 by Eric Maisel. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. or 800-972-6657 ext. 52. Van Gogh Blues is available for purchase now at your local bookseller, or by clicking on the cover image above.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Maisel, Ph. D. is America’s foremost creativity coach and is widely known as the creativity expert. His most recent book is The Van Gogh Blues: A Creative Person’s Path Through Depression.