This ‘need’ for meaning in our lives shapes so very much of how we perceive the world.
The first thing I would say about this is that for the vast majority of the human race, I would never consider trying to deny them the sustenance of believing that there is a meaning for their life.
But for those few of us out here in the hinterlands thrashing in the bushes, I’d say that we should consider why we humans feel such a thirst for meaning.
We are as clearly the product of the evolution that shaped us.
We are, at this late stage of evolution on this planet, intelligent self-aware creatures.
And the evolution, that we are the products of, has honed us, and the survival of all creatures, upon our ability to reliably detect and understand what is going on around us in the environment; as the optimum way to ensure survival and propagation.
So, we are hard-wired to incessantly try to understand what we are seeing when we look out at the world.
And it is from this trying to understand that arises a terrible cognitive dissonance.
Having manifested self-awareness and the inevitable and concurrent sense of personhood that accompanies self-awareness, the observation that we appear to just live and then die deeply offends our sense of personhood, presence and continuity.
“I am, and I can see that I am, and then … I’m not?” Why, why, why?
Even today, with all of our biological knowledge, the central point of Dawkins’ book, “The Selfish Gene”, eludes us.
“You mean it is not all about me and my sense of persistent personhood?”
In the deeper stages of Zen Buddhism, and other meditative and introspective practices, it is often seen that our egos and our sense of personhood are illusions.
Everything is change. We come, things happen and we go. So it is.
Only the illusionary sense of personhood, and the associated automatically arising defensive barrier, the ego, resist the simple evidence of our transience.
So, in the face of this terrible cognitive dissonance, we dream up religions to ‘explain’ things and to comfort ourselves that our person-hoods are not really just transient patterns.
The book, “The Worm at the Core”, by Sheldon Solomon discusses all of this quite nicely.
If our need for ‘meaning’ drives us to construct religions that we believe in to comfort ourselves, then I can only group this phenomenon into the same basket with the other distortions which stand between us and increased clarity.