What is the meaning of life? For some it’s 42, for others it can be found in religion or science. For a few of us, the meaning of life is simply the wonder of not knowing. However, instead of looking outwards for the answer, perhaps we can find what we’re looking for within — and find meaning in our dreams. Anthropologist Margaret Mead described a unique perspective on the meaning of life that came to her in a dream (Amazon):
Last night I had the strangest dream. I was in a laboratory with Dr. Boas and he was talking to me and a group of other people about religion, insisting that life must have a meaning, that man couldn’t live without that. Then he made a mass of jelly-like stuff of the most beautiful blue I had ever seen — and he seemed to be asking us all what to do with it. I remember thinking it was very beautiful but wondering helplessly what it was for. People came and went making absurd suggestions. Somehow Dr. Boas tried to carry them out — but always the people went away angry, or disappointed — and finally after we’d been up all night they had all disappeared and there were just the two of us. He looked at me and said, appealingly “Touch it.” I took some of the astonishingly blue beauty in my hand, and felt with a great thrill that it was living matter. I said “Why it’s life — and that’s enough” — and he looked so pleased that I had found the answer — and said yes “It’s life and that is wonder enough.”
Read more at Brain Pickings.
