Man's search for meaning

Between 1942 and 1945 psychiatrist Viktor Frankl labored in four different Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz. The book Man’s search for meaning is one of books recommended by Susan Jeffers. Same as Susan, I was scared to read this very dreadful part of human history. I have finished part I of the book. The below are some sentences striking my heart, so I copied down.

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

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 man can aspire
There are things which must cause you to lose your reason or you have none to lose

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour Offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self. Your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate

..…in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone….

But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. ……Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.Yet, in reality, there was an opportunity and a challenge. One could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners.….

And the state of immunity of his body will understand that the sudden loss of hope and courage can have a deadly effect.

Nietzsche’s words, ”He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,”…

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us….

.Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

“Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual.What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.) Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we many have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.….

I said that someone looks down on each of us in difficult hours-a friend, a wife, somebody alive or dead, or a God-and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He would hope to find us suffering proudly-not miserably-knowing how to die.

Only slowly could these men be guided back to the commonplace truth that no one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong had been done to them.

还是如同大多的周末，在panera里，望着对面holiday inn的高高的招牌，我想到的是焚烧尸体炉子的烟囱，下面的高速公路还和往常一样,穿梭的车辆或是向北或是向南的开去，每个车辆都有清楚的目标，不知道里面坐的人是不是也会和我一样，迟疑what is our life meaning?我一直不是非常相信一本书可以改变一个人。可是在读这本书的第一部分的时候，至少这一刻我知道我自己的life meaning是什么。以前那个很模糊的概念变得非常的清楚。不想象大多数人一样让自己被所有的责任捆绑的忘记自己。然而没有责任和被需要带来的孤单足以迷失了自己. When I lost courage to experience life, 其实我是已经死了，更不要说how I feel it and how I respond it. 我了解痛的太久，灵魂也会麻痹。停止了self-pity，逼迫自己面对past，那些让我选择回避的画面都象得胜的鬼怪一样跳出，逼迫自己说出“我意识到最初的不对的状态，可是我拒绝改变，回避变成纵容，事情越来越糟糕，是的，是我的责任”是我导致了现在的状态。喜欢那个quote，To be an adult, it does not mean, stop making mistakes, instead, it means to learn correcting mistakes.自由这个词变得意义非凡，一直以来选择不像大多数人那样加上传宗接代的责任，选择不要让自己承担高额的房贷。理由是不可承受之重，其实难道不是想保留那个自由的心？但我不明了的是，保留自己不被世俗的事捆绑，但什么是我inner自由的意义？灵魂难道迟早要被肉体约束吗？所有我想做的事也许不是inner freedom真正要的，只是我混乱生活的consequence,我变成了plaything of circumstance.I only have one small step from craziness. Ok, my life meaning is to feel what is happening or will happen to me, and watch myself to respond whatever happens to me. To do that, I have to dig out my inner freedom from all life dusts.