IN SEARCH OF MEANING — Discover Your Creator

IN SEARCH OF MEANING Discover Your Creator T HE Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997) authored a book in 1946, called Man’s Search for Meaning. Many authors over the years have written books with similar titles. During more than three hundred years of the printing press, billions of books have been published in different languages and if a common title were to be given to all these books, it would, without doubt, be: In Search of Meaning. Everyone is in search of God. It is God who gives meaning to all phenomena, because, after finding God, everything falls into place. A human being, by nature, is a seeker of meaning. Everyone is born with an enquiring mind. Everyone tries to find the answer to his quest; and, it is this quest which has resulted in the publication of many books, both fiction and non-fiction. All are directly or indirectly related to the subject of the quest for truth. When a person reaches the age of maturity, his first concern is earning his livelihood. He opts for various kinds of jobs or engages in different types of economic activity. When he becomes engaged in some work, he goes through the period of satisfaction. Then, gradually, a time comes when he realises that his job is not giving him what he had been in search of. Certainly, he gets his “bread”, but, as Jesus Christ rightly said: “Man does not live by bread alone” (Matthew 4: 4). To earn one’s “bread” is everyone’s first need. But, bread can satisfy only one’s physical requirements; it fails to give any intellectual satisfaction. This is the main cause of frustration and despair experienced by almost everyone today. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe came into existence about 13 billion years ago. Everyone thinks on these lines: ‘Billions of years ago, I was a non-existent entity in this vast Universe. Then, I was born and nature made me a part of the population of the world.’ Every person, consciously or unconsciously, yearns to know how he came into existence and tries to find the meaning of his life in this world.