Founder’s Reflections on the Center

By David White

We human beings have always had a longing to connect with or feel a part of something greater than ourselves. This has been true from earliest times, as demonstrated by the cave paintings of the Paleolithic period, some of which might be 60,000 years old.

This urge to go beyond focusing on our ego lives alone has been part of every culture. It has taken many, many different forms, but I often think of it as the inner journey or the quest for meaning. Plato called it our urge toward the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. But whatever name you wish to give it, this longing has been a central part of our lives since human beings came to be.

It is probably present in you. No matter what else is going on in your life, it is likely you have asked and are still asking yourself deep questions. Or you have been thrust into a confrontation with them through illness, the death of a loved one, or a dramatic setback or loss. Questions like:

1. Who am I? What is my true nature? How do I understand this experience of having an individual life, of having a unique individual self?

2. Are there values that I need to follow to find true fulfillment, or can I just do whatever I feel like doing?

3. What responsibilities do I have to others? How should I be with other people?

4. Does my life have any meaning, and if so, what is it? How do I find it?

5. What is the nature of the universe? Does it have a meaning or is it meaningless? Is there a larger reality beyond my individual self, and if so, how do I live in relation to that?

In response to these questions, there are countless books, internet posts, videos, and teachers offering answers today, but many seem quite shallow, and others to be more about gaining fame and fortune than being of service to those who are seeking valid answers. It is hard to separate out the true wisdom from the sincere but shallow advice and the attempts to sell.

The spiritual dimension of existence

The word spiritual involves what theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate concerns,” and is sometimes used for the search to answer the core questions about life and meaning, the deepest questions about existence itself. Used in this way, anyone who asks themselves deep questions is being spiritual, and it is impossible to understand human history without a deep understanding of the spiritual quest and its effect on all cultures and on every individual life.

For many, the spiritual journey also involves the feeling that life has a meaning beyond our personal ego desires, which sets in motion a desire to know if some values exist beyond our personal wishes, and if there is a higher good that sometimes calls us to act beyond our purely personal preferences. For many, this leads to a search for a connection to something greater than ourselves.

Wisdom traditions

Each of the world’s wisdom traditions, past and present, arose as an attempt to answer the basic spiritual questions about values and meanings, about what is truly important in human life. Each grew up in a particular time and place to offer suggested answers and to provide guidance about how each of us might approach answering these questions.

Wisdom traditions are passed on through teaching stories, myths, parables, aphorisms, the biographies of important people, sayings, even humorous versions of the above. This was the nature of all the great traditions we have today in their early years: Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Greek, Jewish, Confucian, Sufi, Taoist, and all the rest. In this form, they left it to each family or communal group, and sometimes each person, to interpret and understand what it all meant for themselves.

Religions

In addition to dealing with spiritual questions, wisdom traditions often took on the broader role of providing practical guidance for how to organize peoples’ daily lives and for how a community could best live together with each other. Each of the world’s religions developed over many years among a specific group of people as an organized set of answers, made up of biographies, stories, myths, and sayings brought together in a more organized way. This is how religions came to exist.

All religions trace their origins back to founding stories and myths that are mostly spiritual, but the more organized a religion became, the more likely it was to focus on rules and guidelines for how people in a specific culture should live their daily lives. Thus each religion developed methods to teach, promote, and sometimes to enforce its set of answers, including specific beliefs, practices, rules, and prohibitions. When this is effective, the religious structure often becomes the framework for living for the broader social community.

In this way, religions that began with teachers speaking to the deepest longings often developed a second mission focused on maintaining and perpetuating specific cultures and societies. In fact, there is often pressure for the local religion to take on the role of enforcing rules to support and maintain a stable community, but in taking this step, they seldom separated the spiritual wisdom from the practical guidance about how to live one’s daily life. The practical guidance was even given the force of spiritual authority in an attempt to persuade everyone in a community to follow the locally accepted practices about family organization, relations between the sexes, property ownership, settling arguments, and even what to eat.

The two mission of most religions

Because the two missions of religions, first, of speaking to our deepest longings for meaning and connection, and second, of organizing the local society can and do come into conflict, there is also a force toward renewal in every religious tradition, sparked by the need for fresh ways to stir and speak to the deeper impulses we all feel. Jesus grew up in the Jewish tradition and incorporated many of its ideas, but then added new energy and a new focus. The Buddha did the same with Hinduism.

So all efforts to meet our deeper urges and needs, every attempt to speak to our inner longing for growth and development has been characterized by change, change within the traditions as well as and the birth of new traditions. If we put all efforts to speak to these deeper needs into the broad category of religions, we find 19 major religions in the world today made up of 270 separate large denominations. But the diversity doesn’t stop there. One survey found 34,000 different Christian groups, each having a separate defined identity, half of which were not associated with any large denomination. The same diversity exists within all the traditions.

And nowhere has this tendency toward diversity been more prominent than in the United States. Our history has been marked by wave after wave of the emergence of new ideas and new approaches to the inner journey. Many who came here in the early years of our country were seeking greater freedom to diverge from the dominant traditions where they came from, to practice their chosen religion in their own way, such the Puritans, Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans, Irish Catholics, and Jews.

In addition to the mainstream traditions, America has always been a hotbed for the creation of new traditions, such as Transcendentalism, the Mormons, Christian Science, Alcoholics Anonymous, the New Thought Movement, Theosophy, the Edgar Casey organization, and all the modern New Age offerings.

This constant ferment in the ways we try to speak to our inner journeys, plus the need to do so, has led to the existence of more than 350,000 religious meeting places in the U.S, today, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, and all the rest, with many competing for attendees on the same block. There are, in addition, almost a countless number of other learning, growth, health, and spiritual groups and retreat centers that touch on the inner journey in some way. For instance, there are around 60,000 AA groups in this country today.

My own journey

When I started my own inner journey in an intense way more than 50 years ago — attending retreats, workshops, conferences, and visiting monasteries — I would come back to Knoxville and find that many of the people I knew were very interested in what I was doing. They had many questions and I could feel their yearning for something more than what they had so far found.

Many were a part of a religion, but also wanted additional ways to explore the inner journey. Others had left the religions of their upbringing, and a few had grown up without any religious background.  It soon became clear that there were dozens of people I knew who had a longing for something more but had little idea how to look for it. To speak to this need, I started offering a 10-week Quest for Meaning workshop. I was not interested in large numbers, because I felt people needed to get to know each other in order to share deeply about their lives and hardest life questions, the workshops were limited to 12 members.

Some people who attended became very engaged in the journey and recommended the workshops to their friends, so there was never any advertising or promotion for the next workshop. Past participants simply recommended new people, more than I was able to accommodate, since I also began spending more and more time giving additional workshops for those who wanted to stay involved and continue meeting together.

The result over 30 years was that about 1500 different individuals participated in at least one of my workshops (including the one-time half-day and all-day programs that met only once). About 300 attended a Quest workshop that met every week for 10 weeks  When people in those workshops wanted to continue meeting after their first 10-week experience, I began to have on-going groups that would meet 20-25 times each year, and about 200 people attended one of those workshops every year for a few years. As the years went by, about 50 individuals attended the on-going workshops every year, some for 10, 20, and even 30 years, and they became the base around which the Meaningful Life Center was organized in 2015.

At that time, I realized there was a need for a physical location where other people could offer workshops and take over and continue what had been started into the future. And the Meaningful Life Center was born.

My personal inspirations

My own personal inspirations include many well-known religious figures such as Jesus, the Buddha, Rumi, Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, Ramana Maharshi, Shunryu Suzuki, and Meister Eckhart. They also include the Transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; the writers and poets Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Emily Dickenson, and T. S. Eliot. the political leaders Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, and Mahatmas Gandhi; psychologists William James, Carl Jung, and Alberto Assagioli; and an assortment of modern figures such as Huston Smith, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Ram Dass, Peace Pilgrim, Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell, Stan Grof, Robert Bly, Robert Johnson, Richard Rohr, Father Bede Griffiths, Helen Luke, and Evelyn Underhill.

Although some of these figures were not considered especially spiritual, all were deeply concerned with searching for a connection with something greater than themselves, and all offered guidance, by word and action, for how we might each do that ourselves.

(A more complete account of my personal journey is on my web site. Just go to my web site – ameaningfullife.org – and read “About David”