As a human being we are filled with emotions, so many emotions! some emotions you express and show freely, some you hold back, some emotions find the deep roots through the experiences life throws at, some emotions carved into your heart for forever, and some you are trying to come out of it. how you navigate the ebbs and flow of your emotions, how you choose your emotion to rule you, tells who you are as a human being.
Emotions are like clouds in the sky and the sky is the being. Clouds come and go but sky always will be there. one has to learn to surf on those emotions and learn to let it go when time comes. And sometimes, you have to choose those emotions as your meaning in life. So, what are those emotions? Why do we feel so much? All these chaos in mind, for what? To answer this, I would say all this lead to our true self, what we want in life, what we become in life and finding the meaning to live.
There is a line in this book, “Our generations is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.” There is not only good person or all bad person. Each person is the mixture of both good and evil but at the time your action decides who you choose to be. Your response to the situation will decide who you are, a saint or a devil!
This book is about Hope. This book will tell you how precious the life is! how little our problems are, how blessed we are living this life, how the difficult times in life will lead to the spiritual growth, emotional growth. and make you believe the way universe leads you for the growth, no matter how hard it is to walk on this.
This book is about finding the meaning in life, finding the meaning in suffering, finding the meaning to live. Without meaning and hope there is no life. The author Frankl saw the three sources for meaning in life,
- by making a difference in the world (Work)
- by having particular experiences (Love)
- by adopting particular attitudes. (Courage in difficult times)
About Author
Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the founder of Logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force. Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories. Frankl published 39 books. The autobiographical ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, a best-selling book, is based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps.
Frankl wrote this book Man’s search for meaning over a nine-day period. The book, originally titled ‘A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp‘, was released in German in 1946. The English translation of Man’s Search for Meaning was published in 1959, and became an international bestseller. Frankl saw this success as a symptom of the “mass neurosis of modern times” since the title promised to deal with the question of life’s meaningfulness. Millions of copies were sold in dozens of languages. In a 1991 survey conducted for the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month, Man’s Search for Meaning was named one of the ten most influential books in the US.
About Book
This book is for all those who are trying to find meaning in life, trying to validate their emotions. This book will provide you the real examples of extreme human suffering and the psychology of those people who came out alive from all these suffering. What made them not to give up on those extreme situation was Hope. They found the meaning in their suffering, in their sacrifices.
This book is divided into two parts. The first part is all about the author’s experiences in the concentration camp during the world war II. Those experiences will move you and you would be shocked to know how cruel and brave human can be at the same time! I had Goosebumps reading those experiences in the concentration camps. To survive from that means one had survived the hell. Not only physical pain and illness but also the mental illness played the major role for the survival of the prisoners there.
The second part of this book is all about the psychology of a person during the extreme conditions. Author who was also a well-known psychologist had introduced and described Logotherapy which is also called ‘the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy’ in detail. If you are someone who likes read about psychology, you will learn a lot from this book.
Quoting my Favorite lines from the book.
“He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” – Nietzsche
“Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.”
“The man, whose self-esteem had always depended on the respect of others, is emotionally destroyed.”
“Life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.”
“I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run – in the long run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”
“For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
“Love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire.”
“The salvation of man is through love and in love.”
“Even more people today have the means to live, but not meaning to live for.”
“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”
“We were grateful for the smallest of mercies.”
“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.”
“There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” – Dostoevski
“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life.”
“Love is the only way to gasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.”
“But everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find.”
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