Excellence Reporter: Dr. Goldsmith, what is the meaning of life?

Neal Goldsmith: Freud said the meaning of life is to love and to work.  I think that’s not a bad statement of my view: We must express, emanate ourselves in a productive generatively and we must connect with and love others who are generating their own self.

But it’s important to realize that spending one’s life seeking the meaning of life is a waste of a life.  The meaning of life, to love and to work, if you will, is not realized so much through following leaders and paths, as it is through breathing deeply, finding one’s soul, the ground of our being, and lovingly, spontaneously, emanating our current developmental stage, not the one we promise to work to become. Our maturity develops best under these conditions.

And since we are (human) animals, the meaning of our lives will always include our bodies, as well as our spiritual philosophies.  I tend to avoid schools of thought with a large sociological/organizational component, and literally run at the sight of Westerners in white robes…  While we shouldn’t identify with the ego function, nor should we seek to annihilate this valuable psychological tool.

Ultimately, the meaning of life is to lead a happy life, and that is best accomplished though a healthy and mature life, and THAT is best accomplished by identifying with our deepest, perfect, transpersonal self and enabling it to continuously, spontaneously, unselfconsciously unfold.

And two tools that contribute mightily to this process are psychedelics and meditation. Psychedelics for clarity and insight; meditation to enable psychedelic insights to put down roots in permanent new behaviors. Meditation without psychedelics is blind; psychedelics without meditation is lame.

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