{"id":257143,"date":"2024-03-18T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2024-03-18T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=257143"},"modified":"2024-03-14T05:28:35","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T05:28:35","slug":"life-is-like-blue-jelly-margaret-mead-discovers-the-meaning-of-existence-in-a-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/03\/life-is-like-blue-jelly-margaret-mead-discovers-the-meaning-of-existence-in-a-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"Life Is like Blue Jelly: Margaret Mead Discovers the Meaning of Existence in a Dream"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The meaning of life has been contemplated by just about every thinking, feeling, breathing human being, and memorably so by a number of cultural icons, including Carl Sagan<\/a>, Henry Miller<\/a>, Ana\u00efs Nin<\/a>, David Foster Wallace<\/a>, Richard Feynman<\/a>, and other luminaries<\/a>. But one of the most unusual and poignant meditations on the eternal question comes, obliquely yet with crystalline precision, from legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a 1926 letter found in To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the same magnificent volume that gave us Mead\u2019s love letters to her lifelong soulmate<\/a>, Ruth Benedict, and her prescient thoughts on human sexuality<\/a> \u2014 Mead recounts a particularly pause-giving dream. More than a mere record on the unconscious, it unfolds into a powerful metaphor for the meaning of life \u2014 for the beauty of not-knowing<\/a>, for the soul-nourishment of wonder<\/a>, and for the question of \u201cenough\u201d that Vonnegut once contemplated<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mead writes:<\/p>\n

Last night I had the strangest dream. I was in a laboratory with Dr. Boas and he was talking to me and a group of other people about religion, insisting that life must have a meaning, that man couldn\u2019t live without that. Then he made a mass of jelly-like stuff of the most beautiful blue I had ever seen \u2014 and he seemed to be asking us all what to do with it. I remember thinking it was very beautiful but wondering helplessly what it was for. People came and went making absurd suggestions. Somehow Dr. Boas tried to carry them out \u2014 but always the people went away angry, or disappointed \u2014 and finally after we\u2019d been up all night they had all disappeared and there were just the two of us. He looked at me and said, appealingly \u201cTouch it.\u201d I took some of the astonishingly blue beauty in my hand, and felt with a great thrill that it was living matter. I said \u201cWhy it\u2019s life \u2014 and that\u2019s enough\u201d \u2014 and he looked so pleased that I had found the answer \u2014 and said yes \u201cIt\u2019s life and that is wonder enough.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Margaret Mead – The Marginalian<\/p><\/div>\n

Complement with famous scientists on the art of wonder<\/a>.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> My name is <\/em>Maria Popova<\/em><\/a> \u2014 a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. <\/em>The Marginalian<\/em> (which <\/em>bore the unbearable name <\/em>Brain Pickings<\/a> for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person \u2014 intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically \u2014 drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this? (<\/em>More<\/em><\/a>\u2026) <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 themarginalian.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The meaning of life has been contemplated by just about every thinking, feeling, breathing human being, and memorably so by a number of cultural icons, including…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":257145,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[1177,308,2237],"class_list":["post-257143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspirational","tag-inspirational","tag-philosophy","tag-wisdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257143"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257147,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257143\/revisions\/257147"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}