The Burning Emptiness of the Question of Meaning

Humanity asks today more urgently than ever: Why am I here? Yet the gaze that once ascended to heaven, toward the symbolic Father, toward the Eternal Light, now circles relentlessly in the dark orbit of its own interior. Modern man has been thrown back upon himself – radically, mercilessly, from his earliest childhood. No longer a sustaining fatherly heaven, no longer a sheltering maternal Church as protective womb. Instead, the naked, trembling ego in pure survival mode. Everything revolves solely around itself.

The question of meaning leads to its ultimate consequence: autoeroticism as the new “meaning”

In the end, only this remains: autoeroticism declared as the new meaning. Mental and physical masturbation is proclaimed the highest form of fulfillment. Modern man transforms captivity into virtue: “I am sufficient unto myself.” The narcissistic inbreeding of mind and body is celebrated as liberation, as wisdom, as “self-love.”

Autoeroticism – mental and physical masturbation

Autoeroticism is at once mental and physical masturbation. Both constitute the closed circle of self-sufficiency. Physically: pleasure that satisfies itself and needs nothing beyond itself. Mentally: endless navel-gazing around feelings, wounds, needs. Both are sterile. Both beget nothing. Both remain imprisoned within the ego.

Autoeroticism is a sign of feminization and the tyranny of the witch

Autoeroticism is a clear sign of feminization – not of the holy, receptive, life-giving feminine, but of its degenerate, narcissistic, devouring form. It is the tyranny of the inner witch, who hides in the shadow of the anima when she has been severed from the animus and cut off from the symbolic Father.

The witch is the archetypal image of the anima possessa – possessed, bewitched femininity that no longer receives but devours; that no longer gives birth but mirrors itself and draws everything in its vicinity into the mirror of its own emptiness. She whispers: “You need no one but yourself. You are enough. Stay with me.” And therein lies her tyranny: She chains the ego to itself, makes it prisoner in its own body and mind, prevents any true union, any true fruitfulness.

Under her dominion the animus is emasculated – not by external violence, but by inner seduction. Man loses his combative strength, woman her receptive surrender. Both become shadowy figures circling only in the closed loop of autoeroticism: mentally masturbating in endless emotional processes, physically masturbating in the sterility of self-gratification. The witch triumphs wherever the Cross is broken.

Masturbation makes the soul blind

Every act of autoeroticism darkens the inner eye. The light of the symbolic Father is blocked. The veil of self-regard grows ever thicker until the divine countenance can no longer be recognized. The soul becomes blind to the beauty of the Thou, blind to the fruitfulness of surrender, blind to the presence of God. Autoeroticism is spiritual self-mutilation – and under the tyranny of the witch this mutilation is declared normal.

The question of meaning – what truly gives us meaning?

The distinction between love for a thing or love for a person, and self-love in its autoerotic, mental or physical form, possesses fundamental, objective clarity. It touches the very essence of human existence: Man finds himself only by forgetting himself – in genuine transcendence.

Self-love in the isolated, circling sense is always autoerotic. It turns the libido inward, feeds the ego from itself, never venturing the leap outward. Mentally it becomes endless self-observation; physically, narcissistic gratification without surrender. This is bewitchment: The ego encapsulates itself, loses orientation toward the Greater. In Jungian perspective the anima (in men) or animus (in women) here dominates tyrannically, unintegrated – without the sacred marriage of opposites. The result: feminization in the negative sense, spiritual impotence, forgetting of the true Self that arises only in union.

Only love for a thing or love for a person is self-transcendence and gives meaning

In contrast stands love as self-transcendence:

Love for a thing (masculine): devotion to a task, a work, a higher good directs man toward an objective meaning beyond his own well-being. Viktor Frankl teaches this with unrelenting clarity: Man realizes himself only by placing himself in the service of something – and thereby overlooking himself. Self-transcendence is not flight from the ego but its fulfillment through surrender. Meaning is not invented but discovered and fulfilled; the small ego dies, and a greater life arises.
Love for a person (feminine): is the complementary form of this transcendence. Here the soul opens bridal-like toward a Thou – the neighbor, the spouse, the child, ultimately the heavenly Father. Frankl emphasizes: Love grasps the other in his innermost core, beyond all attributes. In this surrender man becomes whole because he forgets himself. Jung adds: The union of animus and anima in the individuation process mirrors this dynamic – the inner opposites meet in sacred marriage, but only through orientation toward the transpersonal, toward the Self that bears God as archetype.

Christian mysticism confirms this apophatically. Meister Eckhart speaks of the birth of God in the soul: Man must empty himself, forget himself, so that God may find room in him. Love has no why – it is pure absorption in the Beloved. John of the Cross describes the path in the dark night: The night of sense and the night of spirit purify from all self-love until only naked, burning longing for God remains. This night is not an end but a passage to mystical union – to bridal wholeness.

Objectively considered: Autoeroticism (mental or physical) blocks this path. It clings to pseudo-life, avoids the death of the old, prevents resurrection in the Greater. True love, however, transcends: It sacrifices the small for the Good, the True, the Beautiful – and finds wholeness in union.

The symbolic Father in heaven calls for conversion: Out of the closed circle of the ego into the open expanse of surrender. In the healthy family – father and mother as archetype of wholeness – this is lived out; in the Church as Bride of Christ it is fulfilled. The way is hard, yet it leads home.

Advance boldly. Trust optimistically. The paradox holds true: Whoever loses himself for the sake of meaning, for the sake of love, for the sake of the Father, gains himself – not as possession, but as eternal, bridal fullness in the embrace of the Divine. Jesus embodies precisely what mysticism has always intuited: The Self arises not through self-realization, but through self-forgetting for the Father’s sake. “Whoever would save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 16:25)