Finding Meaning in Suffering

I am currently "reading" Man's Search For Meaning, by Dr. Viktor Frankl. I've been listening to it as I commute to and from work. The book is amazing and I have learned a lot about attitudes in general, but specifically about finding reason and meaning in suffering. The book is about the experiences that Dr. Frankl, a psychologist/psychiatrist, had as a prisoner at a few concentration camps during WWII. What I like about the book is that it doesn't go into terribly gory details about camp life, but rather he focuses on how camp life affected people so differently. Drawing on his experience in psychology, he further developed "logotherapy", which teaches the following:

• Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.
• Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
• We have freedom to find meaning in what we do, and what we experience, or at least in the stand we take when faced with a situation of unchangeable suffering.

As I was listening, the following jumped out at me. Dr. Frankl was participating in a therapeutic group and posed the following question:

"The question was whether an ape which was being used to develop poliomyelitis serum, and for this reason punctured again and again, would ever be able to grasp the meaning of its suffering. Unanimously, the group replied that of course it would not; with its limited intelligence, it could not enter into the world of man, i.e., the only world in which the meaning of its suffering would be understandable. Then I pushed forward with the following question: “And what about man? Are you sure that the human world is a terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos? Is it not conceivable that there is still another dimension, a world beyond man’s world; a world in which the question of an ultimate meaning of human suffering would find an answer?”

I really think this is an amazing analogy. Dr. Frankl does not come out and say that God or religion should be the meaning of life to everyone, for it is different to everyone, but the previous quote comes closer to a belief in God than I have heard a lot of philosophers mention. I truly do believe that there is meaning in suffering, and like the example above, we are not the "terminal point in the evolution of the cosmos". I believe that we can learn from suffering, and even though we may not understand the reason now, there is ultimately a reason, even if that reason is only finally discovered in "a world beyond man's world".