2.Looking for Meaning and Value on The Eternal Path.
What are we looking for when we are looking for meaning in our lives?
These numbered posts in the series Walking the Path are companion pieces to my weekly meditation and self inquiry classes and are written as a natural continuous unfolding of the topic.
2.Looking for Meaning and Value on The Eternal Path.
Most of us start out pursuing physical satisfaction and enjoyment. We walk the path of the physical world. We don’t like hunger.
Once we realise the limitations of that pursuit, we start looking beyond physical enjoyment. We start looking for meaning as well.
What are we looking for when we are looking for meaning in our lives?
We are looking for some “thing”, some “action”, some person or place, some phenomenon that gives us a feeling we crave; the feeling of meaning. We want to be filled up with meaning. We want to experience meaningfulness.
Many people describe the lack of meaning as the experience of emptiness. We don’t like emptiness.
To sum up: we don’t like emptiness, we want to be filled with “meaning”. We want to feel valuable.
The inner sense of meaning and value is invisible and individual. We find it hard to describe.
This ephemeral state of “meaningfulness” is thought of as a result of connecting to something separate from us. Something exterior. An element of life which we deem to be meaningful and valuable.
We all want as much “meaning and value” in our lives as possible.
But what is meaningful and valuable will change as we grow.
So here is the playing field:
We are changing, the world is changing, what gives us satisfaction is changing. The circumstances giving you a sense of meaningfulness and value may suddenly no longer be available or accessible to you.
When this precious commodity, “meaning and value”, depends on our inner response to an outside phenomenon that is subject to an infinity of other factors, “meaning and value” is not easy to grasp and even more difficult to maintain.
Meaning is highly individual and what gives you a sense of meaningfulness and value this year, may feel empty next year. Life is then seen as meaningless. You may feel worthless.
When that happens, we call it “disillusion”. The disappearance of illusion, literally.
Often, it is this lack of lasting meaning and value in the physical field of perpetual change, that compels us to look for it elsewhere. Maybe on the spiritual path.
Disillusion is a kind of grace. It is the first step on the spiritual path.
We are looking for something more solid. Less subjected to the tides of the world. Something lasting.
Looking for meaning and value is a habit of the mind, and being “spiritual”, we are still looking for meaning and value. We are now trying to achieve a “deeper meaning”, a “truer value”, or so we tell ourselves.
This habit of achievement is so old that we get caught up in the pursuit of “spiritual achievements” because they seem to satisfy our constant craving for this elusive sense of meaning and value. Activities temporarily distracts us from the dreaded sense of emptiness. Spiritual activities can be rituals, pilgrimages, worship, reading, singing, dancing, meditating or positioning oneself in a social hierarchy of a spiritual organisation.
Now, there is nothing wrong per se, with rituals, pilgrimages, worship, reading, singing or meditation.
The problem is that we accidentally transplant our worldly hunt for short-lived meaning and value onto the spiritual path. We repeat the mistake by now searching for lasting satisfaction through spiritual activities. We forget that the spiritual activities, like all activities and their results, are fleeting phenomena too. They are just tools, they are not the answer. We face disillusion again.
Maybe now we stop and ask ourselves what this feeling of emptiness is all about. Why do we find emptiness unbearable and why is “meaningfulness and value” so elusive?
We embark on self-enquiry. Through self-enquiry, we may see that if meaning and value is something we must achieve, it means that we define ourselves as separate from meaning and value. We have defined ourselves as incomplete. Lacking. Empty.
We may see that we have condemned ourselves from the very beginning.
Then ask yourself: What in me feels empty, meaningless, worthless and therefore in need of activity and recognition for that activity, for that achievement? And not just one time. Whatever in me feels empty, needs fed constantly. It is high-maintenance.
When something is high-maintenance, it is flimsy, crumbling, not real. Imaginary. Like a constructed identity or a public image. Or a dysfunctional relationship. It is build on a fragile foundation.
That fragile or illusory foundation is the ego.
The ego is another word for the sense of “being other than”, “being separate from”.
The builder of the high maintenance identity on the base of the illusory ego, is the mind.
The mind is the separating imagination, always picking apart reality and comparing the fragments. Looking for meaning and value.
So, if we build our identity on ego, we build it on an imagined sense of separateness. An identity like that will naturally feel incomplete, flimsy, empty, lacking in value and meaning. It will create a hunger for meaning and value.
It is the ego driven mind that plays this losing game. The ego will never be fulfilled because its existence depends on the sense of being cut off from the whole. Being cut off, it feels less value, less meaning. It feels empty.
The ego-mind does not like emptiness, so it imagines endless ways to achieve a sense of fullness, of meaning. But unless the ego-mind is seen for what it is, a tool for the greater consciousness, it will keep thinking that it is running the show.
Only when we give the ego-mind its proper place and realise ourselves to be larger than that small tool, can we give up our painful sense of being cut off from meaning, of being empty, alone, of being inherently worthless.
We will see that we, as all permeating consciousness, as Oneness, are born valuable and full of meaning, a meaning and a value beyond the mental judgments and limited grasp of the narrow ego-mind.
So, is the dreaded sense of emptiness just the ego-mind’s word for the experience of Oneness?
Vijay Shyam,
“Stop Looking
Here is a truth that we can scarcely imagine: where God is, there is the soul, and where the soul is, there is God.
Think about it. When you do, you'll stop looking for God here or there, now or then, and pay attention to where you are and
who you are in your soul. Only then will you finally see that the soul and God are one. The rest will be easy.”
Meister Eckhart