I have heard it said that human beings are meaning making machines. I agree with this. As long as we attempt to make meaning in our lives we are machines. Either a person has meaning in their life or they don’t. If one has to force a meaning and/or context onto their lives then it would seem that what they need to address is the bigger issue of inner poverty that they are experiencing. As long as our inner lives are impoverished it does not matter how many books, relations, or degrees one has. One can live amongst the greatest wealth, but if they are poor inside then their lives meaning nothing. That is just the catch though, for life is inherently meaningful.
What I am trying to say here is do not attempt to understand your life. Don’t attempt to force meaning onto your life. No matter how profound you think you are, no matter how well you know Plato or Jung or Shankara, you always exist within a paradigm. This paradigm necessarily limits your vision of reality because a given paradigm can only let so much information in. Not only thins, but a paradigm also interprets the information we are given in a certain way which conditions how we see life, existence, and reality. This is fine. There is nothing wrong with thoughts and the conditioning which produces them. The problem is when we begin to believe in the paradigm. We get into trouble when we think that the particular thoughts, or methods of investigating and interpreting reality, that are so appealing to us are in fact “the truth.”
I know the old maxim of the Delphi oracle, “Know they Self,” but I say don’t believe it. The second we say we know ourselves is the second we get into a lot of trouble. As soon as we think we know ourselves we put a box around reality. We convince ourselves that this is who I am, this is who I should be, this is how I should act, and/or this is what I should become. All of a sudden we drastically reduce our ability to perceive the wonderful movement that is life.
Let me give you an example. The Buddha said not to believe anything he taught unless you experience it for yourself. This is a favorite saying that so called free-thinking spiritual seekers like to quote. I say that this idea can get us in a lot of trouble. More then anything the Buddha’s idea seems to be a tool to perpetuate the Buddhist religion. What is being said is, “Think for your self, experience for your self, but only within the realm of what the Buddha and his students taught and experienced.” This is not free thinking at all. The Buddha says not to believe anything he says unless you experience but then he takes your experience away from you by saying follow these ideas, rules, and practices and then see what you come up with.
Maybe, just maybe, if you are a really good Buddhist meditator you will experience these things that the Buddha and subsequent Buddhists experienced. This is a self fulfilling prophecy. Of course you will experience what the Buddha said he experienced, to one degree or another, if you are following his regimen with his ideas in mind. If you think about impermanence and interconnectedness long enough within the Buddhist context, then of course that is what you will perceive of as reality
Really, to be free you must break all such boundaries. You have your experience and your life. You have the book of your life! Why are you so interested in reading the book of Jesus’ life or Krishna’s life and hearing what they have to say about life, truth, and reality when you have your own life? Sign posts along the way? You have your life and your experience. You have your mind and your relations. Why not just look at these things deeply always realizing that lurking on the horizon is something you don’t know? There will always be some thought you haven’t had before or some perspective you haven’t thought about your current situation within and these are good to have. Momentary perspective is wonderful. It can help us see things in a different light. It can help us heal old wounds, but remember that the perspective you “had” is now gone and life has moved on.
Most of us want assuredness so badly. We want to know the truth. We want things to make sense. We want things to remain the same, unchanged. Good luck! You are in for a great disappointment. What about radical openness to the unpredictability of reality? I am not saying that we should not make choices, which one might infer when I say not to cling to any particular thought as a representation of reality. Of course we have to make decisions, but isn’t it interesting how often the actions we take, which end up being best for us and others in the end, are not the actions we “want” to take.
The hard decisions, the decisions in which we really grow, are the ones the go against the known. For us to mature as individuals necessarily means to push through stagnant patterns of thinking and behaving. Each time we do this it is equivalent to taking a leap into the unknown. And when do we most commonly do this? We do this when a situation becomes so intolerable that we realize the ways in which our current way of thinking and being is inadequate to meet the larger reality of the situation. Reality will drag us kicking and screaming, against our will, into the unknown. The more resistance we put up the more damage we will cause to ourselves and others on our way out.
As a friend of mine once said, “How far down the rabbit-hole are you willing to go?”
2 comments:
I wanted to keep reading when it was over. Great essay...
Thanks! There are some aspects that I am not sure if I agree with in my own writing, but I guess fundamentally what I was thinking was that that impulse in us which gives meaning, call it the soul or whatever, is always, inherent;y, and intrinsically "there." As I see it our job is to come to terms with, or uncover, that meanig or soul power which is already there. It seems that philosophy, spirituality, poetry, etc. can give us hints and glimpses of how the soul acts in our lives, but ultimately the soul is something so personal and intimate that we have to uncover it for ourselves and cannot rely soleley on any external supports to make the soul known to us. But then again how do we seperate the internal from the external? Can we know our internal capacities in isolation from a so called external world? I suppose for me the stress just needs to be placed on the internal dimension of the experience because if not we could go around looking for external stimuli-methods-ideas to fulfill our deepest longings (which I don't think will work).
Post a Comment