Every so often I have someone come in for a reading struggling to find meaning in their life. Ah, “The Meaning of Life”! Such a huge concept to wrap our heads around. And yet it is the essential quest that at one point or another in our crazy, busy lives abruptly comes to a head. It becomes vitally important for us to have that question answered, once and for all. Just tell me so that I can get on with the business of checking off the boxes so that I know I am following the rules, playing within the invisible boundaries, doing all the things I am supposed to do to earn my spot in heaven. I know it’s been a life long quest of mine to understand the nature of our reality and reach out for something that feels beyond. I know it’s there and I know it has all of the answers, including The Meaning of Life.
What if I told you that…there is no meaning. There absolutely is none. That concept whacked me upside the head the moment I began to boldly face it. Since I was 17-years-old, over 38 years, I have been on this journey only to be faced with the concept that there is no meaning. Whoa, let me back up here because that is not entirely true. There is something to the whole concept or why would we be so hell-bent, consciously or unconsciously, to resolve it? Allow me to share that the Meaning of Life is not some external factor that has been imposed upon us as some sort of hidden buried treasure that once found we would enter into a state of nirvana. No. Rather it is a key internal mechanism by which we navigate our reality. Cue the mind-explosion!
Allow me to explain. Life is made up of a series of never-ending situations. These situations help us to define the meaning in our lives. Now, here’s the kicker, every situation – every situation – is neutral. It appears to us a neutral situation neither being good nor bad. It is meaningless until…We Assign the Meaning. We may assign it either a positive situation or a negative situation. If it is a negative situation, we may refer to it as “contrast“, but that’s a whole other post. Take for instance when someone shares a story with you about a situation they were in. You are following along and then they say, “and this suddenly happens!” You pause. You wonder to yourself, well that doesn’t sound so bad, but you hold your tongue. You wait with an impassive face and wide-open eyes. Then the story-teller reveals the horrors of their interpretation of this situation. It’s loaded with contrast. You suddenly feel back on solid ground as you now know to grimace and commiserate in their ill-fortune. For you, in that split moment, you felt essentially neutral about the given situation. You had no assignment of meaning to it. Yet the story-teller, they had an assigned meaning. And the moment they gave it to you, you understood and accepted their given meaning to the situation. Well, that may not be entirely true, but that again is an entirely different post.
So what does all of this mean? Well, it means nothing, quite frankly, as I just finished illustrating above. Here’s the beauty in any given situation. You get to assign the meaning. Go ahead, quiet your mind, and then ask yourself, at what meaning do you arrive out of your encounter with the subject matter of this post? Does it resonate with you? Does it call something up from deep within you that sounds of truth requiring a greater investigation into the potential of what this could mean in the greater scheme of the reality of your life? It’s a huge concept and in my next post, I will offer you some insight into how you may use the above concept to shift your reality into a place you would much rather be.