At some point in our life, if we have some awareness, we sense this feeling of meaninglessness about everything. Mostly this feeling comes in when we’ve lived life, or contemplated life, enough to see that nothing really matters from an absolute perspective – everything physical is temporary, all achievements get forgotten/dissolved at some point and all experiences are short-lived. The imperative question of “what’s the meaning of life” arises when this realization dawns in. Of course, the answer is very simple – the meaning of physical life is to afford the experience of physicality for life-energy and to allow this non-physical energy to know/express itself through physicality. Every physical form is life-energy in solid form, you can use any label for life-energy, call it God, the One Consciousness, One Being, the One Self, any label is fine, as long as you realize that everything is life-energy, there is no separation.
So who is asking this question – what’s the meaning of my life? This question comes from the brain. It wants to know the meaning of this existence to get a better understanding of what it’s supposed be doing out here, or just out of curiosity. When the brain understands that this play of existence is the creation of life-energy to know itself and experience itself in a physical format, a lot of questions get answered by themselves. The brain, as an organ, is not separate from life, it’s the creation of life and it’s made of the same life-energy, it’s the “Me” thought in the brain that creates the sense of separation – this “Me” thought looks at itself as being separate from life and thus has the tendency to judge life (Of course, the sense of “Me” has a value for life, it’s not a mistake)- whatever the “Me” thinks about life is a personal opinion in the brain and the only relevance it has is that it impacts your personal experience of life. The more deeply you look at life the less tendency there is to hold negative or positive perspective, you just see life as being life, it’s not a positive or a negative, it’s just living for itself.
Selfishness of Life-energy
The word “selfish” creates a negative connotation in the brain, but I am not using it as a negative term in this reference. Life-energy is all there is, and if you call life-energy as Self, you can say Self is all there is. So life is full of itself, full of self is what “self-ish” means. So life is selfish, because it has nothing else to focus on but itself. Everything it creates is for a deeply selfish intent of self-appreciation and self-realization, it’s just like how a painter creates a painting to appreciate his own expression and see his creativity through it. Life being pure positive energy, akin to wholeness or pure love/joy, it can be compared to “light”. For light to appreciate itself it needs some contrast so that it has something to compare itself with – love knows itself through the contrast of fear, joy knows itself through the contrast of sadness, good knows itself through evil, the yin knows itself through the yang, light knows itself through the dark – so light and dark are both the same life-energy, in different forms, where the dark is the a low vibration of this energy and light is its natural vibration.
If you don’t try to see life from the perspective of the “Me” thought, and just see life from the perspective of life, you can easily understand why it created a brain that has centers for fear and hatred. Be it a human brain or an animal’s brain, or even insect’s brain, they all have centers for fear and hatred. So why would life-energy, which is pure positive, want to create something that has the capacity for fear and hatred? The answer is simple – for the contrast that it provides, because it can only know itself through a contrast, light cannot know what light is until it knows darkness, beauty needs to see ugliness to know itself as beauty, love needs to know hatred to know itself as love, it’s logical. The “Me” thought (in the brain), of course, feels agitated at this prospects and starts creating thoughts like “so am I a guinea pig for life’s selfish intent to know itself”, if you buy these thoughts it’s because you see yourself as being separate from life. If you want to understand life you have to see everything from life’s perspective and not from the perspective of the “Me” thought of the brain.
Life could have created living beings with a brain that is only capable of love and joy, with a body that never feels hungry, which never feels pain. This would have created an “ending” because there would be no movement – if you see in a battery, you have a + and – , that’s how current flows from + to -, if there was just + and + there would be no current flow, it would be dead. The flowing current is what creates “aliveness” or life movement, or else it would just be non-existent or dead. Love/joy can be considered the + and the fear/hatred can be considered the -, both are needed, and will always be around, for physical life to have a forward movement. The problem is not with these polarities in the brain, but with our resistance to their harmonious expression. There will always be the dimension of hatred, and fear, along with the dimension of love and joy, in the brain, it’s not about being positive or negative in your mind states, but about allowing the natural expression – the way I define true negativity is resistance to your natural expression. Things fall into a harmony when you always stay allowing of what arises, without resisting it in you.
The brain has been given the capacity to compare – good and bad, righteous and evil, beauty and ugliness. It’s only through this contrast that life knows itself, it can appreciate itself – so this play of existence comes from the selfish intent of life-energy, you can call it noble or you can call it childish, it’s your perspective. I don’t see life-energy as “noble” or holy, I see it more like a child that wants to play with itself, that enjoys seeing itself, appreciating itself and experiencing itself – there is nothing holy about it, it’s just a play. All ideas of holiness are just means of the brain to create extra-ordinary and dramatic imaginations about life, when you see it for what it is you drop all your extra-ordinary notions about it. There is as much life-energy in your garbage bin as there is in a shrine.
Your natural-expression is life’s meaning for you
When you feel hungry you look for food and you eat, when you feel thirsty you look for water and you drink – during these times you are not asking what’s the meaning of it, and even if you do ask it doesn’t prevent you from wanting to satiate the hunger or thirst. So why not drop this inherently meaningless question of asking for a meaning, and just live life as it dances in you, as you. For life the meaning is the moment, what arises in the moment is the meaning of this moment, it doesn’t need anything else. If you feel meaningless about life, where you don’t feel the desire to do anything, it’s totally fine – it just means that this is your meaning right now, this is your expression right now. When you allow this expression fully (by “you” I am referring to the brain here), you allow life to have this experience fully and thus fulfill the meaning of this moment. The next moment you may find something to do, you may get inspired into action, you may indulge in some external expression – and it becomes the meaning of that moment.
There is such a thing as opposing your natural expression by holding on to several resistances created by limited thinking of the brain (thinking that it picked up during its growing years). Opposition to your natural expression doesn’t do any real harm to life in any way because life is eternal, and it finds ways of compensating, but this opposition does feel like a lot of suffering to your body and it causes the body to break down more quickly, and it creates a bad “personal” experience for you because you are constantly living in resistance. The opposition always comes from the brain when it feels the need to fight against the natural movement in the body and in the surroundings. Opposition obviously is futile because it doesn’t serve any purpose other than cause suffering in the body and prevent your natural expression from unfolding fully (you can’t prevent it altogether, you can prevent parts of it).
The more you let go of your limited perspective created from the “Me” thought, and are willing to realize that you are part of life, created by life, for life, you become one with the movement of life through you. You are no longer asking “what is the meaning”, you are just living life because that’s what’s happening right now as this body. The meaning is always apparent, life wants to experience/express as this body, that’s the meaning. If you simply align with following your inspiration, staying true to your natural makeup, connecting with your heart and listening to your inner guidance, you will always feel effortless in your movements, this is because you are now moving in sync with the pull of life and hence there is no resistance that feels like a strain. Of course in order to do so you have to drop the baggage of resistance in you through the process of becoming aware of it and letting go identifying with it (you can read this post “Dissolving Resistance” for more insight on this)
So on this road to enlightenment , from what i have read. The most crucial thing and pretty much the only thing one needs to do to become”free” of the mind is not resist anything? be allowing of everything and everything will fall into a harmony?
I had just been released from a mental hospital and I was very depressed and anxious. I thought to myself if this continues I am going to wind up in the hospital again.. I was so disgusted with myself I I thought the only way out is to kill myself. Suddenly something happened I decided to give up trying to fight the thoughts and feelings and to just surrender and just allow them to come and go as they please. I suddenly felt a sense of relief like a huge load was removed from my shoulders and I fell asleep. So I understand what you mean when you speak of thr power of allowing. This wasn’t the end of my problems but it certainly took me in the right direction. It seems so simple but
It’s not easy. It takes a lot of work and it gets really tough at times but it’s worth the effort it takes.
No one wants to accept the thoughts of depression and anxiety and the the physical pain they cause, but it’ s the only way to get some needed relief. It’s very natural to want to fight them off it sort of becomes an automatic response in all of us. You must turn this automatic response into one of acceptance. It’sbeen a life long battle for me not to mention the pain it caused my family. I am not completely cured now but I have some understanding of my problem.
i LOVE this one Sen. I always enjoy your articles but my brain insists on interpreting your articles as meaning – positive = good; negative = bad. I know that’s not what you have ever said or meant, but that is what my brain tries to think haha. This makes it clear to me :o)
Thank you!
I am obsessed with the question, “Who am I?”. It is literally every waking thought I have. I feel extreme desire to find the answer to this question. As far as meaning, meaning is the construct of he who perceives. I want to transcend meaning. I want to merge with myself. That is what the universe expresses through “me”.
Anon, it’s important to not get into the whole “extra-ordinary” interpretation of the “who am I” question. Quite simple the answer to “who am I” would be
1. I am an aware being, I seem to have the ability to think, my thinking can be categorized along the 6 dimensions of love, joy, fear, hatred, boredom and sexuality
2. I seem to have a physical body which is possibly just a vehicle that I am using to navigate this physical realm. This body has some characteristics of its own, has a heart and a brain as its intelligence centers. The brain seems to have a certain personality and all the usual 6 dimensions of thinking
3. There are also other beings, bodies that I can see around me, and I perceive that it’s all part of “life”, so I am also part of life. Everything seems to be a creation, and comes from “thought” in the source-creator who is possibly an evolved being(s)/consciousness – that’s about the best interpretation I can make.
4. I have the capacity to “experience” and a desire to express. My experiences are dependent on my “way of thinking”, and they seem to attract realities that are congruent with my way of thinking. So in that sense I seem to have the capacity to attract/create my reality based of my way of thinking – this has to be because I am the same life-energy as God consciousness and hence have the potential for creation, and I need to work on developing this potential.
This is about the basic answer to the “who am I” question. The more you observe life, and yourself, the more apparent these answers become, and as you realize them for yourself you start internalizing them. What’s a waste of time is to just sit repeating the “who am I” question expecting some extra-ordinary answer to pop up from somewhere to give you some spiritual ecstasy. The attitude of simple, logical, and reasoning based observation is the quickest path to developing a congruent/aligned understanding about yourself and life.