Our Search For Meaning In Life, Almost Always Starts With The Wrong Step...

The Essence of Meaningfulness

Ever you asked yourself how do you experience meaningfulness in your life? What is meaningfulness outside from the mere meaning of the word? How do we experience it?

I’ll give you a minute of two to realize this within yourself.

Do you feel it? Everything you can truly experience and feel comes to you within this moment: you can recreate inside yourself all the pain and sufferance you had in the past, or all the joy, but the moment you’ll be able to experience that, will only and always be the present moment. Even when you drift in thoughts, completely away from the concreteness of the moment and what is truly taking place inside yourself, you can experience this total distraction just in the present moment.

Otherwise you are still distracting yourself, but while, at the same time, believing to focus on something useful, so in this way you are losing even the meaning of distractedness in your life.

What exists outside of the present moment, it is just a concept, some time a useful concept, some times not. The paradox lies in the desire to experience the joy or the intensiveness of the present moment, only when it makes sense in the bigger picture of the meaning of life, which can never be found outside of the present moment.

Yet something in yourself can’t cease in questioning you about this grander meaning of life, right?

Did we ever even truly asked life about this and give it the time to answer this question? Or did we just arrogantly assumed to know it, made theories, each time more complicated, as to artificially build an answer for a question we never really wanted to pose?

What if I would tell you that the entirety of the life’s essence, is born and dies in every present instant? That every temporal time, that you would like be existing, is completely embodied, in all of its essence, in the present instant in which it stores then our response and completely recreate from it then a new past and a new future?

The Meaning of Life’s Absurd

Like Lawrence Yeo wrote in his nice Article “The Meaning of Life is Absurd”:

“Ironically, knowing that life doesn’t come with a grander meaning allows us to access the things that really do make life meaningful. This truth helps us realize that the big existential questions of life are not where the answers are; instead, this very moment in our small corner of the world is all we really have.”

So, very practically, the moment you are unconsciously thinking about this grander meaning of life, is the moment you are losing it!

Remember, life’s about experiencing and consciously reacting to those experiences. Thinking is more about trying to find ways to practically and artificially create something out of something else. In such a way, you actually get out, of the possibility to truly and fully experience things as they just are.

But you can also decide to think about something consciously and be really present and reactive to these thoughts. In such a way, you can truly turn them to advantage, experience how they feel like and what they do to your internal landscape and also be the observer of those, so that you are not their puppet anymore, but you actually know how to take care of your thoughts, and seamlessly open and close your dialogue’s session with them.

Thereby you’ll be experiencing better productivity, problem-solving, while, at the same time, fully tasting the meaning life serves you with, as to thoroughly comprehend and enjoy the full taste of the present instant!

So, the morale of the story here is, whatever you do, just do it, don’t do something else, while pretending you are doing, what you are apparently doing! Sort to say, don’t kiss your girlfriend, while you visualize to drink a beer! You wont really enjoy the kiss and not even taste the beer ;)

Forgetting about past and future:

What is past? What is future? How do you experience them? What are past and future without the present? They are like the wishes of a universe who never blossomed to be. Who serves that? Truth is that past and future come into reality just through the meaning we give them to in each present moment, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to express themselves.

So, how do we give meaning to what we experience? Is there a pattern in there? How does that work? Do you believe that there is any way to give meaning to an experience, without being present to it?

Ask yourself, what is more important for you, establishing a general meaning of life, that will just be functioning as a delusional reference, or to fully taste and experience what life has already prepared for you within this moment?

Sort to say, do you like more closing yourself back in your room, closing your eyes and depicting yourself a fake reality who is often unconscious and therefore also somewhat heavier than what it exists outside, or rather go out of your room, open your door and truly experience what meets your steps every moment?

To experience life we need to let go, of all this time’s concepts we have learned and saved in the back of your unneeded white-noise-knowledge, and get acquainted again with the simplicity of what just clearly and evidently is, without background stories and interpretations.

So yes, there is meaning in life, but it’s not a general meaning, is YOUR meaning of life, which is taken down and newly created in each of your present moments and that completely remoulds itself after your decisions. So clearly, not being present to this, means, not matter how intelligent and philosophical you are, it means your life has no meaning and what’s more, you torment yourself searching after what is constantly brought to your eyes, if you would just ever open them...

For example, now that you are reading this, the more you can be present to all what this experience activates in you: the reading of these words, your eyes moving through, your mind coming in and trying to interpret beforehand what it all could mean, all the muscles in you moving and adapting to every little shift of your moods, all the countless of little events happening in every of these instants, all of this, the more you can be present to that, the more you’ll truly experience the meaning of life. Do it now. How are you open to all of this, how can you let go of all what lies between? How long and how deeply can you experience this, without making reference and running away towards something complicated, without needing to find this grander meaning based on foundations that once found, are already very long gone?

This is the meaning of life, and maybe it feels like it doesn’t fit, but that’s just because of the preconditioned way we are used to think about life and time.

Ever you asked yourself how is that possible that you remember more vividly that little flower you came in contact with on that beautiful wheat field during your childhood, other than maybe the house in the mountains you bought yourself as you aged up?

Simply because as a child you had no big concept about the meaning of life, so you could simply experience it.

Life it is full of meaning, so it truly takes no effort for you to sense it, if not you being open for it in this present instant, while not trying to achieve anything specific, condition which you had naturally inborn as child. Life it is so full of meaning in each instant, that whenever you try to add something yourself to it, you are actually removing meaningfulness from it.

There is really not much else for you to do, to understand and experience the fulfilling meaningfulness of life, if not removing all the clutter you have sitting around everywhere in your innermost room, open your doors and lay down on your most comfortable chair... there, this meaning of life will be coming to you and not the other way around, and you’ll have a sense of deeply and intuitively understanding it, as opposed to losing it through your fingers every time you try to conceptualize it through the means of your logical mind and unconscious thought’s patterns.