Is Life Meaningless After Awakening?
Close your books and live
I recently came across a question I found interesting. Here’s the original one:
What is the point of striving towards awakening if all worldly things will seem meaningless once attained?
Below is the answer I left to the questioner. Enjoy.
Who told you so?
We seem to live a little too much in scriptures and not enough in real life. Don’t we?
Words and sentences are always subject to misinterpretations.
Don’t take them at face value.
Try considering the person speaking to you; where they come from, what their language dynamics are, is this the exact word behind what they are trying to convey, is English their primary language, etc.
Saying all things are meaningless portrays a pessimistic view of life, which is far from what a “higher soul” might want to convey when using the same word. In most cases, the disciples are the ones misinterpreting things.
Like most people, I have been in love as an example.
The pain from a heartbreak has often made me feel like falling in love was pointless or meaningless. I was constantly haunted by it. And that made me apprehensive about romance in general. I’d often be told to find someone else. Why repeat the same circus again? It was meaningless, after all, wasn’t it?
That’s what I thought to myself.
Approaching life this way kept me on the fence in general. But it was life, and this was something I had to work on because I considered it my duty. Plus, I kept in mind that there were couples in life who were happy. So clearly my mind was playing with me by projecting its negativity onto the world, and I never liked falling for cheap tricks.
As I worked through the pain, and understood myself on a deeper level, often extracting the various life lessons from my past experiences — I started realizing how I couldn’t have learned all this without being “hit” in the face. No books or classes could have. Only pure & raw experience. Only the “battlefield” itself.
Then I felt grateful for it.
Woah. Thank you Existence. Thank you for these lessons. Thank you to my past partners. Woah. Amazing. Without you I couldn’t have learned these lessons. Thank you. Thank you so much.
That’s how I felt.
Today, in retrospect, it all looks meaningless.
The heart-wrenching pain, the grudges, the reverie, the despair, the prayers for her to come back or texts first, and so on. All of it, even though it felt like it was my “oxygen” back then — it’s completely eaningless now.
It’s like waking up from a bad dream, and finding out everything is perfectly okay. And feeling thankful for being alive.
It is all meaningless now because without it I wouldn’t have grown as a man. I am actually grateful for these life lessons because they helped me. In this regard, it is meaningless now. It does not mean a thing to me. I look at it with gratitude. And I move forward with my life.
Now notice the difference or shift in vibration with the word meaningless from the last paragraph. What does it convey? Am I conveying pessimism? Or do you feel uplifted, and perhaps even optimistic about life?
Because your question evokes a sense of pessimism to me. I may be wrong of course.
All I’m saying is to think twice about the words and sayings we take for granted. Everybody can say anything. It may be true. It may not. It’s fine. But it is one’s duty to think things through, because nobody can do it for us.
Best of luck,
Rabih
