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Open to the Light
A young man visited the Sage. The Sage said, "I've not seen you before. What led you here?" The reply came, "Sir, I've come seeking the meaning of life?" "And?" continued the Sage. "Well, how do I find it?" "Life" replied the Sage, "being the meaning of Life, how could anyone find it?"
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Buddhist teacher Anam Thubten writes, "To worry about life being meaningful is a little bit like worrying about insomnia."
*The Magic of Awareness.
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So, if Thubten is right, what do we do? We engage means to teach us how to let Life - not mere biological existence - show Itself to us. Life is Its own Self-Revelation. We do not find it, we receive it.
When Life shows itself, meaning becomes present. Of course, meaning had always been present, for Life had always been present. We were born in and by Life. When present to Life, we see we had not been present to Life. We had not been awake to our natural habitat, but we were living an illusion. We believed in delusions we had been socialized to accept as reality.
Our natural evolution is to be estranged from Life to return to Life. This is reconciliation. Why? We have no reason. This progress is, however, not finding something new but remembering something lost. Still, we do not go back - that is not the "return" -; we receive it by going forward. We can not find meaning anywhere in the past, simply for it is not there, even as it is not in the future. Meaning is no-where and no-time.
One obstacle to accepting this awakening to Life and meaning is looking for something special. Shunryu Suzuki said, in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, of the something gained through sitting meditation, "Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special. It is just you yourself, nothing special." In theistic terms: God is God, nothing special. Not being special, then not not-special.
"You yourself," for as Suzuki says, "[W]hatever we do is an expression of our true nature." Hence, not only do we not get anything special, we do not get anything at all. We lose what kept us from realizing the meaning - ourselves - staring us in the face all along. There is nothing you can get from the Way, you are given the Way.
We are like a face laughing and looking for happiness. It already is on the face. Laughter, happiness, and face are already there, for they are all there. So, the face realizes the folly of trying to find happiness. Then, the face can truly enjoy the happiness.
Hence, we see the wisdom of Thubten's words: "When we allow ourselves to fall into the heart, letting go happens on its own." See, letting go happens on its own, for it is already present. Letting go is not merely an act, as in, "I let go," but letting go is letting go. The act only points to our natural posture. "Letting go" points to the nature of Life. Life neither lets go nor does not let go. We can only speak of letting go from the perspective of separation from Life. So, being natural and already, letting go happens.
Now, what is this "heart" Thubten refers to? The heart is not the physical organ or the capacity for feeling. When persons say things like, "I love you with all my heart," they refer to emotion. The heart is the subtlest aspect of the self, the doorway between self and Self, you and God, time and Timelessness, here and Boundlessness. We name it, but we cannot name it.
So, the meaning of Life is Life. Life understood as personal - my life - leads to the futile quest for sustainable meaning. It will always lead to disappointment. Yet, Life, Spirit clothing itself in this temporal, spatial experience in varied forms, therein is the meaning we seek, so to arrive at the point of no more seeking. As the sage Jesus spoke, "I have come that you might have life and life overflowing" (Gospel of John 10.10). He was not speaking of life as commonly understood from a personal or social viewpoint; he was not referring to biological existence. "Existence" and "Life are not the same.
Augustine of Hippo, in his Confessions, voiced it memorably in theistic terms, "You have made us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they find rest in You." We could say, "Life created us for Life, and we are restless, until we discover rest in Life." This rest in Life is where meaning arises to us as a gift.
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*© Brian K. Wilcox, 2021
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on wisdom traditions, predominantly Christian, Buddhist, and Sufi, with extensive notes on the poetry's teachings and imagery.
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