Finding Meaning...

Recently I was listening to a group of Matrics talk about the Covid lockdown and their final school year. Some felt uncertain and some said they experienced a low-level anxiety about their future. Others felt more optimistic and laughed about the opportunity it gave them to slack off because they reckon every prospective employer would remember that the 2020 Matrics were disadvantaged by the disruption the lockdown created in their final school year.

As the conversation unfolded, they were using words like "earth reset", "pause" or "family reset" and I realised they were looking for meaning in the event, looking for meaning in what’s happening around them.

This made me think about “meaning” and why we instinctively feel the need to create meaning - even in events that inherently have no meaning. We do it from when we are very young. You know: the curious little kid asking why is the sky blue, why does rain fall down and not up, why, why, why, why.

Part of the reason we want to know why and find a meaning is because it's one of our base brain survival techniques. We need to assess the event to see whether the impact will be a threat to our survival. Another reason is because humans are motivated by meaning. The 'why' of it helps us work out the 'how' of it.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and founder of 'Logotherapy', believed that humans are motivated by wanting to find meaning in life, and that life can have meaning even in the most miserable circumstances. He goes on to say that the motivation for living comes from finding that meaning. He wrote a well-known book called "Man's Search for Meaning", based on his own experiences in concentration camps, surviving Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Kaufering and Türkheim.

He wrote: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." Frankl also believed that when we can't change a situation, we are forced to change ourselves.

We’ve spoken about something similar before in one of our meditation classes: "cognitive reframing". But we talked about it in a different way. We could call it perspective, and it’s one of the most powerful tools we can use.

Reframing or changing our perspective isn’t about pretending a situation is wonderful when it's maybe not be that great. Instead, it’s about discovering what could be wonderful about it, what we could learn from it or how we can use the situation to create a better outcome for ourselves.

We are constantly attaching meaning to events around us, and according to whether we like or dislike it, we overlay it with an emotional tone. It is this emotional tone which colours or creates our experience of the event.

There is some slight overlap with mindfulness in this, although mindfulness looks at it 'upside down', as usual :) We try to sit without attaching any meaning to anything at all.

Simplifying it immensely, mindfulness agrees that "meaning” exists only in the mind, not in the event. And that most of us most of the time don’t distinguish between the actual event and how the event occurs to us.

In meditation we recognise and / or observe that we give situations emotional overtones. Even when we sit in meditation, we are usually involved in what Shunryu Suzuki calls “gaining ideas”: we look for something, we have some aim, we strive for something, we expect some improvement, we look for meaning.

But whether our sitting practice is meaningful or not is missing the

point entirely. Our practice is about sitting without attaching meaning. We don't make our practice or our perspective 'narrow' by expecting a certain kind of experience, or outcome or meaning. This is an important emphasis: we open up every door of our mind when we sit, and allow everything to come in and go out equally, without discrimination.

Similarly, sometimes people tell me they can't come and sit because they are not feeling happy. Perhaps they feel grumpy or are going through a difficult time. Sometimes people think "I wont sit because my mind is not right." Their expectation gets in the way of things: their expectation of a certain kind of improvement, experience or being able to achieve or generate a certain state of mind.

It is easy to think our meditation will be 'better' if we have no problems. But actually, a small problem is good to sit with. This is an important point about meditation: sitting practice is something you do with a particular kind of attention or observation, regardless of our state of mind when we start. Meditation is mostly to do with accepting that everything which exists in this world is imperfect, and constantly changing, including ourself.

Nothing we see or hear is perfect.

We are not perfect.

Things do not happen twice in the same way.

The very nature of the world we live in is like that.

And the understanding of that imperfection and that constant change is what we need to understand reality.

Shunryu Suzuki says: "We talk about enlightenment. That is enlightenment: to understand that the true meaning of our practice is to accept that we are living in an imperfect world and still practice."

So we don't have to be 'in a good place', mentally speaking, to practice. Good place or bad place, our practice is our practice. Accepting our self as we are right now. Realising that everything in the world around us is subject to change.

So to sum it up, sitting in meditation is about observing only, staying silent, not trying to find meaning, not putting emotional overlays onto events. It's about opening our intuition. When we sit quietly with open intuition, a different kind of meaning will arise within us automatically.

When we practice in this way, when we change our understanding, we change our way of living and our life becomes stable and meaningful.