Sometimes I feel like I’m knocking at the door and I need only wipe away the condensation on the glass so that I might at last really and truly see what’s going on.
That’s the thing about constantly inquiring into existence – it starts to reveal little snippets of itself. There are glimpses of, what, exactly? Truth?
They are always a bit jarring – like that momentary shock when you realize your hand is on an electric fence. They are jarring because they tear away a bit more of the tapestry of stories that for so long have made up this thing called me and my life.
It’s not that you stop telling yourself stories – I suspect that habit more or less sticks around right up until that last story, the one about “I’m dying.” It’s more that it demonstrates, in the most naked way possible, that all of it is story.
I’m at the age now where it’s pretty clear that – at least from the mind’s perspective – this little story of mine isn’t going to have a happy ending. Not from the mind’s perspective, anyway.
It’s also fairly obvious that we humans are never going to save the world or put an end to the many problems that ail us. Because their meaning, like our own, lies in mind-made stories.
Oh, we may still applaud ourselves for dragging the occasional beached whale back out to sea or defeating some enemy. But the whale will still die, new enemies will arise, and all of the meaning associated with those stories will fade away with those who tell those stories.
I suppose it sounds desolate or empty, a life without meaning or purpose. But one of those snippets points out that meaning is only necessary when there is a subject (a you or a me) translating things as such. In other words, if the whole thing – existence itself – is one, all-encompassing subject – any meaning to it is at once impossible and at the same time baked into its very fabric. It is meaningful unto itself, just for being.
And that’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? Existence is wonderfully meaningful even if we, its imaginary individual storytellers are not.
We grow up to believe life is one straight line, you are born, you grow up, you marry, have kids, you die…the end. What I’ve found is that life is more like a series of transactions, or rather starts and stops. High school, college, the service, your first job, your first career, your first…third marriage, etc. Each transaction leads you on a new path, one that can be as rewarding as it can be disappointing, hopefully memorable, for better or worse. From each you can draw meaning, but like you and I, are not enough or require change. Existence can be wonderful, if we give up what we were taught at a young age what it should be. Not a sermon, just a thought…
I think the milestones you reference are really just more memorable – from a emotional perspective – but that life is really just a continuous state of being. Nothing is ‘real’ as in lasting or true or permanent. I’ve seen a ton of references in spiritual texts to each individual life being like a wave on the ocean. There is an imagined existence filled with peaks and valleys, but ultimately the wave never left its source, rises up out of it, then sinks back into it. The “I” is the One, it’s just mistakenly believing that it is for a time a separate little unit.