Some Personal Thoughts on Meaning, Truth and Perfection
by Dr. Tim Duerden
Meaning - significance, importance, value, worth - is a contentious issue. Is meaning a quality inherent in something independent of an individual who considers that thing meaningful? Or is meaning only something that an individual invests in another thing according to their values, biases and experience - there is no inherent, fixed meaning in the thing itself?
All that follows is from my own set of values and meanings. While I attempt to argue my case convincingly, it is all just one point of view and can be discounted as such. Even if you profoundly disagree with the perspectives expressed in this article, it will hopefully offer you an opportunity to reflect on and clarify your own attitudes.
From my perspective and value system I would say:
~ There is no meaning in unity that has any relevance to the personality – unity either has no meaning or is only meaningful to itself. The personality cannot know unity and therefore cannot know the meaning of unity.
~ There is no fixed, inherent meaning in our lives, in creation, in duality – everything is subject to change, so all meanings will change.
~ What meanings there are in our lives are created by ourselves – we invest meanings in things. The meaning we give to things is a complex product of culture, beliefs, personal values, philosophy, realisations, life experience (negative and positive), habits etc. We often use meaning to construct a coherent narrative of our lives and use this narrative to give a context for the decisions we make according to the values we hold. These narratives have been called ‘meta-narratives’. The narrative changes as we change – and we may or may not be aware of this process. Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) would call this ‘framing’. As events are ‘reframed’ or placed in a different context, the meaning would tend to change.
~ Excessive identification with the narrative and its associated meanings risks being vulnerable to situations that threaten that narrative – and we will tend to get defensive when this happens.
If someone has developed a robust and flexible narrative then they will be less vulnerable – but that flexibility may be a product of being willing to adapt one’s narrative which of itself implies less identification. Part of that defensiveness can be seen in the attempt to impose your narrative or meanings on others without consideration that the others’ point of view may be valid.
The more people that seem to share the same narrative or meanings, the less the threat to that narrative or those meanings. In the extreme this can lead to non-engagement with those that do not share the same narrative and exclusion of people who did share it but now do not. This phenomenon can be seen in almost any walk of life and we all do it to some extent. The consensus narrative frameworks that develop in this way in social groups results in the accepted ‘shared reality’ of societies.
~ That concepts of meaning and purpose occupy the mind and drive many of our emotional responses: from euphoria to depression. The more negative emotion, such as anxiety, tend to originate from a perceived threat to or conflict in what we consider meaningful or purposeful. If you sit in the stillness or being-ness of meditation there is no such anxiety – everything is simple: you are present, just being. There is no judgementalism so concepts of meaning, purpose, truth or value have no context – every thing is as meaningful or as meaningless as anything else. Whether you melt further into stillness or get caught up in distractions is also of no consequence to the neutral acceptance – the unconditional love – of the still state.
Taking control!
We can change our narratives and consequently change the meanings we give to things. One of the biggest obstacles to doing so is where we have invested a major part of our life in a particular activity or where we hold very strong beliefs about something being supremely meaningful. But a polarised view is only entertaining one of two halves…
The ‘path to enlightenment’ is a good example.
Many people hold the realisation of enlightenment to be the most important thing in their lives.
Indeed, they may consider that the realisation of enlightenment is the sole purpose to life.
It is worth considering this attitude in a little depth. The state of enlightenment is perfect and complete regardless of whether anyone realises enlightenment or not. It ‘exists’ independently of duality – the separations that sustain duality disappear in unity. The unchanging, eternal nature of unity continues regardless of anything happening in duality – so unity places no purpose or meaning on duality and therefore on life. To say that the purpose of life is to realise enlightenment is to invalidate the lives of people who do not realise it. We are not born with the purpose of realising enlightenment – our birth is the product of the interplay of a set of environments that formed us.
We usually, understandably, want to give our life more significance by creating a narrative of where we came from before birth (reincarnation or god) and a narrative for where we will go – as an intact personality – after we die (reincarnation, god or heaven).
A consequence of being human is that we can realise states of being outside the personality and so escape the limits of the personality. But the personality itself is a product of the environments that created it – and while those environments exist they can create endless personalities.
As everything in duality will change, nothing that is built through ‘spiritual endeavour’ will persist forever. So the value of anything we do will only last for a time. We do not leave the world a permanently better place through our actions. We therefore cannot find an external fixed meaning to live by. To give meanings to something external to us risks giving away our power and becoming vulnerable to our life being dominated by that external meaning and what is associated with it.
Consequences…
What we choose to give meaning to has consequences in our lives – it informs the decisions we make and the attitudes we have. If we decide to create a narrative that assumes that we each invest meaning in what we personally consider to be important and accept that these meanings will change as we change we can find much more contentment in life. This is because we can change the context of how we engage with life. If you decide to give the realisation of enlightenment importance, you can still say that it is one of the most important purposes in your life – important to the extent that you may make major life decisions in order to increase the likelihood of realising it (e.g. meditating!). It may be so important that it impacts on many areas of your life. But it is liberating to let go of the concept that it is the sole purpose or meaning to your life – it never was and it never will be. Even if we pretend to ourselves that it is the sole meaning to our lives, if we look at our lives we will find many activities we invest time in that have little obvious relationship to realising enlightenment and we will find decisions we have made with little or no reference to ‘the sole purpose of our lives’.
We end up feeling tense and guilty if we think everything has to be part of the quest for enlightenment.
And as anyone seeking enlightenment cannot know what it is (as a seeker they have not realised it) – how can they make it their purpose? It is a realisation that can be made that everything seeks its cause and in that sense everything seeks some degree of unity – but this realisation is made by structures outside those that are seen to be doing this seeking. What is doing the seeking cannot know what is sought. The attempt to transfer what is realised in one state of consciousness onto a very different state of consciousness is the source of much of the confusion in many spiritual systems.
No where to go…
So if we are the ones choosing to put importance on realising enlightenment and we are doing so because, at this point in life, it is intuitively, mentally or emotionally what seems right to do then we allow ourselves to focus on the process not the product and to change the meanings we give to this process as we change. It also places each of us in the centre of our own life. We are not going anywhere. We are not on a linear journey. We are no closer to enlightenment the moment before it is realised than we were at the moment of our birth. We have just learnt how to let go in many different ways and, finally, we let go completely. We are living our life and experiencing it from different perspectives as we change through our realisations. Enlightenment is something that will unfold within and without us – it is not in a particular direction. Everything we do in life is part of the process of its realisation. It is much more relaxing to consider realising enlightenment to be just one of the things that is currently important to us and we can make much more effective decisions about how we spend our time if we are not doing so from guilt or fear.
There is no evolution towards some future perfection if there is no universal sole purpose for life. In fact biological evolution, when it is understood in the way biologists intend, offers a good analogy for the many ways humans can develop and unfold. Biological evolution is not striving to produce the perfect organism – trees of life are very misleading in the way they often place humans at an apparent evolutionary peak, suggesting that all what has gone before has done so in order to create humans. We are at the top of these charts because we turned up recently. The process of evolution favours the reproduction of organism that are well suited to a particular environment – as the environment changes so will the form best suited to that environment. There is no grand purpose to the changes in the environment and so there are no purposive changes in the organisms induced by that environmental change.
Indeed, our very tendency to find meanings in the phenomena that manifest around us can be seen as a product of evolution. There is a biological advantage in responding to an observed pattern that results in more food, less danger etc. It is even advantageous to respond to apparently random or coincidental events as if they were connected as it short cuts the time that would be required to notice the underlying pattern if there was one. Pigeons fed grain dropped at random intervals will repeat whatever behaviours they were doing prior to the grain being delivered – these behaviours can be very strange, such as figure eight dances. Each time a grain drops while doing such a movement reinforces it – the random element however will mean any small differences performed when the grain drops will be added to the pattern. There is an uncomfortable resonance with this pigeon behaviour with our human superstitious habits – wearing the same underwear when off to a match that was worn when your team won. In a similar way, we see patterns in clouds – our inner meanings imposed on the external world.
Another huge burden is lifted if we cease to consider the realisation of enlightenment as being the sole purpose to life, assuming that we held this view, and that is the burden of judging the lives of those who are not seeking enlightenment to be pointless. Everything can be said to seek its cause – but the personality cannot know its cause – we have to let go of it and enter another state. So when we engage with the world through our personalities, we are in no position to judge whether someone is or isn’t effectively seeking their cause. Everyone seeks their cause in their own way. It is usually quite shocking when we realise the extent of the judgementalism in our attitudes about what is a life well spent when we first consider these matters. We will often speak about love and yet there is little love in such judgemental attitudes.
The idea that enlightenment is ‘a goal’ can unconsciously create a belief system that suggests that the only true value of this is in ‘the conclusion’ of the final state. If the realisation of enlightenment is considered the sole purpose of life, then this would mean that upon realising this state the person’s life no longer has meaning.
Testing to extremes…
Extreme examples can help – to consider that realising enlightenment is the purpose of life is to say that a baby dying a few weeks old of starvation or neglect or abuse failed to realise the purpose of their life or is to imbue life with a viciousness that makes such a death fulfil some purpose. It is also to say that loved ones in your life who do not realise enlightenment have failed to live a purposeful life despite their importance to you. Such attitudes frequently lead to intolerance and misery. If we consider that life has no purpose or meaning other than to be what it is and unfold in the way that it does then we are not driven into these heartless attitudes.
The baby dying of neglect does so because humans around him or her are neglectful. It is not wrong or right in any big scheme of things – it is just what happens. If we want to be open to love and friendship, we must invest meaning in love and friendship and in so doing will take on social values that will find the unnecessary death of a child terrible in purely human terms.
Away from these extremes, the concept that we are fulfilling some greater purpose by helping other people realise what we are in the process of realising is not sustainable if we accept there is no one meaning or purpose in life. Every life that is led is as meaningful (or as meaningless) or as purposeful (or purposeless) as any other. Every life will realise what is what is truthful to it. But we cannot live in isolation – our actions or inactions affect others. And our actions or inactions are informed by our values and so will influence others. To live with some contentment, a balance between your values and the values of others needs to found – and such balance will never be permanently found – there will always be conflict between differing values. We have to act – but can we act in a way that loves people for what they are and so love us back for how we are. If we can do this to some extent we will find contentment in our personalities and relationships.
From the perspective that we create what is meaningful in our life, then as a group or society we agree on what is of shared importance. The decisions made on the basis of these shared values are only right or wrong in the context of those values. Different groups will construct themselves around different value systems.
Psychological work…
And this leads on to another consequence of placing sole importance on the realisation of enlightenment – the devaluing of the personality. It is usually argued as follows – only unity is permanent, everything in the personality changes and so only activities that will lead to the realisation of enlightenment are worthwhile.
Anything that focuses on changing the personality or the world is thus pointless. Most seekers for enlightenment enter this phase – not all emerge from it! The attitude lacks insight in that it will proclaim that ‘personality work’ is meaningless and yet the individual making such proclamations will usually only be in a position to do so because of all the love and support they have received in life by people who’s personalities have undergone the work that enables them to be loving and supportive.
In addition there may be the failure to understand that it is the personality that must melt into the process of realising enlightenment – and what holds us back from melting are the attitudes, fears and habits in the personality. Therefore, it is intelligent to use any psychological approaches that help accelerate the process of melting.
Personality work that attempts to perfect the personality is ultimately futile as it cannot be made ‘perfect’ from what therefore must be judged to be an ‘imperfect’ state. If our personality is able to function in society and permits us to reasonably efficiently live and prosper according to our own value system then it is doing well. When we become aware of aspects of the personality that interfere with our ability to realise what we value then it makes sense to use personality tools as part of the approach to doing something about it – if we have a value system that would choose to do so. If we operate from a value system that seeks no fixed meanings or purpose we will often find such personality tools to be highly effective as there is a greater facility for letting go of the attitudes and habits that are the source of most personality conflicts.
The belief system of the meditator is crucial in their ability to meditate. Some belief systems are not useful and too much identification with self-analysis unconsciously creates its own inherent problems as demonstrated by those who struggle in meditation – trying to analyse themselves to enlightenment. Surrender, acceptance, self-love are the context in which the application of personality tools and a moderate amount of self-analysis can facilitate more effective meditation.
Meditation can be used to avoid facing the issues that interfere with melting, just as it is can help us notice and accept and work through these same issues. This is why we need to engage with life as well as meditate - the frictions in life highlight where we are holding on rather than letting go. If letting go of fixed identities is essential to realising enlightenment, life offers countless opportunities to do this – and people will often make the profound realisations while engaged in mundane activities. If we are content and relaxed in life then we are probably melting in life and so will melt more completely in meditation. Yes, it is possible to make vast realisations in the middle of personal misery –that misery may even be a spur to escape the causes of that misery – but misery is not a requirement and the issues that generated that misery are likely to remain post-realisation even if they are then placed in a different context.
Enlightenment…
While there may be no ultimate meaning, purpose or truth in life, life comes with the wonderful and mysterious gift that enlightenment can be realised. And while its realisation serves no ultimate purpose other than to be what it is, it does have profound consequences for the way one can live in one’s life and how one encounters the process of personality death. And so there is value and meaning and purpose and truth to be found in helping others realise enlightenment – but the context for this value, meaning, purpose and truth is in human life and is a product of our individual meanings and narratives.
As someone who has realised enlightenment, I choose to spend time helping others to realise the same state in their own way because my value system considers it to be profoundly liberating and, within this narrative, it gives me great pleasure to see others finding that liberation too. It offers a radical and empowering insight and the possibility of resolution of personal and social conflict enabled by the shift of perspective inherent in the state. But the key word is ‘possibility’ – the limited personality never really know the unlimited nature of enlightenment - it can only grasp at reflections of the state – and after realising enlightenment there is no requirement or imperative to change the personality – one set of vales and attitudes is, after all, as meaningful as any other.
Again, as someone who has realised enlightenment with this particular value system, I do not require personal validation of ‘my state’ by others and so am content to be with people for whom it has no relevance, who are actively sceptical of the possibility of such a state or who may accept the possibility of such a state but feel it is impossible for me to have realised it. Indeed, I would often prefer a conversation with an intelligent sceptic to one with an unquestioning believer. Enlightenment cannot be objectively proven to be a reality as objectivity only operates in the realm of personality and the limited nature of personality cannot reflect the state of enlightenment.
While it is subjectively real to me and there are common qualities to the reported experience of enlightened people, all these could be explained by the sceptic as being due to altered brain states or brain chemistry, fraud, or even evidence of as yet unrecognised quantum connections that induce collective delusions in groups of people engaged in particular meditative practices! Searching for proof takes back into the mindset of fixed values and meanings. For matters of the inner self, only we can be the judge of what is true and meaningful to ourselves, just as only we can know whether we truly love someone or are in pain. So to expect respect from people who have not made the same realisation as me because I have realised a state they do not know, having only my word that I have done so and which is a state for which respect is, in any case, meaningless, is to ask people to behave rather unintelligently. Value systems are based on the personality’s view of life and so it is only meaningful to gain respect through actions recognisable to the personality and its value systems.
Enlightened but hostile…
It takes conscious determination and interaction with challenging situations or concepts in order to question habitual value systems, let alone engage in the process of changing them. It also requires a value system that values such a process – and if, as happens, someone has used meditation to escape from the difficulties, compromise and complexities of interpersonal interactions, then such a person will be unlikely to place much importance on questioning their own values systems after realising enlightenment. Indeed, their value system may be very hostile to any process that involves questioning one’s value system. The concept of a hostile enlightened person does not rest easily with value systems that equate enlightenment with perfection of the personality (a philosophically dubious concept) but it makes perfect sense if it is remembered that the personality does not realise the state of enlightenment – it is too limited – and that everything is as perfect or meaningful or valuable as anything else. Perfection of the personality is not necessary to realising enlightenment – it is learning to let go of fixed identities that underpins this process. And you can still be reasonable at letting go even with value systems that are judgemental or a personality that struggles to cope with people or life – after all enlightenment essentially involves letting go of absolutely everything just for an instant, it does not require that everything is ‘sorted out’ before you let go of it. This is just as well as no one would realise enlightenment if the personality had to be perfected – I certainly would not have done so!
If there is no thing that is more important than anything else, no way of living more meaningful than any other way then we cannot hide from acting to help our fellow human beings behind statements such as ‘life is meaningless, only transcendence from this world of pain is meaningful’. The notion that this imperfect world is something to escape from may result in toleration of human suffering and dismissal of people who have given their lives to help others as being misguided. This has been used with great effect by oppressive religious or political regimes.
Kindness…Restraint…
Care has to be taken in the expression of values not based on ultimate meanings to individuals who value the concept of there being ultimate meaning. In particular, unless someone has had a strong experience of being in stillness and has had the opportunity to develop a sense of individuality in that sense of inner stillness or has never invested much of their sense of self in notions of there being meaning or purpose to life (e.g. a materialist scientist), it can have a devastating effect on someone to have their sense of personal meaning and purpose deeply questioned. Values of kindness and compassion would, at times, leash the philosophical aggression that would attack another’s beliefs. If we consider that values are personal and not universal then there is no imperative to inflict one’s own value system on others – someone else’s values are as valid as one’s own, however personally objectionable. From this perspective there is a balance to be found between meeting your own needs and the needs of those around you. As before, it is a balance that can never be perfectly achieved – conflicting needs will inevitably arise but there is a greater possibility of making some mutually acceptable compromise if the parties involved do not consider their personal values to have primacy over another’s. At times we will also decide that, according to our values, we will not tolerate the behaviour of another – acts of violence, abuse, intolerance for example – and take the consequences of imposing our values uninvited.
Traditional notions of morality and spirituality are also challenged by value systems founded on universal meaninglessness and personally derived meaningfulness. Concepts such as sin and karma have no place if there is nothing inherently wrong or right in any action. This does not mean that the abuse humans inflict on each other should be tolerated or condoned. But it is our human values that consider an action or attitude as being unacceptable and the social consensus of a group of a community that institutes laws to control behaviours that that community decides not to tolerate. To expect justice to be done after death by some divine being or universal law may exert powerful control in the short term but it is easily manipulated by oppressive regimes as those who speak for the divine being or universal law become the arbiters of justice. Many societies are currently in turmoil because the traditional socially controlling religious values are breaking down with the rise of individualism and liberal tolerance. Attempts are being made to find another set of fixed values on which to base a social consensus such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But there seems to be a general unwillingness to accept that any such set of values is ultimately arbitrary – or to accept that there is no fixed set of social values that can be derived from universal truths. If societies could pragmatically decide on an arbitrary set of shared values, on the consequences for members of that society not living according to these values, and how to modify these values in the light of experience then we might go some way in avoiding the current social turmoil.
While we can say that no action is inherently bad or good, every action has consequences across the whole of our lives to a greater or lesser extent. The values we give to life will be reflected in how we relate life. To act from self-interest and hatred will polarise our interactions with life and cause it to be based on self-interest and hatred – and a life led in this context is less likely to find contentment (but it is a product of a value system to place importance on contentment). The realisation of enlightenment is no more meaningful than the realisation of a lifetime’s dream to visit India – but the consequences arising from these realisations will be profoundly different. But we will judge these differences according to our value systems – for some, the realisation of enlightenment will be judged to have a much greater potential to catalyse individual and social change than visiting India. But then, the consequences of visiting India for some will catalyse huge social and philosophical changes – Alexander the Great’s visit to India certainly did!
In order to respond positively to difficult events in life many people use the concept that such difficulties are ‘meant to be’ and that they offer ‘learning opportunities’. There is a sense that their life is heading in a particular direction or to a particular goal and challenging situations are stepping-stones on the way perhaps guided by some universal intelligence. These attitudes help integrate survivable challenges but struggle to withstand lethal situations and seem trite in the face of the worst of human tragedy or abuse. The aspects we use to engage in our physical, emotional and mental lives cannot access a god’s eye view that sees the ‘true meaning’ in a given situation – if such fixed meanings were there to be found. If everything is meant to be this would apply to the most mundane of experiences as well as the most dramatic. We similarly cannot occupy a perspective in the personality to be able to know that ‘there are no such things as accidents/coincidences’ in the same way that a pot cannot know the intentions of the potter or a raindrop where it will land.
Wind-up toys…
Our personalities are essentially reactive – life happens to us, we do not know how it will be before it happens. The choices and decisions we appear to make are mostly reactions to external or internal promptings – free will is at best like a bee in a small bottle – it can buzz around within tight limits. There is more personal empowerment in owning the meanings we invest in life so that when we encounter testing situations we can see them as opportunities to reflect on how our personal values cope with the challenge, modifying them accordingly. In this way we stamp our own meaning on our life – we are not conforming to meanings we have picked up unconsciously from parents, teachers and others around us. Many of the notions we pick up in our formative years are like wind-up toys that have the potential to motivate our actions across an entire lifetime – unless we can enter a state that lets them unwind. Some of these values and attitudes may be ones we would choose to keep – to wind them up again ourselves. Consciously choosing to live according to a certain value is very different to being unconsciously driven by it.
If we take ownership of the meanings we invest in life and we value human life and the life of the planet around us, then it is for each of us to decide how we will interact with those around us, and whether, despite the self-limited nature of anything we do, we seek to make the lot of those around us better as a consequence of their interaction with us.
And we can choose to do this for no better reason than it can be done.
Mystery
Many discussions of enlightenment will give the impression that through its realisation the ‘truth’ is known, that there is no mystery left. While the realisation of the eternal state of unity that is enlightenment means that in that state there is no mystery, the ‘truth’ of that state is known absolutely; the utter simplicity of this state can only ‘answer’ questions that pertain to duality and life with a deep contented wisdom that things are as they are – that everything ‘just is’. An intellectual response to ‘Why are we here?’, ‘How is enlightenment possible?’ or ‘Who am I?’ can only be given by the intellect – the bliss of enlightenment would just answer with acceptance that this is how things are. We cannot ever reach ‘closure’ in life, in duality. We can’t finish our narrative of our lives because there is always another perspective, always something unconsidered or unknown. Only in unity is there such ‘closure’ as it has the simplest of narratives that never changes – it is. The joy of enlightenment for me is to be utterly content that all the meanings I find in life and the purposes I give it are like ripples in the sand that will be reformed with every wave, allowing a creative and refreshing response to life.
In any discussion of meaning and narratives it is only consistent to point out that everything discussed above is a product of one individual’s own set of meanings and narratives – and therefore may be of no relevance or meaning nor hold no truth for anyone else!
That is perfect. This is perfect.
Perfect comes from perfect.
Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect.
May peace and peace and peace be everywhere.
Eesha Upanishad translated by W. B. Yeats, Swami Purohit
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