What is the Meaning of Life?

Humanity has a crisis of meaning because meaning is not something you can find in life. It’s something you can experience only. It’s a state of experience. You can find it in a flower, in the sunset, where everything makes sense and everything is perfect. Nature has that power over us.

Meaning is not something that can be found. In that way, life is meaningless. The whole phenomenal world is empty. We know that secretly and so what we find is fabrication of meaning, creation of false meaning, propaganda, conditioning, brainwashing, projection, chasing and defending this false meaning with all our might.

So, if we want to experience meaning, we have to realise the meaninglessness. We have to embrace the meaninglessness of the phenomenal world and then we can have meaning; it is not something to be found but to be experienced.

“How?” you ask. Well, that’s what yoga is all about.

Our world, ultimately, is an experience within our own consciousness. There is no world, ultimately. At any moment, the only thing you are certain of is that you are experiencing and that you are aware of the experience you are having.

Who is having that experience? You. And where is that experience? Within your own consciousness. That’s all you have access to, your consciousness.

So, the only experience you can have is on the level of your consciousness. You cannot have an experience outside of it. Anything only has meaning within the domain of your own consciousness.

Anything is as sacred as you give it permission to be. For some the bodhi tree is a wisdom tree, for others it is firewood.

So, as long as you don’t refine your consciousness, you will always have a crisis of meaning, as all experience is within the domain of your own consciousness. Whether it’s your job, children, relationship, the presence of them or the lack of them, whatever it is, it’s all within the field of your own consciousness. That’s all you have access to. The experiencer is the experience. You can verify it. You don’t need to believe in it.

Life is an experience and it’s the experience that you are having, so the experiencer is the experience. If the experiencer is being unnoticed, unrefined, then the experience will remain meaningless because an experience independent of the experiencer is meaningless in the phenomenal world. All meaning is experiencer generated so if the experiencer is not being refined, the experience cannot refine itself ever and you can verify that.

Refine yourself slightly and the experience changes. Shift your state and the experience alters. This is not something you need to believe in.

The only meaning is the experience you are having, YOU. Otherwise, if you look for meaning, it’s meaningless. You are born, you die and you are replaced,

The yogis knew this. That’s why all yogic technology centres around refining your consciousness, refining the experiencer.

As you refine the experiencer, the experience refines and there arises the experience of meaning because what we are looking for is the experience of unity, relevance, love and that’s the state of flow.

The more meaning you experience, the harder it is to put into words. It moves you. It can just be the way the sun is hitting the water, or the way someone looks at you, you feel seen by them, or the way a vision arises in your meditation. The more meaningful the experience is, the harder it is to reduce it to words.

Meaning is only within the domain of our own experience and we have verified, through our own experience, that experience is within the domain of the experiencer. So, we have to refine the experiencer if we want to experience any sense of meaningful living. Otherwise, there is a crisis of meaning no matter what you have, no matter what you get. We can accumulate but there’s no meaning in that way. People with a lot of money feel empty too. It’s the same with fame. It’s not about money, how many times you marry, how many children you have.

But, often, people are too afraid to stop and question what they have been told about life. If they really ask, they might realise that it is meaningless and they are afraid of meaninglessness; so they stay busy, distracted, thinking that they don’t have time for spirituality.

Saying “spirituality is not my kind of thing” is like saying breathing is not my thing. It’s intelligence. You have to explore what you are.

So, meaninglessness, only then meaning!