Wanting Meaning
Meaning is inherent in life — life is meaningful. However, wanting meaning is just one more desire that we humans suffer over. While meaning comes from Essence, our essential Self, the desire for meaning comes from the ego. We only desire what we feel is lacking, and the ego is what experiences lack and therefore desires.
It doesn’t experience the inherent meaning that exists in any moment, so it desires it. It is out of touch with this, so it desires it. When we are identified with the ego, we are always looking for something to satisfy what is never satisfied — the ego — and meaning is just one more thing the ego seeks, when it is right in front of its nose, so to speak.
Meaning is right here, right now in the experience — the gift — of life. Being alive is meaningful, and whatever springs out of this moment is meaningful. Life feels meaningful when we are in touch with Essence and Essence’s experience of life. The ego, however, is looking for something more, as usual, something that will make it feel meaningful. It isn’t necessarily looking for the experience of meaning, which is already here.
What will make me and my life meaningful? asks the ego. The ego is what wants to be meaningful and wants its life to be meaningful. To whom? we have to ask. The ego wants its life to be meaningful to others so that it is cherished and loved and admired, which is why it wants much of what it wants.
Wanting meaning is a form of spiritual ego. It is a higher desire, not as materialistic as wanting a new car, but ultimately this desire is still in service to enhancing the ego’s self-image, and it imagines it will feel better about itself once and for all if it finally finds meaning.
The trouble is that the ego looks for meaning in all the wrong places. It looks for meaning in accomplishments and experiences, but these come and go, and the ego never has enough accomplishments and experiences to be satisfied. It experiences meaning briefly from these, and then it is back to lacking it, to needing more meaning.
The one place the ego doesn’t look for meaning is in the beauty of this moment. It doesn’t expect to find it there, so it looks everywhere else. How can there be meaning in just existing? This makes no sense to the ego. To it, only a fool or a child could be satisfied with that.
It overlooks the one thing that can satisfy — the moment.
But this should be no surprise because when we drop into the moment, the ego disappears. It turns out the ego is just thoughts about ourselves and our life, and when we are no longer engaged with our thoughts but involved in the experience of our being existing in this moment, the ego (the “I”) disappears.
The ego can’t experience true meaning because as soon as we do, the ego dissolves. Only when we drop out of our egoic minds and into Essence can we experience true meaning, and in that experience nothing else is needed, nothing is missing or lacking. What a relief it is to experience true meaning. We didn’t have to strive and struggle for it after all. It was here all along, only hidden from us by the ego that told us it wasn’t here and we had to go searching for it.
And so it is with the spiritual search as well: We think we have to seek enlightenment, when all we really have to do is just allow ourselves to be here right now in this moment without seeking, trying, striving, wanting, needing, doubting, fearing, judging, or doing any of the other things the ego tells us we have to do to be happy and safe. The ego is a liar, and once we stop believing it, we find everything we were looking for.
~ From the blog of Gina Lake.