eThoughts : Meanings and Meaninglessness

Sometime back I heard from a friend who had been told “if we find something sad or depressing, we are giving it pseudo-meaning; if it is truly meaningless, it is not really sad.”

All right, hold on now. This is the kind of statement that can make us spin off down a path of illusion. In the first place, I take it the statement was designed to explain something–thus it was meant to be a meaningful statement. Second, I take the term pseudo-meaning as the giving of meaning where there is none. But where is there no meaning? This statement about pseudo-meaning and meaninglessness is really a nihilist’s position. I’ve not gotten such a position if for no other reason than I’ve noticed that nihilists seem to spend a great deal of time writing and explaining their position. It reminds me of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, apparently a book of procedures.

I think meaninglessness is not really an option. First of all the concept of “nothing matters” is not the same as meaninglessness. Besides, you may have noticed that awareness exists, it may not matter unless we matter it, but awareness is. That is not meaningless, even if we try and make it so (as Richard Bach said about the number 8–our not mattering it or making it meaningless doesn’t eradicate the existence or influence of the number 8).

So, for me, awareness does matter and it does have meaning simply because it is. But, and note this if you will, I’m not pretending that I know what the meaning is. Regarding feeling good or bad, for me, happiness and joy, along with sadness and depression, serve as great adjuncts to awareness by letting me know that I care. Yep–we can indulge, in most anything. And like everything else, depression or happiness, etc., can become a master instead of a messenger. So let the aware be aware.

In our awareness, let’s consider this: Moving to another plane or even cleaning up the plane we are on is likely to include re-learning or at least re-organizing what we’ve been taught is important. Losing the original cultural download is like losing a faithful old blanket. And, it is confusing–since we seem to be hardwired to organize the world in the first place–as nihilists seem to know. So, once the straw guidelines of the cultural download have blown away, we are still compelled to build or discover anew. Compounding the issue of re-learning and re-organizing is that we are mostly programmed to see and to utilize what we were taught in the first place–in our case it may be a lot of straw as our building blocks.

But I don’t see how all of this renders the seeming meaninglessness of our download as the general meaninglessness of existence. That would be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Besides, meaning and meaninglessness are transitory landings, both useful in what we choose or don’t choose to utilize from the sea of awareness.

Energy may be the only something without a contrast, but it sure is the building block of contrasts. And contrasts are the building blocks of distinctions. And distinctions are the building blocks of choice and freedom. Interestingly, choice and freedom are the building blocks of cause and effect–determinism.

So, in the midst of this muck or this beauty, here’s to proper filing, good definitions, and bridges across paradoxes, all structures built, at least in part, on our abilities to re-member and to re-cognize, and utilized with the energy that is everywhere–something we can influence, but not get rid of. That’s not an attitude, it just is.