meaning

Owing to our comfortable lifestyles, many of us have the opportunity to explore deeper, more existential ideas about the kind of lives we want to live, and the purpose of our being. We search for “meaning” in our lives as if it’s a treasure to be found somewhere. We look for it everywhere – in our work, our relationships, our experiences, often times with little success.

For the better part of the past 22 years, I’ve been looking out of the same window. Sometimes it feels like not much has changed, but then upon close inspection, everything has. The seer and the seen. Everything has changed, and yet it feels familiar. The same window, the same view, the same black grills - a cage one moment, a safety net another.

I’ve been through a few of these cycles now to see them and know them for what they are — a cycle. Nothing more, nothing less. Is there merit in discussing what has changed more - the seer or the seen? Is it not a false dichotomy? Does it matter?

The true seer is the one who sees the changing world as the unchanging infinite. For the one with sight, there they can be no boundaries. Nothing begins or ends, it all simply is.

Definitely no merit then in compartmentalising our world so we may understand, with our feeble intellect, the complex nature of it all.

“We murder to dissect.” - as Fukuoka once said.

One can only experience the whole, and this experience of the whole is the only truth there can be. For it may well be the only thing that cannot be described. Truth once uttered ceases to be the truth, for it is now tainted by language and its subjectivity.

It is also worth noting that this knowing of the whole must be the only pursuit worth our time, for it alone is unchanging and uncoloured.

This must be the meaning we so desperately seek.