39. Mindfulness and Meaning

What does it all mean? What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose here? These are, in my view the great pseudo questions of religion and philosophy. We need not ask them. As often imagine that in the absence of having answers to questions of this kind, there’s a massive void in our lives that must be filled by something. Myth, superstition, agonizing doubts. This is an illusion. It’s an imaginary problem. It’s a pure confection of thought. Let’s find another starting point. We can start with the big picture. There’s the cosmos, and complex life has emerged within it. Just imagine earth without human beings, you have the full miracle of evolution. You have DNA replicating itself, you have consciousness as it exists in wolves and eagles and chimpanzees. What you don’t have are all the existential doubts that lead people to wonder, what does it all mean? You have no temptation for teleological thinking, purpose driven thinking, he wouldn’t say a wolf is so important that the universe must have had a higher purpose in producing, nor what its beauty be diminished. Once you acknowledged that there is no higher purpose that brought it into the world.

And I would argue the same would be true even if you imagine having a world filled with modern human beings imagine the last generation of anatomically modern human beings, maybe 75,000 years ago, before the advent of complex language, or complex material culture. Before anyone could have a conversation of the sort that we’re now having, before anyone could articulate a concern for the future, that brought into being these worries about what it all means, or what his life’s purpose. Imagine a world with those people were would the temptation to wonder about the meaning if at all, or the purpose of it all come from you, standing outside that world wouldn’t say there must be a higher purpose here. The world is what it is. Everything is simply appearing based on prior causes. A related issue here is that people worry about meaning in the absence of freewill. I should remind you of two things here, when I talk about freewill. Some people find it unpleasant to think of it as an illusion. If you’re one of those people, well, then you need not listen to this lesson. But there’s nothing intrinsically unpleasant about this. And there’s nothing that robs or need Rob one’s life of pleasure and quote, meaning if the movie of your life were rewound, and your brain and your soul, even if you have one and the surrounding world, we’re returned to precisely the states they were in an hour ago, you would spend the ensuing hour exactly as you just have. There’s simply no way for physical and mental causes, or even spiritual causes to propagate that makes sense of this common notion of free will. Okay, and adding randomness to this clockwork doesn’t help any. So there’s this mystery at our backs. Everything is simply springing into view, every intention, and desire and choice simply emerges, as does the impulse to follow or resist these intentions and desires and choices. You don’t know what you will think until you think it. And there is no evidence at all that you could have thought otherwise, a moment ago. Again, if your brain or soul were in precisely the state it was in, you would think that last thought or form that last intention a trillion times in a row. Your experience of consciousness in this moment, and of making choices is totally compatible, with the absence of freewill with a truly deterministic universe, or a universe governed by determinism and some randomness thrown in. So each thought is like a wolf, or an eagle, or a person that simply appears in the cosmos based on prior causes. Now, contrary to many people’s expectations, recognising the illusory nature of free will doesn’t diminish the good things in life, there’s still an impressive difference between happiness and suffering, and remains perfectly rational to prefer happiness. You don’t have to believe in freewill or in some higher purpose to existence or some overarching plan to see the wisdom of removing your hand from a hot stove, or to prefer loving relationships with other people to hostile ones. The quote, meaning in life isn’t found by coming up with answers to badly posed questions like What does it all mean? It comes from finding good enough reasons, to be deeply immersed in the present moment, and to create or discover new and interesting things and ideas, and to connect with the people around us. No one has ever found meaning by brooding over his past or future. And if you do become immersed in the present, you won’t find any evidence for free will here. But neither will you find a reason to worry about its absence. Rather, what is there for you to notice is the intrinsic openness, and freedom of consciousness. And each moment, everything is simply appearing, and you are the condition in which these things appear. And it’s important to appreciate the power of thought and concepts. Here, our thoughts seem to determine the character of most experiences, we’re all intimately familiar with four general states of consciousness. In the first, our bodies are comfortable, and yet our minds are making us miserable. In the second, our bodies may be quite uncomfortable, perhaps we’re engaged in a strenuous workout, but our minds are happy. In the third, our bodies are uncomfortable, maybe we’re in pain. And we’re also miserable. And in the fourth, we’re enjoying some state of physical ease or pleasure. And this is attended by happy thoughts. The mind and body are separable here, with respect to the the valence of experience. Now, people who are living, quote, meaningful lives, generally have a story to tell themselves and others, that puts their pains and pleasures in a context that they feel good about. So the search for meaning comes, when we’re in states one or three. That is, however our bodies feel, our minds are troubled. And we’re trying to get to states two or four, we’re trying to get to a place where we feel good about what we are doing, and experiencing whatever the character of our sensory experience at that moment. And the difference between being wise or foolish lies in how we attempt to do that. And we have 1000s of years of literature, and collectively many billions of years of human experience, that attest to the difference between good and bad decisions in that area.

And to make these decisions, well, it’s important to find a positive relationship to uncertainty. And here, there really is a power in certain thoughts. The conceptual frame, we put around experience matters, how you think about uncertainty and risk matters. So on some level, it’s useful to believe that whatever doesn’t kill you can at least potentially make you stronger. This happens to be true, is very often a silver lining, in difficult experience. So it’s important to realize this in advance, it cuts down on worry, and it allows us to take smart risks that will very likely pay off. Even bad things offer an opportunity for growth. This is a belief that is worth having. This is an algorithm that produces resilience, and changes your conception of failure. Failure is not always bad, and therefore is not worth fearing. In many cases, it’s also important to realize that the things you want, or afraid to lose her rarely as important as you think they are. This is a very widespread observation in behavioral economics. We’re well known to be terrible at predicting how much good or bad things will affect us. The truth is, they don’t affect us nearly as much as we hope or fear. now realizing this, and finding ways to be happy in the present, before things happen, is in large measure what it means to be wise. Wisdom is understanding that you don’t have to hold your happiness hostage until some future time where your desires get gratified. But that doesn’t mean it’s irrational to plan for the future. Yes, none of us know how long we will live. But it’s generally rational to assume that you’ll have enough time to devote to long term projects to build in a family or a career. You need not live every day like it might be your last in order to be wise. But the trick here is To remain process oriented, whatever your goals, the quality of the journey has to become more important than those fleeting moments when you actually arrive at your destination, because most of your life is the journey, most of your life is the process of solving problems. It is not and will never be a condition of basking in the absence of all problems, there will always be something to do, the frame of mind in which you do it determines the quality of your life. So you can’t wait until you solve your problems to be happy. So the question of how to live a meaningful life is fairly simple to answer. In each moment, we have an opportunity to connect with the contents of consciousness with the sights and sounds and sensations, and ideas that constitute the actual character of our lives. Or we can be lost and thought that is thinking without knowing that we’re thinking, then we are fully at the mercy of whatever thoughts arise. And as you know, the character if so much of our thinking is unhappy, the mind becomes the kind of theater of doubt, and anxiety and regret. And it’s only in this theater, that one can be concerned about what it all means, and to get lost in the false questions of philosophy, or religion. This moment, simply this does not, cannot, and need not mean anything, or have any purpose. One can only think otherwise. And thinking otherwise seems to introduce a crisis of meaning. Mindfulness has the capacity to break this spell, and actually connect with experience in the present moment. But it doesn’t come naturally, as you’ve probably noticed. So that’s why we practice it.