The Search for Meaning is the Root of Suffering

Nothing causes more suffering than the search for meaning. The very act of conceptualizing a "meaning" separates us from the essential energy, the bliss, of living. For the mind must be separate from that of which it forms a concept. When "I" separate myself from life in order conceive its "meaning," I only deepen my loneliness. My very quest for meaning causes alienation.

But when "I" abandon meaning, the separate "me" collapses into the wholeness of life-energy. Awareness without concepts is free to sparkle as a seamless continuity where subject and object dissolve in the bliss of perception. "Meaning" is swallowed up in delicious chaos, the chaos of ananda, or bliss. What remains is a dance of energy without reason or motive: it simply Is.

This dance has no Creator, but wondrously explodes out of nothing, free from causation. That which arises from nothing is un-created.

To dive into this uncreated energy of nothing is the end of suffering. There may be pains or pleasures, but there is no suffering.

 Suffering is the mind's resistance to the freedom of energy. Suffering is the attempt of an independent "me" to conceptualize this wonderful wildness as "meaning," which is like trying to capture the sea in a measuring cup.

"I" need not realize or attain anything. "I" merely dissolve into the ocean of living that I Am.

Humanity developed a separate "I" for the evolutionary purpose of gaining a certain degree of self-consciousness, but paid a great price for it: the price of alienation from nature. This alienation led to a sense of meaningless, and a quest for meaning. But the quest only perpetuates the alienation. Now it is time to return, to transcend that egoic self and to merge with wholeness, yet to merge consciously, not unconsciously. So we are really spiraling upward in evolution, not circling back. We are adding a ring of consciousness to the dance.

For thousands of years, seekers have assumed that the "saint," the "yogi," the "buddha" was peaceful and content because he or she had come to realize the meaning of life. Quite the contrary. The buddha has come to realize the meaninglessness of life. This is freedom.

Liberation is a wondrously absurd space that resists nothing, demands nothing, seeks nothing, thus discovering epic beauty and boundless pathos in an ant climbing over the edge of a dish to reach a breadcrumb.

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