Creating As We Go
At the end of the year, I received the latest e-Teaching from Phillip Moffitt’s DharmaWisdom website. The subject was The Search for Meaning, which oddly enough, just sort of floated right over my head. Maybe it’s because I was in holiday overload, but I didn’t even open the email. I just let it sit there in my inbox along with miscellaneous year-end sales promotions, charity pleas and credit card offers.
But then I read it, and it wasn’t the vague over-view that I guess I had been expecting. It contained an idea that I don’t think I’ve ever really considered: The possibility that there isn’t inherent meaning to life, but that there is meaning that we are somehow co-inventing….that we are creating the meaning of life as we go!
Here’s the part of the e-mail that really caught my attention:
“If you can truly commit to “don’t know mind,” you can explore this question of whether life has meaning in a purposeful way. I believe there are three possible truths.
“The first is that there is no meaning outside of our own experience, whether it’s pleasant or unpleasant. If there is no meaning other than the material moment, then our sense of a greater meaning is some combination of superstition and a way of coping with the existential fear of life’s certainties: We will die, we can’t control what happens to us while we’re alive, and we don’t know if there’s any purpose to our struggles and victories.
“The second possibility is that there is meaning to life that is outside the immediate experience. That meaning can be completely predestined, or there can be some room for us to participate in a small or large way, depending on what you believe.
“Lastly is the possibility that there isn’t inherent meaning but there is meaning that we are either co-inventing or inventing by ourselves, i.e. we’re creating the meaning as we go. Maybe we’ve been co-creating the meaning of life from the moment of the Big Bang.”
I find that possibility fascinating.
Check out Phillip’s DharmaWisdom website for more.
(image: me and the sea on Kiawah Island)