The Meaning You Were Given
The age-old question of “what is the meaning of life?” and “what am I here to do?” may not have a final conclusive answer that holds up in every situation, but the discussion of what life is not necessarily or only about may be pertinent and liberating to reflect on.
The average person assumes that the meaning they have prescribed for their life and what drives them is their original idea. But, is it really original? Or did someone else come up with it and pass it on to you?
Generally speaking, the unspoken and assumed reality that most people have been brought up into by modern culture and social institutions is to believe that life’s forefront meaning and purpose is to achieve some kind of “success”, typically through some role or work in the world. Individual minds have become so accustomed to swimming in this sea of convention that they fail to realize that it is a constructed reality. The accepted blueprint for life that overshadows the majority of minds in the modern age is that one must “become someone”, accumulate wealth, have an amazing career, get married and have children, own property, acquire material possessions, and to live out what has been labelled the “American dream” or some version of societally-defined “success” that has been placed on a pedestal as a must for life to make sense and have meaning.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these pursuits in and of themselves. The misconception is that this proposition of following and fulfilling this type of constructed path in life is what will reliably and ultimately bring happiness and meaning to life itself. It is a prescription for happiness and meaning that is essentially made up – it is not actually inherent in some inscribed way to reality itself or who or what we fundamentally are or what is actually needed for fulfillment and happiness.
Where did these ideas about the meaning of life being a socially-defined and measured success come from? The people around us when we were growing up that pushed these ideas onto us including teachers, parents, the media, and authority figures were usually not consciously intending harm or to push us astray. However, because they themselves have taken on this exact paradigm for their lives from a culture shaped by institutions and its billionaires that they have assumed that this is what life is solely and should really be about. They were influential on our conditioning as we were growing up simply because they thought that it was the best thing for others to make life’s main purpose about, too – not necessarily a malicious brainwashing attempt.
Nonetheless, this limited, one-dimensional, narrow, and often suffocating idea of what life is really only about or should really be about has been drilled into most peoples’ psyche since childhood when this shared societal hallucination of life’s purpose as the notion of the noble goal of worldly “success” was handed down through early schooling and life experiences and interaction with people who seemingly knew more about reality than we did.
Arguably, the fundamental intentions of schools, institutions, corporations, and societies in general are by design to prepare young minds and employ them to work long-term for corporations. Why is that? Well, simply put, corporations’ wealth and power solely depends on the labour and effort of the working class – the majority of a nation’s citizens. Because of this fact, societal structures have been highly motivated to engage in deliberate mind programming of the entire lower and middle class since early life experiences in order to make people as emotionally and physically dependent on work, productivity, consumerism, and the system as possible, ensuring that people will keep developing skills and keep being strongly internally-motivated to work for corporations until retirement at 65 or just as often, burnout.
This mental programming has been set up to deliberately tie and bind one’s sense of self-worth, purpose, happiness, and meaning to social status, jobs, careers, productivity, and well, labor. Consumerism has also been a cornerstone in this programming because the consumer narrative creates addiction to endless spending and a perpetual feeling of lack. Therefore, due to the excessive need for continual spending due to consumer culture, the necessity for continual earning through work remains high as well.
We see this kind of rhetoric in “hustle culture”, relentless optimization, fast driven lifestyles, materialism, a need for constant stimulation, productivity, and the impulse to climb social ladders. Failing to follow this rhetoric, even not living up to these societally-defined standards for a day or sometimes even an hour for a lot of people hooked into this rhetoric can result in feelings of low self-worth, guilt and shame, feelings of personal failure, the sense of being lost in life, and grieving a lost sense of self. These cultural norms are so ingrained into peoples’ psyches that they will believe it is their shortcoming instead the result of the conditioning of modern society intended to get people to act in prescribed ways and become strongly motivated to fulfill the prescribed life path proposed by social structures for the primary purpose of the maintenance of wealth of the upper class.
Another goal of social structures is to make people dependent in as many ways as possible on the system in which they live. This is done precariously through convincing people that they always need more – that they don’t quite have enough and aren’t enough themselves as they currently are. More and better things are to be sought after, more debts and loans to take on for stuff, and thus, longer-term binding to work and labor.
What Is It All About, Then?
Setting aside the question of “how do I survive financially in this society, then?”, as that question is outside the point and scope of this article, if life is about more than just worldly success through work and accumulation, what is it all about, then?
Well, firstly, one could argue that life itself is much grander and is truly and already beyond any notion of worldly success. And it’s this way right now – not when something is achieved through a better life situation. What I am calling life itself is beyond constructed ideas, paths, illusions of security and progress, conditioning itself, and even survival.
In its most fundamental and essential form, life is the experience of consciousness or awareness that is experienced as it is in this eternal moment. Life itself is non-personal and non-local. It is beyond duality and dual perceptions – what Taoists call ying and yang. It is the universe itself or universal consciousness that is imbued in and the essence of everything material, including ourselves. We just experience it from a human vantage point through the lens of a human mind. In Taoism, it is known as the Tao. This may sound rather underwhelming or maybe even too esoteric or “new age” to celebrate, see the importance of, or even acknowledge. However, in its unconditioned and purest state, untainted by societal structures and conditioning, completely devoid of resistance to this eternal moment such as the mind’s endless thirst for more, this experience of life itself as eternal consciousness is complete, peaceful, beautiful, fulfilled, playful, and even blissful. It is a love and wellbeing devoid of conditions that “must be met” for its experience. It is unconditional happiness.
“When the shift of meaning occurs from becoming culturally successful to realizing, embodying, and experiencing your divine nature, the motivation for work also shifts from just making money, buying a home, or having a family to using work and everyday life experiences as vehicles or opportunities to uncover more and more of your true nature while shedding more layers of conditioning as well as learning about your reality as you go about your day to day.”
So then, why do so many miss this? Why do so many not experience this presumably “vast ocean of expansive, liberated, and fulfilled consciousness”? What is blocking this immediate and visceral present moment of true peace and eudaimonia that is by nature expansive, liberated, and filled with joy, peace, and is intrinsically fulfilled is the forgetting of what one is through the conditioning of social structures, as well as oneself.
When one is conditioned to believe that they are lacking, they are also conditioned by the same token to resist the present moment in order to escape the difficulty of it. We are conditioned to say “yeah, but” to our present experience, continually. “Yeah, I feel ok right now and things are alright, but my 2000 square foot house isn’t quite big enough for my liking.” “Yeah I’m doing well, but my family doesn’t approve of how I choose to live.” “Yeah I’m alright, but I’m only earning 60k, not 120k like I should be.” All of these are mental resistances to the present moment – resistance to fulfillment and peace and rediscovering the liberated, unconditioned, expanded consciousness that is ever-present. The resistance to the present through desire or aversion to it is what causes suffering, obscures one’s true nature, and prevents one from letting go of the conditions on their happiness and wellbeing. Have you noticed that as soon as you drop the “yeah, but” – the resistance to what is at any given moment, and just accept or say “yes” to your present moment experience and embrace it, your suffering also ceases in that moment, almost immediately? By accepting the present moment, you are not being passive, you are actively and gradually dissolving the resistance, discontent, and unending thirst for more that you were trained by society to adopt, believe, and perpetuate through this dissatisfaction and constant search and thirst for more.
By letting go of attempting to control everything, resist what is, and instead just learning to be present more often and aware of what is, the resistance that in the form of conditioning starts to dissolve and then the beauty, fulfillment, and peace of the present eternal consciousness starts to be revealed in increments. So, life’s meaning can be thought of as to willingly remember who or what you really are. It is to come back and gradually re-discover or remember that natural state of wellbeing and joy that is your birthright in its truest essence and then to live, relate, and operate from that place, that understanding, remembrance, and recognition.
When the shift of meaning occurs from becoming culturally successful to realizing, embodying, and experiencing your divine nature, the motivation for work also shifts from just making money, buying a home, or having a family to using work and everyday life experiences as vehicles or opportunities to uncover more and more of your true nature while shedding more layers of conditioning as well as learning about your reality as you go about your day to day.
When the social conditioning that was placed upon a person since birth begins to deconstruct through radical acceptance and presence, the pursuit of worldly “success” becomes much less serious and important. Societal success simply becomes something that must be done to pay the bills, not as the source of all wellbeing, happiness, meaning, and purpose as it was presented to be by modern culture. Happiness is then understood and experienced as originating from the unconditioned consciousness itself that societal conditioning was intended to cover up.
Admittedly, social structures and their conditioning are not the sole reason for losing this perception of eternal divinity. We are individually capable of doing it to ourselves as well. But cultural programming is a big part of the obscuration and the tendency towards it. As humans, our minds are naturally prone to fragmentation, discontent, conditionality, trauma, and all the psychological “id” (Freudian term) and ego-driven desires, hostility, competition, and fear. These human traits are part of our biology and inherent psychological makeup and have to do with our basic survival instincts. But, what most don’t realize about the human mind is that it is highly malleable to intentions and how one chooses to work with their reality. It is actually the experience and spiritual journey of a human being – the experience of the struggle between biology, survival, and the fragmented mind versus the eternal consciousness’s pull towards its own realization of itself, its wholeness, freedom, wellbeing, and fulfillment.
Our culture is unfortunately shaped to feed and capitalize on the inherent biological survival mechanisms that cause people much suffering while downplaying, ignoring, and rejecting the vital call of being or universal consciousness to awaken to itself and move towards true inner freedom, wellbeing, liberation, and spiritual remembrance. That being said, the potential and opportunity presented to us here on earth is to rediscover our true nature and extricate ourselves from the limited way of living, perceiving, and relating given to us by our social structures that we were conditioned into glamorizing. This freedom is always a possibility.
This process of rediscovering or remembering one’s true nature involves shedding layers of pernicious social conditioning and isn’t always or even often a “walk in the park”. It requires for all the conditionality and ingrained ways of perceiving reality handed to you since childhood to be gradually shed, deconstructed, and released. It can actually feel like a death. A death not of you, but of something you thought you were, but weren’t. It’s a continual process that may be lengthy as an evolution of the spirit (or de-evolution of the conditioned mind, depending on how you wish to see it) that keeps stripping more and more layers of conditioning from itself. It can be disorienting, sometimes frightening, often exhilarating, but ultimately liberating. It’s a process that prompts us to surrender and let go, more and more and more, as well as deeper.
Once a human being gets an initial taste of their true nature, what is called a satori or enlightenment experience – a sudden realization of what you are and always were, the process begins and does not stop until the full realization of the unconditioned is realized and imbodied. As you accept the process as it comes to you, doing your best to surrender into it but also to learn from it as the shedding of the layers of who you thought you were unfolds, what you do in the world often drastically changes and becomes a natural expression of who you are or in the least something you can tolerate instead of the exhausting “work” done by who you thought you were, had to be, or had to become or live up to. You can read my article about how Eastern practices restructure the pursuits of the Western mind here.
This process unfolds in its own time. All it requires is your attention, courage, equanimity, diligence, and faith. Only then do you see what life is truly about.
