So many of the things we say we want are really substitutes and symbols for actual values and qualities we feel we're lacking, intangible qualities like love, truth, honesty, security, loyalty, purpose. The qualities we hunger for are not reducible to physical or material things. Our problem may be that we don't know where to look or how to ask for intangibles
Perhaps without realising it, we are searching for something Sacred -- something we can feel as noble, precious, enduring and worthy of our being here. We are not going to find more than a trace of such no-things in things like houses, cars, better jobs, better relationships with others, goals, dreams -- even a vision of a better world. Material things materialise from divine qualities, not the other way around.
Where is the Sacred to be found? That question has been around since the day mankind got lost and went looking for symbols, icons and rituals to help him connect with his sense of the sacred. But it never occurred to him that the "sacred" he sensed and was looking for actually lay within him. He went looking around. That's when religion sprang up, waving its hands and calling "Over here! We've got what you're looking for, and if you're really good and give us money, power and authority, we might let you have a bit. If you're super-good, you can have the lot after you die. There's this place up in the sky called "heaven"......" The priests then riveted their position in place by inventing the concept of Original Sin, a neat and nasty fiction designed to stop us looking within. The argument is that being human is intrinsically "bad"; we are naturally "bad"; so there's no use looking for "good" in something that is "bad". The doctrine successfully persuaded us that we are all basically "sinners" through and through, and that anything sacred, including God, is separate and outside of our selves. The only reason, so it goes, that God bothers with us is because God is Love. and we are not.
That history has repeated itself down through the ages in the personal history of every one of us. We were born at one with our divine nature, but got separated from it when we bought the notion from our "betters" that there was something wrong with us for being the way that we are.
Divinity is, in a sense, a feeling-into, a kind of re-cognition directed towards something great and good and embracing enough to give our lives a sense of be-longing, purpose and meaning. Divinity perceived gives us life membership to an abundant universe of infinite possibility and meaning. It takes us out of the prison of our selfish selves and puts the grunt of daily living into a greater perspective. We become in-spired. Sacredness is a reverence for the universe of which we are an integral part. An acceptance of integral Sacredness allows us to re-evaluate our personal efforts and lives. A reverence for the universe, without and within, becomes a reverence for the nobility and worthwhile-ness of our selves, because we are a part of that.
The trick for finding meaning that works for me, is to give up the searching for it. First, I got that my life was as I perceive it to be -- meaningless, and that it didn't mean anything that it was meaningless. Then, out of the Nothingness that followed that discovery, I simply declared meaning to be so. What meaning? I made it up! Life for me became a daily experiment, trying out all kinds of new meanings that popped up, to see how they work out. I simply became aware of everything that comes knocking at the door of my attention. Meaning unmasked itself. That's the way it still is for me. It's a lot more fun nowadays.
You might like to give it a try. What have you got to lose?
You will discover that:-
- what you thought you sought was not really what you sought at all.
- what you truly sought, you already are.
- you can have what you are.
You are the meaning of your life.
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