Is life altogether meaningless?

by Vic Shayne
author, Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence

To say that life is meaningless, as many materialists and objectivists frequently teach, is problematic if you consider yourself as consciousness.

What is the meaning of a flower growing in a remote field that nobody ever notices? It just exists.

The problem is that we, as human beings, believe that we are individuals who have lives that are important by some arbitrary measure.

Life happens, because life is the apparent result of the rising, falling, action, and potential of consciousness, which is the totality of all existence.

The problem is the egoic mind
But the problem lies with the egoic mind — the mind that has been conditioned by teachers, parents, authority figures, culture, religion, and so on. This conditioning leads to the idea of an “I,” or “me,” which is the egoic self full of attachments and identities. This egoic self says, “I am a man,” “I am a woman,” I am a Muslim,” I am a Christian,” I am a sports fan,” and on and on and on. This “I,” then, is a creation of conditioning. The self does not really exist, it is an accretion of conditioned thoughts. This is not spirituality, it is basic psychology — a fact that was discussed more than a hundred years ago in Western scientific circles. And, of course, in Eastern philosophy such as the Vedas, this teaching is thousands of years old.

This does not necessarily imply that there is no life and no existence, it just means that there is not really an important individualistic “self” who experiences it. It all just happens spontaneously. This is quite often misunderstood and misinterpreted to mean that life is meaningless and we are powerless.

We are consciousness, not the egoic self
It is the egoic self, the sense of an “I” that is powerless, because like a shadow it doesn’t really exist. When you sit back and watch the play of life without the veil of the conditioned egoic mind, then you realize that you are consciousness observing itself in myriad expressions that we call people, nature, animals, plants, objects, and so on.

Consciousness uses the human body, brain, mind, and senses to perceive itself as all other forms and phenomena.

Life is but a dream…
This is easier to explain in the analogy of a dream…

In a dream, you are the creator, director, all objects, the setting, and all the actors; it is all “in your mind,” so to speak. You don’t actually go anywhere, because your body is sleeping in your bed. But in consciousness, in the dream, you are running through a forest, flying in the air, having wild sex, visiting a dead relative, or doing any number of things that seem completely real.

Similarly, when you are awake, you are the creator, director, all the actors, the set, and so on, because you are consciousness. But if you think you are the actor — if you identify as the actor because this is your staunch belief due to conditioning — then you believe you are powerless and everything is happening to you.