I realise that for many years I have conflated these two concepts, and that we need to untangle them if we wish to make progress in understanding them and how they relate to one another. Recent dreams have helped with the former, which should perhaps have been obvious to me for a long time, namely that meaning in life is:
Not a thing,
not a charm of words
spoke plain, spoke clear,
or hidden in a secret book.
Nor can it be whispered
by a guru, into an adept's ear...
It is more something we inhabit, in the sense of simply living. There are levels to it, of course, some people are quite content to live at the very surface of their being – to pay the notion of 'meaning' no heed whatsoever. Others are driven to enquire more deeply into things, while the truly spiritual, the adepts of the mystical traditions, perhaps, approach the deepest layers of all. This is the idea I'm circling here, that we discover meaning not in revelation, or in a secret teaching, or at least we only do so to the extent that the revelation, the teaching, is that meaning only manifests in our relation, both to others and to the world.
There is a dream-like quality to all of this. Sometimes we wake, only vaguely aware we have dreamed. We search our memory for slight traces, like catching the tails of shy creatures. But, once held, and gently, up they come, and the dream unfolds into memory. And so it is with meaning. It is the remembering of a deeper relationship. But such slender threads require a certain sensitivity of vision, a sensitivity for the connections by which we enter into that deeper relationship. Then the world is laid over with imagination, and the sense of meaning colours all things in more vivid tones.
But our sense of meaning is not a constant companion. More often we catch only glimpses of it in the day to day. At other times the world will seem flat and grey, like the Monday morning commute after a long holiday in the sun. Only certain states of mind will allow us to enter into deeper relationship. This begins I find, with opening oneself to the possibility. Also, if I dream of something, and carry that image with me throughout the day, treat it, at least as a phenomenon, with a certain seriousness, I feel relationship deepens. But this is not to say we understand anything in any greater detail, let alone the nature of reality. Indeed, all things remain mysterious, or even more mysterious than before.
To inhabit meaning, we seek understanding no more than we do when pulling on a comfortable old coat. The coat fits, we settle into it, we navigate our reality with a greater certitude, a greater confidence for the security against the elements it provides. Or, like in human friendship, we do not seek to understand its nature, or the genesis of our connection, but only draw strength and completeness from that sense of meaningful relationship. Such things are elusive to analysis, yet we pursue them anyway, perhaps because even the search for meaning is itself another facet of meaning in disguise.
Having then established at least a notion of what meaning might be, we realise what we are left with is reality. The two exist in relationship, reality being in a sense the stage on which meaning is enacted. So yes, while they are in a sense conflated, and confusion is understandable, we must be careful not to mistake the one for the other. But it is also true our moments of heightened meaning also grant clues as to the possible nature of the reality we inhabit.
For centuries now, and especially in western culture, the light of a life's meaning has gradually dimmed in exchange for the metaphysical assumption our world, our universe is entirely material in nature. In such a world as this, imagination becomes downgraded as merely a source of fiction, rather than being itself a means of sensing and intuiting the nature of reality. Yet it is through the agency of our interiority, our imaginations, humans can achieve, at times, their sense of greatest connection, moments of a profound deepening of our relationship with reality.
A recurring insight reported by adepts of many traditions is that of a fundamental misunderstanding regarding the concept of material reality, and our apparent separateness from it. On the one hand this separateness seems a sensible position to take. From birth, we are aware of our own private interiority – our thoughts, our feelings, our memories, things to which no one else has access unless we choose to share them. And then there is the world, the sensed reality – seen, touched, heard, and smelled. Our senses bring that world into our personal awareness. But then there are also these rare, yet widely reported moments, when the inside/outside barrier appears to dissolve. With it comes an insight that the world, the universe, is itself an interiority – or rather that self and universe are aspects of the same greater interiority, that reality is in essence imaginal.
Perhaps, then, we should think more of the meaning of life, and the nature of reality as companions. The discovery of meaning is not the explanation of reality, nor reality the explanation of meaning. One belongs to the way we inhabit the world; the other to the mystery we abide in. Yet by attending carefully to dreams, to imagination, to those moments when relationship deepens beyond the merely functional, we may discover that each illuminates the other in ways that deepen our relationship with the mystery of both the universe and our own selves.
Will we ever understand either completely? For all the keenness of our enquiry, perhaps that isn't the point, that it is enough to live as though the world were deeper than it appears, and allow its mystery to continue unfolding within us.