PERSONAL MEANING Ever wonder if you have some sort of central purpose in life? Like your DNA, which is yours and yours alone, a physical fingerprint, is it possible that you might also have a psychic fingerprint, a leaning or inclination to reach some sort of goal, or express some idea, realize some specific accomplishment? In the same way that your physical manifestation is the goal (so to speak) of your DNA, is there, in the psychic sense, another goal (perhaps also rooted in the DNA) that compels us to perform some sort of action, or think some kind of thought, an action or thought that we seem to find ourselves involved with again and again? Have you ever taken a hard look at yourself and all that you've experienced in your life and noticed any patterns? Have you been doing the same sorts of things over and over again? Maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe you're designed to behave the way you do, or fall into the same category of circumstances you're always falling into. Maybe there is something to the luck (or karma) idea. Lately, I've noticed that I'm hung up on meaninglessness. I find myself thinking and talking about it more and more. It has almost become an obsession. In a very real sense (you might say), I have discovered that the pearl of great price is that there is no pearl of great price. Then I took a hard look at my past and realized that I've always been hung up on it. It was there all along and I just never paid attention. I have recently made the strange discovery that my direction in life seems somehow centered in the complete absence of meaning. I derive a strange (some might say perverse) pleasure in playing with it. Oddly enough, I have found my meaning in the complete absence of meaning. When I graduated from high school, for example, it was there. I wasn't interested in pursuing any particular career path. Such a quest didn't mean anything to me. I would never express it that way, however. I would just say, if asked about it, that I wasn't particularly interested in anything. I have only recently come to the realization that it was my way of saying that the pursuit of a particular occupation (within the context of an economic system I didn't create and never asked to be a part of) was meaningless. Just to more or less pass the time, I enlisted in the Air Force. My stepdad told me that the military would give me plenty of time to think about what I wanted to do. The same thing happened as in high school. It meant nothing to me. But of course I talked about it in the same way. I said I didn't care about it. During my four-year enlistment, I never put forth so much as a single effort to get promoted. After the Air Force I went to college. Same thing. I didn't care about that particular adventure either. There was no curriculum that I specifically (i.e., passionately) wanted to pursue. (I later realized that the pursuit of any curriculum is nothing more than an act of choosing to follow a path that someone else had designed.) I decided on Education simply as the least of all evils. (I was apathetic about all of the choices, but I was least apathetic about Education.) As a result, I ended up earning a degree that I never used, not to this day. (I even enrolled in graduate school after I was finished, but dropped out after a couple of courses, driven by an attitude of total disinterest.) Whenever I am asked why I remained on the path of higher education if I truly did not give a shit about it, I respond with the simple truth: there was nothing else I wanted to do. Besides, I had veteran's benefits that pretty much paid for it. In other words, it seemed like a good way to pass the time, which, when you think about it, is pretty much all we do with our lives anyway. We spend our time filling the time with one sort of activity or another, and always mindful of justifying our actions, either to ourselves or to someone else. But the pursuit of justification is itself but another aspect of the quest for meaning. The thing that especially intrigues me about the idea of meaning is the fact that we created the very word. I can't help but wonder therefore, if it has any legitimacy. Think about it. We make up the word "meaning" and then sit around wondering about it, asking ourselves whether or not life contains any of it. We wonder whether life contains something that we made up! Who the hell do we think we are? Life made us; we didn't make it. Why in God's name would we think that Life might contain something that we concocted, that we pulled straight out of our proverbial asses? Human beings think about the universe. The universe does not think about human beings. The universe simply acts - without thinking. What we call human thinking is a mere accident. The universe created thinking (purely by accident) and all the words associated with it. The universe is not made of words. There could never be a perfect isomorphic relationship between words and universe events. Our words will thus always miss the mark, be lacking and devoid of real meaning. Human beings, driven by the universe's energy, created the word “meaning.” They created its definition. There can therefore be no real (i.e., universe) meaning attached or inherent in the word. The word has significance only within the context of that peculiar human trait we call language. Outside the commerce of human language there is no significance whatsoever associated with the word “meaning.” In reality (the raw universe), there is no meaning. Human beings created the word and the idea associated with it. We made it up. We made it all up. All the words and all the ideas associated with them. We made the whole thing up. We made up the words, God, good, evil, right, wrong, love, hate and so on. We made them all up. Yet we still posture as if they’re important. We made up the word “meaning” and go off looking for it like it’s really out there somewhere.
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