“… we must know first that our acts are useless and yet we must proceed as if we didn’t know it. That’s a sorcerer’s controlled folly.”
- Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda’s A Separate Reality
I’ve been involved in a forum discussion about the subjective reality mindset and how those who hold it avoid succumbing to meaninglessness. I thought I’d try to flesh out my latest response and share it here, for my own reference if nothing else.
In this discussion, I started out by wondering how, if reality is subjective and we can shape it as we wish (once we become aware of this), a slide into apathy and meaninglessness can possibly be avoided. For if meaning can be given to anything, doesn’t everything become meaning-less? In the same way that a backdrop of darkness is required for us to see the stars, not-meaning is requisite for meaning.
Others replied with variations on the following theme: there is no meaning outside ourselves, so it is up to us to assign meaning however we choose. Meaning is not intrinsic but bestowed.
The other contributors found this to be a freeing, positive discovery, but I found it pretty depressing. If nothing means anything, then what’s the point of it all? I was interested in the subjective reality and intention-manifestation paradigms, but I could go no further without running into a brick wall of solipsism.
But what if meaning is still “real” even if it’s under our control as opposed to something that arises externally?
In this scenario, we can apply the pleasing glow of meaning to anything we like. What’s to stop us, then, from choosing to see everything as meaningful? We could simply sit cross-legged on a mountain or park bench, in a state of constant enlightenment and self-contained bliss. Hmmm. Is that it, then? Is that all there is to achieve? Is that the ultimate state of existence? It seemed kind of anti-climactic.
But then I [my ego] [thought it] realized something – it’s all just shadows on the cave wall. ALL of it – enlightenment, the best ASC ever, cosmic consciousness, et cetera. Everything that we experience – what I will call Stuff – is not the real thing itself, but it flows from the Thing and is an expression of the Thing that is behind all we are able to perceive directly. By participating in the flow of Stuff-experience, we too are an expression of the Thing and that is the point of it all. Maybe.
I have a feeling that, whatever the Thing may be, it is saying something and by playing its game and engaging with life with a view to developing our consciousnesses, we can help it articulate itself more clearly. Maybe this is controlled folly. Existence is, in a way, illusory, but we have to exist anyway because there’s something bigger going, something we can’t quite grasp but can sometimes sense.
“One must always choose the path with heart in order to be at one’s best, perhaps so one can always laugh.”
- Don Juan
(Alternatively, forget all of the above and go watch videos of cats. They’re not worrying about the meaning of life, so why should we?)
Notes:
- I am not talking about the movie. It’s not bad, though.
- I am out and proud about using the Oxford comma (see headline).
Picture from Subtle Energy Solutions
Hi friend.
An interesting and important discussion for sure. I think solipsism is one of many ideas that most of us run up against when we start deeply considering metaphysical questions. To me “controlled folly” as Castenada talked about it was more or less about maintaining the detachment from categorization and the creation of meaning as you point out, but I think that the concept only becomes really valuable if you consider it within a framework of “Two Truths” that you can find well articulated in many Buddhist texts.
In a nutshell, I think that what happens to most of us is that we think of the meaning of Stuff being contingent as automatically leading to the conclusion that Stuff is all meaningless/valueless. But the argument of the Two Truths is that things are conventionally lacking in inherent meaning or inherent existence and that we are able to bestow meaning on those things, however, in ultimate or absolute reality beyond our language and concepts (which Castenada talks about a lot with his discussion of inner silence and so on) things are full to the brim with meaning and bliss. It is just that if you sit around using your everyday mind those things might mistakenly seem to be “meaningless” since you haven’t recognized that there are two levels of truth about Stuff.
Your discussion of your feelings of discouragement reminded me of a quote from Robert Thurman, for example, who explains this Buddhist position by saying, “It’s dangerous for someone with a naive sense of identity to lose that and then mistake the loss of it for their being nothing and therefore become nihilistic.” Hopefully you don’t sucumb to that urge and rather keep questioning it as merely another construct of your mundane relative truth mind.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment! I’m way less familiar with Buddhism than I’d like to be, so I will look into the the Two Truths concept you mention. But for now, unless I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, I think this comment:
“But the argument of the Two Truths is that things are conventionally lacking in inherent meaning or inherent existence and that we are able to bestow meaning on those things, however, in ultimate or absolute reality beyond our language and concepts …”
…chimes with some thoughts that I had later about this bit: “… maybe meaning is still ‘real’ even if it’s under our control as opposed to something that arises externally.” We assign it, but that does not detract from its existence. Maybe there’s a connection there to the idea of bestowed meaning remaining meaningful because it’s lodged in a realer/ultimate reality.
And as for the state in which “… things are full to the brim with meaning and bliss” – been there, done it, tried to go back and got railroaded by thinking too much
. I think the problem for me when I made this post stemmed less from identity/ego loss and more from a general struggle with the idea of subjective reality, making me fear that meaning was only ever an illusion. For me it goes back to [my probable misunderstanding/misapplication of] the Incompleteness Theorems and provability – how can we ever really KNOW the truth about anything if we can’t step outside our own mind-systems to see how well-calibrated they are?
And on that bombshell, I’m off to find a subjectively delicious New Year’s jalfrezi!