The Meaning of Existence – Honest

Despite the irreverent attitude you may run across on other pages of my site, I actually take this subject very seriously.

If you’re lost, if you’re empty of any sense of meaning or purpose, I assure you there is hope.

I can’t give this to you. No one can.

But you can give it to yourself.

It is not easy by any means. But it is absurdly simple.

When the time comes when you can truly ask yourself the deepest soul-searching questions anyone can ask …

Why am I here?
What is the meaning of my existence?
Why do I feel incomplete?
Is there something more?

… when your intent is clear enough, when the answers to these questions become, without exception, the most important thing in your life, when you want to know what the real Truth is, no matter what it may be, then your answers will come.

You don’t need psychologists, motivational writers, or transformational counselors. You don’t need ministers, pastors, or saints. You don’t need prophets, apostles, or saviors. You don’t need gurus, avatars, or gods.

What you need is your own relationship with Truth.

Some of the resources I named can be remarkably helpful. Some of these will point the way. Some of these can be terrible obstacles, or deliberately lead you down paths to nowhere. But ultimately, it all comes back to you.

When you’re ready, it’ll be there. *

•  •  •

My Search for Something More

My spiritual search began in earnest in my teen years, but the foundation had been laid since my early childhood. My mother was physically and emotionally abusive and, as many people in my small town Midwestern world would do, regularly twisted Christian Fundamentalist ideology to justify her actions. Honor thy father and mother, and so on.

Intellectually I rejected Christianity in my early teen years, but I knew at some level something needed to fill the void it pretended to fill. When I reached college age, I took an interdisciplinary Humanities program, but even there, amidst the discussions of Ethics and Psychology, Religion and Philosophy, and Existentialism and Marxism (California campuses are bastions of Liberal thinking and I don’t care what anyone claims to the contrary) there were no real answers. Only emptiness.

Later, on my own, I traveled down a number of dead end roads. One moment stands out — I locked on to the idea that there was an underlying something that everything else was made of. The realization had no utility of its own, but I think it was a step toward seeing there is an underlying unity to all things, something which had for some time been accepted as a basic tenet of Theoretical Physics.

Finally I reached a point where I felt lost, body and soul. I turned and embraced an extreme Christian doctrine that, if nothing else, promised personal accountability in an absolute sense. It was a harsh system, nearly a cult without walls, but my need for answers was so great that I was willing to grab any board of floating wreckage for support before I was pulled under by the whirlpool of my own inner void.

(God, how dramatic.)

I wrestled with this for nearly two years, and one Saturday afternoon in 1980, I was rereading one of the doctrine’s books, and I sat back from it for a moment and thought: Where are the answers I need? Why am I not finding what I want?

And then, the true breakthrough thought: I’m going to have to find it myself.

At that instant I felt a light inside, a sweetness, a clarity. I understood at that moment I had stepped into a new dimension of my own being. Marveling at this, I took a walk and wound up going to a nearby mall. I wandered through a bookstore, and ran across, somehow placed in the wrong section, a book called Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Maurice Bucke. I opened it, and found page after page of descriptions of historical figures undergoing exactly the same kind of experience — though infinitely more dramatic — as I was having at just that moment. St. John of the Cross. Francis Bacon. Walt Whitman. And, of course, the usual suspects — Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Socrates.

No, ladies and gentlemen, if you think I am putting myself in the same category with any of these souls, I’m telling you I am not putting myself in the same category with any of these souls.

I called the presence Truth.

It took many years for me to really grasp the significance and power of this new frame of consciousness. It is still with me. I think of it as an intuitive channel, a tiny window to the underlying Unity.

Oddly enough, some years later I discovered a Hindu chant that is used in funeral processions, when the dead are going back to God: Ram Nam Satya Hey. God’s Name is Truth.

The need to come into relationship with the Meaning of Existence (and all that) is a central part of my odd little universe, and shapes everything I think and do. Perhaps it does for you as well.

If it does, we have much to share.

© 2006 – 2008, by Daniel Brenton. All Rights Reserved.

* For those jokers out there who would want to somehow hold me accountable for their inability to find the Meaning of Existence:

I make no claim of guarantee of the delivery of said consciousness state with the use of the attitude suggested, and assume no profit in the success or liability in the failure of the attitude to deliver same. The use of the aforementioned attitude suggested is at the sole discretion of the user.

So there. Nyah!