The Meaning In Life

Wake the Fuck Up!

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up!

Welcome back to this episode of Wake the Fuck Up.

My name is Tiffany Andrés-Meyers,

Your host,

And I want to start just by saying thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

It's such a pleasure to share these curiosities,

Thoughts,

Explorations,

Concepts,

And ideas with all of you out there listening in the ether,

And I want to take just a second as well to dedicate this episode to an incredible human being and a wonderful friend of mine,

Scott Steiner.

This episode was encouraged and reminded by you,

As so many moments of wisdom and connection often are.

Not too long ago my friends,

Scott sent me and a group of friends a quote from the Petit Passe,

The Little Prince,

And reading the quote reminded me of an idea that I had kind of long forgotten about,

And for those of you that have listened to the podcast or know me well,

I say quite often that I think this experience of being human is really one of constant forgetting and remembering.

I think if we all remembered every single piece of wisdom that ever occurred to us,

We would already be enlightened and awake,

So there's just this piece of being human that's like only certain things are at the forefront of our minds and experiences in any given moment,

And so it's just this constant experience of forgetting and re-remembering and hopefully solidifying a little more every time we remember something that maybe for a while we had forgotten.

So again let me just say thank you Scott,

You are an incredible man and I am blessed to have you in my life as a source of not just remembering but also learning.

So I want to start the episode by reading you the quote from the Petit Prince that Scott sent my way,

And it is,

It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important,

And so for those of you that don't know the Petit Prince,

It's about a little prince who leaves his home planet and finds himself on earth,

And one of the things he's most concerned about as soon as he lands is that there's this rose he's been caring for,

This one single rose that exists on his planet,

And he spent his whole life tending to the rose and cleaning up around it to make sure that it didn't get impacted and impeded by the baobab trees that can often take over it.

I think that's correct,

Now I'm having this moment of being like were the baobabs on a different planet?

So if you know the Petit Prince,

It's been a while since I've read it and I got that wrong,

I apologize,

But I think that's pretty correct.

So anyway,

One more time the quote,

It's the time you spent on your rose that makes your rose so important,

And so this episode is about what makes life meaningful,

And what I want to offer and what Scott helped remind me of by sending this beautiful quote is that the way we typically move through our days and through our life experiences grants us kind of little understanding of where meaning comes from,

Right?

We kind of just take for granted that some things are meaningful and some things are not,

Or some things mean something positive to us and some things mean something negative and some things seem to carry really no meaning at all,

And I think we kind of take for granted and just accept that what has meaning for us is just the way it is,

That it's in a way a truth,

Right?

And I think if there's one thing,

Now I say this a lot and I probably say different things when I follow it,

I think for this episode if there was one thing that I could offer it would be,

You know,

The idea that what we accept as just the way things are or as truths even,

I would invite us to all get really curious about what true and truth mean,

And even in my own journey the things that I come to understand as truths,

While maybe the core of them stay the same,

All these concepts and ideas that I talk about on this podcast have evolved over time and I have no doubt my understanding of them will continue to evolve as well.

So while I feel many of the things,

You know,

Many of the ideas themselves,

The core of them might not change and so in that is a sense of truth,

Right?

That sometimes the the wider gaze or the way I understand them and probably you have a sense of this for yourself as well,

You know,

That even the things that are just truths for you,

That the way we connect to them and experience them over time often changes.

And so I'd love to invite the curiosity as we move forward into this episode about meaning and what creates meaning and meaningfulness in our lives,

That the best way to really explore this in your own life is through the invitation towards curiosity of even the things that you find to be inherent truths for you.

So what creates meaning,

Right?

Here we are,

We're walking through our life,

Certain things strike us as powerfully positive,

Certain things strike us as powerfully negative,

Certain things never really strike us at all,

At least in a mental way.

And I think we've talked about this before but I want to start by offering,

You know,

A number of years ago I heard some scientific figures around how many pieces of information we could be using in any given moment to paint our picture of reality.

So maybe if you can pause for just a second and look up from whatever you're doing or wherever you are and just look around the space that you're in right in this moment.

And notice without needing to define or label how many colors are in that space,

How many textures,

How many shapes,

How many objects,

Is there movement,

Is there sound,

Are there smells,

Are there tastes,

What are you feeling in your body,

What are you hearing in your head.

I mean that just took me probably 10 seconds to even just articulate the broad ideas of what we can be taking in and hopefully you're already feeling the idea here that there's a lot of information that the mind could be using in any given moment to decide who we are,

What situation we're in,

And how we feel,

Right.

So the numbers that I've heard and I'd say take these numbers loosely because I've actually heard different ones over time but the ratio of what I'll express has stayed pretty consistent.

But the numbers that I've heard are that in any given moment there are about three million bits of information that we could be using to paint our picture of reality.

And out of those three million bits the mind actually only uses about 200,

000 pieces of information.

Now that's huge,

Right.

Can you imagine actually processing even those 200,

000 pieces of information moment by moment.

The power of the human mind is just fucking incredible to me.

But 200,

000 means inherently that we are not using 2.

8 million bits of information in every single moment.

2.

8 million bits basically just get ignored,

Swept under the rug.

So how does this happen?

How does the mind decide what 200,

000 bits to use and what 2.

8 million to ignore?

And I think this is one of those places where we can start digging into where does the meaning in life come from.

If we had to process all three million bits of information in every single moment,

We would absolutely be wasted tired probably about five minutes after waking up.

I mean we'd just be using so much energy all the time just to exist in the world.

So basically these 2.

8 million bits of information that get deleted or ignored are based on what feels conceptually inherently meaningful to us and our life experience.

And this comes from from what I understand at this point and feel and have experienced in my own life a couple different places.

One,

The human brain itself has evolved over time to be a really,

Really powerful vigilant space for making sure that we make it until tomorrow.

Ultimately our brains are driven by the need to survive.

You know if you look at humans over evolutionary history,

We are the product of ancestors that made it long enough to reproduce.

Right?

And so over time our brains have become even more hardwired to look for the things in our experiences that may negatively impact our survival.

Right?

So that's one thing.

Our brains are naturally attuned to making sure that we're safe,

We're resourced,

We're connected,

That all of our needs are met.

Right?

The other piece is there are colorings to what we experience in the world that come from our historical past and for all of us it's really firmly rooted in our childhood.

There's some recent science that suggests that the majority of the ways that we interact with,

Interpret,

And perceive the world around us are actually hardwired by the age of seven.

And I think I've said this before but the reminders can be so helpful because basically it means that the culture we were immersed inside of,

The home that we were living in,

And the concepts and ideas that were given to us before the age of seven are the things that drive that unconscious meaningfulness from that three million bits of information down to that 200,

000.

Right?

And so let's put this in sort of not so abstract terms.

I mean here we are we're let's say walking down the block in our neighborhood or driving down the street through your city and there are buildings around you,

There are plant life and trees around you,

There are people around you.

Right?

And certain things jump out and certain things don't and what jumps out to me in some ways is going to be different than what jumps out to you and in some ways there will be similarities.

Right?

I think when I first played with this idea and concept you know and maybe I'll state it a little more clearly here just for a second.

The idea,

The deep idea of this episode is that the meaningfulness and the meaning of every single thing in your life comes from you.

Nothing in the entirety of the world carries any inherent meaning.

You give it that meaning.

Nothing.

I mean this is kind of a radical idea.

Right?

But nothing carries any inherent meaning aside from the meaning you give it and I almost said meaning or value and so I think this is a beautiful point to clarify that I accidentally almost said it and caught myself that value might be subtly different than meaning.

Right?

And they're in the human experience very tied to one another but I intentionally didn't use the word value because when I first started exploring this you know I was sitting in my car waiting for one of my clients to be ready for our meeting and I was looking in front of me and there was this beautiful willow tree and I absolutely have a fascination and a love for willow trees and so I was looking at this willow tree feeling this vast amount of love and I realized that probably every person who lives in that neighborhood drives by or walks by that tree with absolutely no feelings ideas or concepts that maybe it's even there or that it has any meaning to them whatsoever.

Right?

And it might be that on a different day I would do the same thing.

Right?

But as I looked at it I kind of had this argument with myself like does that mean that it has no value and I think the answer to that is no.

Right?

Because from a different perspective it absolutely has value.

You know as a living plant it's producing oxygen that as I sit there in front of it I may be breathing in some of.

As a living plant it's contributing to the ecosystem around it of other living plants and other living organisms and inside of that there's an inherent value that it carries in relationship to everything else in the world and that's true of you too my dear.

Just by existing you carry an inherent value as a member of your community,

Your ecosystem,

Your city,

The world at large.

Just like a sitting tree carries value so do we.

Right?

But value and meaning are not the same and so meaning in terms of what we're talking about here the meaning of life or the meaning that exists in certain things for you and for your life how you experience your life and certain objects and things as meaningful that's different because something can carry a value and we can totally fucking miss it.

Something can be the most valuable thing in the world in terms of what it offers to the universe and we may have no relationship to it whatsoever.

Right?

Here's an example for me as a Buddhist the Dalai Lama has a lot of meaning and I believe tenderly in my heart he carries a great value he brings goodness to the world.

Right?

But there are probably people that exist in the world today that have absolutely no idea who the Dalai Lama is and even if they do they could give one shit.

Right?

So he has value,

An inherent value,

A value that is really bringing beauty into the world and yet for certain people he has no meaning whatsoever.

So how do we apply this to our lives in a way that has the possibility of changing our experience into something more beautiful and more connected and I think the idea here is if you understand the power of your own concepts and ideas if you understand that it's you that's making meaning in your life then you have the possibility to walk into the world and imbue beautiful meaning upon anything you decide you actually want to give it to.

And I want to encourage that you know everything is a practice any new way of being is not something we can just snap our fingers and you know incorporate into our being so if you find this kind of hard to work with that's fine you know give yourself some space however old you are is how long you've existed in the habit of 200,

000 unconscious bits of information and 2.

8 million unconsciously ignored deleted and you know filters of perception from our historical enculturation you know deleted and removed.

So the idea here is what might it be like to grant your attention to things in the same way that Le Petit Prince granted his attention to his rose right the whole book he's so in love with this rose but he's so in love with it because he gave himself to it because he he calls her the rose a she because he gave her his attention because he cared for her and in those actions he created meaning right I think we can see and feel this in the way that we fall in love with another human being and for any of you that have had the experience the great blessing of falling in love and getting to be with that person that you fell in love with for some long period of time maybe you have the sense already right that the way we tend to give those people our attention changes over time when we first meet someone that strikes our heart in that particular way we give them so much of ourselves we give them our attention we imbue every action that they take with power and meaning I mean when I think about meeting and falling in love with my wife I remember waking up every single morning and picking up my phone in the hopes that she had already texted me and all she texted me in the morning as we courted each other was good morning and sometimes she would text and particularly the text was one that gave my stomach butterflies you know like that nauseously happy feeling and all I needed was a text that said good morning and it made me feel alive and it made me feel in love I imbued it with so much meaning right and there was a time where I woke up one morning a few years into being married and I had a text that said good morning from my wife because she was already at work and I realized in the moment that I read it that it felt different and this is another one of those moments that was a remembering moment for the purpose of this episode because as soon as I realized it felt different I had to recognize that it felt different not because it was different but because I was giving it different meaning different value and different attention right and so I took a moment and I remembered putting myself back in my own shoes what it felt like to get those messages from her when we first met and I looked at the message again and I allowed it to be and mean and carry that same value that it did when we first met and again there it was I felt alive I felt in love I felt so much gratitude for being thought of so maybe my invitation I think is to walk back out into your life and get curious about the things that you give some inherent sense of meaning to you know can you get curious about those 2.

8 million bits of information that are getting deleted or ignored and ask yourself you know what would this moment mean if I allowed every color and every texture and every object to mean something beautiful to me right how would I feel about my day if every single time I got a text message or an email or a phone call I let it mean that I'm so important to someone in my world and we really gave that the time to sink in you know I guess the idea in a way is the curiosity is what are we giving our attention to because it's our attention that at the core really determines meaning if we don't give our attention to something we're in a way giving it no meaning at all it can't give us it can't create meaning for us in return if we don't create meaning enough for it and say you are worthy of my attention and we can do this in small ways with individual objects in our space but we also do this with whole experiences my loves like we go into work during the day and in a way there's a subtle tension and experience of work not being worth our time or it being frustrating or it being uncomfortable or not wanting to be there and waiting to be done with it and by saying that in a way we're saying you're not worth my attention you're not worth my time and when we say that we basically say you're not meaningful but what if we walked into work every single day with the attitude that it is meaningful it can create beautiful and powerful meaningful experiences in our lives and so we give it our attention what would our life look like if every single moment and immense numbers of things and experiences in our lives became worthy of our attention in the same way that a single rose became the love of the petite pense's life so this this is what I hope to offer you today this idea that nothing carries any inherent meaning it's you you're the most powerful force in the universe you grant every single thing in your life meaning or not and it's really up to you it's a beautiful source of empowerment and so I hope you take this episode with you to get curious about what carries inherent meaning for you what carries no meaning at all and can you play with the power that you have to change those concepts and ideas you you have the power the beautiful curiosity to decide what you want to give meaning to so I hope you take this with you and play and get curious and see what new and amazing things you can bring meaning to in your life again thank you so much for listening thank you Scott for enlivening this reality into my heart again sending you all so much love and playfulness and hope for wisdom and awakening until next time