S5E1 Essence & Meaning
This episode investigates the idea that human beings manifest an essential nature defined by the ancient Yoga tradition. We suggest that the modern world has mistaken this nature and that we have been educated incorrectly as a result. This in turn has made it much more difficult to experience meaning, which we need in the same way we need things like food and water, breath, and love. We trace the plausibility of these ideas from both Eastern and Western sources: from ancient models of the soul in the Taittiriya Upanishad, which identifies our essential essence as bliss (Ananda), to the work of Dr. John Vervaeke of the University of Toronto’s Cognitive Psychology department. What if loss of meaning means loss of contact with our essence?
Listen to the podcast episode, then add your comments and questions below. Matt will be glad to answer you!
Edited Transcript
Welcome everyone. This episode begins the discussion on the importance of meaning in human life. And I should be specific about this: we're not really talking about the meaning of life, which is a subject that is beyond my individual ability to comment on. What we're really talking about is meaning in life. So what is that? Meaning in life is the sense that makes us feel like life is worth living, even in the face of our ever present foolishness, our constant petty frustrations, failure to realize our ultimate values in any final sense - and of course, the looming specter of mortality that constantly confronts us. Despite the reality of these existential problems, we do manage to get out of bed each day and move forward in our lives to realize some sense of connection, and so meaning is the general term that we would give to that sense, or power that undergirds our lives and gives us the strength to keep going, and to care for things that transcend our limited, personal sense of self.
Let me offer another analogy. Meaning could be considered like the relationship between the words and the syntax in a sentence. The words and the syntax all hang together in a way that allows the whole sentence to cohere, such that meaningful or relevant information is conveyed, and even such that realization of truth is possible from saying or hearing that sentence. Similarly, there's something about how my life and my understanding of the world hang together in a way that feels like I and the world are deeply connected, such that what is relevant, meaningful and real is revealed to me.
This last mention of the real is crucial in our discussion: meaning is reliably experienced only when we feel in contact with something real and relevant. Importantly, we should drill down on this notion of being in contact a little bit more: meaning and relevance are most readily revealed not only when we feel ourselves to be in contact with the real, but more specifically, when we are well fitted to it - when our posture, or our form - is correct. In this case the real is like a glove, and we are like a hand fitted into that glove. When this happens, something called reciprocal realization begins to unfold: the world is revealed as more than I have previously known, and I am revealed simultaneously as more than I have previously known.
So these are the preliminary ideas that are the center of this discussion, and into which we want to go much deeper. But let me leave off this introduction with two two questions that are very important as contemplative tools when we're inquiring into the importance of meaning and realness and how best to be in the right relationship with them. These questions are simple assessments of the prominence of these two things in our lives: one: “what would you want to continue to exist even if you didn't exist any longer?” Or again, “what would you want to go on long after you're gone?” And two: what are you doing in life right now that contributes to that end? Let these sink in for a second and begin to hone in on concrete answers. Answers to these questions point toward the degree to which our lives feel meaningful and real to us. Unsurprisingly, the inability to answer either or both of these predicts bad outcomes in areas where it is necessary to thrive for a good life: relationships, finances, physical, mental and spiritual health.
Human Nature as Bliss and Transcendence
The yoga tradition suggests that our need to realize meaningful, well-fitted contact with what is real derives from our nature. According to these ancient ideas, we are complex, or multi-layered. We're going to leave a lot of the details concerning all the layers aside and focus on the deepest layer, what we at the Shala generally call essence.
Let's connect this idea of essence to meaning: our need to realize meaning via intimacy with the real derives from our deepest essence, from what we are at our deepest core. I'm going to offer an ancient understanding of what we are at our deepest level, and contrast this with modern ideas about what we are, arguing that many of these modern ideas are mistaken; or, if not totally mistaken, dangerously reductive and simplistic.
This idea of essence derives from the late Vedic period, from a source called the Upanishad, and specifically from the Taittiriya Upanishad. In that sacred scripture, we find the idea of the Pancha Maya. Pancha means “five” and Maya sometimes is translated as “illusion”, sometimes as “layer” or “veil”. In more modern translations, it's translated as “Kosha”, which means “sack” or “covering”. As the term pancha maya suggests, there are five of these layers, and the deepest, most subtle is called Ananda Maya: Ananda means “bliss”. You might translate it as the body of bliss that veils or covers the true self (atman). So bliss really is closest to what is original about us, which in this tradition is called atman, or “Self”, somewhat analogous to the common notion of “soul”. Let's unpack this a little bit.
Our word bliss comes from several sources depending on how far back you go. If we start with Old English, bliss means merriment, happiness, grace, and favor. In early Germanic and old Saxon, bliss means gentle and kind. So basically, we have this notion of happiness, grace, and gentleness; one might also say spiritual joy, or perfect felicity. But I want to make another connection here: our use of the word bliss is deeply influenced by the word bless, and all of the connotations that the idea of blessing carries, though etymologically, bliss is not directly related to it. Together, all of this suggests that our deepest nature is analogous to the feeling of happiness, joy, and gentleness, and further to the activity of blessing. What does this tell us, and how are these ideas related to meaning and realness?
To bless means to consecrate via religious right, to make holy, and also to give thanks. In this vein, our essence is directly connected to a sense of sacredness and ritual worship. So to be blissful, or to realize perception, feeling, and action rooted in our deepest essence, is part repetition, as in worship and ritual, and part recognizing, receiving and bestowing the value of sacredness on our experience in life. You might say that when rooted in our essence, we ritually represent and remember our experience in the mode of thankful praising as a means of coming to understand what is meaningful and real in life. We are, at the deepest level then, the thankful liturgical animal.
A Dilemma
If at our core, we are this active remembrance and representation of experience in the spirit of thankful praising, then we are embodied, imaginative, affective actors, desiring intimacy with what is meaningful and what is real, and moving liturgically in the world in order to realize this. So ultimately we're driven by something like love.
It seems then that our education system largely got us wrong. If we allow that perspective, we can linger a little on the mistake. The modern conception of the human being, which undergirds most of our education, is that we're primarily thinking creatures. This has powerful historical precedent: in particular, there are very influential, selective, readings of Aristotle which declare that man is the rational animal. Now this is certainly true in some sense, and it does include thinking. But the modern conception of rationality has been reduced to something like logical management of propositions in argumentation, and as we have seen, this doesn’t really resemble the essence outlined above.
Coming forward a bit in philosophical history, we reach this really important figure named Rene Descartes. Descartes’ philosophy divided existence into two ontological categories, one called Res extensa in Latin, and the other called Res cogitans. Accordingly, reality is composed of an extended substance, which we now call matter, something that is mind independent, or that exists whether it is perceived or not. And then there is the thinking substance, the Res cogitans.
Descartes was trying to ground knowledge, and ultimately science, on something trustworthy, something that was apart from our ability to be deceived. And so he doubted everything he could possibly doubt, and he created as many scenarios as possible to try to get to the bottom level. What he ultimately saw was that no matter the specifics of the scenario, he couldn't doubt that he was doubting, so he associated this doubting with thinking, and ultimately said, “I think, therefore I am.” In this axiom, thinking, or mentation, is equated with the sheer fact of existence itself, and so thinking became our being, or essence. This understanding then became the basis of how we were educated.
Assuming that we are primarily thinking things, making efforts to understand a world forever external to our minds, our education proceeded as if we arrive at truth, meaning, and realness when we are in possession of clear and distinct ideas about that world, and when we can then generate logical propositions which follow from those. So our teachers got busy filling us up with facts, ideas and propositions/concepts. They figured that if we knew enough facts and rational concepts, then we would eventually know what to care about, and how to act.
This approach, however, does not take into account that we are effective, embodied, actively desiring, ritualistic, memetic creatures. It also explains how we could spend so many years in school and remain untransformed existentially at our deepest level: we were trained to participate in the world and ourselves via an interior, mental perspective. This orientation tended to de-emphasize - and eventually jettison - the “non-rational” subjects like art, and the tactile oriented subjects like home economics, shop class, and physical education, where we learned to cut, cook, smell, build, taste and mold our bodies to tools and tasks as ways of knowing.
But the very heady, more ‘rational’ disciplines like mathematics, science, and computer science have not been de-emphasized; and those kinds of things are of course very important, but because we are not primarily thinking creatures, our deepest longings will not be met by their propositional content/methods. They're not enough to vitalize our liturgical, valuing, affective, imaginative nature. If we're going to experience meaning and we're going to realize realness, we need more than information and propositions, more than syllogisms and logic, more than ideas, concepts and formulas. We need sensory-rich-contact. And ominously, if their orientation remains the sole way that we participate in the world and ourselves, we may cease to be fully human.
Yoga: Real Knowledge as Communion
Because modernity has conceived of the human essence as thinking, we have been caught in a representational epistemology, where knowing something means having a clear and distinct idea or concept of it, “in my head”, and then being able to say logical propositions about it.
But if the ancient understanding of our essence as embodied participation, and manifesting ritual praise and remembering is right, we need something like a contact/conformity epistemology.
For a liturgical animal that is actively remembering and representing experience in the spirit of thankful praising, knowledge is not primarily mental representation, but rather transformation of our form realizing conformity with what is real; and that means the experience of self transcendence is absolutely necessary for us to learn and to know. We have to be literally changed in fundamental ways such that our mundane somatic and attentional states are transcended. Only then can knowledge grow, and we can come to know the things that are the most real and meaningful.
Yoga writ large is a discipline that understands and stewards this transcendent formation of the human being. Yoga is often translated as union, but even better, it means well fitted union, or communion. The earliest images depicting Yoga are of the yoking of horses and chariots together. This is illustrative because the two need not only be merely joined together, or ‘unified’, the union needs to be just so, or else their conjoining may be misaligned, in which case it will not last: the considerable power that the horses generate may drag the chariot and the rider into oblivion, or conversely it may harm the horses themselves. In either case, there is no Yoga.
Our knowing in a contact epistemology is analogous to this: we are not only unified with reality in the act of knowing; we retain our essence while simultaneously being transformed - reality remains, and we remain, but not as a simple dualism. Rather, the fittedness that constitutes this union (Yoga) is an infinitely refinable, inexhaustible intimacy. As such, the knowledge that is realized is neither merely subjective, or objective in the common sense of those terms. To borrow a phrase from Dr. John Vervaeke, cognitive scientist and philosopher from the University of Toronto: it is transjective. So, we only know something truly when we commune with it. When this is so, we slide into our rightful place in it, and realize what is real and meaningful.
Spiritual Metabolism
In the yoga tradition, the notion of Ananda maya is part of a larger process that can be understood in terms of digestion and metabolism. So our deepest essence is involved in a cycle of feeding and nourishment; it digests, if you will, certain aspects of experience: specifically will and joy. This means we can actually be sick at the level of will and joy because the system that digests and integrates them is damaged through wrong methods of education, ignorant desires and actions, and misplaced self-understanding. When this is the case, certain specific problems show up.
First, there is dysfunction in the areas of right action, which indicates that something is wrong at the level of will: we do not understand the nature of action, and therefore of consequence; we do not act when we should, and we act when we shouldn’t, and in both cases suffering increases. Second, problems also show up with respect to caring or valuing, both of which are manifestations of the joy/bliss aspect of our essence. We find it more and more difficult to know what exactly we should care about the most because we’ve been educated as thinking creatures and subsequently, our participation in the world and ourselves has been relegated to the mental, propositional level.
So we don’t know what we should be doing because we don’t know what we should care most about. This means we rarely experience the rightness of communion between ourselves and our world. How do we solve this connundrum?
Ancient and Modern Orientations to Problem Solving: Having and Being
When we experience recalcitrant problems, the modern, thinking-ego-centered world constantly advises us to just ask, “what is it you really want?” But according to the ancient ideas we are exploring, this approach is inherently flawed because it assumes there is no ignorance (avidya) at play in our perceptions, desires, and actions. Digging into this a bit, just asking ourselves what we want assumes that we have unfettered access to our deepest selves; or in another way, that we are not biased in any sense, that we've been educated correctly in relation to our nature, and so know the nature of action and consequence well, and know what we should most care about for a stable and long term sense of connectedness and communion with the real. Simply put: can we assume that having the things I happen to desire will alleviate suffering and serve to generate the transformation that is needed for true knowledge and wisdom?
By contrast, the ancient traditions, and yoga in particular, suggest that we begin the project of relating to our suffering through inquiries that are oriented by knowledge of our essential nature. This orientation produces questions like: who am I? What am I identifying with? What continually fills my awareness? Is there anything calling me forward/higher into transformation and transcendence? Am I seeing deeply into reality such that I am able to transcend my current state and change my shape and enter into communion?
The answers to these questions fulfill needs that issue from our essence, so we call them being needs. In contrast to having needs, being needs are fulfilled by self transcendence, or by becoming something that surpasses our everyday, mundane states, such that we are fitted to something higher than our ordinary selves, generating a deep sense of participation in a way that fosters purpose and belonging. We experience ourselves in harmonious union with reality. In this event, the inexhaustible nature of the real is conferred onto our own self understanding and experience.
In our modern predicament, having is often assumed to be sufficient for becoming. Yoga, as a contemplative, wisdom based tradition, is tireless in pointing out that we suffer from this kind of modal confusion: mistaking our having needs for our being needs. So we get busy trying to appropriate and own, rather than transcend and become. Both sets of needs are important, but the former cannot satisfy the longings arising from the later.
This confusion is revealed via a certain set of discernable symptoms, which themselves are part and parcel of the meaning crisis/wisdom famine in which we now find ourselves. Symptom one, excessive physical tension that is inappropriate to the context that we find ourselves in; we suffer a kind of restless hardness at the level of the body that is unnecessary, inefficient, and draining of our vitality. Symptom two, inappropriate emotional reaction relative to the context. It is not surprising that one of the most common things we hear about today is of being triggered by events around us. This drives us into false interiority composed primarily of fear and despair. And lastly, excessive thought, or inappropriate amounts of internal dialog. When having and being are confused, there will not only be lots of thinking, but mental content largely concerns things that are not actually happening. So when we are off course, or out of conformity with our essence, the body, heart, and the mind are excessive in their activities; we are then not well-fitted to the environment. In this sense, there is no yoga or communion with the real, and meaning and purpose are at best scarce, and at worst absent completely.
