Shades of Meaning

Transcript

I was just thinking about shades of meaning. So I picked up a book the other day, a beautiful book I forget which book it was. I think maybe Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and in the dedication he writes these words simply:

For my father, and I paused on that page for a moment and wondered about the depth of meaning that must have for him. It’s obvious in a way when someone puts a dedication like that so simply phrased. I can tell it means something so deeply personal and so deeply universal to Mr. Pollan which is the only reason he would have wrote something like that.

I guess I’ll never know exactly what it means to him personally but I can tell there’s a deep meaning behind it and I can tell because we observe and watch the context and listen to the feelings behind the words themselves.

I remember perhaps relevant to the book one morning I was in small town, I think I was in Tapalpa in Jalisco and I went there for the night to have a trip away from the city and I had an unusual experience in the night.

Some might call it an LSD flashback but I don’t think that’s exactly an accurate term because a flashback would be when you’re experiencing the same thing again.

What happens with a lot of these experiences is we had a new experience though it has some similar flavor to a similar experience.

When I woke up in the morning after having this strange experience in the night and I went to a cafe or Fonda to sit and write as is my habit. As is the wonderful habit of introspection, reflection that we have this gift through journaling. I started to write these very strange things.

I wish I still had the notebook I think I left it in Australia somewhere. But these ideas were coming to me and it was something about meaning is inherent in everything and its not just a simple meaning to look at an object or camera here. Of course I can recall all the memories I had with this camera. The memories and meaning perhaps before I had bought the camera. The hope, expectation and desire to be a photographer.

All of these things and that’s just talking about the meaning of the memories.

Looking deep at the object itself perhaps there are shades of meaning yet undiscovered. In these revelations I was having that morning in Tapalpa I was writing about how every object, that is every object of meditation but also every one with which we interact has this rainbow of meaning flowing from it.

I wondered about this later, could it be that objects are inherently meaningful, things in this world are inherently meaningful?

Things in this world are inherently meaningful. Normally with our perspective we think this sort of western reductionist perspective we think oh well I give the meaning to things, that is how I interact with them. Humans are meaning making machines.

In philosophy I have read there is no distinction between cause and effect. These things are so closely linked that a cause must yield its effect. An effect must be caused.

Likewise you can say that the observed and the observer are one and that is the kind of revelation that we do receive sometimes during meditation.

We notice if you listen to or use the Waking Up app by Sam Harris, he focuses on this theme a lot. He says consciousness cannot be separated from the thing you are experiencing. The experience is consciousness.

Now when we observe an object perhaps we are giving meaning to it, perhaps we are receiving meaning from it. What happens if we relax our mind and instead of trying to force or compel meaning we surrender to whatever meaning might come?

What happens?

How deep is the profundity of meaning? How many shades of meaning and how many colors?