Meaning, Energy, and Truth
When I was young, society was going through unprecedented tumult and change.
And I was a weirdo.
I felt the seismic shift in the Force, life as we knew it, the day JFK was shot and killed. It didn’t matter that I as “only in third grade,” at the time. I couldn’t put it into banker or professor words, but I knew something huge had broken, and a shift had happened. I was aware, even without a vocabulary for my awareness.
My parent loved reading and learning and did both professionally as well as recreationally, as they were both educators.
In my family of origin environment, the #1 go-to thing to do in any situation, for solace, fun, enrichment or profit, you go look it up and read about it. Educate yourself. A damn useful skill.
Do the experiment. Do the research. Think it over. Read more source information. See what points are repeated or echoed in the different perspectives.
Like baking — seek out the best ingredients (sources and information) mix things together, sift it all, see what resonates, what’s discordant, what to throw out, what to keep, and do the veracity tests as you go. Do the conclusions and definitions hold? Are there circumstances where it all falls apart? Does it fall apart because some assumptions are inaccurate? Are there nuggets that hold true?
The world was so insane at the time, the Age of Reason seemed like the best lifeboat there was. (And by Age of Reason I mean the title sounded good. I didn’t research what that meant beyond the comfort of the title.)
By the time I was 13 I knew for a fact, with every fiber of my being, that I’d gotten the answer to Life in 7th grade physical science class.
Everything is energy.
Energy never dies. It just changes form.
Change is the only constant.
That is all.
Religion was a vocabulary for spirituality, and spirituality wasn’t superstition but one’s internal knowingness of energy.
I knew all this, but I couldn’t put it in important enough words to be heard, or more likely, I didn’t have the right body/sex to be taken seriously or be a credible voice and point of view.
Still, I was stubborn, aka I still persisted.
I read Viktor Frankl’s Man Search for Meaning. A whole book that shows and expresses what Shakespeare was saying in the line — “Nothing’s good or bad, lest thinking make it so.”
Meaning became the golden ticket.
Meaning was the The Deal. It decided and determined everything. When I knew the meaning of something, I could relax, because I understood, it made sense to me. I’d have a conclusion and could stop inquiring.
That seemed like a much better state to live in than the constant flailing around, trying to know definitively and declaratively this and that, with banker and professor words, weight and import.
All mixed up together in a mash-up, I had the truth of what Viktor Frankl said — you are the one that decided the meaning, and make choices on that solid foundation — mixed up with things like I could never know enough (everything, ever) facts and history to locate my Self in the shifting sea of facts and the shifting sands of other people’s opinions, and mixed in with that was knowing/sensing energy, and the certainty, solidity and lightness that came with that vs the banker professor world emphasizing over and over that if you can’t “defend your thesis,” to a crowd that is purposefully judging and evaluating your thinking and your words — and if you can’t show your thinking in your words, you not only don’t know anything valid, but you’ve just proved it with the word salad and silence instead of long paragraphs of multisyllabic brick-by-brick explanations.
It wasn’t a perfect foundational conclusion, but it had peer approval — meaning was everything.
And that was true. Well, meaning and the words to defend your thesis. Viktor Frankel had done it, and society swore it wasn’t sexist, it was simply that men’s word salad was more valuable than female’s words. Like the townspeople who say there is no racism in their town, annihilating the experiences and testimonies of thousands of local residents who have shared their experiences publicly, finally, in an effort to have community consensus so healing change and evolution can happen. As long as the bully, the privileged, the ones the social infrastructure exists to keep in the superior position say nope, it didn’t happen, the mistreated, abused, systemically cut out, belittled and socially erased. That right there proves the point of the disenfranchised.
But with meaning, and by that, I mean everyone’s definition of meaning, all the different flavors of meaning, all the different interpretations and implications of meaning, comes a snowball effect.
Finding meaning is what got me out of the hell of emotionality — and all the emotions I tended to sponge up — to take care of others, to soak up their unwanted or too intense emotions, like moping up bits of moonlight and stardust, but also the tar, the sludge, the cruelty to self/others/self, the hyper-knee-jerk judgmental, constant evaluation, all driven by that need to not be in body, not be in the present moment, not be with the intensity, swirl and cyclone of emotions, thoughts, conclusions, mostly belonging to others, but owning it all, thinking all that IS oneself, having no idea that it’s all one's AWARENESS of so many, and very little of it even resonated with what the self IS… and then there’s the question of who’s self are we even talking about.
I read. I pursued meaning through thousands of books, essays, articles, biographies, interviews, and more. Meaning was going to set me free. Meaning and understanding — meaning being able to articulate — was The Thing that would set me free. Right?
I was banking on it. I bought and sold the idea, fervently. The choices I made every day were based on meaning. I assigned meaning to everything, everywhere, in every moment.
That was the markings of “a life well-lived,” and the self-examination so prized and valued,
Meaning was all. It meant everything, as in meaning was more valuable than anything.
That was how you be in the conversation with life all around you — the assigning meaning was everything.
It turns out that assigning meaning is not the same as listening and being in actual conversation; being in actual communion with life and everything around you.
Turns out assigning meaning is like having a script and the other (person) not knowing what the script says because they are not you and are vivaciously independent of you and utterly as complex a cosmology as you, but then you get mad because they don’t follow your script, so one or both of you walks away, rewriting the world and everything without them in it, filling in the gaps with more meanings of this and that and them and you and everything.
Soldiering on with this junk drawer of logic and interpretations became so nutty making, so heavy, so draining yet full of my own inadequacies everywhere all the time, after a lot of grinding down, it finally became simply boring.
I’d worked with thousands of people doing past life readings and energy healings to assist them in changing their perceptions and awareness to include the infinite possibilities beyond what they absolutely knew they knew.
We all went through meaning, looking for meaning, explaining, defending for and against the meanings of everything before realizing so much was just more refined, “sophisticated” versions of the same old punishing, oppressive, colonial domination thinking structures and thought forms that we started searching for the way out from under in the first place. The dog chasing its own tail. The final letdown.
I could articulate and explain in exquisite subtlety and detail, and it did not help. It did not give me the relief I had believed it would, but everything in the world around me said that was the silver bullet.
The energy kept leading me out beyond the reefs of things I knew with my head, the things I had words for, the things I could justify, explain, defend for or against.
Out on that horizon line, I could see the thinking that kept the cage, the net, snug so there’s always just enough wiggle room to exhaust you, but no egress.
Out on that horizon line, I could see the higher octave of thinking, beyond words or the slow mechanics of reason — and instead, the sense/sensation of the flow of multitudes, the sense/feel of infinite possibilities, the lightness and ease of the essences of what’s true, which turns out to be what is generative, what is light, has flow forward, beyond, past what is known.
That higher octave is what’s called a gut feeling or following your gut, or what comes of being perceptive, or all the other common use words for being intuitive, psychically, and energetically aware, the scary words.
Every living body can sense/feel the difference between flow vs stagnant, go vs blocked, rushing up or on or through vs holding back, dammed up, stalled, weighted down, oppressed, or imploding.
All the all the things can be replaced with light vs heavy, flow vs no flow, ease vs hard, receiving vs refusing.
One day about 12 years ago, another energy healer associate called me out of the blue. She said her husband of thick and thin forever had just told her that he had to go away for a week or two, but when he returned, they’d talk but he was going to go his own way; not out of malice or displeasure with her, just he needed to go off on his own for a while, and she had a wedding to perform that day — would I mind coming along and helping her energetically with the day?
Okay. I was up for that. It was a glorious weather day and a lovely drive to a farm outside of town.
Every time there was a lull in her duties, she’d start speculating about what he might say, what he might do, what she might say to him, what she might do, but mostly she kept going back to speculating about all the meanings; what this meant about him, her, marriage, family, the future, the past and everything. And if this happens, that will mean this and that about him, her, marriage, family, the future, the past, and everything. Every speculated utterance or imagined action set up a cascade of if/thens and avalanches of meanings, conclusions, closing doors to possibilities faster than she could breathe.
I’d imagine some lovely opening of possibilities of thriving to ponder, some delightful energy to bath in instead of all the speculation, and she’d play along for a bit, as though it was to keep me entertained but it was a mere distraction from what it all meant instead of the actual action step to creating and generating a future beyond the entrenched limits of possibility she insisted on projecting onto the future with all the speculation.
I was offering this amazing new tool of riding the energy currents of liberation and expansion and inclusion of yummy possibilities beyond the limits of her previous and known life, and all she could see was I was trying to distract her, to keep her from the important work of mining meanings that projected some past limitations onto the future to make it familiar.
We never saw or spoke again. Not because anyone had done anything wrong. We simply were not congruent anymore.
The point of going for meaning, it turned out, was to find the light, the space, the room to be You; oneself unprotected, un-hidden, un-stressed, without pretense or eggshells, or explanation or defending for or against anything or anyone. To be the living perfection of the ocean and the breezes, not some stagnant photograph or projection.
It’s there, at the horizon line, you can wind-surf and soar the energy of choice and being, creating, generating, and Being the bright spark you truly be.
