The Meaning of Being

When a certain celebrity came to my hometown a couple of decades ago, I had an exciting opportunity to be with him as he spoke to a group of people. But as soon as I took the last available seat in the room, I was urgently called away by someone. Her reason for interfering turned out to be something that I considered unimportant. Meanwhile, upon returning, I had lost my seat to someone else and was turned away.

I resented this combination of events. It burned me every time I that I thought about it for years afterwards.

My perception was that three things were bundled together: the presence of the celebrity, my desire to be in that room, and my meddling friend’s agenda. How they totaled up was that a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had been taken away from me.

I had added these events together and arrived at the conclusion that something unfortunate had occurred.

But what had really happened? Nothing. At least, not to me.

In the fullness of being, and when being is the self, nothing ever adds to or takes away from the self. And nothing ever happens that is a comment on the self, or that puts a dent in the self, or that labels the self. In fact, there is a sense that nothing ever happens, because the fullness of being brings timelessness along with it.

So, simply, three separate things coincided. I was there. The celebrity was there. My friend was there. In the playground of time, in the timelessness of our being, we brushed up against each other.

As Answers From Silence says, “Meaning results from one thing connecting with another thing. In timelessness, there is no duality, no ‘one thing’ to connect with ‘another thing’. Therefore, in timelessness there is no meaning, and there is no need for meaning.”

When a friend dropped her forkful of egg salad in a restaurant, she felt stupid and said to me, “You can dress me up but you can’t take me anywhere.” My only reaction was to start cleaning up. I reassured her, “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Two plus two doesn’t equal four. It equals two plus two.

—JC