If You’re Not Aware, What Are You?
What does it take to be aware? Does it take all of you? Does it take a lifetime of focus? If you’re aware of what happens one moment and unaware the next, what happens to you?
What we do with our lives, how we take it all in, and why we do things matters. It matters deeply. Just noticing our breathing–the feel of the air through our windpipes, the expansion and contraction of our diaphragms–is enough to make us feel utterly, undeniably, eternally alive. And when we are not focusing on these things that happen, how alive are we? Are we alive if our lungs work, our hearts beat, our cells exchange nutrients but our minds don’t follow what happens? In a sense we certainly are, but that’s a different kind of life. It’s not a life wholly in the flow of things.
If you’re not aware, you are the same as being aware…but there’s just less of you to know the difference the moment makes.
Meaning is Relational
If I were to ask you
which of the following would you prefer, 1 or 10
how would you answer the question? Could you really answer the question? Perhaps you could if you had some kind of preference for one of the numbers over the other. But for all intents and purposes, you really couldn’t give a meaningful answer. Why not? Because the real question doesn’t ask about the nouns 1 or 10 but the adjectives 1 and 10.
So now if I were to ask you
which do you prefer, 1 papercut or 10 papercuts?
you now can answer the question because you have context. Things in themselves have, by definition, no context, nothing to with them. But once a thing has a context, it has a relationship, and it’s the relationship that bridges your consciousness with the things, which is how meaning arises. Meaning, then, is a relationship between things, specifically things related within consciousness, which is itself a network of relationships.
So how does this abstract philosophical observation relate to meditation, to Zen? Well, mindfulness is about relationships: that things relate, how they relate, what their underlying relationship to other things unfolds. If in the process of meditating you increase your awareness of relationships, meaning grows out of that process. Life vivifies through that meaning. It helps us realize that the cliche query “What is the meaning of life?” has no meaning because it demands meaning in itself, which is devoid of any relation to anything else. Rather, the answerable question is “What are the meanings of what happens in life”.
Our interactivity with the world, through observation or action, is the relation out of which we seek and find meanings. Any practice which increases our awareness of things, increases our relationships, which increases the meanings potent in the stream of happenings we call life.
Zen is relational. Meaning is relational. Zen is Meaning.
