Trying to Make Meaning Out of It
A Dharma Talk by Carolyn Atkinson
January 19, 2005
Last week we talked about this urge most of us experience to make meaning out of life. To understand what something means. What does it mean, that all these people are killed in a tsunami? What does it mean--that someone suffers physically? What does it mean--that meanwhile, someone else experiences good fortune?
I was thinking about what we called the "New Age" movement of the eighties and nineties. This movement is still going on, of course. Maybe it’s not quite so compelling, but it’s absolutely still there. And it seems very American--this New Age belief in perfectibility. We started out that way as a country, several hundred years ago, and we continue right on--believing, as a culture, that it is possible to perfect our lives. (and everyone else’s, I might add.) The dark side of this, of course, is that when bad things happen--we must have caused them. It must be our fault.
This whole perfectibility idea is definitely an effort to make meaning out of our lives--and it is a particularly enthusiastic, pioneering, American way of making that meaning.
I mentioned last week my experience that the way we make meaning seems directly dependent on how we are looking at the event. If, for example, we believe that what we SEE is what is TRUE--then that determines our experience.
Recently there was an article in the New Yorker (Monday, January 17, 2005, Annals of Technology) called The Picture Problem, by Malcolm Gladwell. It tells the story about the American effort to destroy Scud missiles during the first Gulf War. It seems that the American military came up with a $4.6 million device called a LANTIRN navigation and targeting pod, which was capable of taking high-resolution infrared photographs from a great distance above the earth. The Air Force then sent planes to destroy what were clearly seen in these photographs to be the launching platforms for the Scud missiles. These planes destroyed their targets very efficiently, and the Air Force calculated that they had destroyed about a hundred Scud missile launchers.
Malcolm Gladwell writes: "Air Force officials were not guessing at the number of Scud launchers hit; as far as they were concerned, they knew. They had a four-million-dollar camera, which took a nearly perfect picture, and there are few cultural reflexes more deeply ingrained than the idea that a picture has the weight of truth. ‘That photography not only does not, but cannot lie, is a matter of belief, an article of faith,’ Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner have written. ‘We tend to trust the camera more than our own eyes.’ Thus was victory declared in the Scud hunt--until hostilities ended and the Air Force appointed a team to determine the effectiveness of the air campaigns in Desert Storm. The actual number of definite Scud kills, the team said, was zero."
If we believe that what we SEE is what is TRUE--then this determines our version of meaning. Or--if we believe that we have a particular claim to righteousness, for example--then this determines what we see and how we experience life.
Now--the thing is--we all have our own perspectives it seems to me, because we all have our own bodies, our own lives, our own stories--from which we construct our own meaning. There is nothing wrong with this.
However, if we believe that what we learn, how we create meaning is actually INHERENT TRUTH--then problems can easily arise. Wars can easily begin. Yesterday at the Senate hearings for confirmation, Condaleeza Rice said that the decision to invade Iraq was "difficult and necessary and right." Please notice those words: necessary. right. This is not just our experience. These words carry the claim of universal truth. Our country has a long history of believing that we have the insider claim on inherent and universal truth.
So--am I suggesting that there is no such thing as truth? Or right? Let me get to that by telling you a story. I was talking with a friend of mine recently. He is a lawyer. He is highly articulate. Very well educated. And in the past, he has been given to . . . shall we say . . . sharp ideological struggle? Not so much now. Life sometimes has a way of shaking us up enough to get us to slow down, pay attention, open up. Sometimes we can be persuaded to reconsider our basic life stances. So it is with my friend.
As we talked, after some contemplation of old ways of approaching life, our conversation went like this: I asked him, well then, what do you trust? What do you go home to?
And before I go on to his answer, I want to ask you all sitting here tonight this same question: what do you trust? What do you go home to? In a way, I could be asking--when you face death--what then will you trust? Someone else said to me recently: what can I count on? This is the question--what can you, and do you--count on? Please take a moment now to think about this.
So--my friend’s initial answer was that he trusts his intellect. The exercise of his mind. It’s a thoughtful response. We talked about it. I thought about the question too--and my initial response was something like this: I trust my experience. I don’t trust that it won’t change, or be different every time I look at my experience. But I trust paying attention to my experience.
As the conversation went on, I realized that what I trust--truly DO trust--is the practice of awareness. The practice of mindful awareness. I trust the effort to be present in my life. Actually, going even deeper with this, I realize that what I really trust, after these years of meditation practice--is Shikan-Taza. This basic Zen meditation of just sitting. Just being present with life. Just showing up. This is the same as mindful awareness. Or bare attention. It is the effort to simply be here, in the present moment. Just that. RamDas said this years ago: Just Be Here Now.
Which is not the same thing--at all--as believing that there is an absolute truth which I can find. Something that doesn’t change. My friend, who is a long time student of Zen teachings--said, "Well you know, Zen seems to say that there is an absolute truth which you can reach--outside of your own personal experience. A truth that is beyond individual experience."
This is when I sometimes suspect that I am not a good Zen student--because . . . I don’t know about that. I don’t know that I believe we wake up to absolute reality. I kind of think--we wake up to more and more of our own experience. Maybe not some cosmic truth, some absolutely untouchable reality. Maybe? I actually think this is what I experience right now: we wake up to more and more of our own life. I hold this perspective lightly--who knows, it could all change. And pigs could fly . . . we just don’t know for sure.
But meanwhile, I want to come back to this earlier question, because I think it’s really good to look at this: what can we count on? What do we trust when we lay our heads down at night? When we get up in the morning? What do we trust?
There was an article from the Nation, called The Interpreters of Maladies, by Adam Shatz. It’s about two people--one of them is Jacques Derida--the articulate spokesperson for Post Modernism. Derida, the article says, was "accused of the sins of ‘relativism’ and ‘nihilism.’ In fact, he had a high regard for truth and for the protocols of scholarship. If he sought to shake the certainties of philosophy, it was not out of a sense of nihilism, or even anarchist mischief, but rather a principled distrust of orthodoxies." A principled distrust of orthodoxies. It seems to me, this is the very compelling suspicion that coherence in any system can become a tyrant of the mind. Another way to say this is: belief easily becomes truth. And then it is so easy, so compelling to be quite certain about what is "necessary and right."
I find I agree with Derida. Does that mean that there is nothing we can count on?Actually--I think that we can count on things being exactly as they are. We can count on life being exactly what it is. I trust . . . I really do trust just being here. This is not an orthodoxy. This is not something that you must believe. You do not have to have any particular experience. Or go to any particular place. You do not need to circumambulate our zendo a hundred thousand times. And you do not need to wear any particular rainments, robes or hairstyles.
The Buddha said it in a way that I can understand--Be a lamp unto yourself. Be a teacher unto yourself. Sit down and pay attention to your own experience. Check it out for yourself. Don’t listen to anyone else telling you the way things are. See what your actual experience is. Trust your own experience.
I love the story about John J. Audubon, the great creator of the bird books. It’s told that he advised someone who asked about discrepancies between his pictures and the birds in the wild, "If you look in my book at the picture, and then you see the bird, and the bird looks different: believe the bird."
Believe your own life. Trust your own experience. There’s just one necessity: you must pay attention. As the signs say in Las Vegas: you must be present to win. You must be present, if you are going to learn to trust your life.
Just show up. Just pay attention. And then: believe the bird. Believe your experience. Believe your own life. You CAN count on this. You can count on life being exactly what it is. When we pay very close attention, we notice that life is exactly what it is. And we can count on this!
