Meditation on the Nonexistent Meaning

1. The Point of Disappearance: A View from the Future

Let us imagine that you — that we — no longer exist, and 20 years have passed.

The question is: what constituted your presence 20 years ago?

What was it?

Was it ever?

2. A View from the Future: Evaluating What Has Been Lived

From the perspective of the future:

How can everything that was happening then be evaluated?

How can the life tasks and meanings for which you lived be evaluated?

How can those problems and difficulties — but also joys — be evaluated?

Where, ultimately, were you heading, if the past is now viewed from a point 20 years after you?

And after 100 years?

And after 10,000 years?

3. The Point of Return: What Was It?

What was it?

And what is happening now?

(Turn off all the given and imposed “knowledge”, all worldviews, all the noise of the news cycle.)

4. The Present from the Future: What Remains?

What from everything that happened has remained in the present?

(Twenty years later.)

What was important?

(Twenty years later.)

Let us recall all the conflicts, all the everyday confrontations, all the arguments, all the struggles.

Just remember.

What remains?

5. The Memory of Suffering: The Disappearance of What Was Experienced

Remember all the fears and anxieties about what was not achieved, all the humiliations and defeats, all the unpleasant things — everything that one does not want to remember.

Just remember.

What remains?

6. The Memory of Life: The Disappearance of the Past

Let us recall the entire accumulated memory — the memory of life, of childhood, of growing up, of everything that happened.

Just remember.

What remains?

7. The Point of Return: The Remainder of Existence

Imagine:

what from all of this is present now, 20 years later?

What from all of this remains important at the point:

"many years from now, when you have long ceased to exist"?

8. Was It Ever?

What was it?

Was it ever?

And what remains of everyone — friends, those who harmed you, those who lived at that time — if 20 years have passed and all of this has long disappeared?

Imagine generations of those who departed just yesterday.

And what do you know today about their conflicts, their suffering, their hatred?

What?

Yet at that time, in their own “now”, all of this was profoundly important…

9. The Point of Return: What Remains?

And what remains?

(Think.)

=

And what was?

10. Today: The Present under the Gaze of the Future

And what is happening to you specifically right now — here and today — in the context of how this will be evaluated 20 years after you are gone?

11. Forgetting and Meaning

So, what is our life in the context of forgetting?

And what is happening now — in the context of forgetting?

What are we occupied with today?

12. The Imitation of Life

Do we pretend that we are occupied with something?

Do we pretend — pretend the importance of our own importance?

Do we pretend that all of this is interesting to us?

Do we listen to emptiness — and refuse to turn away?

Do we smile?

Or do we perform another form of normality?

13. The Important

So, what remains truly important?

Is there anything?

And if there is not — then why live?

And how should one live?

14. A Note on Practice

Practice is not words — including intellectual words.

Words are not a state.

A state must be experienced — this also applies to intellectual states.

And yes, one can always turn away from all of this, burying oneself in the “importance of the present moment”…

15. Recommended Reading

• Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time.
• Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety.
• Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus.
• Mamardashvili, Merab. Lectures on Proust.
• Rinpoche, Sogyal. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
• The Questions of King Milinda (Milindapañha).

Buddhist Texts

• Anattalakkhaṇa Sutta (SN 22.59) // Saṃyutta Nikāya. Translated from Pāli by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000.
• Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (MN 10) // Majjhima Nikāya. Translated from Pāli by Bhikkhu Analayo. Oxford: Windhorse Publications, 2003.
• Maraṇasati Sutta (AN 6.19–20) // Aṅguttara Nikāya. In: The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha. Translated from Pāli by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2012.
• Rahula, Walpola. What the Buddha Taught. New York: Grove Press, 1974.

Hindu Texts

• Bhagavad Gita. Translated by Eknath Easwaran. Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 2007.
• Yoga Vasistha. Translated by Swami Venkatesananda. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
• The Upanishads. Translated and commented by S. Radhakrishnan. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953.