What is...(Jim Newman)

 

Q: Jim, what is the meaning of life?

Jim Newman: There is no meaning and no need for a meaning of life. Everything is already what it is, which is already needlessly, free and fulfilled.

“Life” is not separate from what is. Without separation, there is no space or distance in which the need for a meaning of life could arise.

There is only what is. “What is” is not objective or subjective, it is not conceptual, knowable or understandable. “What is” is indivisible, all encompassing, everything without position or perspective, no inside, no outside, not two, not separate, non dual.

What is – undifferentiated everything – can appear as something, a perspective, an apparent position. A position can be experienced, making the appearance seem personal. As a personal experience, life appears to be an object or “a something” requiring meaning. However, the person is illusory and has no reality outside of its experience of itself. The search for meaning is a need that arises out of that experience, which is the experience of separation, the experience that “what is” is real and personal.

The question or search for a meaning of life comes from the longing for wholeness, absolute freedom, which is unknowingly a longing for dissolution, an end to the person. The personal experience inevitably seeks for an answer to the question of “what is my life about?”. For the person there is no answer because this, what is, is not about anything. And it does not need to be about anything. The only solution for the person is the end of the person.

The person cannot go beyond the illusory nature of itself and cannot help being an effect of itself: a seeker. Its search is for love, for more or better experiences. It experiences itself on a path to find what it hopes will resolve its diss-ease of need. The path is seeking. Seeking can be the search for money, power, more… Because the search does not and can not address the cause of need, it can only lead to more seeking. The premise for seeking – that something intrinsically is wrong or missing – is illusory. Consequentially all of its efforts are hopelessly limited to that false premise.

The person is trying to overcome this diss-ease of the need for experience through more experience.

The effort exerted by the person can never lead to the fulfillment it seeks, the unlimited all inclusiveness of the unknowable “what is”. What is longed for is beyond personal seeking, by being “what is” already. “What is” is not an objective reality, is not knowable. “What is” is emptiness being everything as it is. Everything being what it is, is already complete, already absolutely free, without any need of meaning.

Jim: I was never able to believe the answers, offered by canned religion or spirituality to the meaning of life, while growing up. A seeking was engendered that ended without finding any answers to the questions. It ended with the end of the questioner. The revelation: there is no need to seek what is already complete."