Unless We Let Go Of The Past, Our Lives Will Remain Meaningless

When our lives are empty of meaning, being mainly superficial - as they are today for most of us - we give importance to the surface of things.

We're "seduced" by nice talks, promises about an ideal, physical appearances, expensive brands, and so on.

When our lives are without depth, our logic is based on the external - how colorful, how impressive, how vivid, how terrible, how sensational, and so on - things are. And the more they do, the more we're seduced.

Eventually, our senses can't get enough, so we keep demanding more and more from Nature, from the Earth's resources, from people, and before we realize how far we've gone to satisfy our unquenchable thirst for meaning - the damage is done. Relationships are broken, animals go extinct, the Earth becomes unstable. Et cetera.

Life is beautiful. To have our hearts opened in front of a smile, a dog, or a majestic tree is natural. What's not is to need an external agent in order to be fulfilled, to find meaning.

As long as we keep depending on transient objects to give us a sense of meaning and security, we'll stand on shifting sands.

It shouldn't be a surprise therefore that most of us are stuck in the past. And our overemphasis on the future - in the form of fears of tomorrows, anxiety about not having enough money and people around us, worries, expectations - is the natural reaction from holding on too tightly to this past, to what is no more.

What happened, happened. Holding on to it is an act of will.

We're wired to avoid suffering. Whether it's stepping on a sharp piece of glass, having our skin pinched, running away from a lion - physical suffering decreases our odds of survival; thus, we're wired to avoid suffering.

The same can be said about psychological suffering. Whether it's having our reputation ruined, people being mean to us, being rejected, or the memory of a painful experience. We don't want that.

Physically speaking, we protect ourselves from suffering through weaponry, building different infrastructures, houses, and so on.

Psychologically speaking, we do the same with thoughts. We forge our sense of self through our beliefs, we stick to our perception of the world, we maintain our position regarding what life is about - we're attached to what we've known.

Through attachment to the past, we seek security - which is avoidance of suffering. And this attachment breeds the weight/importance we give to the future.

Being stretched out between past and future, the present slips through our fingers. This instant, which contains the very meaning we're looking for. That meaning, for which we destroy. The meaning, for which we live.

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After our survival needs, we spend the most money on entertainments/pleasures, which affect our health in the long run, eventually bringing us back to doing whatever we can not to die, which happens by spending--again--on the health industry.

We create our own discomfort. We are responsible for our own misfortunes. While we're accustomed to depending on everyone else to save us, there must come a time when we realize that we're in charge.

We are the ones experiencing our thoughts, feeling our feelings, and even if it doesn't seem to be the case--we are the ones creating these inner experiences for ourselves by not understanding our "psychic structures."

We know so much of the world, we're cultured, we absorb books and discuss with fancy words to impress superficial people. At the end of the day, it may get us far in the physical world but internally, right before our sleep, we feel something is still missing. And the emptiness that remains in us cannot be filled with more of what never really worked.

It's up to us to create our happiness. And we do it, by being responsible bout our inner worlds, by taking them in charge-and by learning about ourselves on a daily basis. Only then, can we hope to make sense of life.