enjoy

Enjoy!

People sometimes ask, what is the meaning of life? And this is a difficult question. It is difficult in this sense: if the question has arisen in the mind, then it is already a sure indication that the thinking mind is up to its tricks, is in control. Life does not have a meaning. It doesn't need one. It's only the human mind, the thinking mind that is always searching for meaning. and there's no end to it.

We perceive something, anything, and immediately the mind jumps on it, trying to deduce a meaning. But it won't let it stop there. Even if it finds a meaning, it will go on looking for further meaning in that meaning. A means B, B means C, C means D and so on, forever. The mind is not limited to the letters of the alphabet. As long as it is busy, finding meaning, it will feel that it is serving its purpose. But in truth, it is just distracting us from life. When a flower blossoms, it's not there thinking I need to have meaning to my life. No, it's in its nature to blossom, so it blossoms. And it doesn't care what the outcome is, whether it is prized or not, whether it is seen in any way or not, the flower is being a flower, and that's all. It's being its natural self, without a need for meaning.

But we humans seem to be incapable of living this way, just being our natural self. We have to have meaning, we have to find a purpose to our life. There is no meaning to life and there is no purpose. But if the mind cannot accept that, then we will play a little game, a trick to deceive it. The meaning of life, the purpose, is that we enjoy it. Enjoyment is the meaning of life. And so with this meaning, we can relax a little bit: okay we know the meaning. The meaning is enjoyment. And we know when we are enjoying life and we know when we are not. So our discipline requires us to move more to those ways of being that give us enjoyment.

Of course, we need to be skilful in this. Drinking alcohol might be enjoyable for a moment. But the next day we will have a hangover, and a few years down the line our internal organs will start to fail, and we will have lots of misery. So in our pursuit of enjoyment, we need to have awareness of what is really healthy. But that's easy to find, if we still ourselves for a moment, and really feel, be sensitive to, what our body is telling us. So if we can follow this path, the path of enjoyment, then eventually our tricky mind might lose its power over us.

Have you noticed that when you are really enjoying life, your problems drop away? Our problems are also created by our mischievous mind, thinking too much. So if we enjoy life, we take power away from that part of our mind: the problem maker, the one that's always seeking meaning, always chasing after something that's not quite there in front of us. When we are enjoying the moment, we don't need all that. We are relaxed. We are present. We are merely being. And this is the way to live life. It's not really a meaning in life, but if you have to have a meaning, then make this the meaning: to enjoy life, every moment, in itself without reference to the past or future, without having to make complicated analyses, just living the moment in a simple direct way, being what you naturally are, which is an enlightened being.