269. Making Meaning

You’ve found meaning in a particular idea. It feels valuable and important to you. You tell me about your idea and the meaning you’ve found in it. I listen carefully to your words, but I do not share in your conclusion. I cannot see the meaning of your idea. For me, the story you’ve crafted around it doesn’t seem real or plausible.

I tell you about my doubts, supplying what I believe to be a convincing argument against your idea and its meaning. I do this because I want you to be free from delusion. I want you to see the reality of your idea as I do.

But in truth, all that’s happened here is a disagreement. Your experiences and values have led you to feel that your idea is meaningful, whereas my experiences and values have led me to feel that it isn’t. Neither of us is correct, regardless of the arguments or evidence we can muster for our own side.

In attempting to undermine your idea, I’ve missed something important. I’ve decided your idea is delusional while forgetting that my own beliefs and values are just as delusional. I’ve fallen into the mistaken belief that it’s possible to live without delusion, which is itself a further delusion.

We cannot live without our delusions any more than we can live without our desires. Just like our desires, our delusional beliefs arise because we discriminate between good and bad, and doing so is just part of what it is to be human.

By trying to deflate the meaning of your idea, I’m acting as though my beliefs and values are superior to yours. But the entire project of meaning-making is always profoundly human, it always originates in us, and if it has any further foundation it isn’t one we can directly access. It follows from this that I cannot know whether my values are actually superior to yours or to anyone’s.

To attempt to deprive another person of meaning is to impose my own subjective understanding on them. It is to be deeply attached to the fictional reality constructed by my own beliefs and values, which means it can only perpetuate the cycle of suffering.