Let's close our eyes.
Let's close our eyes.
I heard a funny reel on Instagram yesterday.
I saw it and what it said was,
You know how language is just a bunch of,
A string of sounds connected together that has meaning.
That's what language is,
Nothing more than that,
It's just a bunch of sounds.
Although it was meant to be a,
Although it was meant to be a funny reel,
It reminded me of my teacher explaining the importance of meaning.
And I thought maybe we can explore that a little bit today.
If you look at our human experience,
It can be boiled down to specific categories that are true across the board,
Namely sights,
Sounds,
Tastes,
Textures,
Smells,
Bundled into perceptions,
Sensations,
And thoughts and images,
Which can also be bundled into perceptions because we perceive our thoughts and images within our mind.
So we have perceptions and sensations.
We don't have anything else.
This is the first principles of human experience that we have.
So a string of sounds,
It can also apply to a string of words on a piece of paper or a screen that somehow convey a meaning.
And we don't normally think about it in our culture that much,
So where does the meaning come from?
If the meaning was inherent in the word,
Then anyone who doesn't know that language should also understand the meaning.
Like if we are listening to a song from a language in a language that we don't understand,
We don't care about the meaning as long as the song takes us through.
But where does the meaning come from?
It's like the meaning is the screen or the thread behind the words or the thread in a pearl necklace.
It's not a part of the necklace because the pearls make up the necklace,
But without the thread they are just a bunch of pearls.
So it's easy to dismiss thread as not being a part of the necklace,
But without that there is no necklace.
So similarly,
We have these sounds,
We have these words,
And the fact that we feel they are connected because they appear in succession,
The background on which they are appearing is like the thread of that necklace.
And the reason this exploration I feel is important is because my teacher speaks about these three things that depending on each person's inclination,
They gravitate to that particular flavor more readily.
And those three things are truth,
Beauty,
And love.
Actually that's the name of one of his books as well.
Truth or meaning or intelligence is the part that we are exploring here.
If you look at something beautiful,
As the old saying goes,
Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.
Where is the beauty then?
Does it fall into thoughts?
Is it in the object?
Is it in the feeling?
Feeling is a sensation.
Where is beauty?
Same thing is true about love.
Can we show love?
Can we describe love?
Neither can we describe truth or beauty.
And somehow in a very sneaky way,
What matters to us in our lives,
What we really care about at the end of the day,
Is that which we cannot describe.
We can describe other things using these words,
But we can't describe these words with a more fundamental word.
The basis of our fundamental stops at perceptions and sensations,
Feelings,
Thoughts,
Images,
Sights,
Sounds.
We care about love,
Happiness,
Joy,
Fairness,
Equality.
Any attempt to quantify or qualify them is not going to be successful.
But we don't pay enough attention on these intangibles to understand where they are coming from.
Because if we care about them,
We want them,
Then we need to know where to look for them.
I'm sure this must have happened to you,
Where you recommended someone to read a book or watch something that you found hilarious or inspiring and the earth did not move for the other person.
But if we explore that,
We'll realize that something in us,
Something that we cannot describe again,
Is being pulled,
As if we are pulled towards things that cannot be described either.
It's like the earth's gravitational pull on us,
On the objects.
We can see the earth,
We can see the objects,
But we can't see the pull.
We can see the sun,
We can see the earth,
But we can't see the pull.
And in order to pull something,
In order to recognize that intangible in something else,
Those two things need to be the same at some level.
We cannot want love without knowing love.
We cannot want happiness without knowing happiness so deeply that we would spend our entire life looking for it.
It's like right now,
If the internet of the world just stops,
We will miss it dearly because we know it.
We know it for the past few years.
Daily,
It influences our daily lives.
But our lives will still continue despite its absence.
But somehow that's not true about love or happiness.
Connection,
Belonging,
Justice,
Fairness,
Equality.
We strive for it every single day.
Beauty,
Intelligence,
Meaning,
Humor.
So my question to you is,
Where does the meaning lie?
Where does the meaning lie?
These five words,
These sounds,
They are getting interpreted to form a sentence or a question.
And then that question takes you to a place where these words stop and there is only meaning.
There's no response yet because you can't describe the response for this.
It's like I heard my teacher say,
What Picasso used to say,
That all art is a lie,
But it points to the truth.
In order to explain the truth,
We might use the words,
But knowing very well that these words are not the meaning.
The map is not the territory.
It's like zooming in into our everyday experience and trying to understand everything that we perceive,
Sense,
Feel,
Think,
Do.
There's something underneath it.
And that's why there's a difference between our intelligence,
That we know it,
And artificial intelligence because it can only mimic the parts that can be described.
The words,
The images,
The data,
It's different metrics,
Different categorizations,
Trends,
Processing.
But where does the meaning lie?
If the meaning lied in the numbers,
Then computers already have a lot of numbers.
Can the computer or any program come up with meaning?
The experience of beauty,
The experience of listening to the truth,
The experience of connection,
Happiness,
For that matter,
Even grief or pain.
Right?
Watch.
In exploration like this,
Force is us.
To break the shackles of what is familiar and dive into something that was always there but was missed.
Being more sensitive,
I guess.
It's like if I asked you to become aware of your naked body underneath your clothes,
You will become aware right away.
So is the case with this exploration.
The thread is right here all the time.
If we pierce into the necklace,
If we pierce into the pearls where they meet each other,
The thread will reveal itself.
Just like that,
If we pierce into our own experience and understand where the meaning comes from,
Where the beauty comes from,
Where the longing comes from,
We become more sensitive to a very different experience that we are having in addition to a human experience.
It's a spiritual experience which is happening right underneath or behind or permeating through our human experience.
That's what we care about,
To be honest.
When we hug someone,
It's not our bodies meeting,
But it's something else that we really care about.
What is that?
Where is that?
Thank you.
