Prof. Doug Powers:

As long as you think your existence is who you think you are, there isn’t any answer to that—because who you think you are doesn’t have any purpose. 

Insofar as you think you are who you are—as in, your narrative, all the stories you make up about yourself, all the projections of what you think you want and whether you’re satisfying them or not, your dreams and images: “Okay, I’m accomplishing this amount, so I’m happy.” “I’m not accomplishing this amount, so I’m unhappy.” “I wish I had this and I hope I had that…” All of this is a completely hopeless and aimless existence.

I can’t help you with that. 

However, that isn’t actually what’s going on. 

That’s the problem. That whole thing that you think is going on, actually isn’t what’s going on. You’ve been fooled!

So from the time you were a little kid, you got fooled. You thought that what was going on was what everybody was telling you was going on—that there were things going on all around you all the time. You thought that there was something going on there that was actually going on. And so then you’ve been having to spend all your time trying to figure out how to make life work in relation to all this stuff that you learned about, which is supposedly what life is, from your childhood, your conditions, your family, television… Everything that’s been going on around you. But that entire construct of everything going on all around you is entirely made up from other people’s fantasies that they have. You’re trying, with your narrative, to make up some story that’ll work. But it’s doomed not to work because the things that you are trying to make work are completely a fantasy that everybody’s making up. Therefore, you feel aimless.

Actually if you don’t feel like you’re aimless or useless, then you’re even fooling yourself more, because that’s much more true than anything else. 

The fact that everything you think is going on isn’t actually going on in the way you think it’s going on is a real challenge. And if you continue down  the paths that are given for you to follow at this particular point in time, when you look at yourself honestly, you’ll see that you’re just kind of aimlessly wandering nowhere. And if you make up something about yourself according to which you’re not aimless, then you’re gonna end up stuck in some kind of a prison.

Right now the choice is between this aimless wandering and being stuck in a prison. So in order to not be stuck with those two choices, there has to be another way of experiencing, another way of reflecting on your experience that opens up the door to something that’s more spontaneous, something that you can be comfortable with: the background of what’s going on before all these patterns—emotional patterns, thought patterns, cultural patterns, impulsive patterns—have embedded themselves in your consciousness. You have to find the freedom of mind before those things become so compelling. 

That requires a lot of open space. A lot of mental open space. 

Questioner:

How exactly does this freedom address the feeling of aimlessness?

Prof. Doug Powers:

If you’re able to engage in that kind of freedom of mind, the aimlessness completely disappears. Because ultimately, when you use consciousness in the way in which it was designed to function in a profound sense, it will actually experience every moment as incredibly meaningful, incredibly interconnected, and incredibly profound.

Every moment is a kind of awe-inspiring moment of existence.

But by getting caught within certain limiting frames of evaluation and thinking about things from the point of view of a limited story or narrative, you cut off this awareness. The awareness, the consciousness, cuts off the connection with the depth of itself and just lives on the surface of its interpretation of what it’s making up. And the problem is that what it makes up can be very compelling. Once it gets made up, and you buy into it, and you attach to it, it becomes so compelling that it’s very difficult to see out of it. And once you’ve bought into it, then that sense of being a consciousness that’s caught up in a narrative feels, if you honestly reflect on it, like just wandering aimlessly and meaninglessly. 

Questioner:

I do experience this kind of aimless feeling, but I don’t really want to give it up. I can tell it’s not working, but there’s still a barrier that stops me from being open to something else.

Prof. Doug Powers:

It’s not the aimlessness that you’re not willing to give up, it’s the sense of the narrative, or self, or whatever you want to call it. The sense of interpretation, or the imaginative world that you live in. You don’t want to give that up. So even if it feels like it’s not satisfying, you’re afraid to give it up. Because you’re just gonna fall into empty space. That seems to be the totality of reality and you feel like if you give that up, you’d be giving everything up.

The really difficult thing about trying to do anything about this is that it feels extremely risky, extremely vulnerable.

Jumping out of this story that you’re telling yourself, the narrative, the self that you’re creating, feels like jumping out of a plane with no parachute: Falling through empty space with no point of reference. People would rather stay in existence that is aimless and meaningless than take a jump.