From Memes to Meaning: Existential Dread and The Real Transformative Promise of Meditation
I’m a fan of internet memes. It’s one of my guilty pleasures. These tiny snippets of social media humor are a convenient way to get a quick dose of laughter and sarcasm when we need it most. As I sit down to write my first blog post, somewhere in the back of my mind is the subtle urge to pick up my phone and catch up on the latest posts from my favorite meme accounts.
Apart from their value as an entertaining distraction, I find that memes can often reflect a thread of the zeitgeist of our culture, whether it’s our obsession with celebrities or our shared frustration with the boredom and stress of workaday life. Often, the most popular and viral memes show more than a hint of nihilism and existential angst, funny though they may be. A few recent examples: A tweet questioning why iCloud storage could ever be full when 'nothing is real,' a cosmic perspective showing our place in the galaxy labeled simply 'you are here, crying in the shower before work,' and a Sunday brunch tweet that captures how even our leisurely moments are haunted by existential dread. While these memes make us laugh, they point to something deeper - a widespread sense that nothing really matters in our vast, scientifically-explained universe.
While it can certainly be healthy and therapeutic to make light of these feelings of meaninglessness and futility, these kinds of memes tell a deeper story about a spiritual crisis that’s besetting our time. Many of us have a hard time identifying with the religious beliefs of our parents or grandparents. We are taught to see life as some kind of scientific accident, and are prone to believe that our lives are completely futile and pointless. It’s no wonder we are facing an epidemic of mental health problems like anxiety and depression.
This is where meditation enters the picture. While countless studies have shown meditation can provide some relief from these kinds of mental health challenges, there's a deeper story to tell. Rather than just alleviating the symptoms, meditation can actually help us address the root causes of our spiritual malaise in a way that is completely compatible with a scientific worldview.
The fact is that there’s actually great wisdom hidden in these nihilistic attitudes (who would have thought memes could be repositories for deep insights?). Ancient wisdom traditions teach us that everything we encounter, from objects in the material world to our own thoughts and feelings, are impermanent and ultimately devoid of inherent, lasting existence. Material things are made of arrangements of smaller parts, ultimately fundamental particles, that will eventually go their separate ways, and thoughts and feelings are insubstantial and in constant flux. So all things are constantly changing and have no meaning in and of themselves apart from what we impute on them. In that sense, ancient wisdom traditions would agree that the world we inhabit and everything we do in it are ultimately meaningless.
But these wisdom traditions go a step further by encouraging us to examine our own minds and look deeply at our own conscious awareness, which is the foundation of all our day-to-day experiences. If we do so carefully and with proper guidance, we will gradually discover that this awareness itself is fundamentally whole and complete, and deeply infused with qualities of peace, compassion, wisdom, and joy. In fact, the same insights that lead some of us to nihilistic views can also be used as an impetus to undertake this exploration, as was the case for me when I first started practicing meditation (more about that in future posts). As the great 19th century Tibetan master Patrul Rinpoche says, “The starting point of the path of liberation is the conviction that the whole of samsara is meaningless.” (1) A contemporary reading of this quote might say “The starting point on the path toward a meaningful life is the conviction that, from our habitual perspective, life is meaningless.”
It is in this exploration that the true promise of meditation lies. When we begin to discover the real nature of our own minds, we tap into an inexhaustible source of peace and wellbeing that is available to us regardless of our life circumstances. Gradually, we can learn to recognize that our own awareness, the ground of all our experience, is ever-present and unchanging, unaffected by the ups and downs of daily life. We can begin to notice our innate love and compassion, genuine care and concern for ourselves and others, which motivates everything we do at the deepest level. And we can discover our innate wisdom, our ability to see things clearly as they are when we quiet our minds and look beyond our habitual reactions and preconceptions.
As we develop these insights, we will discover a richness and meaning to our lives that somehow transcends the apparent futility of our daily struggles. Embodying these qualities of mind and trying our best to bring them into everything we do becomes a purpose in itself in what might otherwise seem like a purposeless existence.
The more we are able to show up in the world in this way, the more we are able to live our lives with joy, confidence, and a deep sense of peace with who we are. More and more, we will be able to transform our initial dread of impermanence and lack of inherent meaning into a source of inspiration. Impermanence means that we are never trapped with the way things are. Lack of enduring existence means we are free to shape our lives however we choose.
Importantly, none of this requires us to abandon our belief in science. The path of meditation doesn’t demand that we believe or disbelieve anything in particular. We just need to be willing to examine our own experience with honesty and curiosity. While many philosophical insights and meditative techniques derive from the Buddhist tradition, they can be put to use completely independently of any religious context. The only proof we need to accept is that of our own experience and insight.
By now you might be asking some version of the question “How can this be true if conscious awareness is just a byproduct of activity in the brain?” We’ll have a lot more to say in future posts about how and why an openness to these seemingly miraculous qualities of mind is entirely compatible with an acceptance of everything we know about science. For now, we can set that question aside and trust to our own experience in meditation. We can also look for guidance and inspiration to people of various contemplative traditions who have gone before us. The 9th century Chinese Chan master Huang Po assures us of what we’ll find when we carefully examine our mind:
It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy—and that is all. Enter deeply into it by awaking to it yourself. (2)
Or we can look at a more contemporary account from the Tibetan / Nepali master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche:
Our fundamental nature is wholesome, complete; it is pure; it is beyond concepts, beyond suffering, beyond problems. (3)
Of course reading these words alone is not enough. We need to do the work ourselves and cultivate these insights within our own experience. As a Zen proverb tells us, “A painting of a rice-cake cannot satisfy hunger.”
I’ll delve into more detail on these topics in future blog posts. Everyone is different, and different traditions will resonate more with some individuals than others. I hope by sharing some of my insights and experiences, I can help you find a path that works for you.
Until then, the next time you find yourself crying in the shower before work, remember your existential dread might just be the first step on a profound and fulfilling journey.
Footnotes:
Patrul Rinpoche. Words of My Perfect Teacher. Translated by Padmakara Translation Group, 2nd ed., Yale University Press, 1998. P. 33
Huang Po. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind. Translated by John Blofeld, Grove Press, 1958. P. 35
Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. Innate Well-being with Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. YouTube, uploaded by Tergar Meditation Community, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5chZ7CGdzlw.
Memes sourced from Instagram and Reddit
