NOEMAYA

The Self eternally shines and gives. But what does it shine? What is its light?
It shines meaning. Meaning is the light of the Self.

Just as the sun cannot not shine, the Self cannot not project meaning. Not that the Self is some “thing” which has meaning as an attribute. The Self is nothing but the eternal shining of meaning, the endless projection of significance.

So then, what is man? For man is certainly not the Self, yet he does not exist apart from it either.

Man is more of a no-thing—a lack of being, an aperture, a hole—through which the light of the Self shines into the world, illuminating it and making it manifest. This is the hole-man. All man can do is limit the scope of that meaning and steer its direction, deciding where it should shine and therefore what should manifest.

Reality—by which I mean the manifest world—is nothing but the result of decisions constantly being made by us, decisions of meanings, the meanings we ceaselessly assign to our encounters. Yet it is not we who shine that meaning; all we do is steer the light, like a man holding a flashlight, pointing it toward whatever we choose to bring forth and maintain.

The practical lesson of this metaphysical story is simple: all experience—past, present, or future—is nothing but the meaning we give it. To change one’s life, one only needs to redirect this flow of meaning. That I am “bound” by what happened in my past is itself only a meaning I have assigned to my present experience.

Take this as absolute: there is no inherent meaning to anything except what we assign to it. That is the ultimate freedom. We cannot control or change what happens in nature, but we are in full control of what it means to us and how it engages us.

The world—as an experienced world—is essentially an already interpreted reality. It has no meaning, no existence, apart from our interpretation. The world is a story being constantly told to us by our psyche.

If only we could muster the courage to drop the story—to let go of the traumas and dramas in which we are so deeply invested (yet claim we want to escape them)—an infinite possibility would arise before us. At any moment we can be anything we choose. It is simple, but not easy. And the very claim “it’s not easy” is itself another story, another interpretation. What makes it hard is not the first decision to let go but our subsequent decisions to pick up the old story again, the one in which we are so invested, instead of walking away from it.

This is a fundamental human possibility, and it explains the spontaneous transformations we witness in the lives of extraordinary men and women.

Let’s see how invested we are in unnecessary suffering: you may be walking around your house, replaying an argument in your head, when suddenly you stub your toe against the corner of a table. Instantly, the drama vanishes—as if it never existed. The only reality is the pain in your toe. And when the pain subsides, awareness expands again, and you instinctively return to looking for that old drama, trying to pick it back up. Sometimes you even struggle to remember what it was: “What was I so bothered about?” Yet you insist on resuscitating it, breathing life into it again.

Or consider when depression suddenly lifts upon noticing a beautiful person walking by, or when you hear a genuinely funny joke.

Here we recall the principle of all principles: The Real cannot not be. That which is truly real cannot not exist. Anything that can be lost, even for a second, cannot be truly real or truly there.

So, if it is possible to lose a story—even for a moment—then it cannot be truly real. It must be a construct, maintained only through your active engagement. You make it, and you keep it alive. See that it is we who sustain the very narratives that cause us suffering.

This is not a denial of what happens, but rather a recognition of our investment in dysfunctional interpretations of what happens. It is not about the events themselves, but about what we make of them. Events are destroyed by time; what remains is the meaning we gave them. And often it is these meanings we suffer from, not the events that are already gone.

As it has been well said: “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”