Making Life Meaningful with Meditation on Impermanence and Renunciation

Making Life Meaningful

Now we will continue with the text. We are on the second verse.

(2) Listen with a clear (mind), O fortunate one, whose mind would rely on the path pleasing to the Triumphant through being unattached to the pleasures of compulsive existence and eager to make meaningful your life of respites and enriching factors.

The pleasures of compulsive existence refer to the fact that for us normal people, our minds are always chasing after sense pleasures. We always want to feel good, and it’s like we’re completely in love with pleasure. If the only thing we seek in life is pleasure, it’s actually quite destructive. It’s the reason why nothing truly meaningful happens in our lives. We just keep chasing after pleasures. We’re completely obsessed with searching for pleasure and gratifying our senses, yet we never find satisfaction. It makes our whole life completely mundane. Even animals do this. Furthermore, it doesn’t bring us any peace of mind, and nor does it work as an antidote to suffering. 

When we are constantly engaged in mundane activities or seeking sense pleasures, it just brings a whole lot of problems, a whole lot of suffering. There is a great lama who wrote a text called Remembering Impermanence. He said that whatever mundane activities we are engaged in, they will never come to an end until we ourselves decide that enough is enough. As soon as we finish one task, another one pops up. 

There is literally no end to the list of mundane activities that we can spend our whole lives on. First, we look for a house. We need to have enough money to buy and take care of a house, so we have to get a job, which usually takes up a lot of our time. Then, once we buy our house, we need to furnish it, and continue working to pay for the upkeep. There is no end to it. Even finding and paying off a house does not mean that our activities finish. We still need to clean the house every so often! It’s a little bit like waves in the ocean, which come one after the other with no end. Our worldly activities are the same, unless we consciously decide to put a stop to them. Actually, we will not find any satisfaction in these worldly activities.

Isn’t it true that since we were children until now, our whole life has been one activity after another, one problem after another? When we’re small we have to get an education, so we go to school. We’re told we need to do this in order to find a good job. Later on, it’s difficult to get into university. Once we finish our education, we again have problems to find a job. When we do find a job, we are always wanting more money and a better position. And if we do manage to have a very flourishing career and become quite well-known, then we have to protect the fame and wealth we’ve created. There is no end to this. We strive to render our life of respites and enriching factors meaningful, as the text says, but we do it in totally the wrong way. Right now, we have this precious human rebirth with freedoms and endowments. It is not truly meaningful if we just live an ordinary life as described so far. Isn‘t it true? 

We all have our own goals and aims in life, and nobody can tell us to do anything. Even the Buddhas can’t force us to do anything. It’s up to us to live our lives as we decide. But now we are talking here about destructive emotions and how to abandon them. If, as soon as the discussion is up, we carry on with our normal lives and completely disregard what we’re talking about and do whatever we want, then of course the teachings won’t work. It is interesting how most of us understand well the meaning of the teachings, we even completely agree with them, and yet for some reason we still don’t abandon our pursuit of worldly activities and goals. 

Top