To live a meaningful life is to participate in the consciousness of the soul. When inwardly touched, a sense of soulful purpose is realized within one’s mind and heart, and meaningful living emerges as a guiding matrix to life. Meaning, therefore, is a state of consciousness. It represents a movement away from perceiving outer events at face value. Instead, events are understood as symbols that reveal hidden significance.
When a person begins to experience this, it indicates that she or he has stepped into the World of Meaning — the state of consciousness through which the soul’s wisdom is revealed.
The World of Meaning reveals the pattern of truth underlying outer circumstance. When the mind rightly interfaces with it, various life events are no longer viewed as random. Things that may have seemed arbitrary in the past are recognized as having an underlying organization to them. A person is able to intuit a deeper meaning beyond the outer appearance of things. Something significant is revealed.
There are certain fundamental features of perception that are common to all experiences coming forth from the World of Meaning, and therefore from the soul:
- Meaning brings spiritual understanding to what was previously incomprehensible. The soul holds the wisdom acquired from countless incarnations. When conveyed, this wisdom provides a type of understanding that the lower self (personality) does not possess. The soul conveys the patterns of truth learned in previous lives, and it is this that the soul radiates into the mind. These patterns then form the foundation of spiritual insight and meaningful thought.
- Meaningfulness reveals the essence of something, rather than the thing itself. When an individual senses something spiritually meaningful, it indicates that his/her perception have grasped upon an essential principle or abstract spiritual truth. Registered by the higher mind, this realization invariably gives explanation and clarity to something that seemed outwardly complex and confounding to the logical and rational mind.
- The World of Meaning will always add context to one’s perceptions. By this is meant that spiritual insight comes when we learn to perceive, not just an event, but also the context of which that event is a part. The further one is upon the Path the wider is the context that is considered.
- The realization of spiritual meaning is both a centralizing and decentralizing experience. The insights gained should give a person a deeper realization of his/her soul and its nature. In this sense, it is a centralizing experience, for it facilitates greater Self-awareness. However, it is simultaneously decentralizing. This is because it causes a person to subtly realize that she or he is merely a cell within a larger life expression, namely humanity in its wholeness. From the esoteric perspective, humanity is considered one living entity composed of billions of cells, each of which is a human being. And, it is via the World of Meaning that the first glimmering of this is realized within the mind.
Entrance into the world of meaning inclines us to look more deeply at life events with an understanding that the soul often speaks through circumstance. This requires that we learn to suspend judgment. To recognize a circumstantial message requires added time so that it can be properly sensed within the mind. Premature judgments prevent this from happening.
Secondly, sensing the hidden meaning within a situation requires that part of the mind be held in quiet wholeness. Meaning does not emerge through sequential reasoning. Instead, it comes through our ability to hold all the variables in a given circumstance within a unitive field of awareness. It requires we perceive life in two ways simultaneously. That is, to be alert to the interaction of a range of variables, while at the same time sensing them as a profound singularity.
Participation in the World of Meaning is an evolving process. Indeed, it takes several incarnations to fully live in such a state. It is a realm of consciousness used by the soul to convey its purpose, and it shapes the underlying patterns of human perception. By so doing, deeper significance is recognized within outer events, and one’s capacity to render uplifting service is likewise heightened.
