The strangest thing came over me for the last couple of days. I've been researching mind bending stuff that goes down to the very core of behavior and beyond. It's been incredibly helpful in restructuring my "mental map" but at the same time there's been such huge foundational changes in my thinking I'm left questioning existence deeper than I ever have before.

Let me back up for a moment so you're not totally lost. In one of my earlier writings I said that NOTHING has meaning until we attach meaning to it. This concept totally floored me. Think about all of the things that happen in our life that we attach meaning to?

If someone smiles, if someone winks, if someone talks slurred, if someone looks up at you and holds out their hand.........

Your old blanket, your old photos, your favorite song, your first car, your first love, that old scent.......

Meanings are EVERYWHERE! We've formed them as a way to deal with the world. I believe meanings are an emotional expression that we impose on the physical world. In other words, we feel emotions - they are very real. So in order to deal with the world on a deeper (emotional) level we form an emotional connection with things. The things themselves may have no feeling or no meaning without us but the meaning we give them makes them come alive!

If you're still with me I'm about to take you on an intellectual ride. (You thought you were already on it didn't you?) I traced meaning all the way down to life itself. If nothing has meaning until we attach our emotions to it, does that mean that life and death itself have no meaning? Wow right? Are you with me? LIFE and DEATH with no meaning? Can you see why I was in a funk? That can't possibly be right? Do you feel that it can't possibly be?

That would mean by some bizarre mathematical miracle the ingredients for life randomly mixed together in circumstances ideal only in a scenario that would come around 1 in infinite. That life was as random and meaningless as the piece of gum you stepped on today while heading to work.

Of course I couldn't possibly settle for that answer. If nothing more than to give my life meaning I had to find a better answer! Part of knowing life is knowing death. I've spent so much time thinking and studying life that I've neglected the meaning of death. Death has always just been one of those scary deadlines that's going to end all my fun. Death has always been a rather inconvenient item at the bottom of my to-do list.

Today as I studied death on the internet I saw more blood and gore in a day than you'd see in a year as a battlefield surgeon. I'm exaggerating of course but I assure you there's no shortage of death "research" on the internet. If you can stomach it. Of course not everyone who downloads this stuff is going at it with such an open mind. Talk about "meaning" when you think of "death" what do you feel about it? Most people associate death with loss or the ultimate confrontation with pain. And think about how death has been used - it's a PENALTY for serious crimes. Can you imagine if there was a cave in the mountains that everyone had to go into if they committed a serious crime? How would you begin to feel about that cave? What kind of meaning would you give it? That would be a pretty scary place you'd never want to visit wouldn't it!?

And there's more! Pain is bad right? I mean we avoid pain. What happens when we experience LOTS of pain? We feel like were... dying. We don't actually die - we just feel like we're close. We're on "death's door step" We've associated pain with death, when in all actuality pain only happens in life! When you die there is no more pain! When the pain becomes too much in life - you die!

Okay so now I'm ready to make my point. I've made several already - but I mean my biggest point of the night. Are you ready? Is death a good thing or a bad thing? Did you answer that question yet? I'm sorry it wasn't a fair question, I tricked you. Death is neither! Death is neutral. We judge death within the frame of life. If we were in the frame of death we might not want to live! Life would be the scary thing. Now you might say, "Hold on James I was with you up until now, now you've gone off the deep end and you've already done that several times in this article, but now you're really deep!" I'll agree with you. This is it - this is the topic of life and death - this is everything. This is the ROOT of our existence! This is where everything we do comes to a head. It's that fine line between a beating heart and electrical current in our brain (life) and nothingness (death).

Now when I say "nothingness" I don't actually mean nothing. I believe our energy goes on after death, how do I know? I don't - I just feel it. But the irony is that knowing and feeling are actually qualities of life! Don't just read that without grasping what I'm saying here, understand it.

Imagine two very distinct frames - LIFE and DEATH.

In LIFE we have pain, pleasure, logic, feeling, desire, etc.

In DEATH we have nothing. It ends the cycle of life. Except something within us moves on. Our energy. The "essence" of our experience goes on to unite with what is known as "god".

But since we are alive now and you'll be able to apply this mostly while you're alive :) I'll conclude with something you can use. Understanding death while you're alive can put you in an incredibly liberating frame of mind. I recall the words of a spiritual yogi, "You must die before you can truly live."

This means you must be able to sense the nothingness of death to truly experience the joy of life. Death is not a penalty - we the living make it so, but look beyond our petty understanding of death. See it for what it truly is. The sweet union back to the seeming nothingness from which we came. No ego, no desires, no pain. Both life and death are beautiful when you see them for what they really are.

And finally - the biggest question I had to answer: What are supposed to do while we're alive? How silly some occupations in life seem. I didn't want to get caught up in something that didn't really give my life "meaning." But ah there's that word again. Meaning. It's everywhere. I guess it has to be while we're alive. That's why we evolved to understand life with meanings. If we weren't supposed to understand life through "meaning" we wouldn't have them. But at the same time we should consciously evaluate ALL meaning and choose what something should mean to us - do not simply let meanings fire off unconsciously shaping the world around you.

This is how reality becomes a reflection of what you are on the inside. When you attach your emotions to every little part of the world around you this becomes the basis for how you react to the world. You're actually reacting to what you've created. Not reality - but the meanings you've created behind it.

You can make every little thing in this world mean whatever you want it to, if you control your focus enough to make it happen. So today I want you to do a little mind bending of your own. See how many areas of your life you've created meaning. Test whether the meaning is valid by seeing if it holds up universally. "Would this mean the same thing to EVERYONE and FOREVER?" If it wouldn't - try to see if you can come up with a more universal meaning. In this way you'll begin to accurately map the world around you and live life with the most power. You won't be held back by silly little unconscious limitations you've imposed on the world around you. Good luck.