The Meaning We Give Things

Years ago, while reading Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God, I encountered an idea that has stayed with me:

Events do not necessarily arrive carrying their meaning with them. Much of that meaning is something we give them.

At first, I understood this mostly as a psychological observation.

Something happens.

Then my mind interprets what happened.

Over the years, however, I have begun to notice something more subtle.

Perhaps the question isn’t only:

What meaning am I giving this?

Perhaps another question is:

What part of me is giving it meaning?

Because what I call my ego and what I call my soul seem capable of looking at exactly the same event and seeing something very different.

The Ego’s Database

My mind doesn’t encounter life empty-handed.

It carries an enormous database accumulated before and throughout my lifetime.

Some of it comes from biology—the instincts and tendencies inherited through DNA and millions of years of survival.

Then come family, religion, culture, education and society.

Then comes my personal history:

Success.

Failure.

Rejection.

Love.

Embarrassment.

Pleasure.

Pain.

Thousands of experiences have taught my mind what things supposedly mean.

So when something happens today, my mind immediately searches its reference library for an explanation.

Often, it doesn’t feel as though I am interpreting reality at all.

It simply feels as though I am seeing reality.

But those are not necessarily the same thing.

My ego may be constructing the most probable explanation it can from the information available to it.

That is an extraordinarily useful ability.

The ego remembers patterns. It looks backward to anticipate what might happen next. It helps me recognize danger, solve problems and navigate the world.

But prediction has an important limitation:

I can only predict from the information I possess.

The Dots in the Newspaper

Imagine looking at a newspaper photograph through a magnifying glass.

At close range, all I see are dots.

Some are dark.

Some are light.

I can carefully examine each dot. I can measure it, categorize it and compare it with the dots surrounding it.

My observations may be completely accurate.

But I still don’t know what picture I am looking at.

Pull the magnifying glass back and the dots become a face.

Pull back farther and the face becomes part of a crowd.

Farther still, the photograph becomes part of an article.

The article becomes part of a newspaper.

And the newspaper itself becomes one small record within a much larger human story.

Nothing about the original dots changed.

What changed was the perspective from which they were understood.

This is increasingly how I experience the difference between my ego and what I have been calling my soul.

My ego examines the dots.

My soul seems interested in the picture.

The First Meaning

My ego is quick to assign what I might call a first meaning.

A relationship changes:

Something is wrong.

A plan falls apart:

I failed.

Someone acts unexpectedly:

What did I do?

The interpretation can happen so quickly that I don’t recognize it as an interpretation.

It feels like a fact.

Then the emotion follows.

Fear.

Anger.

Resentment.

Embarrassment.

Defensiveness.

Once the emotion arrives, it can become evidence supporting the original interpretation:

See how upset I am? Something really must be wrong.

The meaning creates the emotion, and then the emotion reinforces the meaning.

Around and around they go.

The Second Look

Increasingly, I am discovering another possibility.

I don’t have to reject the first meaning. My ego may be right.

But I also don’t have to assume it is the only meaning.

I can pause.

And in that pause, I can ask:

What else could be happening?

What don’t I know?

What am I bringing to this interpretation from my own history?

What would this look like from farther away?

That creates what I think of as a second look.

Something I interpreted as rejection may have little to do with me.

Something that initially felt like failure may redirect me somewhere more useful.

Someone I judged harshly may become more understandable when I recognize the fear behind the behavior.

An event I desperately wanted to control may become something I can observe with curiosity.

The facts haven’t necessarily changed.

My perspective has.

A Larger Perspective

I don’t know exactly what the soul is.

I don’t know whether it is connected to some larger field of consciousness, whether it existed before this body or survives afterward, or whether what I call soul is simply an extraordinary capacity already contained within human consciousness.

Those remain open questions for me.

But experientially, something interesting happens when I become quiet enough to move beyond my first interpretation.

The field seems to widen.

I notice possibilities my analytical mind initially overlooked.

Sometimes this happens slowly through reflection. Other times the wider perspective seems to arrive almost instantly.

We have different words for experiences like these:

Intuition.

Inspiration.

Insight.

Knowing.

I don’t know exactly where they come from.

What interests me is what they allow me to see.

The ego tends to ask:

What does this mean based on everything that has happened to me before?

The soul seems more inclined to ask:

What else could this mean from a larger perspective?

That is a very different question.

Meaning Is Not Reality

Saying that we give meaning to events does not mean reality becomes whatever I decide it is.

Meaning and consequence are different things.

If I break my leg, I can interpret the experience as a tragedy, an inconvenience, a lesson in patience or an unexpected opportunity to slow down.

But my leg is still broken.

If another person behaves destructively, I can try to understand the fear or history behind that behavior.

That doesn’t make it harmless.

I cannot think consequences out of existence. Replacing an uncomfortable interpretation with a pleasant fantasy isn’t wisdom. It is another form of avoidance.

The objective isn’t to find the meaning that makes me feel best.

The objective is to see as completely and accurately as I can.

Sometimes a wider perspective produces compassion.

Sometimes it produces gratitude or peace.

And sometimes it tells me very clearly:

This is unhealthy.

This needs to stop.

I need a boundary.

Seeing the larger picture doesn’t require ignoring the difficult dots.

It means understanding them within more of the picture.

The Ego Still Has a Job

I don’t want to silence my ego.

I need its database.

I need memory, reasoning and pattern recognition. I need its ability to compare what is happening now with what happened before.

The ego can tell me:

Here is what happened last time.

Here is what might happen next.

Here is something you should pay attention to.

That is valuable information.

But perhaps the ego shouldn’t always have final authority to decide what everything means.

Sometimes it is looking through the magnifying glass when what I really need is to step back.

The Space Before Meaning

This may be the most practical part of the entire idea.

Something happens.

My ego assigns meaning.

And occasionally now, I catch it happening.

That moment of awareness creates space.

Instead of immediately asking:

What does this mean?

I can ask:

What meaning am I already giving this?

Then:

Why does my mind prefer that interpretation?

And finally:

Is there a larger way to see it?

Sometimes nothing changes. My first interpretation may have been accurate.

But occasionally, the entire picture rearranges itself.

The dots become a face.

The face becomes a photograph.

The photograph becomes a story.

And something that seemed frightening, insulting, unfair or disastrous from six inches away looks remarkably different from six feet away.

Perhaps that is one practical purpose of developing a relationship with what I call my soul.

Not escaping the human experience.

Not eliminating the ego.

Not pretending painful things aren’t painful.

Simply learning to step back far enough to see more of what is actually there.

Perhaps wisdom isn’t always knowing more facts.

Sometimes wisdom is seeing the same facts from a larger perspective.

And perhaps the meaning of my life isn’t permanently embedded in the events that happen to me.

Perhaps meaning continues to emerge as I become capable of seeing those events from a wider and wider perspective.