It came to me during my morning meditation, just appeared in one of those moments when I feel I am sitting alongside myself, my own empathic companion: “My spirit is lonely”.  And, as I do in these times, I turn it over and look at it, a kind of exchange, reflecting back what I had heard.  My sense of it seemed not to be an ordinary feeling of loneliness, but more to touch on being lost.  And not even just that (because we can be lost amid plenty), but rather a sense of being lost in emptiness.

I came to wondering whether we set a trap for ourselves, humankind that is, reasoning species that we are, with that web of connectibility which reason gives us and which is subsumed in our very means of perceiving the world.  Not the perceptions themselves, but the (assumed) knowing that each thing can be perceived and in a way that connects it with each other thing, whether the perception is accurate or not.  A kind of web - like the warp frame into which the tapestry weaver threads the coloured weft yarns, like the set of referents to which our frame of reference is tied - that web simply there, the only way to do our living and surely the source, if we could just work it out, of the great elixir 'the meaning of life'.

And if it weren't there, this web?  Well, if it weren't, then no way to place ourselves amidst the throng of other living things, no way to know ourselves… the extreme of loneliness.  The spirit's loneliness, then, an existential disillusion at the absence of a web for the projection of our living.

Such a proposition might feel like all the markers had been removed in one sweep, but projections do not belong to the objects on which they are planted and they do not make for authentic interaction with our fellow human beings.  Revealing them starts a process of dissolution and a shift towards a new realness.  And if, in the end, the fundamental question for us all is "What is the meaning of life?", then from a re-discovered reality comes the realisation that the question cannot be answered in its cliché form (because that would be projection), but only if we ask it of ourselves: what meaning do I give to my life?

(Simon Cole is the author of "Stillness in Mind: a companion to mindfulness, meditation and living", Changemakers Books 2014)