A friend turns 42 today. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the answer the great computer comes up with to the question "what is the meaning of everything?". We had tea. Here are thoughts, further to our conversation.
I was a leftie from my youth, a child of my time. I felt I had to be to succeed, to pass, to be loved. A vast collective mindset came across my generation and I never questioned it. A switch was switched. I who so desperately wanted to be a man of my times gave myself to it completely. I wanted nothing of the old. It was all about being hip and current. I had no sense of a centre or a core. I only related - as I would say it today - horizontally.
No solid core despite the fact that I meditated for more years than you've lived, more or less daily, often for some hours. I was trying to find a place of security. I could find it only from the top down or from outside in, a tranquilizer. A puff of wind would blow it to bits. I needed to be somebody. I needed something on the outside. And even though I often saw it, my seeing did not help me change my relation. I was much like an addict, a slave to my need for outer validation.
There was more than that of course. I also intuited and felt deeply the goodness of people, laughed and was passionately interested in ideas, found the beauty of nature, had my heart broken and also broke hearts and suffered deeply over that. I missed the boat.
But there's a boat that can't be missed. I say all this to my friend S., who I see all my story in. I see the good heart of S. As R.D. Laing said, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, I would. I can just be your witness. I can't do it for you just as you can't get it from another.
There is a One that my heart loves, my soul loves, my being loves. Imperfectly of course as befits a prodigal son. But still. It's that from which all meaning comes. It is meaning. Because of it all lesser concerns exist, reflections of its light. They're entirely made of it.
I see this as what we're made for, the higher reaches of the human capacity. Our body's needs and even health are nothing without it, don't exist without it. The human is made to know she's part of the glory, to participate in it. Without it we have only animal life which, for a human - since we're no longer creatures of instinct alone - is to be lost. Without it we live in the mundane, pining for the truth our hearts stubbornly know is there. As it is.
Literally I believe, I feel, I see, and I know from my life that without this participatory knowledge of the higher, we are lost and lamenting. That participatory knowledge is the answer to everything. It's 42. It's playful for all its seriousness, unassuming and lighthearted. It's the finding that comes when we seek, the door that opens when we actually knock. It's 42, the answer to everything.
The Answer to Everything
Hello Andrew
This is just the best! Beautifully written, incredibly insight-filled.
My friend, you have excelled yourself.
Love ... John