Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Meaning of Life Part 1

hmmm.. been a while.
Existentialist crisis? mid-life crisis? who knows?
Nah, not really.

I was given a catholic school education. My motto in my youth may as well have been 'question authority'

Catholic school taught me about God and Jesus and so-on and so-forth. When I was old to enough to understand such things I had on the one hand church religion and the great philosophers on the other, philosophy telling me of the great mystery of existance and the church with the far too glib and simplistic answers to life's mysteries. Not only that but other religions with different but similarly glib answers, each confident in their own 'Truth' being the 'only truth'. Well I was not so confident.

It slowly dawned on me most established religions used myth and poorly interpreted historical events to establish a religious dogma, the primary purpose of which is societal control. Historically straddling the transition between monarchistic fiefdoms and the modern representational democratic method of societal control and regulation during the middle ages. The 'religions' I thought that came closest to quantifying the nature of existance were the eastern religions, particularly buddhism.

So religion was largely a disappointment for me as far as answering the fundamental questions of existance, and the 'truth' (if such a thing exists) of it may be unknowable within existance - In Douglas Adams' book "hithhikers guide to the galaxy" the ultimate answer to the ultimate question was not the enigmatic '42' as first declared but rather that-

"...if the ultimate question and the ultimate answer were to exist in the same universe at the same time, they will cancel each other out and that universe will then cease to exist... "

Who to turn to then other than the greatest philosophical minds of a generation? Monty Python! In the movie "The meaning of life" their answer was

"..Not much, just have fun and try to be good to each other..."

What I'm left with though is that there is something within us, within all people, and as far as I know all creation, that searches for such things, a search perhaps for what has been lost, motivating the founders of religion, of those who seek the answers, like the philosphers who speculate on existance, and for me as I try to follow and make sense of all, there is some larger dimension to us, something bigger than we know. There is something .. 'extra' involved in all this, the root and basis of all religious and spriritual thought.

As in Jethro Tull's album 'Aqualung'

" ...and in the beginning man created God, but the spirit that caused men to create his God lived on in all men, even within Aqualung, but he saw it not. But for christ's sake he'd better start looking. "