I used to swear that if there was anything we didn’t need, it’s another ‘ism’. And yet here we stand at that crossroads. The girl at the start of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Universe?—she is me (you get to be Arthur Dent). Stranger things have happened. You’ll recall another young woman in a café scribbling down on serviettes ideas for a series of children’s books. Now look at her—richer than the Queen of England!
In my own restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-universe, middle-age has brought me to an unusual personal perspective. I’ve developed my own take on Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. It’s pretty much unique—truly a case of ‘and now for something completely different’.
And like Thaddeus Golas, Tom Campbell, Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and others, I feel that I owe it to the greater universe to get those thoughts out there, so I hereby devote myself to that mission. For the benefit of all, I promise to make it readily available, and to continue refining, retuning and revising my magnum opus (I’m up to the second edition).
Given that this text is mainly for my own edification, is there any point in sharing it with anyone? In other words, will it be profitable for you, or a waste of time? To help you make up your mind, let me provide an inkling of where this is headed—a kindly teaser, if you like. There follows a brief note of explanation from your well-wishing sponsor.
As mentioned earlier, I consider it my life’s work to tease out the strands of life’s larger questions. The philosophy that I’ve arrived at could be expressed in just one sentence: Life is a single-entity achronological simulacrum. Or, if that’s too much of a mouthful, here it is in a single word—one originally coined by Neale Donald Walsch. It’s . . . wait for it . . . Applorange.
How did that go over? Like a lead balloon? I’m not surprised if I haven't brought on a flash of enlightenment. Sorry about that. I can see that we’ll need some context. I’m going to have to provide some scaffolding.
If it took me half a lifetime to reach this point, then I’ll probably have to lay out my thinking in more than a word, sentence, paragraph or even essay. I think a book is on the cards, boys. And, in the spirit of a 100-minute bible (yes, Virginia, there is such a critter) I plan to write it.
To make a start, I’ll pick up and brush off a couple of oft-aired but poorly understood aphorisms, because this will allow us to begin our rendezvous with the solution of all solutions. First, time and space do not exist. Second, all of us are one.
I can imagine what’s going through your head: What? Is that it then? Is that all that you’ve got?
Yes, I know that those statements seem trite. I agree with you that they’re old hat. Those two ideas have long been floating about in the milieu. People have already taken them on board, albeit with a grain of metaphorical salt.
But that’s just it; the rub lies in that condiment. People may have ingested those aphorisms, but they haven’t properly digested them. The corollaries have not been imported into the fabric of their lives. I’m confident that this is correct, because a world view which fully accommodated the above principles would be mindblowingly different to any previous school of thinking.
The problem is that no one has taken the no-space, no-time, all-of-us-are-one idea to its logical extreme. No one has developed it. No one has followed the idea through to an inarguable conclusion.
