This page was exported from King Weekly Sentinel [ https://kingsentinel.com ] Export date:Fri Mar 29 0:02:17 2024 / +0000 GMT ___________________________________________________ Title: What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? --------------------------------------------------- MARK PAVILONS “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”― Joseph Campbell Plato once said that an unexamined life is not worth living. But Kurt Vonnegut wryly asked “what if that if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”Many people over the millennia have tried to answer the seemingly impossible question - what is the meaning of life?I always liked the response from late author Douglas Adams, who wrote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Put simply, it's 42.Forty-two is a sphenic number; a primary pseudoperfect number and a Catalan number. The number 42 appears in many contexts of Christianity and there are 42 principles of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. The Gutenberg Bible contained 42 lines per page. The list goes on.I think the reason we ask this age-old question is the fact we have a well developed consciousness. This alone is a conundrum, an enigma wrapped in a mystery.Some speculate that our consciousness is in fact, our soul.This thing, that we can't identify, measure or quantify in any way, is at the heart of it all.It is us.And not just us as individuals, either. Some also ponder that we share a collective consciousness, an inherent knowledge passed down to us by our ancestors. Scientists also believe that the answers lie in our DNA – the amazingly complicated genome. It's taken decades to unravel some of the mysteries of genome coding and while we're almost there, many questions remain. Also, there are sequences that we can't crack, or can't find a function for.Look deeper, eggheads. The final decoding of ourselves will be the Pandora's Box of the new world, our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.Researchers believe that DNA has “memory” and that our offspring may inherit the responses to the things experienced by the previous generations. There is even a hypothesis that they also may inherit the memory of those and other events.That's crazy cool.My son is plagued by the mysteries of the universe and wants to know the answers. He needs to know about the soul, other dimensions, gravity, quantum physics and life after death. Does it really matter?Well, yes. Everything matters all at once, now and forever.I have been studying ancient religious doctrines; reading psychological texts and listening to Robin Williams's ad-libs for years. I have come up with a rather simple explanation as to the meaning of life – we're all in this together and we're more connected than we think.We had no control over our own creation or how we entered the world. But we have total control over what we do with our lives. So, everything we do from the time we learned to walk and talk, has meaning, one way or another. And our freedom of choice allows us to decide how to be meaningful.And by being nice, cordial, amiable, considerate, pleasant, kind and just fine and dandy, we can make positive contributions to society. After all, we're all brothers and sisters here, who share the same lineage.If our DNA does indeed have memory, then passing on these delightful genes makes the world a better place, don't you think? Our planet needs more wonderful people and can do without those nasty, unpleasant types.Michael Jackson observed that the meaning of life is “contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.”This leads me to answering the next toughest question of all time: Why am I here?We're here to contribute. We're here to give more than we take; to love more than we hate; to improve more than we destroy. In other words, we're here to be, and I've said it already, nice!So, it doesn't really matter if we're destined for greatness, mediocrity or obscurity – the path we carve and those we touch along the way are what matter.Now that I've dealt with those heavy questions, I'll leave you with answers to some other puzzling inquiries.Being inside during a thunderstorm is the safest place to be.Identical twins have different finger prints because they're formed semi-randomly in the fetus.Yes, there is such a thing as a fish out of water – many species can breathe, even walk, on land.Plants can live forever.And yes, men do have cellulite, just in different places.I'll let you in on a little secret – there's a very simple explanation as to why everything exists. It has something to do with random fluctuations in the quantum vacuum. In other words, it just is.I hope I've cleared things up. --------------------------------------------------- Images: --------------------------------------------------- Excerpt: Plato once said that an unexamined life is not worth living. But Kurt Vonnegut wryly asked “what if that if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?” Many people over the millennia have tried to answer this seemingly impossible question. I always liked the response from late author Douglas Adams, who wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Put simply, it’s 42. --------------------------------------------------- Post date: 2021-10-20 11:08:52 Post date GMT: 2021-10-20 15:08:52 Post modified date: 2021-10-21 12:14:40 Post modified date GMT: 2021-10-21 16:14:40 ____________________________________________________________________________________________ Export of Post and Page as text file has been powered by [ Universal Post Manager ] plugin from www.gconverters.com