This is going to make very little
sense. Or maybe a lot of sense. I hope to leave you mildly intrigued or mildly
bored. Like a Chetan Bhagat book.
I read a lot of nonsense; none of
which includes any kind of religious or spiritual or self-help psychobabble that other human beings
read. I have not read The Secret or The Magic or Seven Habits of Highly Constipated
People or Count Your Rabbits Before They Scratch. A lot of people- mostly old,
mostly of the female variety- spend a lot of time and money on reading crap
like this.
My wife once told me that the essence of
the book “The Secret” was that you send positive energy up into the Universe. For
example, you whisper to the Universe “I
want to have a great day in office today” and the Universe shall listen to
you. But if you were to whisper to the Universe “I want that bastard who keeps boring me with lame jokes at lunch every day
to get impaled under the photocopier”, the Universe isn’t going to listen
to you. Because that’s just not positive.
While you are figuring out a
positive way of asking the Universe to ensure certain irritants in your life
die painfully, I am left wishing that I could write books containing psychobabble like
this; crap that might help people believe they actually have a chance of changing their lives. Like “How to improve your life by
wearing odd colors to office everyday”. Or “The eight untold secrets of stress free photocopying”.
But I can’t. And thus I will
never be an incredibly successful writer. Perhaps. Because what I am about to
do is give it all away for free. Life, the deeper meaning of life, the Universe
and everything else. Yes, free! (Feel
free to donate to my cause by buying my book which, of course, has nothing to
do with this blog post.)
As I said, I read a lot of
nonsense. Most of it has nothing to do with the self help variety of literature that people make small fortunes peddling. But I am addicted to reading- I read to fill
my mind with stories… fiction, non-fiction, history. And in my endless quest
for nothing but pure entertainment of the soul, I believe I have stumbled upon The Actual Secret. If I were marketing
savvy, that’s what I would call the book. Or maybe, The Real Secret. Or better still, What That
Bitch Rhonda Bryne Didn’t Tell You.
Let me tell you there is no such
thing as the Universe listening to you. Or people with seven specific habits
being highly successful. (I haven’t read
the book and slept through presentations where people spoke of the book; so I
am going to refrain from attacking it, for now.) Erm... back to my point- no such thing
as the Universe listening to anyone. The Universe barely has time for itself-
it’s not going to listen to you. It has galaxies, black holes, comets,
asteroids, stars, planets to manage. It is about the rank of a General Manager
in the Corporation of Everything.
As I said, when you read as much
as I do and you read simply for the guilty pleasure of sneaking a read in your
limited leisure time, what you acquire is not knowledge but wisdom. Without
sounding too boastful, the rough approximation of this is the attempt for
attainment of God through prayer. Pray and you shall hope to find God. Fill
your soul with stories and you shall hope to have a mildly intriguing/ boring
epiphany.
So now that I have built this up
with about seven paragraphs of riff raff, I am going to break it to you. The
deeper meaning of life, the universe and everything. And (drumroll…) it is…
The meaning of life is merely the
act of forgetting that we are going to die. Everything that we ever do; our
education, our love lives, our careers, our families, our children, our fitness
regimens- are all a charade to help us forget that we are terminal. When we rue
a bad appraisal, when we bereave a dead pet, when we celebrate standing second
in a debate, when we cuddle next to a pillow with the flu- all our sorrows, our
miseries, our joys- all our senses collude to create an emotional space in which
the fear of impending death gets crowded out. Simply put, our everyday gamut of
emotions, of pursuits, of little joys and miseries helps us forget- helps us
live.
When sages, godmen, demigods,
etc. meditate and withdraw to their mythical mountains to ponder on the meaning
of life, they are in effect validating my philosophy as well. Their crusade for
the meaning of life helps them evade the absolute certainty of death. I believe
that their quest for a grand afterlife engages their minds so that they might
forget that they too shall be dead in a few years. And thus, their quest for
meaning would actually stand as a subset of my “Real Secret.”
And thus like all great stories, I
shall finish this with what I started. When I read, when I fill my head with
stories- real or fictional, it just helps me forget. And that is the deeper
meaning of life. Simply, to forget.
Now if you disagree, consider
this… I could have written a book about this. Titled it “What That Bitch Rhonda
Bryne didn’t tell you” and made a few million bucks. And that would have made
you extremely jealous.
It is another matter that your
jealousy would have made you forget about your mortality. But let me not
oversell this.
I have not plagiarised this
theory but if Einstein or Stephen Hawking or Rhonda Bryne or Asaram Bapu has
already written about this, I am going to plead ignorance. I read to entertain;
not to educate and have given all these writers a miss.
