You know the routine. You seek knowledge, so you climb some mountain in Nepal or Tibet, walk humbly into a temple or monastery, and ask some old guy in a robe to explain the mysteries of life. He looks at you as though you’re an incarnation of Ziggy and says, “If you seek wisdom, my child, go…,” and then his voice fades, and he dies right there on the cold stone floor under the thin air of the Himalayas, leaving you with a brief and incomplete explanation of the meaning of life.
“Shoot!” you say. “I’ve come all this way for meaning, for answers to my most intriguing questions, for THE answer to the meaning of existence, and now I have only a long trip back down the mountain. It took me a long time and great expense to get here. I learned everything I could in the valleys below before seeking knowledge in the great elevations of the mountains.”
Then, on the way back toward the frenetic world from which you came, you give in to noise, turn on your I-Something, and hear Robert Parker singing “Addicted to Love.” The rhythm of the song gives you a light step over rocky paths to the world below, and, when you arrive in some village, you see the people going about their daily business, all unaware of the failed pilgrimage that you just made but moving about in their daily routines, all of them certain that what they do has meaning. As you walk past stark homes and shops, you are possessed by an earworm that you can’t shake, “Might as well face it; you’re addicted to love…Might as well face it; you’re addicted to love…Might as….”
More than 13 billion light years from Earth once lay an object that died in an event so explosive it sent gamma rays streaming through the universe. Then on April 29, 2009, the Burst Alert Telescope on NASA’s Swift satellite detected the radiation from that object, now labeled GRB 090429B and believed to be, if not the most distant, then one of the most distant objects ever detected. The gamma rays had traveled for more than 13 billion years and, luckily, the Swift satellite was in the right place at the right time and looking in the right direction to detect them. Had NASA not sent Swift into its high orbit through great effort and expense, no one would know about the burst of gamma rays from GRB 090429B.
GRB 090429B is the old dead monk. It had a secret that has lasted for almost the entire life of the universe. For a moment or two GRB 090429B made brief, incomplete statements. By the time we climbed to the heights of a satellite, the old object was probably “dead,” that is, radically altered from something that could send a cryptic message across a universe. Gamma ray bursts are like that. Powerful and brief, they give their meaning to a conscious being who just happens to be in the right place at the right time, in this case, the NASA scientists and by proxy, the rest of us. Otherwise, the meaning of any old celestial object just passes through the universe, never lingering or waiting for consciousness to come along and never waiting to be replayed on an I-Something. The old universe gives us chances to understand it, but we aren’t always around to hear the old monk’s last incomplete lesson.
You could make extraordinary efforts searching for the meaning of existence and of life. You could read many books on wisdom and visit many acclaimed wise people. You could climb every mountain and seek out every wise monk on the planet, but if you aren’t in the right place at the right time, the message might never reach you; or, if it does, it might be a fragmentary thought that escapes your understanding, such as St. Paul’s “and the greatest of these is love.” Your best tactic is to keep your mind open like the gamma ray detector on the Swift satellite listening to the passing messages, however fragmentary and fleeting they seem to be. The Burst Alert Telescope doesn’t know from which direction a fleeting message might come; it just keeps looking. When it does detect something, it becomes the I-something of NASA scientists.
Maybe you will be the old monk on the mountain one day. Filled with wisdom, you will see a stranger approaching, someone in search of the meaning of life. Even if you can’t convey the wisdom you acquired before you expire, with your last efforts hand the stranger your I-Something. It does contain a wise thought from an unlikely source. “Might as well face it, you’re addicted to love.”
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