Maybe there is no *P*rana and no mystical afterlife glow suffusing us, but, maybe still, I can wish you a meaningful good night, and love from me personally. A rare few people demand evidence for all meaning. To show meaning for things like music and love requires the deepest sophistication of understanding of language. Consider as best you can the math I’m told that Goedell showed. Language is ultimately either incomplete or incoherent. Goedell totally weirded Einstein out about this. Einstein believed in Truth having a possibility of being objectively known. And Nihilists believe the opposite. Goedell stymied us all, and proved, in math, the Buddhist insight that the nature of the universe is neither eternalistic nor nihilistic – that is, it neither exists as exactly our concept, nor is concept irrelevant. Words are inaccurate and bound by changeable relative associations, yet not meaningless.
To put it poetically, the word is yet.
Wisdom is all about the yet. The yet is that love is neither true, yet neither false. As a concept, it is meaningful within the context of the relationship between all the symbols.
If you push rationality to it’s limits, you have to confront this.
Yes, meaning is contingent, yes love is relative. Yet. Meaningful. A train will hit you meaningfully, and the death of a loved one will hit as hard.
We have a trillion ways we can be. I sat up and laughed and laughed today at the Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy show, where Mandy is trying to win a beauty pageant to best her rival, and is on stage singing “Over the Rainbow”, each syrupy phrase punched out with the force of grim ennui. To win over the judges, she must smile, and when she finally contorts her mouth into that feature, the wrongness of it all warps all space and time and Mandy and Billy and Grim find themselves transported to another dimension where they have been transmorgrafied into the Powder Puff Girls. Doesn’t get much better than that.
Another of my favorite episodes was when she touched a magic hand that made her face her worst fear. She faced her much older, much fatter, much sweeter and kinder and loving self. Horror!
We have a bagillion ways we can be in this world. They all function and make sense of it. The very common sense to enjoy and share love in all its manifestations seems the most prudent, and also, the most wise.
It is in that spirit that I talk of sex and chikung, and all the rest.
The mentors in my life have all been kind, and cheerful. And that was their main message. There is both meaning and power in the love a Grandma emanates – it can reach down generations and reach out into a community.
