CHAPTER 15 What's the meaning of life?   To be honest, video arcades aren't exactly my thing. But as arcades go, Bo was right, this was the most amazing one you could ever imagine! The twirling lights and tinging and whooping and clanging sounds coming from the most amazing video machines, consoles and panels ever, just exuded fun wherever you turned, and it was magical! Bo was eager to try everything out, but he could see I'd be stuck in place drooling over the wonder of it all forever, so he grabbed a virtual reality helmet from a stand next to us, plopped it on my head, and dashed off to have himself some fun. I began to protest but as the unit clicked on, I was suddenly overcome by the larger than life reality I virtually found surrounding me. I was filled with such a deep sense of awe and wonder that tingled with The Mystery of Life. In an instantaneous flash of awareness I felt all of evolutionary history swirling around me. I saw life arise from inanimate basic elements, into single cells, and evolve through a detailed DNA-encoded plan of increasing complexity, spanning across billions of years and across an infinite number of variations in an infinite number of universes, creating amazing intricate beauty and trillions upon trillions upon trillions of creatures, each experiencing the mystery of life. And each time a living creature was born, I felt a rush of wonder and joy and it was truly magical. "Bo," I sighed, forgetting that he was far away doing his own thing. "Bo, life is so precious …" I could barely breathe; it was just so amazing. The moment of understanding seemed to last forever as Life's evolution continued to unfold around me, revealing deeper and deeper truths. "Life's the most magical and mysterious and wonderful thing in the universe…" I whispered as all the questions about life that continually haunted me disappeared and everything seemed to make perfect sense. "The Universe created living things to experience its wonder and marvel at its mystery and…" As I was speaking I was gazing into the eyes of the tiniest mouse, and I felt the magic and the joy of living and I realized that I was experiencing the universe flowing through this tiny creature. For the first time in my life, I really understood how amazing being alive really is, and for the first time I truly felt alive. But just then a cat pounced on the mouse and slashed it with its sharp nails and I gasped, and the moment of truth and clarity was gone. I watched the cat bat the mouse back and forth and I felt the terror and fear and watched helplessly as the once beautiful glow of life in the mouse's eyes began to fade and then disappeared. I was reeling in a hazy stupor, when suddenly I heard the rapid fire crackle of machine gun fire indiscriminately blowing away the living creatures all around me. I watched the life seep away from each of them. The beautiful glow of mystery in their eyes faded and then, without any fanfare whatsoever, was gone. It felt strange. I felt numb. But I didn't have time to feel anything really, because the gunfire was much too close for comfort. I ducked behind a rock and saw a foxhole dug into the ground to my left and quickly threw myself into it. As I lay there, completely confused, I could still sense that magical rush I'd experienced before as I knew that new lives continued to be born over and over again all around me. But it was overshadowed by the weight of so many other lives being extinguished, and it created a profound vacuum of loss in my heart with each and every life that was taken. Through the haze of mixed emotions, I noticed a young girl clutching a doll, who stood scared and dazed in front of me as bullets rained down around her. Quickly I dashed out and pulled her into the foxhole. We cowered in the dirt as explosions ripped all around us. A deer wandered by and I ran out between bullets and dragged him back to safety, too. As I leaped back into the foxhole I saw that somehow Bo had now joined me in this virtual reality nightmare, but he was preoccupied with his GameBoy and barely looked up or flinched at all at the roar of bombs and machine gun fire all around us. "This just doesn't make sense, Bo. Why go to so much trouble - billions of years of intricately constructing DNA instructions for more and more complex Life, when the universe doesn't seem to have any reverence, let alone respect, for individual living things at all. The 'rules' here just don't make sense!" Bo looked up sneeringly. "Kind of reminds me of the 'god is evil' possibility, huh," he said snidely. I gasped. "You have noticed that LIVE is EVIL spelled backwards…" he snickered. I gasped again. "I'm just saying…" and as he turned back to his GameBoy, he was just about to say something else too, when a bomb sailed into our foxhole and exploded. GAME OVER! Emptiness. Nothing. "Aw man!" Bo grumbled. "I was just about to make it to the Last Level! Now I'm back on Level One!" I opened my eyes and looked past Bo angrily banging on the device. Things seemed wonderful again somehow …. like they had before … before the universe started callously extinguishing lives all around me. And yet, it felt completely different, too. I felt the magical wonder of new lives being created, and I saw the joy of living in every creature's eyes that my eyes met. But there was no fear in them at all. No sorrow. No hunger. No pain. No disappointment. No emptiness. A dog and a cat a mouse and a spider strolled past peacefully playing with each other, and I instinctively knew that in this universe, no creature had to kill another to survive. In fact there was no death here at all. The awe and beauty and mystery of life here was eternal, and in every moment the wonder of it all just grew and grew. My heart was so full, I thought I'd burst in everlasting joy. "Damn!" Bo screamed, throwing his GameBoy down onto the ground. "Killed again!" "No!" I gasped as I felt this perfect universe I'd discovered fading all around me. But it was too late. It was gone and we were no longer in the virtual reality game but back in the Arcade. I was so sad and depressed that I didn't even notice that I was shrinking … and fast. In fact in my depressed state, I was so deflated that a gust of wind carried me up into the air and swooped me right towards, what was now to me, a giant pinball machine. Bo had seen the entire trajectory and he ran after me and stopped at the pinball machine I was somehow now inside. Part of me was glad that Bo was coming to my rescue. Most of me though was so down I didn't really care. Bo however, hadn't rushed over to rescue me at all. "Whoa, cool dude. You're a pinball!" he laughed and immediately stuck some quarters into the machine and pulled back on the lever as the pinball machine whirred to life. I found myself violently flung forward to crash into one of the bumpers and then right into one of Bo's paddles that whacked me higher, and bells and whistles and dings announced Bo's victorious points. Unfortunately Bo was pretty good at pinball and I ricocheted around inside faster and faster, hitting bumper after bumper, and I was being swatted by paddles so much I didn't know what was happening any more. "When is this going to end?!!!" I screamed after an interminable amount of pain. "I suspect as soon as you can answer the Question, old boy." Bo chuckled. At this point he was so close to getting the High Score that he could taste it. That's when I saw the hole and though I somehow knew it meant certain death, I plunged into it. "Oh man!" Bo yelled. "Dude, why'd you have to get killed? I was SO CLOSE!" I heard Bo's disappointed exclamation as I slid down into the darkness until I plunged out of a slot in the bottom and plopped onto the floor. I bounced aimlessly along until I slid down what appeared to be a rabbit-hole. I could tell that I'd plunged into a different universe. It was very similar to my own, but I knew the 'universal laws' were slightly different here. Better. But definitely not the perfect universe I'd seen. I looked up and saw the entrance to the rabbit hole above me, and not knowing what else to do, decided to try to jump out. It worked. I popped my head out and saw I was back in the Arcade. I tried to grab the sides of the rabbit hole but wasn't quick enough and fell back downwards. When I landed, I saw that I'd entered a completely different universe. Instantly I knew this one was much worse than mine. I quickly leaped upwards. I popped my head out of the hole and then gravity pulled me back down. Nope. That wasn't the right universe either. I sighed and jumped up again. "Nope, not this one," I groaned popping back up. This wasn't just a game for me -- it was a matter of life and death! I was driven. I was focused. Bo however thought it was a perfectly good game. He'd found a large wooden mallet over on the side, and the next time I popped up he whacked me on the head. "Ouch!" I screamed and dove back down, searching for another universal possibility. I popped back up to try again and was summarily whacked on the head. One might have thought that I would have stayed down, but I was obsessed with finding that perfect universe, and though the pain of Bo's whacks was tremendous, it was worth the chance that my next dive down the rabbit hole would be to the Peacetopian universe I sought. This went on for quite some time until I guess I'd had just one whack too many and much to my chagrin, I opened my eyes to find everything totally dark. There was just complete emptiness. "I see a door," Bo announced. "Where?" I sighed. I didn't see anything. "In your mind," he insisted. "Uh. Okay. How do we get there?" I inquired urgently, now certain that this door Bo supposedly saw would lead us to Peacetopia. "It's your mind, Dude," Bo reminded me. "Try that meditation-mumbo jumbo you're always saying you're going to start doing one of these days." It was worth a try. But how do I start? I'd never really been very successful in my previous feeble attempts at meditating. "Concentrate on a mantra," Bo mocked. "That's what you New-Agey folks call it, right." While I was puzzling over what I might possibly choose as my mantra, I suddenly noticed the door. As I blinked again, however, I saw that there were lots of doors. I just stared, not knowing what to do. That's when I suddenly noticed we were standing in an elevator and the doors were closing. I quickly stuck my foot forward and the elevator doors slammed against my foot. Man did that hurt! "Get it off me, Bo!" I screamed. Bo tried to pull the doors apart, but they wouldn't budge. He pulled on me instead and we crashed into the back of the elevator as my foot was gratefully extracted. The elevator plunged downward. We continued our rapid descent downward so fast I felt completely woozy and horror stricken. Plunging elevators apparently didn't affect Bo the same way (unless they happened to be occupied by that annoying Id), , and while I cowered on the floor praying to die, he was checking out the panel that listed the floor numbers. "Weird, he said. "I see a couple of numbers on these buttons … 42 … 1043 … 409 … but most of them have words … Responsibility … Tradition … Pursuit of Happiness… Sex … Ice cream … Oh look, here's one that says 'Peacetopia'. You want me to push it?" "YES!" I gasped between hissing prayers and obscenities. He did and the elevator stopped so quickly I bounced off the ceiling and then crashed back down onto my knees. The elevator 'tinged' innocently and the door slid open to reveal another hallway. Full of doors. Bo grabbed me up and pulled me out of the elevator before it slammed shut again behind us. "Hey, look what I found in my pocket - a keycard!" Bo declared. As I stared dejectedly at the row of unmarked doors that stretched endlessly in both directions, I absently reached into my pocket and found I had a keycard, too. Suddenly I felt hopeful. I knew that I had the key to find Peacetopia. But which door was the right one. "Let's just take this room Jack," Bo suggested pointing to the one in front of us. "This has been a long dream, and I need a break. I'm going straight for the minibar … I could sure go for a few vodka shots, and one of those $40 Toblerones would really hit the spot." "No, we've got to find the right door to Peacetopia," I muttered. "Each of these doors opens into one of the alternate Universes they talked about in the Book of Peacetopia." I just knew that if I could open the right door, the light would be so bright and beautiful and wondrous that it would seep into every doorway in this entire hallway, changing the rules of every universe, until they were all peacetopias, too. I tried to calm myself down, and focus my mind so that I could approach this logically. "If each universe is infused with successive degrees of the power of love, logically the perfect universe would be at the end of the line…" I reasoned as I stared off into the distance. The row of doors seemed to go on forever. I turned my head and looked in the opposite direction. It was like a mirror image. "But which direction do we try…" I mumbled, the sense of hope fading fast. Bo saw how frazzled I was quickly getting. "Look we'll check one, then go a few down the line in one direction and see if it's better or worse. Then we'll know which direction to head down…" What a great idea! Bo stepped forward and stuck his keycard in the door in front of us. But it flashed red and wouldn't open. "Uh, I'll try…" I said thinking that since it was my dream, I might have better luck. But it wouldn't open for me either. I didn't know what else to do, so I just picked a direction and started running, thrusting my keycard into door after door. But none of them worked. The sweat was dripping down my face and my legs were killing me. It seemed like I'd been trying doors for forever, and I didn't seem to be getting any closer to the end of the hall at all. And for all I knew, I might be heading in the wrong direction! I was just about to suffer a major meltdown (again) when the elevator door behind me dinged, and as the doors opened, I heard laughing voices step out into the hallway. "There you are, Jack!" a woman's voice exclaimed. "Jack!" a few other voices added enthusiastically, "We finally found you…" "Huh?" I gasped spinning around to face the voices. I looked at the small group of strangers. I'd never seen any of them before, so how did they know my name? "Come on, Jack," they laughed as they headed down the hall to the left. "Let's go save the universe…" I started to have this strange, wonderful déjà-vu feeling. Actually, I did recognize them, now that I thought about it. I mean I'd never actually met any of them before, but I remembered them from daydreams I'd had, in those InBetween moments when I imagined what my life would be like if I were doing what I really wanted to be doing with my life. What I SHOULD BE doing with my life. Yes, in those daydreams, I was part of a team working to make the world a better place. We were doing our part in an even greater mission - humanity's mission to evolve and transform our reality into the heaven on earth -- the Peacetopia -- it COULD be … This moment where I was WITH THEM was the reality my daydreams had flashed forward to all these years … Finally I'd found the moment I'd been waiting for, and the people I would share this wonderful mission with … Finally I was about to be living the life I was meant to live … "Wait up Jack!" Bo called. Startled, I turned back to look down the hallway and saw Bo tear his attention away from his GameBoy and slowly saunter toward me. "Bo!" I laughed joyously. "Bo, I found my mission and purpose and the Team that will share the life I was meant to live," I gurgled. "Oh yeah…Cool," he said unconvinced as he approached. "Yeah, come meet them, they're right …" I turned and pointed but they were gone. They must have entered one of the rooms. Where else could they have gone? That's when I totally lost it. I ran down the hall and tried door after door, but none of them worked and with each one I tried, I became more frantic. "Jack, calm down," Bo called as he dashed after me. "This is all a dream anyway. You're only here to think about what Truths might exist out there in your world. You're not going to find a door into reality here, that's for out there. Here you just discover what possibilities might be waiting out there for you to discover." Wow. For once something Bo said made some sense. Perhaps everything wasn't lost after all. I let him lead me out of the Chapter. We stood quietly outside the Chapter gazing in at an endless row of entrances to an infinite number of realities stretching off into the darkness. I felt a strange sense of hope and sadness all rolled into one. "Well…" Bo said as he pulled out his GameBoy again. "What's the verdict, professor?" I couldn't help it. I was all smiles. Peacetopia was an amazing vision. And the possibility of someday finding a team to work with to make this world more like that vision was the only mission and purpose for my life that I'd ever need. That feeling put me back in a philosophical mood. "Well, first off, I don't know about the Infinite number of universes thing … it's an interesting concept, but you've got all the technical god-paradox problems. What created them; what's outside of them; what's came before and what's there after they've run their course …" I noticed Bo wasn't really listening as he fiddled on his GameBoy. I rolled my eyes. "And of course the biggest paradox - which we already decided way back when in the God is Everything Chapter - is that if the purpose of Life is for the Infinite to experience itself, why go through all the infinite possibilities and have to evolve them all to the One path that's best with all the infinite amount of suffering to experience … there are just so many problems that have to be addressed before you can say whether it's True or not." Bo grunted. I wasn't sure if it was because of his game or impatience at my indecision. "But Bo, after having SEEN a vision of Peacetopia, and to really fell I have a mission to help make my world more like that vision … and the hope that I'll find others to share it with me … who cares about anything else! It doesn't matter. That vision of Peacetopia is so beautiful, it stands alone as an Answer. A Truth. A… "Whatever," Bo clucked. "That's what you said about Love," he reminded me. "It's all very well and fine, but you're not answering the question for the Chapter… remember, what's the meaning of life?!" I began to protest that I'd already answered it before, but realized that after seeing Peacetopia, my answer had changed. Or expanded actually, because what I'd said before was still true, but there was more to it. Yes, there was definitely more to it. "Okay, here it is …" I giggled excitedly as it hit me quite profoundly that I'd REALLY figured out the meaning of life, and it was even bigger than the 3 BIG questions. "There are three parts to the answer to the meaning of life…" I began, ignoring Bo's eye-roll and the fact that he'd gone back to his game. "The first is the way to truly Live. And that is to love and be loved by the people in your life with all your heart, and to seek to live in the Now - to strive to be present with them, and remember this mission and purpose through the struggles and the joy, and to share the amazing journey of life together..." "Okay," Bo conceded as his fingers continued pressing buttons. "You mentioned all that before." "The second part is to see Life as more than your own life and your own time. To see that throughout history, humanity has shared a vision of a perfect world of peace and joy and happiness. And though it is an impossible dream, only a life lived in service to humanity - in honor of this shared goal - can help to validate the struggles of the 93 billion people who have lived and died, the 7 billion dreams of those alive today, and the hope of humanity to come…" Bo didn't say anything to my new profound conclusion. I continued on unperturbed. "The third key is to find a balance between the two - between living your individual life to the fullest, while striving to help humanity evolve to a higher consciousness of compassion, meaning and purpose." Wow, was I proud of myself. Bo didn't seem too impressed. His GameBoy had run out of batteries and he was looking quite upset about it. But then he perked up suddenly. "Looks like we're finally going to wrap this crazy dream up!" he said pointing. I followed his gaze and read the next chapter heading: "SO, WHAT'S THE ANSWER?" "Huh," I chuckled happily. I'd figured out the meaning of life and now I was going to find out the unanswerable deep questions to boot. What a dream! "Come on," I laughed and pushed Bo ahead. "Before it gets away!" Table of Contents | Previous Chapter | Next Chapter