Eckhart & Douglas Adams
I seem to have Meister Eckhart on the brain lately. I came across this quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams & I’m sure Eckhart would love it.
The Babel fish,” said The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quietly, “is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe… if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language … “Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
“The argument goes something like this: ‘I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, ‘for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’ “‘But,’ says Man, ‘The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’ “‘Oh dear,’ says God, ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.
This is Eckhart’s call to release “God” to find God, the Via Negativa. I love it because writers on spirituality often forget about fun. We tend to get serious very quickly!
Actually, as strange as it sounds, reading Adams as a kid was my first introduction to spirituality. Even though I am descended from a long line of spiritual ancestors, on one side Elder William Brewster and a slew of Baptist ministers & missionaries and on the other some solid Catholic stock, I was raised with no religious or spiritual guidance at all. When I read Adams’ idea of “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things,” it blew my mind because I instantly knew it was true. I didn’t have a name for it yet but I felt the connection. It was only later I discovered that connection is God.
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Sunday, November 25th, 2007,
by Painter of Blue and is filed under "Douglas Adams, Meister Eckhart, Mysticism, Mystics, via negativa, Douglas Adams, Meister Eckhart, Mysticism, Mystics, via negativa ".
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One Response “Eckhart & Douglas Adams”
Beautiful! The interconnectedness of all has been on my mind lately, too. I heard an interview with Reynolds Price on Fresh Air recently, in which he shared a vision he had as a child of the interconnectedness of everything. It seems visions like that are fairly common and, of course, the major religions support the idea. It seems science is going in that direction, too (though this is a topic I’m not qualified to say much about).