Angry winds rush through the cave as she enters, their primal roar sending a chill down her spine. Darkness engulfs her quickly, and she navigates by feeling her hands across the narrowing crevices. She bumps her head against a sharp edge, and blood trickles down scalp to chin. The wind echoes through the gaps, howling like a pack of wild animals. Then the gap turns sideways, and soon she’s creeping on her back. Here, so deep underground, even the wind falls silent. When the crevice turns impossibly narrow, when she can squeeze no further, she knows she has reached her destination. She carefully pulls out her red dye and begins to paint on the walls.
Close to 40,000 years later, her anatomically modern descendants will look at what she painted and wonder why she did it. Why did she do it? Why did she and her contemporaries leave behind symbols, images and meaning when they had no way of knowing these would be examined by people thousands of years later? And why did no humans do so for thousands of years before them? Were these the first signs of human consciousness? Were these the first steps on the journey that led our species to ask- what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
In the highly recommended novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams imagined an advanced alien civilisation that aspires to know the secrets of this universe. To do this, it builds a supercomputer, and the question it poses to the computer is- What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? In the novel, the best answer the poor aliens receive is 42. Since then, 42 has served as a good cultural meme, but there are in fact serious speculations available on this pertinent human query. Scientific understandings of cosmology and evolution shed light on the origins and future path of the universe. Philosophies like Vedanta and Buddhism go deep into the nature of reality and the phenomenon of consciousness. Contemporary thinkers have advanced a more scientific understanding of morality and human purpose, and finally, the wisdom drawn from psychedelic experiences and shamanistic traditions informs us on a wide range of queries from purpose and origin to mind and matter. This work is an attempt to examine all such available literature and provide a holistic answer to the fundamental question- what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?
When did our species first ask this question? Somewhere along our journey from ancient ape to modern man, a kind of sapience arose in us that hasn’t been found in other living beings. Between 3 and 5 million years ago, hominid brains expanded dramatically compared to those possessed by their ape cousins, leading to critical improvements in cognition and several other conditions that differentiate the homo genus from other ape families. 40,000 years ago, the first homo sapiens left behind paintings on the walls of prehistoric caves. Something happened between 3 million and 40,000 years ago that gave our human ancestors the awareness of their existence within a larger world and crucially, the ability to ask what their place in it is.
In the thousands of years since, we have endeavoured to answer the fundamental questions in many ways. Putting it broadly, we derive our answers from two arenas. On one hand is religion, but we are increasingly finding the answers inadequate and made up. Religion must necessarily assume that everything that exists has a cause or creator. To Hindi-speaking Indians, this first cause is expressed as the common refrain- kuch toh hoga! There ought to be something! Without this assumption, the positing of a creative entity is impossible. But to posit a god, religion is forced to argue that there exists a first uncaused cause, which it calls god and characterises with human traits. It does not concern itself with doubts on how this uncaused cause revealed ‘truths’ to ancient men (no one should begrudge the use of masculine form here). A moment’s thought on why we should believe some things, and why we should reject them, reveals that religion is a flawed explanation of reality that has outlived its usefulness in determining the ultimate meaning of life, the universe and everything.
On the other hand lies science, much in vogue since materialism became the bedrock of human thinking. Science has helped us understand the why of countless things that were hitherto attributed to gods. But as scientists will delightfully confess, we are still far from understanding everything. The limitations of science are illustrated in the Big Bang model of cosmology. The model explains existence only after the eponymous Big Bang. Further, it insists that asking ‘what existed before the Big Bang’ is meaningless. It’s easy to understand why, if we imagine the universe as a game played according to a set of rules. What we demand the Big Bang to explain is this- How was the game played before being played in the manner we can perceive? Imagine asking how many balls made up an over before the invention of cricket! Sadly, this is an impossible question. Many people point to such gaps in science and fill them with a single word- god. But the god of gaps is placeholder for human ignorance, and science is but the highly successful enterprise of reducing human ignorance. Yet science is conducted by humans, who can be plagued with bias, prejudice, ignorance and bigotry regardless of their take on the god debate. We must keep this in mind as we examine scientific explanations of reality.
There exists a third arena of human inquiry that straddles the membranes between science and religion. In trying to find the meaning of life, the universe and everything, the psychedelic experience enables each of us indiscriminately, beyond all barriers of caste, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality or ideology. Attainable through certain plants and fungi, the psychedelic experience does not need you to believe in anything for it to have its effect on you. A precise dose of the right psychedelic substance is a guaranteed exercise in inquiry and speculation that each of us can engage in. But when choosing from such disparate fields, one must have an internal rulebook to follow. These rules should define our epistemology- how do we know what we know? We reject knowledge derived from faith or ancestry. Thus we do not accept the answers presented in books written by bronze-age hunter-gatherers or medieval-age desert-nomads, or even modern-age science-fiction writers (a la Scientology). We must also be circumspect in accepting personal testimony, at least until we determine that these testimonies are re-creatable and falsifiable. And yet we cannot rule out the importance of imagination and speculation, for the outer limits of how weird our reality might be can only be set by outrageous ideas that seem patently absurd at the time of their introduction.
The itinerary of our journey pans out such. We begin by setting down the ground rules which detail our epistemology. Then we will move to the Ten Questions. These questions are the readers’ way of assessing this journey. The meaning of life, the universe and everything is better understood when broken down into lesser but equally pertinent queries. At the end of our journey we will attempt to answer these ten questions. How well we’ve done will depend on how well we’re able to answer them. After the ground rules and ten questions are set our journey begins in earnest. We start at the point of origin- of life and the universe. Section One asks why something exists instead of nothing, and we examine religious, scientific and psychedelic speculations on this question. In Section Two we deal with consciousness, and what place it occupies in the fabric of reality. In Section Three we sharpen our focus to humans in specific, including the elaborate cultures we create to shape our reality. Having established the place of life, mind and human in this universe, in Section Four we turn to the issue of purpose. Is there a purpose to human life, or to existence even? In Section Five, having answered all these questions, we will formulate a holistic and final theory on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. This is where we revisit the ten questions and articulate the best answers available to them.
I should disclaim here that I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher. I’m an average component of the corporate economy. In finding these answers I’ve used an acquired understanding of concepts I have no expertise on, and I write this book for people such as myself. I’m no expert on quantum physics or mindfulness meditation, but you’ll find me talking of both. I’ve tried to speak of things only as much as I understand them, and when they lie beyond my comprehension I will acknowledge as much to you. Besides, some of us can become either theoretical physicists or meditation masters, but rarely both. And the rest of us must settle for vocations far less profound, with the sort of common understanding that specialists might chuckle at. My intent is not to end with a conclusion of the kind that ‘reality is mathematics’ or that ‘reality is just an illusion.’ These explanations may suffice for the physicists and mystics that live by them, but the rest of us need a more tangible portrait of what is really going on. For every concept we visit in this journey, there exist countless books that explore it with greater expertise. But none perhaps contain the breadth and scope this work seeks to cover. This confessional done, let us now move to the ground rules of our inquiry.