--- In [email protected], "hugheshugo" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], "John" <jr_esq@> wrote: > > > > Interesting article. But in MMY's view of things, the author > > lacked something-- enlightenment. > > It's a shame Doug is dead as I'd like to know what he would make of > that remark. He may have been a card-carrying atheist but he would > have been broad-minded enough to consider the concept of > enlightenment, undoubtably would have been fascinated by it. But, > like me, would have considered it a purely neurophysiological > process and nothing to get religious about.
And more important, Doug would have considered it something to laugh about, and to help other people laugh about. When it comes to an epitaph, I suspect Mr. Adams would've been far happier with "He made millions laugh" than "He made thousands get so serious about enlightenment that they spent years turning their backs on life and scrounging up the money to attend the Next Big Course that promised it to them." The man had a wit on him that has rarely been equaled. And he coined the ultimate definition of how to fly. "You hurl yourself at the ground, and miss." All these thousands of people following Maharishi, for all these years, and not one of them has missed yet. Here's a glass lifted to the memory of Douglas Adams, and a few of his own toasts to go with it: "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." "The spaceships hung in the sky in exactly the same way that a brick doesn't." "There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is second theory which states that this has already happened." "Arthur Dent hoped and prayed there wasn't an afterlife. Then, realizing the contradiction, he merely hoped there wasn't an afterlife." "Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though." "Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so." "We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty." "The problem with designing something completely foolproof is underestimating the ingenuity of a complete fool." "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair." "On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life, and the obliteration of all other life forms." "Well I think we've sorted all that out now. If you'd like to know, I can tell you that in your Universe you move freely in three dimensions that you call space. You move in a straight line in a fourth, which you call time, and stay rooted to one place in a fifth, which is the first fundamental of probability. After that it gets a bit complicated, and there's all sorts of stuff going on in dimensions 13 to 22 that you really wouldn't want to know about. All you really need to know for the moment is that the Universe is a lot more complicated than you might think." "It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'As pretty as an Airport' appear." "It is an important and popular fact that things aren't always as they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons." "In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." "Life... is like a grapefruit. It's orange and squishy, and has a few pips in it, and some folks have half a one for breakfast." "You live and learn. At any rate, you live." "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." "He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it." "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."
