To me, the "Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy" begins with a great disappointment. On the first page of the story, Douglas Adams wrote:
"And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that
had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever. This is not her story. But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences."
To my disappointment we never get to learn what she was about to say on the telephone before earth was destroyed. I always wanted to know what is going wrong on this planet and how we can fix it without anyone getting killed.
Actually the answer is in the book, or in the first three books of the Hitchhiker series. But Adams doesn't give us a brief and blunt answer. There are essential bits of information in these books, hidden in a funny and fictional, but yet sarcastic story.
Reading the Hitchhiker can be a therapy for the 21st century schizoid man. Or, as Adams puts it:
"People, who have conversations with themselves on the phone, never learn something useful from it."
I don't intend to tell you the story of the Hitchhiker again. Here is what I think would be the untold story of the girl:
Since at least a thousand generations man is actively talking and listening to his own voice in his head, and it appears to him as if his voice is actually talking with himself. My fellow humans, who are currently working hard to mess up their life and this beautiful planet, are silently and invisibly talking with these voices, in an attempt to pretend to themselves that they have a personal prompter in their heads who is smarter than they really are. However, their internal prompter is a lunatic, a charlatan, who will never admit to them, that he or she is even more dim-witted than they are, to say the least.
Their concept of thinking by talking with their inner voice in the prefrontal cortex of their brain is a childish idea, that has never worked for them, and never will. It is a fixed idea, which has turned them into schizoid lunatics that can start killing each other any day with conventional, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, if someone they consider an authority will issue the command to them. Actually murder, torture and rape are incidents that occur every day at many places on this planet.
What I want to tell them is an uncomfortable truth at first sight. A truth most of them actively deny and run away from, a truth that will not likely become popular anytime soon.
Even if they try to understand – in order to digest what I am saying, they draw on their broken concept of thinking: They try to explain to themselves, what they actually didn't understand. That is never going to work! Since they keep on talking to their demons, their voices are getting louder, and their inner voices have the last word on everything.
The truth about their mind is bitter and sweet. It will eventually take away their comforting illusions and lies. And it also will give them freedom and serenity. How long will it take for them to collectively understand what I say? I don't know. Maybe I will be already dead by the time that more people will realize what I am writing here.
I can offer you a trick, that can help you to get in the state of serenity pretty soon.You can answer all the questions, that you ask yourself, no matter how strongly you are interested in giving yourself the answer, with the very same sentence:
In order to be able to answer this question to myself, I would have to talk to myself.
I have stopped talking to myself a long time ago. Which might not yet be true for you, but I hope it will become true for you in the future. You will find the answer in the universe that surrounds you, but not in yourself. Talking to other people is not always helpful, but talking to yourself is guaranteed to be always pointless. Don't ask yourself, if you expect answers.
I have ceased to talk with the voice in my head. The voice in my head has stopped talking to me. I am one with the universe. The mind dissolved in a little cloud of logic. Serenity.
I hope you all will share serenity with me, one day.