The 1960's were a turbulent period in our nation's history, especially if you were a student at the time. The events cascaded through the months, and given the already present polarization over our military involvement in Vietnam, campus activism was ramping up to levels unseen in modern times. These were the events that formed me: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the French student riots, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, my own marriage on the day they buried Kennedy, the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Democratic National Convention police riots, the election of Richard Nixon as President, and the wonder of the Christmas broadcast of Apollo 8.
Something even more amazing, however, was going on all across college campuses in the U.S. besides protests, and had slipped in under the radar of cultural consciousness. It was the emergence of a new form of an older academic discipline that had gone under the moniker of the History of Religions, or sometimes the Comparative Study of Religion. I and millions of fellow students now knew it as Religious Studies.
Having grown up in the 60's comparing suburban Episcopalian mores to the more violent urban and militant mores of our fractured culture, I found the institutional church coming up short. In fact the church seemed to be spending more time debating the ontology of God (the "Honest To God" controversy) than the morality of war and discrimination. Around this time I had read Dr. King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail and Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. We had a British academic as a teacher who had spent several years in a Japanese Zen monastery. We had guest lecturers of the likes of Charles Hartshorne on Natural Theology. We were exposed to Sufism, Chasidism, Vedanta, the English Mystics like Julian of Norwich, and the Pali texts of Buddhism. I did not realize it at the time, but I was embarking on a forty year vision quest, during which I practiced every form of meditation I had learned of - Vipassana, Zazen, Kinhin, and many others.
During the last several years of my life, and after a brush with death on the operating table, I began to acquire a sort of quiet, Confucian peace. After all, as a generation we all seemed to be looking for inner peace, were we not? I don't know for sure, but I am beginning to think it's really not all that complicated. I wouldn't want to be accuses of using a teaser title and then not deliver the goods. Below the fold then, I shall reveal the meaning of life as I have found it. No, the answer is not 42!
1. Your role in life is your meaning. Identify your role, and be it. We are indeed players, and whether a son or daughter, husband or wife, student or employee, lover or grandparent, simply be the best you can be.
2. Attend to your daily affairs. If you have time for games of any sort, you have probably left some chore or task unfinished.
3. Take a walk, and find meaning in it.
4. Try something new; a new food, a new experience, or a new discipline.
That's it. The reflections of an old hippie who has found his bliss. Your mileage, of course, may vary.