I haven’t turned Buddhist or anything and was just turning ideas around in my head. But of late it has struck me that the most successful way for an individual to live was to assume that his life meant something. Similarly, civilizations are more likely to survive and flourish when their culture and myth invest activities with a purpose. What’s always fascinated me was why even people who would concede the assertion on practical grounds felt compelled to turn around and put it on the footing of make-believe. “Well of course we must act that way even though it isn’t so”. In reality we don’t know one way or the other. We are still finding out.

But a mode of thought which proves useful is very suggestive of the possibility that the idea has some correspondence with reality. And so while we at most have conjecture or “faith” in our hands, it is not an altogether unreasonable thread to follow. It is, at any rate, a proper field for human intellectual endeavor. We are made to look up at the stars, even though we quite don’t know why. The fact that we cannot now, nor perhaps ever reach them is less important than the fact that they are there. And somehow we guess, though we cannot really explain how, that they have something to do with us.

An Oxford mathematician who was giving a lecture on the existence of God that I once attended said and I paraphrase, “the fact that the world may have transcendent meaning makes inquiry much more, rather than less exciting. Why should we bother to learn anything if it were all meaningless. But if the contrary were true then rush out now and live.”