Froodist Taowelism and the Way of the Galactic Hitchhiker
The First Taowel:
Yellow.
Kettle. Plug. Fridge. Milk. Coffee. Yawn.
Bulldozer.
Yellow.
One will get nowhere at all, lying in the mud.
The plans were on display.
You’ve got to build bypasses, beware of the leopard.
Six pints of bitter, time is an illusion.
Not from Guildford after all, a place in the Reader’s Digest.
A fish in the ear helps to listen,
A thumb shows the way.
We are almost never really aware of what is to come
And if we should begin to think that we are, we are not. True initiation into greater awareness comes when we are not looking. Arthur was only dimly aware of the bulldozer come to knock down his house. As we can often be when we become too centered on all the things that we deem so very important, we tend to miss what actually is important.
Even if we find focus and gain a modicum of awareness; when we go down to the cellar to see those plans, there is still a great deal more going on that we will ever know about. We may never know about a lot of things, but we’ll never know a thing if we hold ourselves in place and refuse to accept that the universe is ever changing and ever increasingly more bizarre. “One will get nowhere at all, lying in the mud.”
You’ve got to build bypasses. Not just highway, or hyperspace bypasses, but bypasses of the mind. Too much clutter in the brain clouds the deeper vision, the real sight and awareness. We have to teach ourselves to divert the traffic flow of stress. Where it goes is not really our concern, not our exit as it were. Rather it’s important on our route that we don’t let the stress take root.
Often in life we are told we can’t do a thing, or that are obstacles in our way. Beware of the leopard. We have to go down to the cellar with a torch, and look inside that locked filing cabinet anyways. Change in any form is always subject to opposition, sometimes we have to push past the things or threats we perceive standing in our way.
The only time that exists is now.
If now is lunchtime, then time is not an illusion after all, but if not then lunchtime only exists in our minds, like so many of the worries and stresses that plague us in our daily lives. If we can let them go, build the bypasses, just drink the beer and enjoy it our minds begin to open, our eyes begin to see.
And yet even as we may start to see things as they really are, we may still find out that the way things really are is not how they really are at all. Our friend of many years is not from Guildford after all. Ford offers Arthur a kind of initiation into a different reality, and with the initiation Arthur sets foot on a new path. It’s not a path that Arthur would have chosen. At first he scoffs the notion of deeper things off, telling Ford that there is a place in the Readers Digest for people like him.
Humans really don’t like change, it puts us right out of our comfort zone. Arthur faces it it as reluctantly as any of us might. But like any true initiation, revelation comes when we are not expecting it, or really even necessarily wanting it. Arthur becomes more aware in the instant he was teleported to the Vogon ship than he ever might have if he had remained on Earth, and if the Earth wasn’t being destroyed by the poetic bureaucrats.
Once the planet was destroyed, there was no going back for Arthur. Such is the case with initiations, revelations, and new truths. We have to embrace the change, and invite it to change us. We open our eyes wider, and learn to not only listen, but communicate in a whole new way.
A fish in the ear is symbolic of a new understanding, a thumb out, the gesture for hitchhiking a ride, doubly so. The Way of the Galactic Hitchhiker is one of going for the ride. Even if we don’t always know where we are going it’s not the destination that matters, but the journey itself.
