Carl Spackler: So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas.
Angie D. Annunzio: A looper?
Carl Spackler: A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald…striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one – big hitter the Lama – long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga…gunga, gunga-lagunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I go that goin’ for me, which is nice.
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Steve was a C-Suite Executive at a company I once worked for who occupied the obscenely large office immediately adjacent to my obscenely large office. Steve was a big guy with a walrus mustache, a hearty laugh, and a child’s heart. Although he was considerably older than me and his views skewed to the wrong side of the political spectrum, Steve and I were good friends who spent hours shooting the shit about everything and anything. Everyone seemingly has a catch-phrase they lean into during conversation and Steve’s was “it is what it is.” Whenever he encountered an intractable problem, or we arrived at a point where something could not be adequately explained or rationalized, Steve would figuratively throw up his hands and recite his catch-phrase. He did that so predictably often that if you ever uttered the phrase “it is what it is” in other company, Steve’s name would invariably come up.
I never really gave Steve’s favored saying much mind. I certainly never imagined that the philosophy undergirding it was the key to understanding the universe. It was just a cute retort that I found both mildly-amusing and endearing. It was also a cop-out; a lazy and convenient “out” that one could leverage to gracefully escape an intellectually-challenging conundrum. Or so I thought.
One evening a few year back, long after life and the Great Recession had separated Steve and me, I was out hiking alone in the hills. It must have been the summer because although the hour was late, the sky still held a residual glow. I don’t now recall specifically mulling over the grand, unanswerable religious and philosophical questions that go to the heart of our very existence – why are we hear, what happens when you die, how do you explain the infinite nature of the cosmos – but I must have been, at least on a subconscious level. I also may or may not have been under the influence of substances of questionable legality. In any event, as I was coming down the trail on my way back to the car, I had a moment of clarity that was so revelatory that I literally had to stop moving to fully absorb it before it faded back into the ether. The curtain only gets pulled back so many times in a lifetime, so I had to take full advantage of this rare moment of absolute lucidity.
Like dreams, ghosts, and UFOs, instances of acute consciousness are fleeting and solitary events. When you attempt to share them with others, they are usually received with blank, disinterested stares. So too I’m certain with the revelation I had that evening. When I repeat it now, it doesn’t sound that deep or profound even to me. But I’ve held onto it because it was so simple and obvious: the universe exists because it exists. It is, always has been, and always will be. Reason, purpose, and meaning are all completely irrelevant. It doesn’t require any further rationalization or explanation than that.
At first, I was reluctant to accept that as truth. It was a scary proposition that contravened everything that I thought I knew. It also didn’t fit the narrative. My mind was programmed by the culture, the educational system, and religious dogma to believe that the universe, and our place in it, can all be explained through linear thought and faith in an anthropomorphic deity. That particular line of thought distills infinity down to a simple formula of beginning, middle, and end with man at the center of everything. It’s a comforting story conceived to give us place and purpose. To explain the unexplainable and rationalize the irrational.
But therein lies the rub. What I came to realize is that the boundless infinity of multi-dimensional time and space defies both reason and logic. It cannot be explained by rational thought because our Spock-like minds are ill-equipped to accept that and its implications. The only way you overcome that is by wrestling your rational mind into submission.
I’m pretty certain that is what I unintentionally accomplished that evening in the hills. For one brief moment, through some mechanism I don’t understand, I was able to pin my rational mind to the mat. To get it to cry “Uncle!” When that happened, I was suddenly liberated from the need to explain everything. I could just accept things for what they are without attempting to invent meaning and purpose. And you know what? It was fine. Everything made perfect sense to me and it still does even though I can’t reclaim that moment.
That is how I became an adherent of “Is-ism:” the belief that things just are. I’ve put aside the silly and arrogant notion that I can pound the complex tetrahedron of infinite time and space into the 2-dimensional oblong of rational thought. I’ve accepted and am comfortable with the idea that explanations for everything are neither possible nor necessary. Existence is a strange and mystical thing. It is, has always been, and always will be. Or as my friend Steve used to say, “it is what it is.”
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