There was one thing that got my attention in that last conversation the night before I left the monastery, when we were flinging ideas and thoughts back and forth, vibing and relating and riffing off each other. It was new to me, I hadn't thought of it that way, but thinking back to it, I think he was right. I now smile at the way he put it.

We were in an existential space, one that I feel perfectly comfortable in, but causes him to wig out. By normative standards, it is completely useless thinking and most folk don't even go there. We even admitted that it was useless and futile thinking, but we still did it because that's just our psychological make-up.

The gist of it was that in our thinking, we get to a point where existence breaks down and becomes meaningless and unreal. I'm comfortable with that because one of my basic premises is that material reality is just manifestation, an illusion, symbolic of something we can't touch that really is real. I guess that's to say I'm jaded. But for him, getting to that space in his head was frightening and he didn't like it (maybe my comfort with it was simplistic and naive). He got to this problem that he needed at his core to understand. He needed a theory that made reality and existence make sense, and that theory had to be beautiful.

We weren't debating, we were just riffing and the vibe was mutually respectful, so although when he said that, I furrowed my brow in curiosity, I didn't express my base reaction that beauty has nothing to do with any objective existential theory, just as "happiness" has never been a goal of mine in life. But having heard him say that, why not? Why shouldn't a solution be beautiful?! Why shouldn't a solution have to be beautiful? It's wonderful!

He's still striving for his solution, but I already have mine; I'm perfectly happy with my deconstruction of physical reality. Is it "beautiful"? The cynic and skeptic in me is demanding some answer that allows for "no", and maybe I'll find it eventually, but at this point I can't get away from looking at my theory (or my way of looking at the same theory), and seeing it as pretty goddam beautiful.

I never think I have the answer, I never necessarily think I'm right, but whatever I have at the moment, I allow and allow myself to be happy with. But however my thinking changes or whatever permutations there are in my "theory", I think a very reasonable question to always ask will be, "is this beautiful?" And yes, it will have to be beautiful.