A week ago, on the
TV show Big Bang Theory, one of the
characters, in a drunken funk, leaves numerous messages on Stephen Hawkings’
answering machine. This motivated me to
look up the account by Eckhart Tolle of his first encounter of Stephen Hawking
in a campus cafeteria when he was a graduate student at Cambridge
University. He noticed
A man in a
wheelchair would sometimes sit at a nearby table, usually accompanied by three
or four people. One day, when he was
sitting at a table directly opposite me, I could not help but look at him more
closely, and I was shocked by what I saw.
He seemed almost totally paralyzed.
His body was emaciated, his head permanently slumped forward. One of the people accompany him was carefully
putting food in his mouth a great deal of which would fall out again and be
caught on a small plate another man was holding under his chin. Occasionally the wheelchair-bound man would
produce unintelligible croaking sounds, and someone would hold an ear close to
his mouth and then, amazingly would interpret what he was trying to say….
A few weeks later,
as I was leaving the building, he was coming in, and when I held the door open
for his electric wheelchair to come through, our eyes met. With surprise I saw that his eyes were
clear. There was no trace in them of
unhappiness. I knew immediately he had
relinquished resistance; he was living in surrender.
A number of years
later when buying a newspaper at a kiosk, I was amazed to see him on the front
page of a popular international news magazine.
Not only was he still alive, but he had had by then become the world’s
most famous theoretical physicist… There was a beautiful line in the article
that confirmed what I had sensed when I looked into his eyes many years earlier. Commenting upon his life, he said (now with
the help of the voice synthesizer), “Who could have wished for more?”
