I found the Schopenhauer thing - it's actually from Bill Moyers' interview with Joseph Campell. It's more contemplative that the average navel. Incredibly profound stuff - well worth getting a handle on if you're into that sort of thing. Make of it what you will
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CAMPBELL: That's Right. Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual", points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can be seen to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensible factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed the plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
