Subconscious Stockpot

I can’t exactly provide the comfort of telling you here at the beginning that by the end of this article, things will make sense. I am writing to try to make sense of it, but it seems rather sketchy so far.

There is a mind connected to the fingers that do the typing here and that mind is a non-physical information system that has developed in and around a physio-chemical structure that is probably based in a brain which is now—in a legally-provable way—nearly half-a-century old and has been inputting indiscriminate bits of information for quite a long time and trying to make all the various and sundry bits fit into some kind of cohesive pattern.

One life, one mind, a million memories. And “life”, “mind” and “memory” are nearly indefinable. All the same, here I am, trying to make sense of it all.

Charleton Heston died yesterday. He played the character of Moses in an old epic movie “The Ten Commandments.” When I was a kid, the misconceptions went something like this: “Did you see “The Bible”? Charleton Heston is God!”

“Yeah, I saw that movie, but the book was better.”

“Books are boring. Books are what you have before they make a movie. A book is like a ‘who cares’ version of a movie. Once you have a movie, nobody needs some dumb book anymore.”

“Uh…”

“Did you see the part where he makes that big sea part? The good people walked through the bottom of the ocean and then when the bad guys tried to follow them, God made the ocean close back up and it drownded all the bad guys. That was COOL.”

“Yeah: the Red Sea.”

“Whatever…Hey, that wasn’t in the movie! ‘Red Sea’? That wasn’t in the movie. What are you? Some kind of heathen who tries to put stuff into movies that wasn’t there?”

“Well, no. I read the Bible. It says it was the Red Sea.”

“Reading is for dorks. It wasn’t in the movie. If it was true, Charleton Heston would have said it, after all, He’s God.”

“Um, MOSES.”

I don’t remember the conversations progressing much past that point. I remember shouting and little sparkly stars swimming around my field of vision, trips to the nurse’s and principal’s offices, quiet hours in detention and being asked whether I’ll think twice next time about starting fights.

I do seem to remember beginning to hate movies at that time. There are lots of nice movies and lots of very intelligent, talented people who work on movies. There are lots of truly wonderful things that are done in the cinematic art-form. And there are millions of people for whom a well-produced motion picture becomes a definitive historical document. I could love the version of “Cinderella” that I read in the book that helped me learn how to read and to learn that reading could be meaningful to me, but once Walt Fricken Disney made Cinderella into a blockbuster animated feature, my memories of a written story and my feelings about it became worthless as social currency. Cinderella stopped being a story that could be expressed in a child’s imagination after it was made into a Disney movie. Disney didn’t just steal a classic fable. Disney made off with a billion children’s right to imagine.

Who was it that directed “The Ten Commandments”? I don’t even care enough to search Wikipedia for it. Whoever it was, they took something that many people thought was the Ultimate Truth of The Universe and disconnected it from its existence as an element of thought to create one polished picture of something that may or may not have happened in actual history.

Starring Charleton Heston as Moses, who was later mistakenly thought of as God but was only an actor portraying a man and was the same actor who later in his career was a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, a group whose lobbying efforts continue to supply automatic weapons to inner-city gang-bangers who think killing is COOL.

Because Moses/God says so.

I normally like to speak well of people after they die. Once someone is dead, they can’t do any more damage. Oh wait…yes they can: the indirect damage done by the followers of the dead person. Even if a leader leads very nicely, the followers can always mess it up. Just look at MLK as opposed to the Black Panthers or the kind of guy Jesus was as opposed to the sort of people who do all sorts of evil stuff in the name of…something that wasn’t even the guy’s name fer crissakes! If the mailman had come to Jesus’ door saying “Special delivery for a Mr. Christ”, that letter would have ended up back at the post office because Iesa bin Yusuf never knew that later generations would change his name to Jesus F. Christ.

What if—just a suggestion, mind you—a person wanted to believe in something TRUE, but all the truth had been buried by ignorance and everyone claimed that the only choices were to believe an ignorant lie or be labeled a heretic?

I’m a little angry. I don’t like being angry, but I don’t know how else to cope with something that makes so little sense. If I could make it make sense, I’d have some other choice—something other than anger.

Destructive emotions are what take over when we get to the end of sense. They’re the scum that rises to the top of the subconscious stockpot. A good cook would skim all of it off and throw it away so it wouldn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the good soup underneath.

To that ignorant brat-kid playground bully who probably grew up to be an ignorant adult bully in some slightly-larger playground, I would like to deliver this message today: Your God died. Naa, na-naa, na- naa, NAAAAAH!

That was mean. I am being mean. I’m mean when I’m sad and angry without being able to really understand why I’m sad and angry. The pain of sadness and anger might even keep me from looking beneath my own surface to find out where these feelings are coming from. People like me are the ones who start wars because they’re sad and angry and they don’t know what to do with those feelings except to lash out against others.

Or, maybe they write. Or sing or play instruments. Or make sculptures. The making of art is often the result of channeling the energy of possibly-destructive emotions into constructive pastimes.

I can’t swear that this will ever make any sense, but it’s better than physically going on a rampage. I can’t guarantee that my writing will make sense, but it’s the one viable alternative I can find instead of screaming “Geeeeeee-Hawd!” at the top of my lungs.

I could start a war or I could join one of the wars already in progress…or I could write stuff that barely makes sense. For the record, I would like it if someone would read my writing and find something helpful in it for making sense of the barely-sensible stuff that fills the average human information system. I would like to write TO someone or FOR someone, but even without that, the simple act of committing words to paper or screen is helpful to me.

Words are logical. Feelings aren’t. Actions might be either logical or not. My writing is the alchemy of taking anything I find inside myself and transmuting it into something useful. Let’s see a movie do that. Let’s see any passive entertainment do something that actually brings some peace to a disturbed soul. Emotions are feelings and feelings are energy and energy is a force of nature and forces of nature need something to do. That’s the one sensible thing I can say: Feelings are emotional energy and the definition of energy is “potential to do work”. Energy has to do something and will do something and your choice—when it’s your energy—is to direct it to do something good (or at least not too harmful) or pretend that you can ignore it and let it do its work without your awareness and direction.

But—for the sake of making a strong point—I am pretending today that I am actually writing something useful and logical to the ignorant little bastard who used to insist that Charleton Heston is God-whose-word-is-inviolate.

Am I making you mad yet? What are you going to do about it? Hit me? Go ahead and try. I work at the store where you’ll have to go to buy a new monitor for your computer after you smash the old one in a fit of idiotic rage. And I get commissions for my sales. Go ahead and take a swing at me. You won’t hurt me. In fact, I’ll laugh about it all the way to the bank.

And in the best case, you’ll realize that you were just being silly because you will come to recognize that you swung your fist because you had emotional energy that needed to do something and you proved my point, even if I told lies to make my point, fighting lies with lies in the manner of a person who fights fire with fire and just waiting for the moment when someone says “Hey, this is getting to be a pretty big fire! Maybe we should get out of here!”


But it’s just a pretense. That kid probably never learned to read and he wouldn’t be here now. You can’t teach those who refuse to learn. In the later years of life, you finally realize that you are your own teacher, guiding your mind to the places where there is something to learn.

And those places are everywhere if you approach life with open eyes and ears, an open mind and an open heart. It is participation in your own life that makes you able to learn. Reading and writing are participatory sports.

Don’t wait too long to notice that you’ve been going through life as a spectator.

Twelve hundred and forty-one words later, Bob realizes he hasn’t even begun to write about the subject indicated in the working title.

There is one truly eternal question in life: what am I doing right now? It takes a few different forms, but it’s always really the same question of what to do. It might be “what do I want to do?” or “what should I do next?” or “what is the right thing to do?” or…any of many variations on the theme, but it’s always the question that leads you to do whatever you do. It’s The Eternal Question because it underlies all of the other questions that are considered classic eternal philosophical questions. If you had no interest in what to do, you wouldn’t ask questions like “Is there a God/Heaven/Hell/afterlife/absolute good and evil?” or “Is infinity real?” or “what is reality?” You’d never ask those questions—or the many other deep-meaning questions—if you did not first and foremost want to know what to do.

We have cultural mythologies about “being at the crossroads” and “choosing one of two paths” because we want to simplify things for ourselves by saying that it is either this or that. In reality, there are many more than two paths. All the same—because language has limitations of convention and accepted structure—I’ll refer to the “two-path” system even though each of the two has a large number of variations of its own.

Let’s name one path “Logic” and the other “Intuition” or—better yet—one set of paths “logical” and another set “intuitive”. Here we find one of the primary divisions of schools of thought. Some people call themselves “logical” and others specify that they do what they do “intuitively”.

But every capable human mind does both.

Because of the researches of psychology, anatomy, surgery, electrochemical studies and “brain science”, most of us are somewhat aware of a few interesting bits of information about how brains work. We know that—physiologically at least—we have brains that are composed of a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere: “logical” and “intuitive” sides in every healthy brain.

And logic is complex and so is intuition and in every healthy brain there exists a complex set of interactions between at least two highly-complex structures. And some mechanic with a blog and a bad attitude is going to make it all make sense?

Yes I am.

You see, no one actually deals with the complexity. People who work with complex things have a mental grasp of the complexity, but they only actually handle one simple piece of it at a time. Okay, they actually work with TWO pieces at a time, fitting Piece A to Piece B while Pieces C through X-times-infinity and all pre-A pieces lay on the worktable awaiting the assemblage of A to B. Even in the most complex things, it is always about the work at hand, just like it is in plumbing when the Great Cycle of Waters is connected to a faucet with a drain underneath and the gunk that you wash off of your hands flows eventually to the bottom of the ocean where it becomes food for an algae that no one has ever seen up close.

I know that evaporation and aeration and settling and precipitation and capillary action and water seeking its own level and the path of least resistance and the universal force that no one really understands—gravity—are all parts of the system, but in any given moment all I really have to do is make a good fitting.

But even with a run-on sentence, you don’t get the real gyst: I only have to DO one thing at a time, but while I’m doing that one thing, I’m holding all the other information relating to that thing in my mind. The One Thing is informed by the rest of the knowledge.

Here is what conscious/subconscious is actually about: conscious simply means the thought that you are currently having and subconscious is all of the information in your mind other than your current conscious thought. Suppose you had breakfast today. You can—if you choose—remember as many details of your breakfast as you choose to remember, but if you are thinking about something other than this morning’s breakfast, the memory of breakfast is in your subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind of the average person contains more data than most people would ever find any conscious use for, including everything about the way things look, sound, feel, smell and taste and any thoughts or feelings you may have had about every experience you’ve ever had. Even though any individual lifetime has its natural limits, the amount of information we gather is nearly limitless and it is all stored inside us, informing us as to who we are and what we think and how we feel about everything else we experience: complexities built upon complexities and all we really want to know is what to do right now.

The parts of the near-infinite information that you can call to conscious awareness and put into order are called “logical thoughts” and the parts that only seem to fit together randomly are called “intuition.”

But they are all thought/feeling information that gets us through our days, all “stored energy” in need of work to do, all opportunities to direct our energy to do something we want done.

That’s my stockpot for today, April 7, 2008. I feel better now that I’ve stirred it and skimmed the scum off.

It’s SOUP!!!

Creation Versus Evolution?

Why "versus"? In the richness of life, doesn't it take both? Are there not examples all around us of created things AND things that develop? Is the world not big enough for creation AND evolution?

The other day I was cyber-surfing a little bit, just trying to keep up with current events, and I clicked a link in the news window of my homepage to look at an article on LiveScience.com that had a title that was something like "Top Ten Missing Links". LiveScience is an entertaining site, full of all sorts of the type of pop-science that most internet users love to look at. I'm sure there must be some real science in there somewhere, but it's mostly "science-y stuff for the masses".

"Missing links" indeed.

I had already registered with LiveScience so I could comment on articles and so I could use their RSS feed on one of my other blog pages. My prior registration seems to have turned into a "missing link".

The article I'm referring to is a photo gallery of the "top ten" (their picks, not mine) pre-sapien hominids whose bones have been unearthed and looked at by archaeologists, including the famous "Lucy", an austalopithicene chick, a few Neanderthal and Cro Magnon dudes, etc.

I suppose the upshot is that LiveScience wants to show some "proof" of humanity's less-than-human origins.

Meanwhile the idea of "we evolved from monkeys" is still quite offensive to religious people, no matter how many "scientists" say things like "we didn't say we evolved from monkeys".

"Yes you did."

"No we didn't."

And so on.

Sure enough, the first comment on the article was from an intelligent-sounding guy who said (I'm paraphrasing from memory) "...still no compelling proof of evolution..."

Well none of us is ever truly compelled to believe what we don't want to believe, especially when the subject in question involves remote history (let's face it: we weren't there) or any other thing where direct observation is impossible. There IS NO objective, quantifiable observation of things like morality, the meaning of life, the existence of an afterlife, the edge of the universe or the beginning of time. It's all guesswork and we all believe what we want to believe. There are (and I believe that there always will be) exactly ZERO provable facts in these cases.

The funny thought that occurs to my tiny, possibly monkey-derived brain is that maybe we don't need to have big, bloody battles about things we can never prove. Maybe there's a lot of it--important though it may seem--where we should just realize that what we think we know is really nothing more than our personal beliefs.

I wrote another article about it. It's long and it's unfinished. I'm going to post it here today so I'll stop writing it, making it ever longer, making it ask more questions and leave more questions unanswered. It seems to me that the human mind has difficulty tolerating questions that can't be answered, so we keep pushing our minds to find the answers even when we know that we can't come up with a true and factual answer. We still want to think of what is possible, then choose the possibility that appeals to us the most.

Anyway, here's my article:

Evolution Versus Creation?

There are a few areas of discussion where I feel that I could make a valuable contribution, where the things that need to be said haven’t really been said. This is one.

My primary reason for thinking that I have a contribution to make is because of the polarization that exists regarding this debate. There are several such debates in our society of the sort where no resolution seems to be forthcoming. This polarization, partisanism, “taking of sides” or whatever you would like to call it keeps us from attaining the social agreements that we would need in order to be a cohesive society.

I’ve written about this before, but I haven’t written so well as to feel that I have said all that needs to be said or even all that I would want to say. So I’m trying again. I expect disagreements from both sides simply because there are two very separate sides and I’m not on either of them.

Or I’m on both of them. Confusing? Not really. I’m on neither side and on both sides. I’m a moderate because more than any other thing, I desire social healing. I want to live in A Society rather than living as I do now on the fringes of fragmented societies. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life straddling some crazy fence with one foot in one world and the other foot at the opposite end of the universe.

I’m an American. I don’t want to think of myself as belonging to some ethnically or religiously divided version of my society. I don’t want to feel any compulsion to think of myself (or worse—to have others identify me as) Euro-American, or theist/atheist, liberal/conservative, black/white. I’d like to think of myself as merely American: capable of agreeing on the important matters with any other American. The quest for agreement with my society seems to entail a few moments of seeming to disagree with everyone. In a world where all the people have divided themselves into A’s and B’s, I’m the sort of person who just wants to do the math that adds A and B and comes up with C because C is the group in which I belong. C is the set of nice people, some of whom are A’s and some of whom are B’s.

Maybe an X,Y, Z equation would be more PC. IDK. LOL.

So…I would like to ask both “evolutionists” and “creationists” to prepare to approach the fence that divides our society and for everyone to be ready to do some genuine healing of our shared world by removing the blinders of your own limited opinion. Don’t do it for me. Do it for the higher purpose, the greater good, unity, love, the collective consciousness, the world-soul or for God—whichever of those ideas (if any) seem worthy to you.

The sciences are in the domain of thought, while spirituality is in the domain of feeling. Humans are the beings who do both: we think and we feel. If thinking and feeling were always completely reconciled, we would probably never have the need to communicate. Arguments span the entire spectrum from communication with a view to reaching agreement all the way to out-and-out warfare. My recommendation is a simple one. Let’s communicate and disagree when we must, but until we declare communication to be at an end, we don’t need to beat each other up.

As a sworn moderate, I will trace the argument back to the last place we were before we decided we couldn’t communicate. I will attempt to begin with a tentative agreement: at some point in time, non-aware matter became something that is alive and knows it is alive, but also knows that it is in some ways separate from- and in other ways connected to-the rest of the universe. We’re individuals AND we’re connected, but the important realization is that we’re alive and aware. We’re aware of ourselves as living beings and we’re more-or-less aware that other living beings exist who are potentially connected with ourselves somehow.

The “somehow” seems to us to be largely a matter of our choice. We choose to connect ourselves with the parts of the outside world (including the people in that outside world) that we want to connect with and we try to choose to distance ourselves from the parts of the outside world with which we do not wish to be associated. In our hubris, we think that we can somehow exclude parts of the outside world from our concept of ourselves by shutting the undesirable bits (these “bits” are people not really so different from ourselves) out of our awareness. What we don’t like, we reject in the same way that a body rejects a transplanted organ. It matters not at all to us that acceptance might save our lives.

Somewhere between six thousand and four million years ago (depending on how you count and who keeps your calendar) a new sort of life appeared on Earth: humans. We’ve been arguing ever since. We’ve argued about which of us are “real humans”, about what “right thinking” is, about what should be important to us, about which real estate belongs to which group of humans, about who is included in which group and even about how to measure time. The basis of all of this arguing comes down to one simple point: we have questions about which of our fellow creatures we like and how much we should like them. We almost universally decide that we will like the ones with whom we have the most in common. We decide to like people who are like us in some significant way and we often decide to dislike those who are unlike us.

You could disagree with me at this point, but that wouldn’t do you much good. Your disagreement would merely be a case of you saying that you don’t like what I have to say because I’ve said something that is different from what you think; you’d be pointing out that your opinion on the subject of like and unlike is unlike my opinion and that you don’t like that.

Yes, I am using the term “like” in a funny way. I’m doing strange word-magic with it, but it’s justified word-magic because—at least in English—we have a word that points to the obvious fact that we feel an emotional connection to people who are similar to us; that we like those who are like us.

And we dislike those who are unlike us. Unless of course we don’t like ourselves, in which case we dislike others for being too much like us. Complicated? Yes. For something so simple, it IS very complicated.

Here’s how to solve any problem that is both simple AND complicated: keep the simple part in your mind as you work your way through the complicated part. Not many people solve problems that way, but that’s the way to do it. It’s just like division or multiplication without a calculator: figure the simplest part first, make a note of it, then calculate the next-simplest part and so on, making notes of the simplified parts as you go. Be the first one on your block to know the real method for solving problems!!! Start today!!! No extra charge!!! No hidden fees!!!

The simple part is that we all need the right to decide who and what we will like. That’s a basic survival right. We all need the confidence to trust our own judgment regarding anything and anyone we encounter; the absolute right to choose whether to fight or unite or flee or even to say “eh, seems okay” and choose not to fight, unite OR flee, but merely to ALLOW.

The simple part of the problem is that all your choices are yours. Always. Not every circumstance is completely in your control, but your choice about how to meet circumstances IS in your control. What you like or dislike, what you believe or disbelieve, what you include in or exclude from your mind is always a matter of personal choice, even though some “leaders” would prefer that you don’t know that. You are a conscious being. Consciousness comes with rights. Rights come with responsibilities. It is useless to try to separate any of these components from the others. If you try to rid yourself of responsibilities, you throw some rights away along with them and when you do that, you find yourself with fewer choices and fewer choices will be so offensive to your mind that you will be forced to become less aware. The reverse is also true: increasing your awareness maximizes your choices and gives you more rights and more responsibilities.

Now, if you look at this problem in a somewhat mathematical way, you can see that the basic choice that all aware beings face is in the level of awareness; in what you allow into your mind.

Here, religion agrees with science. The personal practice of religion is with the intent of bringing a person to wisdom. To be a scientifically-minded person is to seek knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge are each species of awareness. Both science and religion are ways of thinking that direct minds to an increase in awareness.

At this point, you could begin to disagree with me very strongly, but your only basis for disagreement would be in support of your own chosen position. If you are a believer in science, your disagreement might be that science directs your mind to awareness and religion doesn’t. And if you’re a religious person, you might say that religion makes you aware, but all those science-headed folks are not aware at all.

Thus we have one of the world’s oldest and most stubborn debates with the people on both sides pointing at the other side and saying, “those people just aren’t right!”

Am I laughing at you? Not really. I’m trying to get you to laugh with me. I’m trying to get you to see how ridiculous it is to continue disliking each other over something so subjective as the fact that we each take different paths to wisdom. Wisdom isn’t really a single destination after all. Wisdom is a process. If wisdom were something that just sits there doing nothing except saying, “Come to me, for I am Wisdom” then what good would it be? No, wisdom is a tool that a wise person uses for the many purposes involved in the living of a wise life.

The one thing that wisdom does not ask of you is that you become unaware.

Part of me is reluctant to appear to be holding your hand as I walk you through baby-steps to this important realization. It’s the part of me that is reluctant to insult your intelligence. I’m not smarter than you are. In fact there’s every possibility that you are smarter than I am. I am not writing this article in this way because I think I’m smarter than you are. I am writing this article in this way because of the type of specialist I am. Even though you may very well be much smarter than I, you also may have the need of my specialized professional services to do for you what you don’t know how to do for yourself.

I’m a mechanic.

I’m a specialty mechanic. In the current context, I am applying what I know as a specialty mechanic to a thought problem.

I know something that all mechanics know: there is no single tool that does every job. The next couple of paragraphs are going to illustrate and expand upon that point, eventually to tie that point in to the main topic of this entry. If you already know that one tool doesn’t do all jobs, you could skip a couple of paragraphs at this point—unless of course you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing.

I’m applying the idea of a tool to more than the common ideas of what tools are, but I believe the logic works in the same way and that it will be a useful thing to make an analogy between physical tools and thought-tools. Starting with common tools, a hammer doesn’t do what a screwdriver does, nor is a screwdriver a good hammer. You could use a screwdriver as a temporary hammer, but it won’t be a very good hammer. You can find a hybrid tool that is a hammer at one end and a screwdriver at the other end, but none of these is either a very good hammer OR a very good screwdriver. The best tools are highly specialized tools, made to do one thing well.

And the most accomplished humans are those who have the knowledge and the skill to do one thing very well. However, I’m not comparing a human to a tool. Each of us is a beautiful, unique, sensitive, loving, caring individual. It’s only the people who don’t know us well who tend to think of us as tools to be used for a certain purpose. If you are any type of specialist, you get used to having people think of you this way. You never really learn to enjoy having your human-ness undervalued in this way, but at the same time, it’s nice to be recognized for your skills. No one really likes being objectified, but being thought of as an object is better than not being thought of at all.

A hammer is a tool for pounding, a wrench is a tool for gripping and applying leverage, an automobile is a tool for transporting, a tuba is a tool for making a bass sound in a band that has a horn section. A pan is a tool for transferring heat in a controlled way from a fire to some substance that needs to be heated in a controlled fashion and all the various areas of learning are tools for thinking in a controlled fashion.

Now, even if (and it’s a very big if) science is the thought-tool that helps us better understand every aspect of our physical world, science still doesn’t do much to help us understand our own awareness and our own feelings. Science is a tool. There are many specialized sciences, each of them a good tool for one type of thought; each of them not much good outside of their own specialties.

A “new” science was created many years ago—called “philosophy”—to be an area of study that could link the other specialized sciences into a greater study of knowledge-in-general.

And verily, philosophy did go forth and yon in such ways that the thing designed to bring thinkers together became many things that keep thinkers apart, and behold there came to be realism and idealism and existentialism and antidisestablishmentarianism and (as John Lennon sang) ism, ism, ism, proving to us all that we could continue to disagree despite all attempts to unite.

Some systems of philosophy were somewhat successful at unifying sciences. But philosophy’s ego became swollen by its successes and philosophy began to suppose that it could treat spirituality as just another science. Spirituality IS NOT the same sort of science as logic, mathematics or chemistry, primarily because the variables in spirituality are too diverse and it is quite short-sighted to apply the spiritual “equations” that work for one person to another person. We each have our own sets of experiences and our own sets of observations and feelings about our experiences. If you look at it honestly (many people don’t) you understand that the primary concern of any person’s spiritual life has to do with “feeling right” toward one’s own existence.

Individual choice and aware self-management are essential in spirituality. Any “religion” that does not allow individual responsibility is not actually a spiritual benefit to the practitioner. Religions that attempt to tell people what to think—as opposed to offering guidance as to how to think—is actually just a political movement. I’m sorry if this sounds harsh or offensive, but this is what can save us from destructive versions of “religion”. If it doesn’t let you make your own choices and feel good about your choices, it’s not good for your soul. Religion-by-force is something to fight against.

Religious choices are spiritual choices are personal choices. Choice is not absolute. Neither is fate. Life is lived through a succession of moments wherein some events are inevitable and other events can be influenced by choices. An amoeba is a lower-level form of life that has few choices, and yet even an amoeba has SOME choices. The higher you go on the “food-chain”, the more choices you have, even if choice never really becomes absolute. If there is a God, perhaps God has absolute choice. Perhaps even God does not choose to exercise absolute choice even though God is the one being who could. The rest of us do the best we can. An important indicator of how well you’re doing in life is how many choices you have. Your ability to make choices is the most valuable thing you will ever own. This is the actual secret of the ages. This is the actual key to your life. Guard it wisely.

Even if (and it’s another very big if) religion is the spiritual tool that helps us feel right about every aspect of our spiritual lives, religion still doesn’t tell us much about our physical world.

There is no good tool that is religion at one end and science at the other. You could find a hybrid tool that seems to contain both, but it won’t be very good science OR very good religion.

In fact, you could find many different hybrid tools in the realm of philosophy that purport to do the jobs of both science and of religion and you could waste your life away exploring every one of them, witnessing first hand that each has its own advantages and disadvantages or you could simply come to realize that the tools of science are in a different kit from the tools of spirituality, whereupon you could have spiritual tools to do your spiritual work and scientific tools to do your science without ever being tempted to use one toolkit to smash the other.

A truly wise person reads more than one book and is able to have more than one thought.

Scriptures are not science, nor is science scripture.

Attempts to use one in place of the other are the same as trying to use a tuba to pound a nail. If you apply enough brute force, you might get the nail to go, but you’ll ruin your tuba.

Here is the big revelation at the end of the story: I just wrote over 2000 words about creation versus evolution without giving you the ability to call me either a creationist or an evolutionist.

It’s because I’m neither and both at the same time. It’s because I’m a mechanic doing my best to develop into being a wise mechanic with as many toolkits as it takes to get all my work done.

Be wise and well. Love enriches your life much more than hate does, but still all the choices are yours.

I merely recommend selecting the right tool for each job.

An Introduction

“Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands.” Psalm 66:1

It had started out as a true story. It hadn’t started badly, except for the foreboding that the writer felt, knowing as he did that no matter how pure his original intentions were, he would eventually succumb to either outright lies or exaggerations, the one for the purpose of hiding his crimes and the other merely as an attempt to be interesting.

But he intended to tell the truth. The first uncomfortable truth that he would try to bear was that he had wanted to be a writer ever since the first moment that words on a page had activated his imagination. He had known from an early age that words were magical—not because of the words themselves, but because of what happened in his mind to make sense of the words. Unlike movies—which used pictures and acting and music to tell stories—written words relied solely on the reader’s ability to create mental pictures that gave life to the story. A movie could show a beautiful sunset, but that was only one shot of one beautiful sunset, whereas a sunset in writing called to the readers mind any sunset the reader wanted to think about. When movies tried to tell the truth (IF any movie ever tried to tell the truth) it would be a very limited truth; the truth from only one camera angle, the truth with only one song playing on the soundtrack, a truth expressed by the performances of one or two actors in one or two scenes. Writing was different. Writing does not attempt to create truth. Writing merely tries to find the truth that already exists in the reader’s mind.

Even if the writer makes his best attempt at lying.

Movies never show you what is behind the screen. Writing can’t avoid showing you the things the writer doesn’t really want you to see. Writing is total psychological nakedness.

He had scarcely written two paragraphs and he was already sure that he had said too much.

He thought about continuing the fiction that he was writing a fictional story about a fictional character, but he knew that smart readers would be catching on by now and that he may as well go ahead and admit that the fictitious person he wrote about was not a made-up person at all. He was actually writing about himself.

So I let go of that first lie. Writing the truth isn’t as easy as you might think. All the lies and all the accustomed forms of lies are so readily available. It’s one of those conundrums or inherent contradictions. A story is a story: inherently untrue. A mask is a concealment of a face. Real truth needs no words. Real truth needs only to be experienced.

He knew this. He sat and wrote, knowing full well that if it were really true, it wouldn’t need a long explanation. Only lies need long explanations.

This is the long lie that I will be using to try to show you the truth that I know I can no longer hide. It’s up to you to catch me lying. For my own part I will merely alert you that it is a lie and that the truth underlies it in the same way that pure silences underlie sounds and in the same way that a blank screen underlies the projection of a motion picture.

Act 1, Scene 1: He remembers more about his infanthood than most people do and his preternaturally early memories serve as an explanation for the hurt inside him. Everyone he knows is happier than he is. He wonders how this can be and then he realizes that no one he knows has the memories he has. He remembers those early events and he notices that he was alone at the time. Oh, people were physically there, but his experiences were internal and he was completely alone inside. Someone shared his experiences, but he had those experiences completely by himself. One of those memories was something he came to think of as the dawn of his own awareness: his earliest memory.

I was less than two years old. I can’t remember how much less because age and number didn’t mean anything to me until after I turned 2. I could probably work it out retrospectively, but that would be cheating. Remembering retrospectively might tend to replace my actual memories with pseudo-memories that are less offensive to my adult sensibilities, so I keep the real memories as intact as I can by not trying to force them to make grown-up sense. The actual memories are my perceptions and thoughts as a child; seeing, feeling and thinking the way I saw, felt and thought while I was a child. I can trace my earliest memory back to a time when I was less than two years old and the things I remember from that time are the things that happened in a mind that was not yet two years old.

For many years, the memory of my second birthday was my earliest memory. It was an accessible memory because it had a strong linguistic and logical anchor: the number “2” began to have a meaning for me that day. My mother had taught me to make a sign for the number 2 by holding up two fingers. My favorite stuffed animal toy—maybe my only stuffed animal toy—was a rabbit that was bigger than I was. The rabbit slept with me and—since he was bigger than I was—he kept me from being afraid of strange noises and shadows in the night. When I held up my two fingers to show how many years old I was, the shape reminded me of the ears of my brave rabbit friend. On my second birthday, I was rabbit-ears old. That made it memorable for me and it was a tellable memory; something I could tell people about as an adult.

It took some concentration for me to find an earlier memory because my earlier memories didn’t have a linguistic anchor. My adult brain didn’t know how to retrieve my pre-linguistic memories. I knew that some people did “past-life regressions” by being hypnotized and even though I had no particular belief in reincarnation, I felt that there must be something to the process of remembering while hypnotized. It seemed to me that a human mind does store memories of every experience that a person has, but that it’s a matter of being able to recall a certain memory. Memories that are linked to words or sounds or images have a “file-path” in the brain; a series of thought-linkages that allow the person to access the memory. I knew that by trying to remember something that happened before I learned to speak, I was not going to be able to recall it the same way I could recall a “normal” memory.

I started with my second birthday and being “rabbit-ears old”. I relaxed my body and my mind, getting into a sort of meditative state, then I asked myself “What happened before I was rabbit-ears old?”

It was very nearly a total mental blockage. It wasn’t easy to recall an earlier memory. Well, in one way it was very difficult—meaning that it didn’t happen right away—but in another way it was very easy because all I had to do was relax my mind enough to let the memory come out. It was difficult to remember myself as an infant who didn’t think in logical terms, but once I got over the idea that I needed to think the way an adult thinks, it was pretty easy. My earlier memory was in images and feelings; in unprocessed, in-the-moment perceptions. Here I was, a grown person, letting my mind return to a time when I was not a grown person and I processed my perceptions of my surroundings in quite a different way.

And this was exactly what I was looking for. One of my main questions about myself as a young adult was who I was before my head got filled with ideas that were not my own ideas. Who was I before the world taught me what to think and how to think? What was the foundation of my awareness before the world came crashing in upon me? Before the filters of skepticism, doubt and distrust covered my eyes, before I learned to be afraid of strangers, before I learned that people could be cruel and selfish, before I began to realize that the world was a big place full of beauty and ugliness, love and hate, differing points of view that led people to sometimes kill one another, hidden motives, emotional manipulations, the idea that some people are good and others aren’t; before I even knew that there was any difference or separation between “me” and the world outside of “me”—who was I? And how did the world look to me? By pursuing my earliest possible memory, I was trying to find the pure, unspoiled place in my soul.

He was lying on his back on the sofa in the living room of a small house in a small town in Central California. It was a house for poor people, in a poor person’s neighborhood, in a town no one knows. He didn’t know he was a poor person’s child. To him, the place he was laying was just “the couch” and it was in a place that was merely “the house”.

As he lay there, he listened to the voice of Mom, who was alternately speaking to him (“you just wait right there”) and singing a gospel song:

“Low in the grave He lay, Jesus my Savior,

Waiting the coming day, Jesus my Lord!

Up from the grave He arose,

With a mighty triumph o’er His foes,

He arose a Victor from the dark domain,

And He lives forever, with His saints to reign.

He arose!

He arose!

Hallelujah! Christ arose!…”

He loved hearing Mom’s singing even though he couldn’t be sure who she was singing to. It seemed like she might be singing to him—her baby—but then it also seemed like she was singing to herself—to keep her spirits up. And she was also singing to someone whose name was either God or Jesus or Lord. As far as he could tell, when Mom sang, the whole world was filled with music. Music made everything okay. Later in life, he would be unable to remember a time when music didn’t have a profound effect on him; the effect of making him feel as though everything would be okay.

In Mom’s voice—a voice that he would later come to consider a very ordinary and commonplace sort of voice, but with the sort of genuine beauty that can only come from that which is unaware of its own beauty—the child discovered music. He would go on to make many discoveries, including the discovery that it was music that gave power to his idea of religion; that if not for the music—the singing of simple songs by ordinary voices and the songs that transformed those ordinary voices into glorious music—he would never have felt an emotional connection to religion at all. It had always been the music that had hooked him and this moment as he lay on the sofa at the center of the totality of his small universe was the first moment he became aware of his deep love of music.

The writer paused to review what he had just written. It seemed to be the true story he wanted to tell, but he was at a loss for an explanation of why this was the story. He could tell that he wanted to say something about remembering beyond normal memory, but he didn’t know how any reader would be able to see that the memory was true. He could have made it all up, in the same way that writers always make up stories to tell. In the second place, he could be telling a memory that he truly had, but that he had fooled himself into believing in exactly the same way that people fooled themselves with past-life “memories”. There was nothing to prove that the story had any truth-value at all.

There is nothing in any story to prove a truth-value except corroboration by a separate source. Apart from the rare cases where two unaffiliated writers independently tell the same story with the same details, no story ever has any proof.

To make matters worse, even some corroborated stories were obviously fictional—mere repeated myths, only repeated by different storytellers because the stories are good stories, not because they are true stories.

There would be no corroboration for this story. No one else was there: just a baby and a mother and they each experienced the same moment in their separate ways. Not even Mom could tell this story the same way. There was no way to escape the fact that the story was one person’s story. There was no way to declare it true.

Yet, this was the challenge. This was why the writer was a writer: because of the throwing-around of “truth”; because of the debates about truth; because people fought and died under the banner of truth and because of the people who were put to death because someone was so certain that untrue words were spoken and that a liar should not be allowed to live. He wrote because truth seemed vitally important to so many people and he knew that truth was important to him and still he could discover no way to “prove” any truth objectively.

He could tell truth, but he couldn’t make anyone hear it. He could make music, but he couldn’t be sure if anyone would hear music or just noise. He could sense that he was a real person living a real life in a real world and he couldn’t prove any of it.

That was a problem. If you can’t prove reality, the unreal has just as much validity as the real. If you can’t prove that what exists actually exists, hallucinations and fictions are just as valid as any real thing. This was in fact a major problem. Real things can be made to look just like lies and lies can be made to look just like real things. “True story” began to seem like an oxymoron and the writer began to feel like a fictional character in his own life, ineffectually asserting “but it was REAL!”

Is there anyone out there? Can you hear me?

Before the baby knew he was a baby, before he knew he was a he, before he knew to be afraid of the possibility that some unknown imaginary monster might be lurking under his bed or that an equally unknown-but-very-real criminal fiend might be invading his home as he slept, before he knew anything at all, he knew that he loved music and that music came from Mom. Sensing that what came from Mom might be able to come from Baby, he found his voice, opened his mouth and began to sing the old gospel tune. It wasn’t an old tune at that moment. Even if it had been sung by countless others for hundreds or thousands of years, when he sang it, it was as fresh as the breath in a baby’s lungs.

So he sang. His voice didn’t have the quality or the control of Mom’s voice, but the fact that the vibrations of the notes were coming from the inside of his own head rather than outside—that he was hearing himself sing for the first time—gave the experience a power he had never known before. Years later, he would try to write about the experience and words would fail him. He had no words for it at the time—as a baby—and as an adult, he resisted his own attempt to retroactively conjure words for it.

It couldn’t have been the first time he had ever heard music. Mom sang all the time. But as far as he could tell, it was the first time that music had come from inside of him.

He wasn’t aware of being diaper-less as he lay on the couch. It hadn’t registered on his mind (just then in the process of becoming an aware mind) that he was in the middle of a diaper change. He didn’t realize that he was peeing on himself and on the couch as he lay there discovering that he could sing. Mom brought those facts to his attention a little later, slightly after the fact.

“You’re singing!” said Mom enthusiastically as she re-entered the room where her baby awaited the installation of a fresh diaper, “and you wet all over the sofa,” she continued as her enthusiasm changed to disappointment.

That was the moment when I first noticed that there was a world outside of myself that was separate from my inner self. My inner self had just had a triumph. My outer self had just peed all over the couch and was in trouble with Mom.

This story is of course completely true. If it was fictional, I’d have made it more interesting.

He was the baby and he was the adult looking back at being a baby and he was the writer trying to tell the story that was his earliest memory, earlier than any normal sort of memory, significant because of its lack of adornment or excuse. In that moment, the mind of an infant became aware of itself, knowing itself as separate from every other thing.

Mom swatted the baby’s wet bottom lightly as a mild reproach to the unacceptable sans-diaper urination. The baby began to cry, but the crying was not because of any physical pain caused by the gentle swatting of its bottom. The baby cried because it knew that its mother was disappointed.

In that moment, I knew that sadness could interrupt the greatest triumph and that I was one thing on the inside while being an entirely other thing on the outside. For the rest of my life, I have been drawn to music and I have carried a deep sadness and shame. I’ve made every possible effort to understand how I interact with my world and I have found very little certainty about anything.

My personal history of awareness started with me noticing that I did not gain the approval of authority figures even if I happened to deeply love them. I became aware upon noticing that I could sing, but that I would also pee.

With the exception of sleeping each night, I have remained continually aware throughout the rest of my life, never really losing consciousness at any time along the way; never having the relief of blacking out as some people do from drinking too much. Oh, I’ve tried to drink too much to blot it all out, but I’ve never managed to find the comforting oblivion of passing out. I am cursed with awareness. I still sing. I have acquired skill in bladder control, at least for the time being. In some future time, I will probably go back to peeing my pants while I sing. Maybe by then, my memory won’t be as good as it now and I’ll sing enthusiastically but incoherently.

But for the time being, all of my memories are still there: strangely mixed feelings, absurd situations, experiences that don’t make enough sense, moments of profound insight and moments of excruciating boredom. It’s all still there and along with it, the desire to tell.
But can I give you the desire to hear?

Forget for a moment that I seem to be asking you to hear me. Can I spark your desire to listen to yourself and to listen to the world in such a way that you can know truth?

What will follow in this blog will be a course in meditation, philosophy and living authentically. My classroom is my life. I seek nothing more than to share what I have learned through the living of a long, strange, aware life.

I’m not a role model or a guru—in fact I find myself to be quite ordinary, so I’m fairly confident that any amazing thing that I can find inside myself can be easily found by others in the contexts of their own lives. I’m saying that anyone who is willing to honestly look is a person who can honestly see.

Lesson one has been that truth may not always be pretty, but truth is always true whether it’s easy to look at or not.

And I’ve just created a place where a writer and a reader can have open eyes, minds and hearts.

Therein, truth can be true.

Welcome.
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