Thoughts on Framing the Goals I wish to Pursue March 3rd, 2021

 

Thoughts on Framing the Goals I Wish to Pursue

Bob Bowerman

January, Year 2 of the Virus.

At age 68, having dealt with the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease for the last 7-8 years, having the wrestled my life back from the hobgoblins that had found a home inside my head, having grown dissatisfied with how I was leading my life. Realizing with or without PD, I had only limited time to achieve whatever it was that I picked to apply myself to. Looking about me and seeing disarray, disintegration, hate, anger, ignorance, being manipulated by unnamed others for agendas unknown. I came out of my hermitage and began to engage the world around me. I was tentative at first, writing more to project an image that I wasn’t, as well as a false image I still wished to become.

In thinking about what I wanted to spend my remaining time pursuing, I realized, all goals are for the most part, ego driven, this is certainly most true if the goal is fame, fortune, or power. I thought about this a lot and this was the beginning of me starting to discern the lie we were encouraged to believe in. If you really think about it, you will only have maybe 85 years of existence to work with. Assuming college or tech training, you’re say 25 yo when you begin this journey in earnest. If we use 85 years of life minus the last 5 years as consumed with elder health or mental issues encountered at the end of your life, you have 85-25-5= 55 years to pursue what ever you pursue. The unstated assumption is you know what you wish to pursue from the git-go and you pursue it effectively. You can get a lot done in 55 years.

The trouble is that’s not how most of us start out. Most of us will not have life coaches at age 12, tutors teaching to the test, getting us “the grade” through HS, mentors through colleges and sponsors through grad school. Those who were responsible for your education, may or may not have been interested in self actualization or not. Self-actualization doesn’t always pay very well. But connections do, so does special privileges—if they are invested correctly.

Most of us initially tried out lives that we were told since diapers were the way we should go. And go we did, with all the drive and ambition that youth can bring to bear. The results were mixed, in some cases sailing through life one success after another, sometimes truly making the world a better place, and sometimes merely providing an example of a life spent gathering and hoarding all things shiny.

We cannot forget, many of us stumbled coming out of the blocks; babies too soon, marriage without maturity, buying happiness with debt, never learning to love learning, walking through life with our heads lowered- the bill of our baseball caps limiting our horizon to the here and now or we held our head so high we failed to see the obvious obstacles about to entangle our walk mid stride. For those of us who fall into this category, it wasn’t until the passions of youth waned, it wasn’t until we racked up enough data points of dead-ended endeavors that even the blind could see a course left unchanged was ticket to an early grave, a life incarcerated, a life spent in anger management group meetings – a life we didn’t want. It usually took some sort of a midlife crisis to bring this realization into focus and provide the impetus to bring about change.

Mid life crises can be broadly defined as mid forties to late fifties. For me it was late fifties, I was no longer finding satisfaction in my job of buying grain and feedstuffs to make poultry feed. The futures trading aspect was losing it’s luster as computer trading and AI formulated and executed risk management programs in nanoseconds. I had spent my life as the guy at the end of the hall, with his door closed, deep in thought as he stared into his monitor. I was not a people person neither in my career or in my private life. I was not a joiner, booster, a cheerleader of anything, nor did I want to be. I was father to three wonderful kids, kids who now in their late twenties and thirties, are successfully avoiding many of the sometimes tragic pitfalls of early adulthood. A day does not go by that I don’t stand in amazement of their maturity beyond their years. A day doesn’t go by that I don’t wish I had spent more time with them than I did. There was much they could have taught me. My wife, Sue, was and continues to be the love of my life. An unwavering companion, confidant, guardian, and explainer of all things social. I love her immensely and it is that love which even while personally having experienced it, I have yet to find a way of truly putting it into words. And it is this inability that gives me certainty that Love is real. That Real Love is within our grasps. That it can be achieved, and most importantly acted upon and shared.

So, for me, I was pushing 60 when I could finally say, “it’s time”. Going back to the math, 85-5-60 = ~20 years of usable time left. Since then 8 years have passed so 20 - 8 = ~12 years, of sand is all that’s left in my hourglass. Those 8 years were not wasted, I spent a great deal of time in frank self evaluation thinking about what motivated me, why it motivated me, what pushed my alarm buttons and why did that trigger that particular reaction? What was it I wanted from relationships? Why did I need such and such feedback from others? The list of tail chasing ideologies I tried on was long, but none answered my question of what did I wish to accomplish with the rest of my life?

I still don’t have a definite answer to that, but I’m getting close.

Conclusions I have come to.

The answer to, “Does God Exist?”, largely depends on your definition of “God”. The answer in any form is largely unprovable. Humankind is probably hardwired to believe a Higher Power exists. If hardwiring is indeed fact, it neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. As our knowledge grows, our concept of God must change or our antiquated God will abandoned. Over time, man adds structure to formalize his relationship to God. This is called Religion. Religion is susceptible to forcing itself into the role of mediator between the individual and God. You don’t talk to God about your problems, you talk to the High Priest about your problems and he talks to God about your problems. Universal Access to God is scary to people who have power issues. Religion further cements it’s claim to ownership by claiming sole right in determining what is orthodox and what is not orthodoxy. The very conservatism of a Religion, its Orthodoxy, is the inert coagulum of a once vital sap.

That last sentence raises a lot of questions inside my head. It seems condemnatory, that religious movements should always remain in the early growth stage, where flexibility and willingness to entertain new ideas and constructs, is the fertilizer to rapid and sometimes rampant growth. But is that any different than a certain organism being more prone to experience higher rates of mutating? Even if nearly all mutations are fatal, does that alone determine remaining to be “forever young” should be avoided? Or does going through the stages of aging allow for a better way, because later stages while often vilified, are also the incubators of deeper thinking? This choice is not one I have been able to come to a firm conclusion on, try as I might. I keep coming back to something I feel is requisite to be true if I am to endorse it, and that is “Every person, of every culture, of every degree of understanding, of all time periods, has ongoing Universal Access to God¹”. I choke on the qualifier that what is communicated from God to us today must be plainly clear in it’s agreement with the bible (of our choosing), in the translation (of our choosing), as taught in seminaries (of our choosing) and preached from websites (of our choosing). This normally brings up the claim, I would in effect be practicing Situational Ethics, to which my reply is, “that’s what the Christians have been doing since the Ascension of the Lord.”

Footnotes and further thoughts;

₁I have struggled with the use and meaning of the word God for a long time. It has become clear to me that the word has been used by so many to name or describe such vastly different concepts, that the word is no longer useful at describing anything. I particularly choke on using the term God when referring to something that is employed to help my cow win Grand Champion, not get a speeding ticket, or for me to get a raise. That is not God, but a deity, a household or family deity. Another area is the God prayed to for vanquishing those who oppose a country or a chosen peoples destiny regardless of any moral test. This is probably just the human ego not wanting to take responsibility for immoral activity and to bolster its confidence that the action these people are about to embark on is “God ordained”. I have not wrestled with this enough to clearly explain myself, but I do not consider myself an atheist by a long shot.

Do I think God exists?

I have spent decades dancing around that question. My ego, not wanting to appear foolish, pressures me to conclude there not only is no God, in fact there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that any belief in a God is only the evolutionary brain playing tricks on us in its hard wired program to seek patterns and meaning to those patterns. While I think there is a considerable amount of truth to that statement, it is not the conclusion that I find myself holding. (I’m groping for words here) The closest I can come to putting into words what I know at some level that I can’t name it or tell if it resides in the mind or in my DNA is, that, all that is, all that was, and all that will be, -- could never be, if not for the presence of something akin to a Supra-Conscience. The Supra-Conscience is not just the human conscience writ very, very large. It is not the sum of all human beings conscience rolled up into a yet bigger conscience. Just as human ways of thinking have yet to provide the vocabulary and the mental sophistication to comprehend the 26 dimensions of Closed Unoriented Bosonic String Theory, I am in the same situation with grasping The Supra-Conscience. To think in terms of Omniscient, Omnipresent, Eternal, etc, is like to limit your thinking to Newtonian Mathematical concepts while attempting to master advanced quantum mechanics.

Whether I believe the earth was breathed into existence by a monotheistic Being or was the results of a situation on the other side of the Big Bang that we currently have no way of comprehending, no longer is a question of significance to me. It just no longer interests me. For me to feign otherwise would be a lie.

What is my understanding of the concept of Change and the concept of Evolution?

Before you can have evolution, you must have change. Although that sounds elementary, it is rarely given much thought. Whether it is a neutrino hurling from the far side of the universe and randomly severing a few molecular bonds as it speeds through the earth as if it were merely a shadow, or an imperceptible change in the energy given off by our sun, something has to change before evolution can begin. Thinking in the opposite direction; In order to not have evolution take place there can be no change. In order for nothing to change, nothing can exist or at most only one thing can exist and that one thing is most likely a vacuum.

Once change has occurred, evolution begins immediately. I think evolution is one of the most awe-inspiring phenomenon observable by humankind. Lastly, given the right environment, evolution can progress at an amazing speed. (subjects for later; gene expression regulation, epigenetics, self-determined evolution)

(continue with the covid and the variant covid, no-a-distant god, has an interest in us, evil as a necessary by-product of a predictable world (genetic errors/randomness))

On Doing the Necessary Homework

It is my conclusion the search for God and the search for Meaning by the secularist are the same journey.

‘’’’’’’

Once we take this experiential approach to meaningfulness, science – the supposed enemy of a God-given meaning of life – becomes our ally. Psychological research can help us to identify the things in life that most consistently tend to make people experience their lives as meaningful. Such psychological research has proliferated in the last few decades, and based on my own search and research by others, I recommend focusing on three things. First, invest in your relationships. Most people, when asked what makes life meaningful, spontaneously mention their family and friends. As social animals, we humans tend to experience our intimate relationships and the time we get to spend with our loved ones as highly meaningful. Second, do good to others. When we are able to feel that our contributions matter, that we have a positive impact in the lives of other people, this makes our own life feel more meaningful. Third, find ways to express and realize yourself. Think about what activities and experiences you yourself find most enjoyable, attractive, and elevating. What are the activities that feel self-chosen – something you want to do, instead of something you have to do? Then go out and do more of that.