A tribute to my father, Lloyd D. Bowerman, who would have been 102 years old today, July 12th, 2024

 Sunday Meditation, June 27th, Ano dos

Thoughts, meditations, and meanderings of the mind

over the last few days.

Bobb

Sometimes I wonder where to start when I do a recap and think of how the week has gone and what has rolled around in my mind. There were a few things that I hit last week that I want to expand on but I'm not sure how to do that.  As I look over what I've written over the years I see recurring themes of continuing to try to improve relationships by having patience with those whom we have no patience with. Studying ourselves, trying to become self aware of what we really are, not what our ego wants us to perceive ourselves to be. Then we came to “community''. Everybody talks “community'' today but if we had community like they had in the old days we would feel smothered. We have an unprecedented amount of individualism, individual freedom, individual choice and we're not going to give that up. But that comes with a price because it is only when you can have deep community and deep friendships that you can really do some of the heavy lifting in being truly human to your fullest capacity.

  

The time that I live in, the time that I will die in, is a time where religion/spirituality is falling away, probably never to return to the role that it had and that is not a bad thing.  The secularization of our thinking, the secularization of our values, the loss of the Holy, the loss of a belief in higher powers, puts humankind  at risk of basing all decisions on humanistic/economic factors. You will be valued by what you contribute not by what you are or what you do, but by what you contribute and what you pull out of the system as a cost to society. As I say, “When your green line falls below your red line, it may be time for you to leave”.  I vacillate between being optimistic on humankind's future and falling into utter despair. You will see this in my writings.

Genome editing is becoming or has become, a technological/economic reality and it will grow by leaps and bounds and it will have a bigger impact on us than anything the Industrial Revolution brought to bear. There is a huge amount of power in self-directed evolution that is falling into our hands and how we deal with that will say a lot about how we will exist in the future. We will be able to edit out diseases and risk of diseases, it's a matter of time, not possibility. We will be able to edit in intelligence, courage, wisdom, vitality, insight and if you listen to some, just about anything that has ever been seen in humans because of the belief that everything we are is written into our genes and therefore open to edit. There are days and they're becoming more and more common for me, when I feel that statement has a fair amount of Truth in it. And it concerns me, as gene editing is such a powerful tool that it is like a six-year-old kid picking up and waving around a loaded machine gun. I seriously question whether we have the wisdom to do the better thing for all, rather than the most lucrative thing for the few.  Time will tell. Gene editing will be a subject I'm going to come back to a number of times. As I said, it is the biggest thing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and we don't have a clue how to deal with it.

Starting off the week I spent a lot of time thinking about what I have written earlier concerning friendship, having a soul mate, and whether I was getting my message out in a way that was clearly understood.  Whether you agreed with it or not, I was more interested in whether you understood where I was on the subject, and if you disagreed, I'm fine with that. Soul mate is the word that new age people have taken over, it's gotten sappy, a lot of people have made a lot of money writing books about it and doing seminars, and that makes it difficult to have a serious conversation about it.

“Why people do what people do”, was my reply to the admissions administrator at Elizabethtown College when she asked me what question in my life did I hope to answer if I graduated from Elizabethtown.

On the Myers-Briggs grid I am an Introverted Intuitive Thinking Perceptive person (INTP). I scored unhealthily high in the introverted intuitive. Actually, when I took the test I was so extreme the test admin pulled me aside and had a private discussion with me concerning that very issue. I'm also thinking/perceptive, I scored unusually high in those two aspects also. “I am not extroverted” - is an understatement. Face-to-face social gatherings involving small talk and social bonding rituals are for the most part a major energy short for my social battery and can leave me totally drained at the end of the encounter.  For the Enneagram, I orient from a five with a four wing.   I have spent some time in some very unhealthy levels on the Enneagram. Throw that in the pot, plus you can add experiencing Chronic Early Childhood Trauma, and you have a very interesting personality walking around. 

The early childhood trauma was not sexual. It was an accident where I pulled a deep fryer full of 400F grease down on me and I spent a lot of time in the hospital and a lot of time experiencing inflicted pain as scar tissue was scrapped and cleansed by medical staff who cared very much for me. I was too young to understand that. All I knew was that people could be around you laughing, reading you stories and sneaking you cookies and the next minute strapping you into a restraint harness and scraping newly regrown nerves and skin tissue as they cleansed and rebandaged me.  It takes very few trips to get new bandages before you become hypervigilant and don’t trust anybody.  That type of thinking contributed heavily to me going through most of my life perfectly happy with enough friends I could count them on two hands with all of my fingers shot off. I lived the solitary life and I was actually thought I was quite happy with it as it gave me a lot of time to think and that was a good thing as I like to spend a lot of time deep in thought on subjects that interest me. I think that would have been true even if I hadn't gotten burned. It wasn't until later in life, in my fifties, mid fifties maybe, that I began to sense that I was in need of something that I couldn't put a handle to. I completely distrusted my emotions, being of the opinion they were an evolutionary deadend and the sooner humankind shed them the better. It’s difficult for me to comprehend having people close enough to you that you could share your darkest secrets, because as a thinker I have some pretty dark thoughts. In my mid-60s my mental health was deteriorating to the point that I sensed I needed to get some therapy, somebody to talk with or I was going to be in deep trouble and in just a few more years probably be  suicidal. I did therapy. I committed very strongly to it. It helped immensely and I changed the trajectory of my life significantly.   So that's what's behind where I come from when I talk about friendship.  I'll get back to this in a minute but first I want to discuss my interest in spiritual issues and beliefs.

I can never remember not being drawn to spiritual things. No, I’m not talking about a child's fear of an OT God, with his long boney fingers hovering over The Smite Button. I've always wondered about what was beyond what we can see, feel and sense with the body that we have.Even as a small child I had a strong sense that “something” was just beyond my vision, my hearing and touch.   I felt that those who think that there is nothing higher in intelligence than the human being haven't really given that a lot of thought considering how big the universe is. There's plenty of room out there for other intelligences and there's been enough time that most of them could probably be much higher than we are so I will not be too surprised if we ever come across other beings inhabiting the universe as we know it. This makes believing that a God could exist isn't too hard for me, although I am tired of using the word God as it is so overused it has lost any meaning at all. I am more in the area of thought that God is for all practical purposes unknowable, our little 3 or 4 lb brain just isn't big enough to comprehend what this being would be like.  I spent most of my life giving this a lot of thought and it’s very much like putting steel on an anvil and hammering out a knife blade - you heat and now hammer hammer hammer, than you put it back in the furnace and burn off the dross and you repeat this time after time after time and eventually you have worked out where you were at in your spiritual beliefs at least that's the route I took. And that’s what one  would expect if you give it some thought. However, in following my curiosity, I ended up with beliefs that are not in good correlation with what I thought I was starting out in search of...

 

This does not put me in strong opposition to the beliefs as stated in the Christian Bible as one would think. I just think that we have fallen into the error of thinking too small in our interpretation of what is stated there, far too small. It's the message behind the story behind the story that we must pursue, as it is revealed only for the level of comprehension available to the people at the time that it was shown to us. I am fascinated by the science that explains the world to us and I do not find that in opposition with the belief in the spiritual Realm . It just means that how we believe must be constantly reviewed and refined as science reveals more and more of the workings of the world that is beyond the world of sight. Most religious people and religious leaders of all of the world's faiths have an incredibly hard time coming forth and saying “oops we just got this one wrong big time”, much less so with those who are labeled religious mystics, as mystics are on a lifetime journey of Discovery, not the Maintenance of the status quo. And this has given the world a long history of religion as the basis of actions that have included genocide, murder, rape, and ecological devastation. I think when religions come to the point where they can admit and adjust as our understanding of the finer points of how the world works become evident, the outlook for mankind looks much better.

Having said all that, and circling back to the subject matter of friendship between humans I find it interesting that as science-based as I am, I think the ultimate issue is love with a capital L. I think the love I'm just discussing is like God himself or herself, is beyond comprehension of the human mind. It is, as I have stated previously, not the gooey sappy version writ large, but is deep, impenetrably deep and we can only get a hint of its immensity. As I’m prone to say, “ all is science, all is science, except the Ultimate Reality which is Love and can only be understood as Love.”  The mystics understand this.

  

And this my dear reader, finally brings us around to my favorite Irish mystic, John O'Donohue. He has had a huge influence on me. I sense that he and I both sense and perceive the world, and the world of ideas, along similar lines. Here is his poem,The Blessing;

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the grey window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colours,

indigo, red, green,

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the currach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean be yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

You read that poem very carefully, I want you to see the clay, I want you to feel the stumbling, I want you to see the colors -Indigo ,red, green, and Azure blue, coming into focus before you. I want you to see in detail what your currach looks like. You need to be able to visualize the yellow moonlight walking across the waters, the slow winds working their way through your heart.

It is the works of John o'donohoe and those like him that give us a glimpse of what science can never show us about ourselves. It is the next level of being. It is unfortunate but I find science in opposition to this type of thinking and I think that is unfortunate because while we can build upon science, at some point we need to consider what we become if there is no John O’Donohue’s in our lives. 

(paused for now)