The Power of Now and Then

One dimension of a meaningful life is purpose. But another might be called something like… intrinsic significance.

Intrinsically significant experiences are those that you find worth remembering because of their sheer goodness and joy. Looked at from the perspective of intrinsic significance, really living is about the process of how it feels to make good memories.

There is a depth and mystery to these memories and to the process. It’s a form of significance that seems to point not beyond itself but down deeper into itself, further down than you can peer.

I posted a related poem several months ago.


As Time Allows – My illness is progressive and bedridden time has risen; I’m no longer able to reply to most comments and emails. I do read everything I get and sometimes this gives me ideas for posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Original Faith – the Book, the Life, the Very Notable Endorsement...

Has anyone noticed my famous book-endorser?

Her endorsement went up on a page of this website a few months ago. Tess at The Bold Life just referenced it in an interview with me.

“There are already plenty of books out there fighting the war over belief in God. For me, it feels more constructive to try to help focus attention on things that unite us.”

Me, quoting, uh, myself – from Tess’s interview…

ALSO

Anything you're under-appreciating? That's the topic of my guest post at Porsidan.


As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up, so I need to focus on writing posts. But I read everything I get and sometimes take direction for my posts from comments and emails. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

God’s Grandeur, Duct Tape on My Nose, and the Supernatural

(More in the mood for music than poetry or duct tape? Please see my guest post at Porsidan.)

God's Grandeur
By G.M. Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins was a monk writing in the late 19th century. A few phrases/words need explanation: “reck” meant obey, “foil” meant sword, "trade" meant commerce, and “the ooze of oil crushed” seems to refer to the appearance of oil after being pressed from grapes or olives, I forget which.

I love how thick with sound the poem is. The music of language, with no need for accompaniment by bells, whistles, or percussion instruments, is largely missing from poetry today.

Hopkins died in his forties - early forties, as I recall. His dying request to his best friend was to destroy his writings. Hopkins felt that he had sinned by celebrating nature too much - that his focus on creation must have displeased the Creator.

Duct Tape on My Nose
By P.M. Martin

I wonder about God as Other. If existence can be divided into Creator and creation - or, for that matter, any divine entity or energy on the one hand and less sacred stuff (like duct tape) on the other - don't both still share in that all-important matter of BEING? Aren't they part of the same process?

It seems to me that the relationship between a Creator that IS and the creation that the Creator caused TO BE would be pretty tight...

I know the two are often distinguished as supernatural vs. natural, but when I anyone says "supernatural" I just hear "What does that mean?" Do we already know all the laws and bylaws of nature? The full text? With footnotes? If something happens how do we know it's not natural?

Because it's amazing? I don't know... to me a snail is amazing.

Because it happens very rarely? So then, when that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit the earth, that was supernatural? Or how 'bout this: "If there were less duct tape on my nose I could smile more."

I bet nobody's typed out that sentence before. So then... have you just witnessed a supernatural miracle? (Clarification: there is no duct tape on my nose although my house is pretty much held together by duct tape...)

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up, so I need to focus on writing posts. But I read everything I get and sometimes take direction for my posts from comments and emails. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Loving It for What It Is

Just noticed Jay at Porsidan has my guest post up. This was a fun piece to write, thanks for having me Jay.

Spirituality and LOA - The Law of Aliens

First, Old-School LOA…

Positive thinking is always a plus – and for people who habitually engage in self-defeating thought patterns, learning to think positively can be truly transformative. However, the “Law of Attraction” and similar approaches that I’ve noticed online view negative thinking as the cause of any kind of difficulty that anyone faces in life. If bad stuff happens to you, it’s because your negative thinking attracted it.

Proponents insist. Does the individual suffering dire misfortune appear mentally sound? Well then, the negative thinking must be unconscious. Did the person recently ace a series of personality tests and clinical psychological evaluations? Then the negative thinking was somehow missed or it occurred in a past life.

LOA Breakthrough: The Law of Aliens

The law of aliens states that if bad stuff happens to you it’s because of aliens. Not a trace of trouble-making aliens in this solar system? Then they must exist in another one. Turns out that we’re alone in the universe? Then the aliens are from a different universe.

Which LOA do you believe in?

###

Lisa at Mommy Mystic has me as a guest. She puts a lot of attention on the last couple chapters of Original Faith, which I found hardest to find language for -- Thanks, Lisa!

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up by a couple hours over recent months, so I need to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and sometimes take direction for upcoming posts from comments and emails. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Spirituality Beyond Personal Happiness

Lisa at Mommy Mystic has me as a guest. She puts a lot of attention on the last couple chapters of Original Faith, which I found hardest to find language for --

Thanks, Lisa!

Personal Immortality – Are You Sure You Want That?

Every moment of your life as you’ve known it has been highly dynamic, a process of change – your experience of a psycho-biological arc of maturing and aging. Throughout, there have been major cumulative changes not only in your biology and inner life, but also your potentiality.

Think, for example, of who you are now and who you were at five. Even as you became the person you’ve become, other possibilities for life have closed down in the wake of that path. For example, whatever training and education you’ve received and whatever you’re doing for work now, you had the potential for many more options when you were born.

Eternity Sounds Really Long…

Would immortality be the extension through all time of your life as it happens to be right now? As it was at age five? Twenty-five? Forty? Is it possible that eternal life-extension isn’t necessarily the best thing that could happen to you? Would you get bored, LOL? I mean, forever – that’s a really long time! Nobody’s even lived a thousand years. Our species has only been around for two hundred thousand years.

And while personal immortality as a kind of reunion with friends and family sounds good to me too, I have to wonder… Much as I loved, say, my Uncle Bob’s goofy sense of humor, would I feel the same after fifty million years?

And if you try to picture doing things with friends and family in a literal end-time - after time ended - what does that mean? Human thought, language, activity, and life are so time-bound that heaven as a glorified version of life as we know it minus the passage of time sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Does Anyone Know Exactly What They're Talking About?

I once read – as I recall it was in a discussion of Hinduism – that what people really want are infinite knowledge, infinite joy, and infinite being. That sounded good to me! Yet it also sounds bigger than me. Inclusive of me, but bigger. And stated in a much less precise way than “Someday you’ll be reunited with your deceased loved ones and enjoy their company again, but this time forever and in perfect health.”

Precise and wonderful as that sounds, not only do I have trouble picturing what an eternity with my loved ones would look like and uncertainty as to whether it’s what I’d really want; I don’t have confidence that it’s realistic or possible. It only takes a little struggle with Einstein’s concepts to realize that your common-sense impressions of what time is are far from the whole story.

What if you don't know enough to know exactly how you want life to turn out?

As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. My illness is progressive and bedridden time has gone up by a couple hours over recent months, so I need to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and at times take direction from comments and emails for upcoming posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.

Death and Spirituality: If death isn't a problem then what about...

Sorry for the inconvenience - I've enabled comments moderator, steady spam for three days.

To simplify, you might say that last post I asked,

“So, does death bother you?”

And that about half of you said “Not a problem!” with the other half saying, “Very deeply...”

“Why do they have to take away the people you love?”

Maria, Grade Three

“Yeah…why can’t it just be your toys or something?”

Karina, Grade Two

-- Two sisters, on the death of their grandmother.

Excerpted from Original Faith: What Your Life Is Trying to Tell You

The work that I did counseling children who were grieving the loss of parents, grandparents, siblings, and sometimes pets leads me to think that most of you who don’t see mortality as a problem didn’t always feel that way. Can you give an idea of the process of how it stopped being a problem?

Power of Nowers

If your answer is a version of learning to live in the moment, I wonder if this is the complete answer...

While being in the moment is possible and desirable in many ways, it’s not a hundred percent for anyone. As an analogy, a quarterback won’t have the ticking clock at the front of his mind while he’s playing – but it’s in the back of his mind. He knows the end of the fourth quarter’s coming. People who practice living in the moment as much as possible still know that death is coming.

Knowers

To those who believe they know that we’re immortal, it seems to me that it’s important to notice that near-death experiences are near death, not death. That’s a really big difference.

Near-death experiences, like every experience that anyone has lived to tell, occur while a person is still very much alive and possesses a biologically intact brain. Almost dead is alive, not dead. Having a profound experience when you’re almost dead or at any other time doesn’t indicate that you can experience anything like it – or anything at all – once your brain has stopped functioning.

Every experience we have occurs while we have a living brain; therefore no one can know that any experience is possible without one.

Contrasting emotional tones?

I seem to notice two emotional tones for those to whom death isn’t a problem. Some of you sound perfectly OK with it - with your existential good cheer perfectly intact, so to speak. It sounds like mortality just hasn't been that big an issue for you. Others sound more like you may have pondered mortality and come to a philosophical perspective on it - like Tennyson in "In Memoriam" (“a sadder and a wiser man”) or the sober but appreciative author of Ecclesiastes who advocates enjoying life’s best and simple pleasures to the utmost because tomorrow we die.

Up next: If death IS a problem to you, how confident are you that personal immortality is the solution?


As Time Allows – I’m no longer able to reply to every comment and email I receive. Disease progression with more bedridden time means having to focus on getting posts done. But I read everything I get, and at times take direction from comments and emails for upcoming posts. So please keep them coming and I’ll reply as time allows.