How Things Work

First Part: My Early Experiences:

My early experiences involved my parents and me. My earliest memory was of me playing alone on the living room floor with blocks. My parents were in the kitchen or dining room. Later when I was 4 I told my mother I had 7 memories, or 8 if I included the memory of the what I was looking at right then, which was clothes on a line across the street. Later, from when I was 5 or 6, I remember having a nightmare or two, and I remember my father reading to me in the evening. I remember that my parents loved me, and that means at the least that they cared enough about me to take care of me and I felt that I could depend on them, and they liked me. How these things work: There are such things as memories, love, parents, and parents taking care of children. Where the necessities of life come from: parents give food and shelter to their children. (Where parents get food and shelter became evident much later.) These things are not true for everybody. But they are how I learned to view the world at an early age, without thinking much about the love at the time; it was just the environment I was in and I didn't know any other.

Second Part: The Wider World Of People:

For me, or for the vast majority of people, the world consists mainly of people. We care about what people do for us or to us, we care whether they like us and spend time with us, and we care how they perceive us. What a person cares about becomes the shape, or the main content, of his or her world, insofar as he or she perceives the world and interacts meaningfully with it. I've never gone hungry, and virtually never gone without shelter, but even if food and shelter were problematic, it's likely that other people would form a large part of how one obtains them.

Compared with the rest of the world, my parents' love for me seems to have been virtually unconditional. Starting at the age of 4, I began to experience problems relating to people who were not my parents, and I think most people have experiences roughly similar to mine. I often felt inferior in some way to the person I was with, and occasionally I was bullied or teased and I did not react favorably and I didn't fight back much either. I was just unhappy about it. I also had good experiences. At age 7 I acquired a best friend. And when I went to Kindergarten and first grade I had a friend or two then also. I spent a lot of time with my older brother and had a variety of experiences with him: some good and some not-so-good.

When I became a teenager I had greater difficulties with some of the boys my own age, and my adjustment involved some alienation. (Here, at first I wrote: "I became somewhat isolated for a year or two." But that's not quite true. It's more like an emotional distancing, and perhaps wasn't quite that long.) I lived at home and went to school but I vowed to stop attempting to make friends. Another major change was when I went to college and started having friends there. (That sentence too is slightly editted from what it was originally. It's hard to summarize one's own life!)

Third Part: The World Of Work:

The world of work is much related to the world of people, that is, relationships between people. But work also has competency regarding things, and some self-discipline and self-respect just about the self and the work together. I've been working part-time, such as in the summers, since I was 14, and full-time since I was a young adult. Some of the work, starting when I was 14, was occasionally hard work, (Here, at first I wrote: "such as mowing lawns in the heat, hauling hay, shoveling gravel, and long hours working on a farm.". But I didn't shovel much gravel and the really physically hard part was just some of the hay hauling.) Overall it's not hard like what poor people endure, but enough to be a significant experience. (I've also slightly changed that sentence.) I was glad when school started because then I could rest in a classroom instead of being out working on a farm. Working on the farm involved feeling incompetent or inadequate some of the time, and that was the hardest part of it. I didn't feel that way as much in school, although school, even just academic work itself, is sometimes rather onerous and difficult. Since I was about 15 or 16, September and October have been my favorite months, largely because to me they mean less hard work and less time feeling inadequate or on edge about work.

Fourth Part: The World Of All Things:

Starting at age 22, I began thinking of the physical universe. In my mid-40s I became more aware of social issues. In my late 50s (which is now) I have philosophical ideas about mortality. In between I've had some thoughts about religion and I'm developing my own unreligious spirituality.

As for the physical universe, I think of it with a rudimentary concept of evolution. I think things evolve. This means that some things tend to last longer than other things; some things reproduce or otherwise stay around a long time; and the existence of a universe such as this one is very plausible, not requiring any miracle. As for God, which is an entity many people talk about, so I might as well address it: God may evolve just as other things evolve. God may have evolved from more rudimentary things. I think that's actually what happens. As for people and societies: they evolve too.

Fifth Part: The Nature Of People:

Generally, people want to be good people, though some probably don't formulate that concept about themselves. Generally, a person will want to think of himself or herself as being "good" or competent or lovable. So why do people do bad things? Bad behavior usually comes from errors. After a while, a very-bad-behaving person gives up on himself or herself and just starts vegetating: not really fully alive, but going to work and going through life by habit.

I learned that no matter how bad an act is, there is some circumstance where I could imagine myself doing it. This is an important lesson, and I think I was beginning to learn it in early adulthood, but have gradually become more aware of it through mid-life. Once you can imagine yourself doing the bad thing, a bad behavior which you despise when you see somebody else doing it, then, as you imagine yourself capable of the same thing, you can learn to empathize a little with the bad-behaver, and realize that he or she is a person too, like oneself is a person. I'm not really good with social relationships (No, that's not quite right. It would be more accurate to say that part of my adolescence was difficult, not really because of a lack in myself, but mostly because it really was an odd or difficult situation, and I cared enough about it to make it a memory.) (remember the alienation when I was a teenager); but I can imagine a lot, and I can see that even my enemies have human feelings and have a lot in common, as human beings, with myself. (Additional note: I don't feel so empathetic all the time! What I'm saying is that in quiet philosophical moments I can understand in principle that adversaries and bad-behaving people are still persons with a common humanity with myself. This really is an important lesson and does have practical effects, but it's a gradual awakening, like personal maturity. What I'm contributing that I haven't heard elsewhere is the idea that oneself might do very bad behavior too, depending on circumstances. That is the lesson which leads to understanding.)

Sixth Part: Other Topics:

There's a little more, but I'll save that for the summary section.

Summary:

So all that is how things work. I described how a person may awaken to the world (as a child), how things come into being (what I call evolution), how spirituality and God are also part of that same elemental evolutionary process, and how people are and what we all care about (being loved or being good).

Now, supposing I'm wrong about all of it; even then, as I fall to the wayside as chaff, the universe can move on without me. I am not so big an obstacle as to mess it up much.

We yearn for something which is hard to define. A lot of us call it God. My notion about God is that God is compassionate enough to be at least reasonable with us, and sensible enough to furnish, or to not interfere much with, a rational universe. Suppose I mess up badly, such as becoming a terrible sinner. God has a way around that, or a way to integrate that, such that the universe will go on. I might be in a bad way, but it will never be so horrible that I have to have nightmares about it. God allows everyone, even the worst of us, to eventually have peace, if only by an obliterating death, and maybe better than that.

The Ultimate Thing

I've noticed there's an ultimate thing /
which is important to feeling beings such as humans.

(new stanza)
Existence? Pfah! We could do without it./
But if there is an existence, then some important things go along with it./
For everything that exists to exist, there is evolution (which I mean in an encompassing way, not just in biology). No problem. It's the best hypothesis and it satisfies./
To end suffering, there is death. Death is attainable. And, ultimately we need not fear it./
For peace and justice, there is ethics./
For joy, there is life. Every moment, there is life; the other possibility is that one is not alive, and when one is not alive, there is no moment. One may theorize that there be other moments, but such need not concern us. As for joy: life is sufficient, to make joy.

(new stanza)
All these things (not including the ultimate thing) are within our capability as feeling beings such as humans.

(new stanza)
Even order, even goodness, even being ultimately safe forever: all this, too, follows from the mere natural way of things, and if you want to know how, just look to evolution, which from nothing creates the primordial flaw in the fabric of nothingness, which is the first something, from which all else easily evolves, or alternatively doesn't create anything at all and that too suffices: no suffering, no regret, and safety forever from evil.

(new stanza)
However, there is one thing, beyond all these other things, which to feeling beings such as humans is the most important thing. It is: to be known and loved. (You may call that two things, but to me they go together as one.) To be known and loved, or to put it another way, to be fully known and fully loved: this eludes our grasp as humans. So now I say this in 5+7+5 beats:

(new stanza)
What we want from God:/
No act. No home. This only:/
To be known and loved.

// -jrl

Spirits

Today I think like this: The spirit of the cats is waking me up. Then, for later: This is the spirit of waking up. Then, when I wash a dish, I can think: This is the spirit of washing this dish.

On Saturday I wrote a post that had something about spirits in it. But even on Friday I had another thought about a spirit. A coworker was talking to me, and I was happy to hear him talk about work, because he had the same workman-like manner that my father had. One of the ways I perceived my father was his way of working and talking about work. So on Friday I was thinking: This is the spirit of work which is like my father James.

This morning I went on to think of many other "spirits": The spirit of handling money responsibly, the spirit of being on time, and so on. Even the spirit of expressing myself, which is like writing here.

One day in class Alfredo told us that when he felt low (but had to get going anyway) he thought of himself as a bug, and then later when he was feeling a little better he was a mouse, then successively higher animals until he was a human. So now for myself, since I find a lot of things difficult because they are so many or so voluminous, instead of "washing dishes" I can think "washing this dish".

The Overture

What's Important

(What matters)

(What I care about)

(What's God all about)

(What's life all about -- what's the universe all about)

(What's left after death? -- what goes on and on, even after everything else stops, and after we die -- insofar as anything might go on and on, or insofar as any of it matters?)

 ... whitespace, or drumroll, and the curtain rises ...
 

 

What's Important

Thought number 1: being a good person

In the beginning of these thoughts, which for me may have been (in vague form) when I was about 3 to 6 years old, what's important was partly about identity, partly about being loved (or, perhaps, being taken care of), and partly about being nice. Being nice is similar to the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you, thoughtfully applied. Being nice, as I understood it, is probably a little different from the golden rule, but I don't know how to describe the difference.

For many millions of people, something else may be more important. For example, if they're starving, then they may be more interested in physical survival, but I've been lucky enough that I've never felt desperate about that.

I mentioned identity. Identity, as I have absorbed the notion since I was 4 or 5, all the way up to the present (I'm 58) usually has to do with the worth of the self as an individual. This form of identity is not the noblest, but it is natural in the society I grew up in. I tend to feel good or bad as I feel that my worth is good or bad. Believing I am a good person or not so good (nice or not, honorable or not), being either competent or incompetent, being gender-differentiated (that is, male or female, or having some kind of sexual identity), and accomplishing things, are probably the main parts of my identity. I mean, aside from relationships with other people.

A nobler form of identity, I suppose, would be a group identity or a spiritual connection with a god or with a great spirit.

"Spirit" and "spiritual" can mean "non-physical" and can mean "emotional". In this context, "emotional" is not just base, simple emotions but can include subtle or deep forms of satisfaction from being in the right endeavor for a long time, or whatever high form of existence one can appreciate. For me, "emotional" is usually an easier word to understand than "spiritual", and the way I use it, it means roughly the same thing. More simplistically, spiritual merely means anything beyond physical objects.

My concepts of what's important are partly a product of my heritage and environment.

I mentioned "being loved". My hard-working parents (now deceased) were "loving". What does that mean? I mean to say that they cared about us kids and tried to be good to us. Their good qualities are important to me now. I dare say, their good qualities or good acts may eventually become more important than the persons themselves.)

What came next

As I was growing up, there was church, in which heaven, hell, and God were mentioned. These were presented as very important things. For me they never fit together quite right. Either I didn't understand them, or they really weren't quite right. So finally, when I was 22 or 23, and in a transition part of my life anyway, I made an attempt to sort out for myself what I think is really important to me.

My attempt to think deeply may have been feeble or even poorly organized. In the end, maybe it doesn't matter whether it was very good thinking or not. It was and is plausible to me, and perhaps that's enough. Anyhow, to be organized about it, first I thought of the topic "what's important to me?" and then, as a way to be organized in my thinking, I began with the concept of a nothingness, which I call the Void.

I'm earnest about that Void. When I think of the Void, I am imagining a scenario. I imagine the scenario in which the entire universe: people, worlds, god or gods, atoms, and all, never existed and never will exist -- there would only be nothingness everywhere for all time. In my imagination, I can insert things into the Void and consider them, one at a time, without distractions, because there's nothing else in the Void at the time I am thinking about the thing.

Then I made a couple of further steps in my thinking:

I decided that the Void was Not Bad. It's Not Bad because there's nothing in it to be bad about.

Then I put a blob into the Void. (That is to say, I imagined that there was a blob in the Void.) The blob is a non-nothingness, and that's all it is. Whatever minimum quality it takes to be not nothing, that's what the blob is.

So far, so good. After this, the thinking begins to get fuzzier, because how would I choose what to think about next?

I've already mentioned "Not Bad", which is already a fuzzy concept. I had begun thinking about Good and Bad. I may have been influenced to think about them, because they had been mentioned in church (as Good and Evil, or God and the Devil, or righteousness and sinning). Church was supposedly important, and I wanted to think important thoughts, so there you go.

After putting a blob into the Void, I asked myself: Is this blob good or bad? Now you could say it's good, or you could say it's bad. I think that may be arbitrary; one might explain it either way. I was able to decide for myself that it's good. I'll explain that soon, after the next several short paragraphs, which are digressions.

Simply speaking, the Void is a nothingness, which has nothing in it to be good or bad about.

I also think about the Void as analogous to death.

Also, the blob is analogous to the entire Universe, including life and including God. (That's explained in the next paragraph.)

For me, it's quite simple to imagine that one blob evolving into the entire Universe, including life and including God. To me that seems plausible, though some people may not see it that way.

Even more elementally, for me it is at least as plausible that there _would_ be a speck of dirt, or a blob, as that there wouldn't be.

For me the blob (being the only non-nothing entity in the Void) is analogous to life. Life is something; death is the entrance to nothingness. We almost always prefer life over death. We prefer somethingness over complete nothingness. So I imagine the blob, being somethingness, is good, or at least neutral, rather than bad.

One eventually escapes suffering, by dying. So that's another point that tends to make me think that both the blob and the Void might be good or neutral, not bad. Everlasting suffering would be bad.

If the blob (and/or the Void) is "bad", then, since there are no distracting other influences in this primordial universe, all I have to do is redefine "good" and "bad" such that this situation is defined as "good" and its opposite is defined as "bad".

Additionally (but less philosophically and more fuzzily), I feel that God wouldn't be bad. If you want to leave God out of this discussion, just ignore this paragraph.

That's pretty much it. After thinking in this way, I decided for myself that The All Is Not Bad, which is now my creed or the basic thing that I believe.

Thought Number 2: The All Is Not Bad

"The All Is Not Bad" means that the sum total of the universe, including God if God exists, has a net value which is not bad.

Being said in such simple words, it probably doesn't sound smart. Even if it's neither smart nor correct, what it means is I have a very simple foundation for my belief system. I tried to reason it out, and to me the result seems at least as plausible as the alternatives I've seen. Some of the choices for what to think about are arbitrary.

If there's a supreme God, I believe It would allow this kind of belief system, without punishing it.

If the all-powerful supreme being is bad, then all bets are off. How would we behave in that situation? Our behavior might be governed by fear rather than by morals. But I really don't think that's how the universe works, and not how a supreme being works either. An earthly, human king might behave in a bad way, but a supreme being, God, would not behave in a bad way.

Morality, and Church

When I say "The All Is Not Bad", one of the things I am thinking about (but contrarily) is the concept of hell that I heard about in church when I was small. What I heard, or absorbed because I thought I heard it, is that if you're imperfect and don't ask God for forgiveness all the time and don't ask Jesus to be your personal savior, then you (along with the vast majority of people) will probably go to hell which is an everlasting torment for individuals, usually described as being burned in a fire, which is horrible enough to think about, but this is worse because it lasts forever, which is a really important word, so I'll say it again: FOREVER. That means, no escape. Ever. If that's not bad enough to curl your hair, I don't know what is. (Yet why aren't more people acting scared? Do they _really_ believe it?) I've concluded that God is not like that. Rather than a universe with an all-powerful God who punishes most individuals forever for bad things they did, or good things they failed to do, in a finite lifespan, I believe, oppositely, that there is a universe which is Not Bad, in net value.

Now, some people think that if one discards or rejects some part of the religious canon, such as the party-line version of Hell, then one's whole morality will go to pot. I think that an opposite statement would be closer to the truth. There are many thoughtful, ethical, moral people who are not just moral for the reason that they fear Hell (which they may or may not); rather, they are moral because they really think morally or ethically and they care about their fellow creatures, and _not_ because they think there's some reward or punishment that they're going to get if they behave in a certain way. And (in the opposite group) there are many people, who claim to be religious in some conventional way, who do horrible things in the world (or more commonly, support those who do horrible things in the world, or fail to be against that) and don't seem to have a clue about what's wrong about it. This happens now, but is easier to see if one looks back over history and sees when it happened in past centuries.

"The All Is Not Bad", and "Morality"

Contrary to that notion that one's whole morality will go to pot: There is not any contradiction between "The All Is Not Bad" and morality.

Thought Number 3

Thought number 1, for me, was the concept of "nice" or the golden rule, and other concepts I grew up with such as identity. Thought number 2 was The All Is Not Bad. (I also think that the Nonbadness of the All tends to distribute among its parts; however, I feel less sure about that than I do these other things.) Thought number 3 is something that I've vaguely recognized most of my adult life, but I was thinking a little more about it this morning. One way to say it is: interpersonal relationships are the big important thing of our lives.

This morning I was thinking: we die, and would like to somehow be something beyond just this little finite life-span, but even if we were to live forever, it still wouldn't be enough, without love, which is to say, interpersonal relationships, approximately. And, further, I was thinking this morning that the thing to do is to build a spirit which is somehow worthwhile. This spirit (somewhat similar to the Christian ideal, but probably without the religion) is characterized by loving people and, presumably, giving to them.

Living a long time is insignificant; and living well, with kindness or love or a good spirit, is significant.

Being an individual is relatively insignificant, but the good spirit is significant. Recall what I said above about my deceased parents: Their good qualities are important to me now, and may eventually become more important than the persons themselves.

By the way, spirits can be shared among physical bodies. (In "The Heaven It Expects To See" I described spirits as the main things and bodies as the less-significant things. Of course this idea has already been expressed by others, in Christianity for example.)

The individual human's physical death is actually insignificant, although of course we cannot help caring about it. We care about it because we have this physical life that we function in.

Tonight I phrase Thoughts 1, 2, and 3 like this:
1. Be a good person.
2. The All Is Not Bad.
3. Build a good spirit.

The End

But if the universe ceases to exist, what then?

You live. Then you die. But that's ok, because what you really identify with is something bigger than your individual life, and that bigger thing continues on.

That bigger thing dies. But that's ok, because your god will provide whatever you need, or whatever your soul needs.

Your god turns out to be evil. But that's ok, because the universe, of which the god is only a part, is benign. The essential needs of your soul will be met. We're talking bare essentials, here. But that's ok.

The universe ceases to exist. < sigh > But that's ok, because what happened (the love and the beauty) still did happen.

The love and the beauty: It happened one moment. Prior moments anticipated it. Later moments remembered it. But if it were not anticipated, even so it still happened. And if it were not remembered, even so it still happened.

Even if it's not anticipated nor remembered, it still has its own value. Once it has happened, no-one and nothing can ever take that away.

So when, or if, the universe ceases to exist, the valuable moment that happened still has its value. Memory has a value but it's not the only value. Memory is not required, for a thing to be valuable. Anticipation has a value but it's not the only value. Anticipation is not required, for a thing to be valuable. Even the continued existence of the universe is not required, for the thing to be valuable.

I got this notion from something my late father once said to me; although he may have meant something else, and might disapprove of this post. As I recall, what he said was, "If it were to all end tomorrow, it would have been worth it." After hearing that, later I have imagined this: "If the universe were to cease to exist, the time of love and beauty that happened still retains its value and was worthwhile."

-by jrl, 2012/January/21st, 10:30pm

Leaf

Death is okay, or would be okay, if we understood better.

We can be part of something bigger.

We are like leaves on a tree. To a human looking at leaves on a tree, it seems quite natural that in the autumn the leaves turn color and fall to the ground. People come from hundreds of miles away to places like Vermont just to see this beautiful sight. This beauty of autumn is death to the individual leaves.

Leafdom is good, but in a way treedom is better.

When I die someday, I'll be like a leaf on a tree. If I'm focused on the tree, and feel as part of the tree instead of as an individual leaf, I won't have to regret dying. Actually I'll be just shaking like a leaf, more likely, but I'm just saying that individual dying doesn't have to be so bad a thing if we understood the situation better. After shaking in fear for a while, I'll eventually die and be still, which in a way is better than shaking anyway, and death takes me there to stillness even if I fail to do it otherwise. Good things happen even if I fail as an individual.

So I thought, for a few years, but today I had an additional thought: Today it finally occurred to me to ponder what is a tree leaf thinking about all this?

One leaf, named Henry, had an old friend, Arnold, who was changing color and getting ready to fall, which is to die. Henry was sad about it and not really agreeing with the idea that Arnold would ever die. When the day finally came, Arnold dropped away. With a great cry of anguish, Henry yelled, "Hold on Arnold! I'm coming!" And with a great effort, Henry detached himself from his stem-base and launched himself into the air, and went flying after Arnold. Arnold wasn't paying much attention to Henry. Arnold was just going about his business, which at the moment was to drift slowly to the ground.

Arnold came to rest on the ground. Henry, by contortions and contractions, came down as fast as he could, and landed right next to Arnold, and immediately began performing leaf-to-leaf resucitation on Arnold. After a little while of this, Arnold woke up, or was revived, and looked up at Henry, a little crossly, and said, "What are you doing?" Henry, breathless, shouted, "I've saved you! You're alive!" But Arnold, annoyed, said, "What for? What now? Look at us! Look up at the tree! What shall we do now?"

Henry gazed upward, at the tree branches far above, from whence they came. No way would they ever get back up there, unless a tornado happened along and they were both extremely lucky. He looked around but the weather was nice and it didn't look like any tornado would be along for a long time.

Arnold was too wise to stay annoyed for long. He explained: "Henry! It's natural for me to come to the ground at this time. It's what I was meant to do! The forest needs me to fertilize the next generation of trees. The very tree we came from" -- here he gazed upward reverently -- "has to shed leaves as part of its seasonal cycle. If we all stuck to it forever, the tree would suffocate and die. Moreover" -- and here he got a very thoughtful look -- "if we could stay green forever and autumn never came, we and everybody around us would get so bored that we'd be better off dead. Let the new generations grow! Let the world exhale and inhale, expire and inspire! Love the new baby leaves. That's what life is about. The new baby leaves are the spirit of the world -- they have boundless joy. I serve them by settling into the earth this way. If I insisted on staying up there on the tree, I'd only be impeding the inspiration and joy that is to come."

Arnold peered closely at Henry, who was at least quiet now, though still grieving. Arnold said, "You can grieve for me the individual leaf; that's okay, though not ultimately necessary. But now that you're down here with me, savor the ground! Love the environment now, and the role we have now in it! This is what we are meant for now, just as surely as in the earlier time we were meant to be green."

by jrl, 2012/January/17th, 7pm