October 14, 2017 (Tallahassee): Last Sunday, while Amber was at work, I took the girls to church. I think I did it for their sake and because it's free babysitting. I won't do that again, though...After the sermon, we had Communion. The thought crossed my mind as to whether I should participate. But I went …
Shedding symbologies
August 23, 2017 (Tallahassee): Experience is Reality reflected in human consciousness. Before humans, Reality was Reality, but pre-consciously reflected in pre-human cognition. Experience is the fountainhead supplying our human propensity to make myths and worlds: symbolic interpretations of experience. Experience is universal, while interpretations of it are not. If we took one mentally healthy person …
A knowing innocence
July 31, 2017 (New Orleans): Yesterday, on our 12th wedding anniversary, Amber and I attended Mass at St. Louis' Cathedral, the oldest in North America (1718). It is a beautiful building, and the service was touching. The message was about a sensitive and obedient heart being the essence of the gospel - hearing and responding …
Quarks to consciousness
June 29, 2017 (Tallahassee): Lloyd Geering writes: "The very great difference...between the emerging global world and the many traditional worlds it is undermining and threatening to supersede is that they were meaningful worlds and the global world is not, or at least not yet...All the worlds which humans had constructed prior to modernity had been …
Naked truth
May 31, 2017 (Tallahassee): Aldous Huxley: "To such [dim] minds Reality, whether material, psychic or spiritual, presents itself as it is darkened, tinged and refracted by the medium of their own individual natures. But in those who are pure in heart and poor in spirit there is no distortion of Reality, because there is no …
Led by temptation
April 9, 2017 (Nairobi): What is MEANING? What happens when a word, an event, a life, means? Meaning arises from the relation between one holonic (part-whole) unit to one or more others. And meaning is made possible by syntropy, LOVE, the cohesive force that connects things into assemblies in the first place. A word has …
Wholly fractured
April 9, 2017 (Nairobi): Everything is fractal, everything holarchical. Fractality is holarchy. Holarchy is fractality. Molecular, chemical, cellular, neural, linguistic, and social structures are fractal and holarchical. Like is drawn to like, or repels like. Like is drawn to unlike, or attracts unlike...and new, more complex arrangements emerge. Emergence is the playful, spontaneous, even flirtatious …
Saviors of the world
March 23, 2017 (Nairobi): A 'savior' of the world is anyone who can lead a group of people out of an existential cul-de-sac. People get trapped in institutional religious systems that support life at a status quo but do not favor new expressions of life. To idolize one such person, like Jesus of Nazareth, is …
Russian doll of religion
March 14, 2017 (Nairobi): In Judaism, Yahweh was the god of a single ethnic group: the Hebrews. God's promise to them was Canaan, a physical place, and their 'heaven' was to be a kingdom set up on this earth, in Israel. And their holy book was the Torah, and their holy men were Abraham, Moses, …
Human manifesto
March 13, 2017 (Nairobi): The question has come up recently as to whether I am still a Christian or not. Well, if being a 'Christian' means that I believe that: Jesus Christ was the sole and final human embodiment of God, born of a virgin, who lived divinely without sin or error of any kind, …
