Free ticket to hell

** I have to go to Boston. I'm allergic to Boston. Because of its chaotic layout, noise and bad memories, there are only three or four people I'd actually try to connect with if I were forced to go there. One of them is George Kay, the intellectual dentist, inventor, world traveler and general bon vivant with whom I have spent many actually enjoyable hours when I lived there. (Also thousands of dollars and some pain.) It's choosing to let George do it that promises to make my Bosto-phobia all worthwhile.

And all because I have a free ticket on United.

How I came to have a free ticket on United is for another story, another time. Upshot for this entry is that I am betting this ticket on the skin of my teeth. Translation: there's a chance that George can resolve a dental issue that could cost me thousands if done in CA. I can also use the time between my Thursday appointment and my Tuesday departure to connect with that handful of people. But more deliciously, to hang out with my favorite daughter, Clare, who lives in Maine, a pleasant "Downeaster" train ride away.

So I've booked the redeye out of SFO, flight 180 scheduled to depart 11:50PM, arriving at 8:22 the next morning - non stop 5-hr trip. I hate cross country flights - and all airline travel actually – because of the security circus everywhere, the stockyard ambiance and the financial crises that have forced the carriers to downgrade the whole experience and openly not give a shit. But I've been blessed with an iPod that allows me to listen to audio books, and I had a couple that have engrossed me of late ("Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country" by William Gibson). So in meticulous preparation for the ordeal I had loaded up the iPod with the books, made disc copies of the files, added some chatter-blocker white noise in case the crying baby (inevitable when I'm traveling) gets too distracting and I want to sleep.

13E was the seat assigned to me - a middle seat. The worst for a 5-hr night flight. So I decide to get to the airport waaay early - like around 8:15 – so I could get the seat changed. I even put in for a first class upgrade, using miles, in case coach was full.

Well, they don't allow seat changes until one hour before the flight. OK, I'll just go have a drink and call Dick to see how's he's recovering from his shoulder surgery. Did that. Got back to the departure lounge and pulled out the iPod to listen to the five hours I have left on "Pattern Recognition."

And that's when I realize I am in some kind of Kafka-MarxBrothers movie.

Clicking on "AudioBooks" on the iPod got me a completely blank screen. In fact, none of my music was there either, including the chatter-blocker. What the hell? After countless retries, reinstallations, re-syncings, re-everythings trying to get my life-saving audio back I place a call to audible.com. Kafka replies: "we're not going to help you because we're not open. "

I lose it. Call Joan to spoil her evening with a rant whose expletive-laced outbursts must be louder than I think because I notice several people in the lounge looking at me - some with sympathetic expressions, others with "oh crap, crazy man on board" looks.

Ticket agents appear at the desk. I'm first in line - my rant post. One tells me there are absolutely no aisle or window seats. Furthermore, they've changed the equipment and this plane is smaller than the one originally scheduled so now everything is oversubscribed. Nope, nothing in first class either - they're overbooked there by two and everyone has checked in.

I go back to my seat and fume silently for the next half hour. Boarding - last group of course. Plane jammed. Ahead of me is a family of 5. Two restless chattering little girls and a 7- or 8-month old babe in arms. I hear the mom deliver another Kafka line to one of the girls: "Honey just watch for row 13."

Joan had cautioned me to grab a blanket and pillow because planes can get cold overnight. So I arrive at lucky row 13 looking like a refugee – or someone checking into a prison cell. I have a blanket and TWO pillows in addition to my inflatable, all in my arms, with a heavy backpack in one hand. I can get into my middle seat because the aisle passenger hasn't arrived yet. But I've got this pile of blankets and pillows on my lap and no place to put anything. The blindfolded (why didn't I think of that?) MIT student on my right wants to sleep so that's OK - but I don't want to wake her by squirming around. And besides, there's really no place to put the pile. In addition, I've worn a t-shirt under a long-sleeved heavy shirt with two pockets, which I like to have handy when I travel so I can stuff iPods, cell phones, etc. And because Clare had said it would be "coolish" in Maine I am also wearing my Sleeping Bear Lake hooded parka. The only thing coming out of the overhead nozzle is ... breath. Weak, warmish breath. Like a failing convection oven.

Before I can figure out what to do with my pile, my aisle seat mate arrives. As she bends over to put her bag on the floor, water pours from the glass she's carrying - onto my left sleeve. Inwardly, I start to laugh - no I mean laff - a kind of maniacal mental paroxysm as it sinks in that I am totally screwed the rest of this trip.

Confirmation - and another laff riot - comes a few minutes later. The plane has been towed out to the taxi-way. As we sit there, the sound of a dog being whipped a dozen or so times tears up though the floorboards. ERRRROWWWWEEEE! Then silence. Then Kaptain Kafka again: "This is your captain. You may have noticed us trying to start the left engine. It won't start. So we're going to wait until they tow us back to the gate. You see, the engine is started with compressed air, using the same compressor that provides our air-conditioning. [TMI, and besides, what air conditioning?] We're going to detach that compressor and have an external emergency starter try to get the engine going. It'll be just a few more minutes."

Yeah, sure.

Actually it is. A few more whipped dogs and then the roar of the engine. The baby doesn't like it. But we're off. I decide to try to become very small in my seat - scrunch up and just see if I will doze off. Lean forward a bit - a good angle, propped on my lap-full of cloth.

BLAM!

Guy in seat ahead launches the back of it into my forehead.

Pathetic giggle.

Movie time. Little 9-inch flat screens drop down. They're showing "Shrek" tonight. Boring.

Lady on left squirming. I offer her one of my pillows. Gives me an idea. I offload the blanket by dropping it on the floor between my legs. Another layer gone.

I decide to set my watch to eastern time. But I don't want to turn on the overhead light for fear my two blindfolded seat-mates will awake. But the watch has a backlight. Three seconds to figure out what the other 3 buttons do. Ten minutes of that and I decide to go with the default Pacific time, plus or minus whatever changed while I fiddled with it.

By now the baby has mercifully settled down and I decide to try the on board audio system. I had remembered to bring my ear-muff headset with the big, pouffy cushions that will shut out ambient noises. Oh, and I've already plugged my ears with expanding foam. The only trouble with this system is that my ears sweat after a while, compounded by the airplane breath above me.

On United flights you get to listen to the radio transmissions going on in the cockpit on Channel 9. The captain has told us we could do that if we just wanted to relax. This is definitely not the relaxation channel. (Nothing much this time, but I'll never forget an earlier flight when I heard the word you don't want to hear on that channel: "OOPS!" Tower had instructed pilot to turn right at a certain intersection of taxi-ways. As he got there the pilot said, "You mean left, don't you?" Tower: "Oops, yeah.")

Everything else on the audio menu unappetizing, not what I want to hear when needing to become unconscious. Even the classical channel is "Pops!" Too up for this kind of flight. Also, the selections are too short, which gives the hyper DJ a chance to plug Sirius radio, this United channel and jabber from the liner notes of the recordings he's spinning. I unplug, and take off the headphones. It's kinda quiet at last. And a bit cooler, at least around my ears. I take out the orange foam plugs. Hmmmm...people, including baby ones, are asleep.

I am confined to staring straight ahead. And besides, if I had been interested in Shrek I couldn't see it no matter what I did. Though there is a screen above and just 2.5 feet in front of me, it's a LCD so the viewing angle turns everything dark and negative (not what the makers of Shrek had in mind, I'm sure). Normally, I could watch the screen three rows ahead, but the guy in front of me is about 8 feet tall, so his head comes between me and the screen. Which would be OK as long as he sits still. Which he does. But he's wearing outsize pouffy headphones, like mine, so his head is now effectively about a foot wide.

I've taken two melatonin but I'm still not sleepy. Must be all the excitement. Eventually, another hour drags by and another movie starts up. From the few opening scenes, this one looks interesting. I can't tell which movie it is because the titles are too small to read from ten feet away. But it stars Anthony Hopkins, appropriate companion on this flight. A murder mystery definitely. I don my headgear and tune to channel 1, the movie sound channel.

Enter, Franz Kafka, projectionist. No one on the flight crews seems to have noticed that the tape has been damaged so that not only does a horizontal line dribble slowly down the screen, but the sound track cuts out EVERY FIVE SECONDS. Not easy to follow dialog, you think? I jiggle the headphone plug but no change. I sneak onto my right seat mate's jack and change to channel 1. She stirs. Audio interruptus as before.

Some time later, seat-mate to the left gets up to pee. I take the opportunity to do the same - and exercise my legs. I hang around in the rear galley and start to do toe lifts and other calf stretches. A guy comes in with a baby bottle and asks to have it filled. So I have to get out of the way. After I come out of the can I saunter down the aisle (on therapeutic tiptoe) to my seat, where seat mate is standing waiting for me. Guy in front still has his seat reclined so it's one of those Twister moves to get re-installed into my cage. But at least I've been able to take off the goddam parka and shirt and wet down my head to get the momentary cooling effect of evaporation. Aisle seat sighs. I say: "It's not easy." She agrees and curls up with her/my extra pillow. She's a lot shorter than I so bends quite easily to put her head on the tray table - and the guy in front of her isn't taking target practice on her head.

Another hour goes by and something must have happened to my brain because I don't remember anything about it. I may have slept or blacked out with boredom. When I look out one of the windows on the other side of the plane I see creamsicle sky and know that we're heading into dawn.

Eventually, we land and we're only 15 minutes late. No problem because I've got nowhere to go yet. I head into the handicap stall of the men's room to change out of my sweat pants and t-shirt and put on something more suitable to be seen in in daylight. While I'm in the luxurious quarters of the handicap stall I think about the crazy night I've just had, when just about anything wrong that could happen has happened. I hear a noise outside the stall. I laff again and think: bring it on, baby! I just KNOW it's some guy in a wheelchair or crutches, rocking back and forth or side-to-side, waiting to get in – and give me the evil eye as I slink out. I never see anyone in these spacious stalls but I know this will be just another scene in my long nightmare. And though I know I'll never see him again, I still care - a little - but plan to avert my gaze as I drag my suitcase and backpack and criminal ass out of there. Surprise: no handicapped guy there. Just me playing Kafka.

Mother Teresa: atheist

** Mother Teresa’s revelations have thrown fresh fuel on the debate between atheism and theism. In the following excerpt from the TV program, Hardball, Chris Matthews tries to moderate a debate between atheist Christopher Hitches and theist Bill Donohue. The following excerpts are taken from the blog of Jason Rosenhouse, and include his comments.

Hitchens and Donohue on Hardball

Category: Religion
Posted on: August 29, 2007 6:04 PM, by Jason Rosenhouse

God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens and Catholic League president Bill Donohue showed up on Hardball yesterday to mull over the issues raised by the Time article. I'd write some commentary, but some things simply defy comment. I have taken the liberty of putting certain choice nuggets in bold:

MATTHEWS: I want to go to Christopher Hitchens. Christopher, you have been tough. You say this is a profound revelation, that this woman did not believe.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR, “GOD IS NOT GREAT”: Yes, and a very moving one, actually, and a very honest one, I have to add. She tried her best to believe. Her atheism was not like mine. I can't believe it and I am glad to think that it is not true, that there is a dictator in the heavens. So the fact that there is no evidence for it pleases me. She really wished it was true. She tried to live her life as if it was true.

She failed. And she was encouraged by cynical old men to carry on doing so because she was a great marketing tool for her church, and I think that they should answer for what they did to her and what they have been doing to us. I think it has been fraud and exploitation yet again.

MATTHEWS: Bill Donohue, your reaction?

BILL DONOHUE, THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE: This is laughable. I suppose next week we will find that Mother Teresa considered herself to be a sinner as well. The fact of the matter is the Vatican is standing behind this book. If this is such an embarrassment to the Catholic church, why in the world is the Vatican proud of this book? I am proud of it too. You have to understand, give me a quick anecdote--when she was in the United States, a professor came up to her and said, are you married?

Mother Teresa said, yes. I am married to a spouse who sometimes makes it difficult for me to smile. His name is Jesus. And that's because he is very demanding.

Look, any person of faith understands what I have just said, but if you are a dogmatic atheist, then you would have a very difficult time trying to understand this. Quite frankly, I'm not sure if I have enough time to educate Mr. Hitchens.

HITCHENS: I agree. That does sound like white noise, nonsense, to me, and I think to almost everyone else. If I told you last month--actually, you probably do know that this. All these letters were published in 2002. but if I told you in 2001 that Mother Teresa did not believe that Jesus was present in the Eucharist and couldn't feel--

DONOHUE: She never said that.

HITCHENS: Yes, she did. And father can tell you, has been very clever and honest in saying so, could not feel it in her heart, could feel it in the real presence, so called, of mass of the Eucharist. If I told you that, you would accuse me of slandering your so-called faith.

DONOHUE: Let me ask you this, Christopher, a number of years ago you wrote the thing against her, five and a half inches by eight and a half inches long, 98 pages, not a single endnote, not a single footnote, not a single citation. I have told you before, I'm going to tell you it again tonight, buddy, if you handed that in to me in an undergraduate class, you would get an F.

HITCHENS: You are not likely to be anybody's professor.

DONOHUE: When you make a serious charge against a--an Englishman has to be quiet when an Irishman talks. When you make a serious charge against a serious person, a public person like Mother Teresa, and you have no evidence, whatsoever, what in the world do you expect? You have to get an F.

HITCHENS: This is well below the F level. In my book I say that she took money from the Duvalier family in Haiti, not denied. She took money from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan in exchange for an olive wood crucifix. Not denied.

None of the factual assertions made in my book have ever been challenged. It actually got very respectable views in the Catholic press. For this reason, Mr. Donohue--the reason I got respectful reviews in the Catholic press was this; as Lord McCauley (ph) once brilliantly put it, the great strength of the Catholic Church used to be that it knew how to discipline fanatics and enthusiasts and zealots. It knew how to keep under control people who were too hungry, too fanatical.

Because of the opportunist chance that Mother Teresa offered them for publicity, they failed to restrain someone who really should have been seeking proper help that she never got. Instead, they exploited her to the very end and even gave her an exorcism, as you know. The archbishop of Calcutta has admitted it. He even had to give her an exorcism in 1997, because they had so much despair of her state of mind. It's a cruel exploitation of a simple and honest woman.

DONOHUE: At the end of the day, this is a woman who received 124 awards, who set up hospitals for AIDS patients.

(CROSS TALK)

DONOHUE: Listen--

MATTHEWS: Bill needs some time here. Bill, take 30 seconds.

(CROSS TALK)

MATTHEWS: Christopher, we have to give him 30 seconds, please.

DONOHUE: She set up hospices, the first one for AIDS victims here in Greenwich Village. She opened up 500 hospitals, hospices, homeless centers, health clinics, orphanages. That is why she is loved all over the world. In India, when they surveyed the people, next to Gandhi, she is regarded as the most revered person.

Now, all the whole world is wrong, and you, with your 98 page book, five and a half by eight and a half inches long--you have no citations. You have no evidence. Who is the world going to believe? Me or you?

HITCHENS: I turned out to be right though, don't I? I do not believe a word of it, and neither did she. I never expected that it would be just the two of us.

(CROSS TALK)

MATTHEWS: Let me end the citation with a citation that is relevant to this discourse, Jesus has a very special love for you, she wrote to someone. But as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and I do not see. I listen and I do not hear. The tongue moves in prayer, but does not speak. I want you to pray for me. Then I let him have a free hand.

So she must believe in something to ask somebody to pray for her or was that just rhetorical, Christopher?

HITCHENS: He was trying and failing to say that his church, in fact, an answer for everything. If you can't believe it, if it all seems to be radically untrue, nonetheless, faith will square that settle for you. She was trying for that. But as we now know, she failed. It can't be done. You can't make people believe in the impossible. All you can do is make people feel very guilty that they can't make themselves believe it.

DONOHUE: The only people that do not have doubts today are dogmatic atheists, people like you, Chris.

The MT life - me and Mother T

**Daniel Dennett in his latest book Breaking the Spell makes the distinction between belief in god and belief in the belief in god. The former accepts the existence of an actual being who controls the universe and with whom one can interact through prayer, worship and obedience to that being’s commands. The latter indicates a frame of mind that holds that it is right, practical or otherwise necessary to profess and/or act as though such a being exists.

It’s obvious that much good has been done by those who profess belief either way. But Mother Teresa appears to be one of those in the latter camp. Her just released journals "Come Be My Light" chronicle deep inner conflicts, many of which were expressed to her superiors or confessors over the course of fifty years.

Some may see her angst as an indication of faith, as does this writer for the Christian Science Monitor:

Mother Teresa may have believed she had no faith, but was not her persistence an act of extreme faith? And is it not faith in something greater than themselves that sustained leaders, such as Mr. Lincoln and Mr. King, as they carried out their missions?

The answer has to be: NO. Faith, according to the Bible, is "the evidence of things not seen." Mother Teresa worked on without evidence. People can persist with actions because they believe the actions are worth the darkness of doubt. Obviously she cared deeply about suffering humanity and tried to do something tangible about it. But none of it indicates faith in the existence of something for which there is no evidence, whether external or internal. The goodness of the work itself supplies enough motivation in people of strong will and deep dedication.

The revelations of Mother Teresa’s lonely journey resonate with some of my own experiences. Though I never accomplished anything on the magnitude of her achievements, I tried to help people who were suffering, and I thought I could best do it through the practice of Christian Science. In that microscopically small community I was regarded as someone who had achieved a certain success. I was a spiritual healing practitioner, a teacher of same, a frequently published writer in the denomination's magazines and websites, and a somewhat popular (in the church community) lecturer on the subject. I was considered to be a person of some deep understanding of that belief system.

I persisted in that belief and work for over thirty years. I was a proponent, defender and exemplar of its truth and effectiveness because I believed it supplied the most reasonable explanation of reality. What I hadn’t realized all that time, however, is that I had never actually questioned the basis of all religions: belief in the existence of a supreme being. This was a belief that went all the way back to my upbringing in the Catholic community. Once I had the opportunity and occasion to reflect on what I had committed a good chunk of my life to, I investigated the subject with the help of Messrs. Dennett, Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, et. al. Over the course of about a year, I saw that the existence of a spiritual dimension and spiritual beings, supreme and otherwise, is entirely unnecessary. While I am happy and satisfied with the world as it now appears to me without the veil of “faith,” probably like Mother Teresa I will die knowing that whatever good I accomplished was in spite of and not because my faith. No hospitals, no clinics, no interesting memoirs - just a nice guy trying to do good while a baseless metaphysics got the credit.

Sam Harris challenges scientists to be scientific about religion

** By now it should be no secret that I am a fan of Sam Harris - even though in my opinion he wanders uncomfortably close to Buddhist spirituality. His book, "The End of Faith," helped pry me away from a lifelong delusion. Yes, it's an angry screed that gets him branded as islamophobic by the ecumenically minded, but he well expresses the pent up frustration of those who have had to live politely under the sway of believers and their institutions.

In this letter to the editor of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, he exhibits the perspicacity and razor sharp tongue that makes him a formidable foe of institutionalized irrationality, and the feeble "tolerance" mentality that coddles it.

---

Scientists should unite against threat from religion

email: author@samharris.org

web: http://www.samharris.org/

Sir

It was genuinely alarming to encounter Ziauddin Sardar's whitewash of Islam in the pages of your journal ('Beyond the troubled relationship' Nature 448, 131–133; 2007). Here, as elsewhere, Nature's coverage of religion has been unfailingly tactful — to the point of obscurantism.

In his Commentary, Sardar seems to accept, at face value, the claim that Islam constitutes an "intrinsically rational world view". Perhaps there are occasions where public intellectuals must proclaim the teachings of Islam to be perfectly in harmony with scientific naturalism. But let us not do so, just yet, in the world's foremost scientific journal.

Under the basic teachings of Islam, the Koran cannot be challenged or contradicted, being the perfect word of the creator of the Universe. To speak of the compatibility of science and Islam in 2007 is rather like speaking of the compatibility of science and Christianity in the year 1633, just as Galileo was being forced, under threat of death, to recant his understanding of the Earth's motion.

An Editorial announcing the publication of Francis Collins's book, The Language of God ('Building bridges' Nature 442, 110; doi:10.1038/442110a 2006) represents another instance of high-minded squeamishness in addressing the incompatibility of faith and reason. Nature praises Collins, a devout Christian, for engaging "with people of faith to explore how science — both in its mode of thought and its results — is consistent with their religious beliefs".

But here is Collins on how he, as a scientist, finally became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ: "On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains... the majesty and beauty of God's creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ."

What does the "mode of thought" displayed by Collins have in common with science? The Language of God should have sparked gasping outrage from the editors at Nature. Instead, they deemed Collins's efforts "moving" and "laudable", commending him for building a "bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the so-called heartlands."

At a time when Muslim doctors and engineers stand accused of attempting atrocities in the expectation of supernatural reward, when the Catholic Church still preaches the sinfulness of condom use in villages devastated by AIDS, when the president of the United States repeatedly vetoes the most promising medical research for religious reasons, much depends on the scientific community presenting a united front against the forces of unreason.

There are bridges and there are gangplanks, and it is the business of journals such as Nature to know the difference.

Right you WERE, Dick!

** No one else could say it better.




https://pol.moveon.org/donate/cheneyvideo.html?r=2879&id=10983-6585567-Ztj_GB

Time and a bandanna

** NOTE: For the past six or seven years, this blog has been mostly about the "current events" that engage my attention, and so it generally presents public issues. But nowadays I am freer to share some important private issues and changes that have been going on in my thinking the past couple of years. To that end, I present this initial entry:

On August 10 I presented four original songs, singing and playing guitar and keyboards at the “Songwriter’s Café,” an event held a couple times a month at Red House in Walnut Creek. It was a slow night as these things go, according to Peter Avery, the Red House coordinator. They usually have six acts, but only five signed up. And of that a couple didn’t even show up. Ryan, the RH host took the first set and paired me with Walty for the second set of four songs each. Walty is a great guitarist and singer who instantly contributed an excellent guitar solo when I happened to muse while singing that this would be a good spot for a nice guitar solo. He asked, “What key?” I told him “C” and he launched right in. It was so good I had him repeat it. This is the wonderful kind of magic that happens during live music that gives me such special joy. Now that this “debut” is over, and I didn’t get de-butted, I hope to become a regular at the Café, which will help me get through my catalog of songs written in the 70s, and may encourage me to write some new ones.

This experience only roughly approximates the public appearances I made over the course of over 30 years as a Christian Scientist, both as a “Reader” in the churches and as a lecturer. The content is decidedly different! So is the audience. In my previous appearances, as well as in over 150 written articles, I’ve only represented that religion, even while trying to rehabilitate its culture with a touch of contemporaneity. This time I'm representing only myself – albeit a self of the 70s. Back then I had considered myself a songwriter and generated a few dozen songs, which were quietly shelved once I became a practitioner and representative of the Christian Science point of view. There’s nothing specifically against artistic expression in that system, but the more public you become – as a practitioner, teacher, writer, lecturer, etc – the more constrained you can feel about displaying emotion, doubt, ambivalence, or anything too "personal." You’re supposed to represent the absolute and fixed verities, which admit of none of that “human” roughness.

I was 36 when I first thought of myself as a Christian Scientist. Since 2005 – and now that I think about it, probably before – I have evolved away from that set of beliefs and have found myself mentally (but certainly not physically!) back to where I might have been if that 30-year detour hadn't happened. I'm creatively alive again, if not entirely free of the kinds of problems that at the time probably induced me to take up a religion that eschewed the kind of world view that would be characterized as “sensual.” For example, the opening line of the first song I performed at Red House went:

Here I sit smoking my last cigarette, it’s been a long, low night and it ain’t over yet.

I don’t smoke anymore, not cigarettes anyway, but I’ve had plenty of long, low nights in the past 30 years. The difference this time is that I'm not ashamed to admit it in public, since I don’t consider myself an example of the kind of idealized human being that is supposed to result from believing in the absolute perfection of the true “spiritual man." Once in a while, when confronted by something scary, I do detect a mental twitch that in the past would have been called “prayer,” a desire to turn to some Agent above and beyond the present challenging situation that could lift me out of trouble. It’s the “skyhook” mentality that Dennett so clearly demolishes in “Breaking the Spell.” I now believe in what he calls, in “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “cranes,” as opposed to skyhooks – in other words, progress built step by little step, adding to work that has already been done. The way evolution does it.

It’s what led me to my present state – a label for which still eludes me. I am not an “atheist” in the narrow sense of someone who eschews the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. I eschew all divine agents. So "non-theist" might better characterize me. But that states it negatively. Maybe better would be “naturalistic humanist.” But that sounds overblown. And the term "Bright" seems a bit contrived, although I would align with their description of a person with:

• a naturalistic worldview
• free of supernatural and mystical elements
• ethics and actions based on a naturalistic world view

What I want to make clear is that I am not on some kind of “spiritual quest,” not finding my way back to god by some other “path.” I think of myself as unwrapping possibilities. Yes, self-discovery, but not in the sense of ascending toward an already set identity – especially not one set by a “Creator.” It’s more like just fooling around. For example, I used to love to watch Avner Eisnberg, a clown/mime, standing on a stage with no other prop than a bandanna around his neck. He would just stand there and look around until he eventually found the bandanna and started fooling with it, twisting it into various shapes, stretching, waving, pulling, throwing it and so forth until he was thoroughly occupied with it and had made the most of it. Just fooling around, playing with the possibilities in the here and now – that’s more like what I'm doing these days. My work now represents no one else but me, advances no cause but to unfold the joys of existence. Even then it’s work, and sometimes difficult work – like preparing to get up on stage and singing. It takes a lot of time, and I go through a lot of emotions and tension. But in the end, it’s over and it is what it is and that’s enough.

I heard Steve Shapiro speak once on the subject of “goal-free” living. That’s probably what I am doing these days. I have no goal, lead no movement, pick no fights, and bear only a grudge or two – the pain of which is receding more every day. And yet I feel open to explain to anyone what I am discovering since breaking free of the spell that there is something more than what exists here and now, or what can come into existence by just fooling around with it. This is sufficient. Just give me time and a bandanna, especially time.