I spent most of the day working in the library. I found at least two more books. I must be down to 15 left from that first list. When I have only ten more, I will tell John Coughlin to reach out to the Josephinum Seminary with the same offer he made to the seminary in New Orleans. He should speak to the librarian directly.
I spent some time trimming the haole koa trees, which are joyfully regrowing in that space between my plumbagos and the neighbor’s fence despite my best efforts to keep them in check. While I was down there, I noticed that the wedge I had placed under the downspout to redirect the water had moved. I anticipated this possibility. If when it rains hard enough, it can move rocks; it moved that wedge.
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Musings:
When I was in my twenties, I felt a need to get down to basics, living from day to day. I was thinking of hitching across the country, not starving or facing physical threats. Thinking about physical survival, if it is a real concern and not a manifestation of a mental disorder or a desperate situation, is so much more relaxing than thinking about my existential survival.
That was my intuition when I was young, and it is now. It is our concern for our existential survival that drives us nuts. Whatever the objective truth of our beliefs, religion is designed to help us cope with this new, relatively new state of being. We were designed to be hunter-gatherers struggling to survive to the next day like any other animal. Early religions were prayers for help with physical survival. Now, our physical survival is as secure as it can be. Unless other humans threaten us, it is never as bad as it was in the bad ole days. Most of us are stuck in the modern world, living like zoo animals. It makes us anxious and confused.
The challenge is to forgo our certainty that our way is the only way. We have to live with the uncertainty of an abstract nature. We have to live with the possibility that there is more than one way to put the toilet paper roll on the roller, no less accept people as humans who look and talk differently than we do, and no less believe in something other than what we do. Forget the toilet paper; we’re talking about a life-threatening difference.
The problem is that our nonconscious minds can’t distinguish between physical and existential threats. The goal is to relax enough to allow our nonconscious minds to learn we are safe. All bets are off if our nonconscious minds are not on board with the current reality. We have a name for it today, PTSD. While some people have a bad case of this conscious versus nonconscious discrepancy, we all suffer from it to some extent.
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