At any rate, I’m going to take you outside with me while I feed a feral cat colony. I’ve been using a trap, neuter, and release program. However, there’s a little bit of a complication right now, in that the last trapping didn’t trap all of the females, which is always the issue. So there’s a litter of kittens some place out here. If you’re listening to the audio of this, you’ll be getting some sounds of me taking care of about twenty cats outside my backdoor.
I’m thinking today about what makes me, me. I was going to talk a little bit about it because there is kind of this origin story.
I went to a Unitarian Universal church this evening. They have like a community night. I’ve been to a couple of their Sunday services, which are kind of interesting, very traditional in form to a Christian church, to like a protestant church. They have hymnal, they have supplemental hymnal, they sing songs, and they have a sermon. It’s just like a regular church service.
Anyways, the book was interesting, except that it was all dark stuff. That bored me at that point, but I wanted to learn to master using a whip, because there was one. It looked like a western whip, it had an 8 inch piece of wood, and it didn’t have the kind of tails you could change, just a fixed leather tail on it that I wore out.
I wore the whole thing out and then they decided that it was too weird and I should get rid of it. I was like, “How is that weird? Cowboys use whips. I just want to get good at it. It looks like an art form to me.” To me, it looked like an art form. I’d watch the cowboy shows and see stuff that some of them could do with whips, hear them crack, and think, “Ah, that’s pretty cool.” But my parents thought that there was something wrong with learning it, and that struck me as very strange.
There was an alley behind the house, and it had some books in it, because someone had thrown out some books. They were next to a garbage can, or maybe in the garbage can. I don’t really remember. Garbage cans fascinated me. I could go into the alley easily on my bicycle and check out trash cans.
There was a time when my cousin and I got into trouble with the police. I was probably eight or something like that, for being trash can Robin Hood’s, taking trash can lids off the houses that had them, and putting them on the trash cans that didn’t have lids down the alley. We had a little bit of childhood hooligan energy. So at any rate, some neighbor stopped us in the alley and we surrendered our bicycles to him and he sent us home and called the cops. It was pretty funny. Well, it wasn’t funny at the time I guess.
A lot of things have transpired, but one of the things that seems most interesting to me is that there has always been with me a need to understand a little more. Not that I need more knowledge, but that I need that peace of mind, that assurance, the awakening that comes with the learning. I’ve just always thought that this is what we need to understand. As humans, this should be one of the first things that we understand; we should be taught this in front of our children. This is what I realized I wasn’t being taught. All of a sudden I’m like, “Well hey actually they’re asking me to learn all of this stuff at school, but they’re not teaching me the most important things, which is what’s going on here.”
This is a planet, and there’s a star that we call the sun. What’s happening here, really? Where are you trying to go, and what are you trying to say here? There’s some sort of a god that bowls in the sky? That was one of the stories that I was taught, that people believed that God was bowling when the lightning and thunder happened. There used to be some great storms in Phoenix though, so I always thought that was interesting, so I’m like “Seriously?” They were like, “Yeah, that’s what people used to believe God was!” I’m like, “What do they think it is now? The moons made of cheese, God bowls from the sky, what the heck is going on around here?”
You know? All these things were disconnected from what’s obviously happening. It’s pretty obvious that what’s going on is not someone bowling, or a moon made out of cheese, or the earth being the center of the universe. That’s not what’s happening here. This is a bigger experience than that. I think it’s so self-centered, and it really says a lot about the level of insight when people say that the entire universe was created for us.
Okay, on the one hand, that’s a great sentiment, you know? Everyone should feel that way. Look around you. There’s billions upon billions of stars. There’s billions and billions of galaxies. This place is bigger than you can imagine. It is build out of just notions, right? It’s built out of ideas, mathematical equations. It’s fascinating. That to some extent we can see those equations and what’s actually happening, and the structure of the universe in new and amazing ways.
It’s phenomenal. It’s really phenomenal that a mammal on a planet where the species that have been wiped out like a half a dozen times would evolve a brain that understands how to measure the size of a galaxy that is so far away that it’s just a few pixels on an enormous screen, in a corner of a universe that is so far away, and yet we know that. We can measure; we know how far away it is and we see how the light is. It’s so fascinating.
But do we know the age of the universe? Here’s the thing. Even if we could come up with some notion, which I’m sure we have, of how old the universe is, we know nothing of the lifespan of the universe. We don’t know the first thing about it, we can figure out what eventually gravity is likely to do with the various black holes. So we can figure that stuff out in a way, but we don’t necessarily know everything.
We assume that the universe is a closed system. When we look around, us we don’t see any other closed systems, so why would we assume that? What we think of as the universe, look around you. Just look around.
There are many, many, many, many things that might consider themselves to be the universe. In fact, right here I have a CD, and in a way a CD is an entire universe. If this is the entire universe, the music that’s on the CD is all there is in that particular universe. Maybe not though, because if that universe is smart enough, then it would see the derivatives of everything. It would begin to see that certain Latin rhythms exist. In that way, every Latin rhythm becomes a possibility, and every song that could possibly be built upon a Latin rhythm becomes a possibility, if a Latin rhythm even exists.
We don’t see any closed systems, so we’ve got a CD that’s the entire universe, but it still requires a CD player, right? Once you have the CD player, then the CD player becomes the entire universe, except the CD player requires CDs, and it requires a variety of them, and requires electricity also, and a space to play. If you were to appreciate the CD player, you would of course need speakers and some sort of an amplifier. Then why bother with the CD when the digital information available is stored somewhere else? Of course, the CD is stored over on that side of the room, and the CD player is over in this area. Not all the CDs are in the player all the time, so there’s only so much that can be going on at any one given time, which is why we look at the universe and think, “Oh, there’s not enough gravity to pull the light back in.”
That in itself is fascinating, because as far as distance and time go, that’s just going to go on forever. Imagine that. The light is just going to continue on forever, which means space will continue to grow and time will continue. Well time isn’t stopping and starting around us right now, right? But form certainly does, for shifts and changes all the time and on every level, for a variety of reasons but there mostly is a cause for everything. Look around you. Everything comes from something, even the planet comes from debris and heavy and light stuff collecting together.
So it’s very likely that the solar systems form in particular patterns. It’s very likely that one solar system is very much like another. There may or may not be the same way with electrons, because electrons are in particular places, and they’re either there or they’re not. They don’t move around.
If you have an element with five electrons orbiting, those 5 electrons are going to be on that same exact spot for that element every single time. Their orbits aren’t random. They’re the same exact distance apart. That atom for that element forms a particular way, whether it bonds with another element or not. It still forms in a particular way, and there are particular electrons that orbit around it. Those are at a particular distance, traveling at a particular speeds. That’s what that element is, and that’s what that atom of that element is. It is that shape, and that’s consistent. Every element is different, but only in the number of electrons; the electrons are always going to be a consistent distance from the center, as I understand it. That’s fascinating, right?
The size of the nucleus of the atom can vary, and the size of that determines how many electrons fall in line there. Now when I say electrons, there is one caveat to this. There is either an electron present or space for an electron to be present. It’s either there or it’s potentially there, and so that’s how the bonds form between atoms. One that has an electron there can bond with one that has an electron potentially there, and they share the electron then. That bonds them together. Now, because it’s capable of having the potential electron there, the bond can be separated obviously, but it doesn’t have to be separated. It can still stay together.
I started this off tonight by wanting to tell you a little bit about my formation. I was born into a family, the grandson of a very, very spiritual religious lady. If you knew this lady’s energy, you’d know that she is a true believer and that she was as light as a feather because of it, and that it served her in a phenomenal way. I’m not saying that she couldn’t be judgmental or harsh, because she certainly could, but the sincerity and strength in which she believed in a loving and caring God is largely unmatched in my experience. I’ve encountered some people in my experience who have very strong beliefs. Sometimes, when they’re speaking of their beliefs, they can become that way, but she just kind of embodied it.
I think were a sensitive soul to enter into this world it would be very hard to sell them on my family, right? However, my grandmother was the matriarch, at the center of my mom’s family, and my dad’s family lives in another state. My mom’s family became our de facto family, my de facto family. I barely really know my dad’s relatives, but I have met them. I have been to weekends with them, but I don’t know them really well, you know.
However, at one point in time, I doubted whether or not my dead father was my biological father, but after meeting the family, it just seems like it must be. It’s amazing how much alike we all are. It was really difficult for me, because I felt like I was kind of talking to the same person everywhere in my dad’s family.
There was so much family resemblance that it seemed like there was a homogeneous in appearance. Like in facial features and mannerisms, terms of phrase, and figures of speech. It was uncanny. Like this family really still had a lot of the same kinds of traits. They would say the same stuff my dad had said. Mostly just my feeling comfortable even though I felt like that was a new experience for me, to be around that many people that I felt like I really fit in with. I never really felt like I had fitted in with my mom’s family. Very, very Christian, but in a way that I don’t think was very functional.
My aunt and my grandmother eventually, through living with her or whatever, became Mormon. My aunt went to the LDS church, and then my grandmother followed. She had been a Methodist I think up until then, and I think that it helped her live longer. They had family nights and other kinds of things, and I think that she was able to continue to contribute to the lives of the people around her.
In the end, I would go and talk to her, mostly at just the family gatherings. She would be there and I’d always sit down and ask her how she’s doing, and she’d say, “Well I just don’t know why I’m here.” She lived to be 102, and in the end, she was like, “I don’t know, God’s doing something with me, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why I’m still here.” Really the last few months she began to have visions of family members and other kinds of things going on and would get kind of caught up in I don’t know what. Whatever it was, somewhat otherworldly other experiences that she was having. She was like, “I don’t know why I’m here.” My uncle would carry her around, because walking wasn’t really a great option and that was just the easier way to do it. I think he carried her around a lot. It was probably not a bad way to be treated. I think that if you don’t have medical devices around you all the time, as a culture we seem to be consumers until the end. “Oh give him a walker and an electric cart.” One of those carts wouldn’t have been a great plan for her. Without him putting her in chairs and moving her around and stuff, she’d probably just have to say in bed, so that was probably a really good thing for her.
