Summary

May 11, 2026 7:57am

In the past seven years, I have done a lot of thinking, writing, and reading. My conclusion: we live in a material universe – all else is the product of human psychological fragility. We live, we die and the universe goes on about its business.

Myth, Obituaries, Death

May 12, 2026 7:44am

Our lives are tales of mythology – beginning with ego and our internal dialog about ourselves. The delusions are pervasive – vines that spread through every weakness and fracture of human psychology. So, these myths begin with the individual but then are shared and spread to entire populations by stories that we invent to give added meaning to our existence. The apotheosis of the stories is our classic literature and religious texts. The stories become the touchstones – the culture of tribes and nations leading entire groups to believe in their exceptionalism. Eventually, the myths find their final expression in the creation stories of every group of humans ever to exist upon the planet. And the personal saviors and Gods we invent are the last redoubt of the fragile beings unwilling to face their own mortality.

The obituary is the final summary of the myths we create about ourselves.

I lie in bed in the early morning thinking about my early teachers and I realize that the vast majority are dead. I wonder about their lives – I was 10, they were 25 or 30; what joy and what despair did they experience? What myths did they devise for themselves, and did they manage to find happiness?

Who, or What, OWNS You?

May 18, 2026 9:02am

A writer I follow is a cancer survivor now plagued with existential questions. To be or not – either choice is a valid response to those questions. To be a conscious entity for a short time in a 13-billion-year-old universe is not a thing to be dismissed lightly…. plus, why give up when you can struggle along, see what happens and provide a little encouragement to your fellow travelers. You have all eternity to be non-existent.

This mortality thing is a hard pill to swallow – I’m always surprised that so many manage to give it superficial treatment – if they think of it at all. We all want purpose and immortality, so we are ripe for any faith that promises these mirages. My own religious conversion at age 10 was an emotional calling from the spiritual side…an “old soul” understanding of the sadness and impermanence of our lives. I believed because it filled a need. We all choose to believe or not to believe. Some base this decision on tangible physical reality and some base it on the things they believe exist yet unseen. Who is right? We do live in a matrix of concepts and even some physicists say that consciousness is a fundamental component of reality as shown by our nascent understanding of quantum mechanics. Or…is this all the new mythology – designed to provide the hope ebbing away as global religious conviction disappears?

In my US Congressional district, the most expensive primary race in history pits Thomas Massie, who will not bend the knee to the Jewish lobby, against a sock-puppet bought and owned by billionaires that hold Israeli citizenship. If Massie loses because US Zionists don’t know the difference between faith and reason, I may be done with politics…maybe that’s what they want.