The path we’re on is certainly tough. One day I feel like I’m making great progress and getting strong, the next day I feel like I don’t want to get out of bed. Today was the latter. I really struggled today at work.. and came home feeling like a whipped puppy. Nothing specific happened.. It was just hard… lots to ponder at home too.  I think I’m  getting too busy to do the grieving and healing I need to do.. I end up putting it off to later.,. then never make time for later. I’m going to have to work on  getting more down time in my schedule to think.. or actually to not think.

    I have been spending the little quiet time I have trying to figure out where I am on this new spiritual journey I’m on since Sam’s passing. I’ve been part-way through several books on death and dying. life after death,  men’s healing and I’m not sure what to think .  I know that I believe in something bigger than we are.. at the same time, the teachings of any organized religions I know of don’t do it for me. I was deeply moved by the Gandhi quote I saw at the Peace Abbey which I mentioned yesterday.. “There are as many religions as there are people’“ I think that is so true.. Diane, Pat and I were talking about this in the car on the way back from Boston last night . None of us can know what is true .. we can only know what we believe.  Even many of the strongest tenants of science that we take as facts are just elaborate belief systems.. Think of Newtonian physics before relativity.. it was believed as fact, taught as fact… and still it was wrong.. or at least it was incomplete.   

I’m thinking that all the scientific training I’ve received over the years has made the spiritual journey I’m on harder and more confusing..  On one hand my training makes it hard for me to beleive in a soul.. yet my heart ablolutely knows that we have one and that it lives on after we die. I hear it from Sam all the time. I remember a Terry Gross interview I heard last year with Brian Greene the well known String Theorist and Author of ‘The Elegant Universe’ (String theorists believe that all things in the cosmos from the very large big bang to the very small sub atomic particles can be explained by the actions and interactions of tiny one dimensional vibrating ‘strings’ of pure energy) Terry asked  Greene if string theory is true, does it make religion unnecessary. I can’t recall Green’s exact quote.. but he said something very similar to this quote of his  I found on the internet  “The universe is incredibly wondrous, incredibly beautiful, and it fills me with a sense that there is some underlying explanation that we have yet to fully understand,” he said. “If someone wants to place the word God on those collections of words, it’s OK with me.”

   I find it hard to believe in a G-d that is outside of me.. since I can’t rationally explain why that idea is necessary to explain what I see and experience . At the same time I can’t help believe  that the collective consciousness of all of the living beings in the universe can be  explained by physics as we know it. To me the organizing energy that makes us us is somehow divine and worth of respect. I also somehow believe that that organizing energy endures and builds, ..even learns throughout time. To me that’s our before-life, during-life and our afterlife…  And even though  its impossible to know this.. . I believe it  with all my heart. I know that Sam is part of that as am I, Diane, Max, Gabe and all of you.. That’s John-ism… and I’m the high priest.

-jc