{"id":584,"date":"2007-04-24T06:31:00","date_gmt":"2007-04-24T10:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/04\/24\/monday-night-johnism\/"},"modified":"2007-04-24T06:31:00","modified_gmt":"2007-04-24T10:31:00","slug":"monday-night-johnism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/04\/24\/monday-night-johnism\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday night &#8211; Johnism"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"pBlogBody_256991538\" class=\"blogContent\">\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">The path we&#8217;re on is certainly tough. One day I feel like I&#8217;m making great progress and getting strong, the next day I feel like I don&#8217;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\u2026 lots to ponder at home too. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>I think I&#8217;m <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>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&#8217;m going to have to work on <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>getting more down time in my schedule to think.. or actually to <i>not <\/i>think. <\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/span>I have been spending the little quiet time I have trying to figure out where I am on this new spiritual journey I&#8217;m on since Sam&#8217;s passing. I&#8217;ve been part-way through several books on death and dying. l<st1:city><st1:place>ife<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> after death, <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>men&#8217;s healing and I&#8217;m not sure what to think .<span style=\"\">&nbsp; <\/span>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&#8217;t do it for me. I was deeply moved by the Gandhi quote I saw at the Peace Abbey which I mentioned yesterday.. &#8220;<i>There are as many religions as there are people&#8217;<\/i>&#8220;<i> <\/i>I think that is so true.. Diane, Pat and I were talking about this in the car on the way back from <st1:city><st1:place>Boston<\/st1:place><\/st1:city> last night . None of us can <i>know<\/i> what is true .. we can only know what we <i>believe.<\/i> <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>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\u2026 and still it was wrong.. or at least it was incomplete. <span style=\"\">&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">I&#8217;m thinking that all the scientific training I&#8217;ve received over the years has made the spiritual journey I&#8217;m on harder and more confusing..&nbsp; <span style=\"\">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. <\/span>I remember a Terry Gross interview I heard last year with Brian Greene the well known String Theorist and Author of &#8216;The Elegant Universe&#8217; (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 &#8216;strings&#8217; of pure energy) Terry asked <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>Greene if string theory is true, does it make religion unnecessary. I can&#8217;t recall Green&#8217;s exact quote.. but he said something very similar to this quote of his <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>I found on the internet <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>&#8220;<i>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,&#8221; he said. &#8220;If someone wants to place the word God on those collections of words, it&#8217;s OK with me.&#8221;<\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\">&nbsp;&nbsp; I find it hard to believe in a G-d that is outside of me.. since I can&#8217;t rationally explain why that idea is necessary to explain what I see and experience . At the same time I can&#8217;t help believe <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>that the collective consciousness of all of the living beings in the universe can be <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>explained by physics as we know it. To me the organizing energy that makes us <i>us<\/i> 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&#8217;s our before-life, during-life and our afterlife\u2026 <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>And even though<span style=\"\">&nbsp; <\/span>its impossible to <i>know<\/i> this.. . I believe it <span style=\"\">&nbsp;<\/span>with all my heart. I know that Sam is part of that as am I, Diane, Max, Gabe and all of you.. That&#8217;s John-ism\u2026 and I&#8217;m the high priest. <\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\" class=\"MsoNormal\">-jc<o:p><\/o:p><\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"> <\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\" class=\"MsoNormal\"><o:p>&nbsp;<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i147.photobucket.com\/albums\/r319\/johncohn\/april07\/Apr2207103.jpg\" \/><\/o:p><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The path we&#8217;re on is certainly tough. One day I feel like I&#8217;m making great progress and getting strong, the next day I feel like I don&#8217;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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/2007\/04\/24\/monday-night-johnism\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Monday night &#8211; Johnism<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/johncohn.org\/base\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}