THOSE MIXED UP NEURONS

After I retired a few years back, I took a couple of algebra/mathematics courses. I noticed a strange quirk in my mental processes. Frequently four years ago when I meant to write down x, I would write down the numeral 8. Recently, I've begun working through my old algebra textbook in order to get to a new unused textbook I bought and wasn't able to use back in Spokane because my wife and I moved to Vancouver. This morning, I was doing the exercises at the end of a section, and I wrote down 4 when I meant to write down +. I'm still also confusing quite frequently the 8 and the x.

So, according to my poor befuddled neurons
8 looks like x sometimes and
4 looks like + sometimes also.

These slips occur when I'm lost in the overall algebraic function I'm doing and not always paying attention to the finer details that my hand is putting on the paper. But I can see how certain neurons which are responsible for curves and curlicues can get confused between x and 8 and I can see how the neurons responsible for lines that are vertical and horizontal and which intersect in the figures for numeral 4 and a + sign can also get confused when I'm not paying strict attention and am slightly distracted.

Now isn't that fascinating to catch our neurons at work like that?

A WHOLE IN ONE

The other day I had an insight as to the whys and wherefores of my life. I think what I have to say might sound almost mundane, but like so many things in a man's life, I may have known something for the longest time, but until I actually focus awareness on it, the real force of the insight remains lost. 

I've been an atheist probably as far back as I can think, with some lapses and backsliding into belief under the duress of painful times. In short, when I am most weak and helpless is when I make decisions about gods and powers of greatness that I normally would not make. 

I don't know why I came to be an atheist, but as a teen, I probably said I was an atheist in order to shock people. The other day, though, I understood something about atheism that I'd not noted before. I was thinking about the book I'm writing and was trying to phrase a central theme of it when I chanced upon the following thought: my life seems to be directed toward the purpose of seeing myself as I truly am beyond or outside of the consciousness of a judging god. 

To live godless builds a truly human way of evaluating life. I think atheism is allowing me to quit having a split nature, seeing myself at one time as a human animal and at another time as a constructed creature at the mercy of a whimsical god like the gods of the Bible or Koran. The end of dualism is the end of being split, coming to live within existential doctrine. I'm sure that's what the existentialists were hoping for—to quit living as dual people and to be as one. 

To think as an atheist one escapes the duality of good and evil. As long as one is encumbered by the good versus evil continuum, he cannot help but be judgmental. His consciousness is bathed in good and evil thinking rather than in evaluating life on less onerous and practical terms. 

WRITING FROM SPACE

Long time since last entry. 

I'm at Tully's in Vancouver. Just got back from the Humanists of Greater Portland meeting. At the meeting this morning, I felt light-headed and couldn't follow the talk on "dark matter" very well. Suddenly I was struck by the thought that I didn't belong among these "smart" people so I didn't go to lunch with the sub-group that always meets for lunch following the Sunday presentations and drove straight back here to Vancouver. On the drive back I was filled with fear and a sense of worthlessness—fear and worthlessness, my old nemeses from college drinking days. As soon as I pulled into Tulley's, a place familiar to me, I was okay again. 

Like most fears, this morning's fear gathered strength and spread the more I indulged it. First thing I knew I was imagining my old age, myself in a nursing home, whining for help, trembling and begging. Not a pleasant set of feelings and imaginings. But that's just the way it goes with me sometimes, rather fewer times than in my old drinking days and in early sobriety. But my bouts with insecurity seem to be increasing in frequency again. Maybe stimulated by working on Boomed Out? Dark matter indeed!