With the advent of the process of electing our next President of the United States, I offer my opinion on the process of election in light of President Joe Biden stepping down as a candidate for the Democratic Party. The Vice President, Kamela Harris, is assumed to be the next nominee to head the Democratic ticket. I would ask: Democrats, is this the best you can do? To be fair, I ask this as one of my vetting questions for all national, state, and local politicians. I ask this of former President Donald J. Trump and the choice for Independents. Let this question sink in. Don’t answer it at on ..read more

As my life experiences are at the end of their usefulness to my humanity, I have noticed several cross-cutting themes that are always present but not always acted upon. My Lay Cistercian Way has allowed me to possess a profound focus on three of them, which I use to vet all my concepts and ideas. I share three of the more popular themes as they pertain to my notion of a key to understanding the three longings of my human heart. ALL IDEAS AND THOUGHTS-– There is such a thing as horizontal spirituality, which is time encumbered and lasts from here to there, e.g., Liturgy of the Hours. I have di ..read more

Let’s recap. I have three innate longings that plague my unconsciousness, and I am anxious to resolve them. They are: a. What is that next level of my humanity that keeps pulling me towards a resolution of my next level of evolution? b. How can I love fiercely with all my mind, heart, and will? c. What is true outside of the corruption of matter and mind? All I have in my unique lifetime is my ability to reason based on my accumulated good and bad experiences, plus my free will to choose what will make me happy. Suppose the ideology, theology, or philosophy that I have assumed into what I cons ..read more

In past episodes, I have explained how my reasoning is centered around my ability to reason freely and choose what is best for my three innate yearnings: What does being fully human at that next level mean? How can I love using my next level of humanity as energy to become what my nature naturally intended? What is truth, not corrupted by matter or mind, which does not change? In previewing all experiences from my lifetime of searching for meaning (Viktor Frankel’s notion of meaning), unlocking the mystery of my humanity at its next level requires a set of assumptions or presuppositions that I ..read more

Inexorably linked with the notion of a template through which all reality seems to fit together, at least in a preliminary sense, is the ability of the human species to choose what they think is good for them. What differentiates us from other living species is that we can control nature within the limits of human nature. If B.F. Skinner’s concept of operant conditioning holds true; humans and animals respond to pleasure/pain impulsively. I know I do. In the operant conditioning sense, free will gives me the ability to choose an alternative that I know to be true but may not be pleasurable. If ..read more

In my book, The Three Rules of the Spiritual Universe, I try to set down (for myself) what I have observed about spirituality, using my unique set of experiences. “I am not you; you are not me; God is not us; and we, most certainly, are not God.” To discover anything about God, I must listen with “the ear of the heart,” as St. Benedict points out in his Prologue to The Rule. Most of my life has been juggling what words mean, such as “God” and “Trinity,” and what it means to have embraced a Catholic Universal approach to the reality I meet each day. What has changed for me during the last year ..read more

In my last blog, I talked about what I have discovered to place in that lock to open myself to the deepest part of my humanity, one which natural evolution alone can only take me so far. I offer you little mosaic glimpses of my thinking over sixty years of ups and downs in my attention to the whispers God is giving me. There are two elements to this process (which, I might add, encompasses my last sixty years of searching for meaning and the answer to those three innate questions.) I have my whole life of experiences, trials and errors, lessons learned, and squandered to use as my palette of c ..read more

I find it very disconcerting that, as I come to the end of my human existence, I only now discover some of the missing pieces that would have made all of this so simple had I had them in my wheelhouse forty years ago. But, because I only garnered a fleeting piece of the truth here and there, the final pieces seem to pop up unannounced in my 83rd year. There are many blanks left for me to discover what it means to be fully human, what it means to love fiercely, and what truth stands the test of time. Today, I will deal with one of them: what it means to die to myself to open up the next level o ..read more

In the last segment, I related how human reasoning and the ability of each individual to choose what seems best for them differentiates us from all other life forms. Life is the condition that allows organisms to move, noticeably gaining in complexity and consciousness, given the parameters of time as a succession of movements gathered collectively. I am not only NOT you, but I am not an animal, although my roots exist in the ongoing movement of all life forms as they move toward their fulfillment in the future. What makes me different and unique from any other life form, including each human ..read more

Here is the second piece of glass mosaic that takes a lifetime of trial and error to settle on what quells the dissonance of my humanity in finding an answer to the three innate questions imprinted on my being and possibly all humans (not animals). Only humans are capable of knowing the longings of the human heart. Here is the beginning of my search to find what fills that void, one which St. Augustine called: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” Using the progressive Teilhard Map (unattributed) as one guide, I think about why humans are different from all other lifeforms, althou ..read more