Month: September 2021

A fact is something known or proved to be true. By itself, a fact is unemotional. It is neither good nor bad. It simply is – something based on a preponderance of evidence from careful study, systematic observation, or collective experience.

On average, humans are living longer than they did one hundred years ago. Medical discoveries and advances in waste water management have largely contributed to our lengthened life expectancy. Fewer children die or are permanently disabled in a world with equitable access to, and use of, vaccines. These are all facts because they are clearly measurable and documented. They should be beyond dispute.

Unfortunately, in a world increasingly plagued by the relativism of extreme individualism, in the cacophony of media-fueled commentary manipulated by those who would seek to destabilize social trust through deliberate confusion or woefully inaccurate opinion, a growing number of people have come to disbelieve in facts and objective reality. This trend does not make facts any less true. Facts remain. The trend does, however, make facts the subject of disheartening debate and misguided understanding. It threatens the foundation of the fundamental social contract we call representative democracy. It makes certain facts sad to some who would prefer that these truths were different, a subset of whom in turn invest harmful energy in ignoring and even trampling the tremendous effort that it took to establish these facts – and the improvements in human social life often associated with them.

Here is a representative sample of 8 “sad” facts:

1. Since early 2020, the new coronavirus has killed more than 650,000 Americans and over 4.5 million people worldwide. Most of these people would have lived had they not been infected by the new coronavirus. We have lost these people – our family, friends, and global community members – because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Simple protections, if used consistently, decrease the chance of becoming infected with the COVID-19 virus. These measures do not eliminate the chance. But they decrease it, just like a surgeon who wears a mask in an operating room, or a nurse who wears a mask while caring for hospitalized patient with influenza pneumonia, decreases the chance of spreading or acquiring an infection.
3. The COVID-19 vaccines work. They are not perfect. Their immunity may fade in some recipients. And a small percentage of people experience side effects, some of which are serious. But these vaccines save far more lives than they cause temporary side effects. They do not change a person’s DNA or alter a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant. They have saved countless lives.
4. A person with a public megaphone is not necessarily an expert. A megaphone can be a pen, a microphone, or a TV camera. People with such megaphones sometimes share misinformation. Some of these people do this on purpose.
5. Many human beings today are afraid – of infections, of mistreatment, of inequality, of weather pattern changes, of what the future will bring. “Fear”, as it is famously said in the novel Dune, “is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.” Fear can make someone forget that there are facts, that some people know facts and can be trusted, that some other people distort or subvert facts for their own gain. Fear makes any living being subject to erratic and sometimes destabilizing decision-making.
6. Freedom does not mean I can do what I want, when I want, and how I want. When one person’s choices place other people at risk, a representative democracy can and should place limits on that person’s choices. The U.S. Supreme Court has long acknowledged this core principle, including a ruling at the turn of the 20th century upholding a fine for one Massachusetts man’s refusal to get the smallpox vaccine. Since that time, smallpox has been eradicated. Vaccines eradicated smallpox.
7. My personal belief in God, Buddha, Allah, or any supreme being is no shield for my moral and social duty to others. In the United States, I am free to have and express my religious and spiritual beliefs; I am not free to impose those beliefs on others, even indirectly, such as when I behave in a way that places others at risk. My individual liberty is not absolute. It is not threatened when I remain in a country that mandates certain vaccines and I am personally protected by the decision of others to receive those vaccines – yet I myself choose not to be vaccinated. The reverse, in fact, is true. A government comprised of elected representatives can pointedly remind me of my constitutional and ethical duty to my fellow citizens to be vaccinated. I can be held accountable to live by the terms of the social contract in which I otherwise derive great benefit.
8. We are a country of citizens – not taxpayers. There is a cost, a commitment, associated with the benefits that we derive as citizens of the United States of America. As a child, I was inspired by these words from John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country”. I remain inspired by those words, and am humbled by the additional words that President Kennedy used to conclude his sole presidential inaugural address: “With good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

The human enterprise is messy. We must continuously nurture our common purpose and compassionately negotiate our response to the dynamic circumstances of our world. Challenges, such as pandemics, remind us of our frailties, our vulnerabilities. The future is uncertain. But we stand ready to greet that future, together, when we have the courage to stand firm upon a foundation of fact, of truth. We ask for blessing. We seek and pray for spiritual help. Here on earth, however, God’s work must truly be our own.

Where does the soul go when the body is asleep?

I suppose it could sleep too. That, however, seems counter-intuitive. The soul is the life spirit, that within us which persists no matter the physical state – alive or dead – of the body. If souls exist outside of evolution, they should not need sleep, an historical byproduct of the light-dark cycle of earthly days.

Of course this presumes that souls or spirits or whatever you’d like to call the “I” that watches the “me”, the feeling of observing outside of acting, the essence of continuance beyond the physical form, truly exist. There are some who believe that consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of the intricate interactions occurring within the cloistered confines of our skulls. To folks who believe this, there is no place for anything to go when we sleep because nothing exists to go anywhere. I think, because I am awake. I think not, because I sleep.

And yet I wake up each day the same self who closed its eyes hours before.

“Patterns,” the non-spiritual enthusiast would argue. “Neurological circuits. Nothing more. The wiring of your house doesn’t wonder when it will be turned on if the light switch is off. Neither does the so-called self. There is simply no current. No one is home.”

Well, some charge must be persistent for the brain to still live during sleep.

“A different state of activity,” the unsouled believer argues. “The brain is made of cells. Just like all the other cells in the body, brain cells get tired. They need rest, recovery. Why seek an explanation for something – the soul – for which we have no real proof exists?”

For years, I have had a conflicted relationship with sleep. How could such a beautiful state of suspended animation, something so inevitably inviting, be marred by the unwelcome and unexpected interruption of a nightmare or a bizarre dream? It seems unfair that some nights end with a dream of flight while others arouse us with a frightful encounter. It feels gratuitous to explain dreams away as unprocessed experiences or neurotic tensions. It is intellectually naive to interpret the rare and startling real vision revealed in lucid, healing, or prophetic dreams as neuronal cleaning.

Still, the time we spend dreaming is small compared to the remainder of the time we sleep. And we sleep, on average, about a third of the time we live. So there is quite a bit of human life spent in a state of unconscious dreamlessness, supposed nothingness. Allegedly, we are consolidating memories, processing emotions, and detoxifying our brains during all those hours of emptiness. I smile at the subtle conceit nestled within such explanations. They make sense, as explanations go. But who has ever witnessed a memory being consolidated or an emotion being processed? And, uh, if that is the purpose of sleep, why and how do things from decades ago suddenly present themselves for reprocessing? Please don’t offer me the facile response that my brain didn’t it right the first, second, or five hundredth time around. That’s like saying the sun rises at daybreak because every morning when I awake there it is. We need some perspective on matters in order to draw certain conclusions. Fortunately, we have off-planet views of the relationship between the sun and earth. No similar off-personal body vantage seems possible when it comes to the strange experience of life from the perspective of my brain.

My brain. My life. My self.

It is odd how we act so possessively when it comes to our individual body parts, personal histories, and lifetimes of experiences. Stranger still though is how we don’t adopt the same attitude about the nonlocal or timefree “everywhen” nature of being. It is interesting to observe that I can be so connected to you that we think of or call each other at the same time, or that two or more people separated by space can physically feel similar sensations when only one is affected by a local force. We are all comprised of the same original atoms released at the Big Bang, we smile. We are more than individuals, we nod. We are interconnected, interdependent, we agree.

But we are nothing, we are inactive, our souls are without intent and engagement when we lie in dreamless states?

I posit something different. After more than sixty-two sun cycles, it has finally occurred to me that some essence, the core vitality I have come to believe is more than my body or my mind, is busy during the hours that my body and mind are relatively immobile. What is that “soul” doing? I can only imagine. Is it still within my form? Doubtful. Does it interact with your spirits, with those who have lived before or even after us, during the hours each day when the metaphysical is not required to supervise the sometimes disappointingly bumbling journeys of the physical? Possibly. Something else? I seem ill-equipped to reply.

If a soul can be released when a body dies, then so too can a soul travel when a body sleeps. Because there is wonder and beauty within the release of spirit to greater purpose and good. There is light from spirit within the darkness of night surrounding the body.

The soul I call mine may be at work when my body and mind are not. I think of that each night before I stretch into sleep, offer some prayers and good intentions to help direct and support my soul’s itinerary while I slumber. That reminds me that perhaps only part of “me” is really asleep. It is refreshing to feel active when I appear most at rest.

Should you find the idea too fanciful, yet are someone who believes you have a soul, do you think that the Creator/God/Yahweh/Allah sleeps? Can something that is always ever be nothing?