What It takes to be a Man ( or woman).   I have left the whole discussion in place for those who might see it later.

What It takes to be a Man (or woman).

The questions of life?

I spent a lifetime of learning, with a love of knowledge, and the ups and downs of life. I have spend plenty of time exploring ideas and issues. I love philosophy, history, books of all sorts. I live in a house crammed full of books and book shelves. Books are different to Google. Google is an illusion, a phantom, its just a whole lot of flashing dots, turn off the power and its gone. Turn it back on and maybe or maybe not you will find the same information again.

But when I scan the bookshelf, and see the books on the shelf, I remember each one for what it is, a certain body of knowledge, and I remember, broadly the sweep of was in it, and the specific important bit that means its still there. I have met many people, some in the flesh, some on the phone, some by letter, some on the TV, and some on the radio. I have learned much by doing, skills of the hand (which also needs the mind),  and spent all too much time daydreaming about what I might do next. I have had the privilege not granted to many of my ancestors, of travel to many places, some for work, many for pleasure, and for learning.  I guess I have always since those days as a kid missing school because of illness, and discovering books (no TV then), had a great desire to know about everything.

But in the end, I conclude that there are just four questions in life.  I have often dubbed this my “what it takes to be a man” speech. But its usually  a conversation between  two people, rather than a monologue like this. But stick with me. And email me your questions, make it a discussion.

Firstly and pivotally. Who am I?   This one is the pivot point. Get it wrong and every where just leads up or down rabbit holes, and into dead ends.

Secondly, where did I come from? Sometimes, its better called how did I get here?

Thirdly,  how come the world is so messed up? Today there are fewer and fewer people who live in the privileged cocoon of happy family, free from physical  wants, with broad knowledge and a satisfying  view of the world. Especially true in this pandemic world.

Fourthly,  where  ( or how) will it all end?   We must all come to terms with the physically finite.

 Find the answers to these, and in the words of Kipling in Desiderata (which means desires), you will be a man. (I use this generically to include woman, and at the same time recognize we think differently)  

This is a long journey, and I will not go down every side track, though I have been down many. I am a self taught philosopher (everyone is an expert) and would be fooling myself if I tried to cast myself as an expert in any or all of the disciplines I will touch on. But I will say that I am freer than most studied people, because I am able to escape the constraints of the formal “disciplines” which would have required me to agree with my teachers in order pass exams.  This is especially true in the world of ideas.  I am sure that there are, in places, errors in logic, or unfounded assumptions in my writing, but then, if there were not, you and I would not be having this discussion, as I would be unique in a very special way.

Feel free to email me, jim at trewalla.com.au.  This is not facebook, where every answer must be in one line, and I respectfully reserve the right to not reply at length to every statement or objection. But thoughtful exchanges are welcome.

The Next Episode

So, in full lockdown again. Freed from some of the pressure to be somewhere or do something, I can again stop to think and continue. And my first thoughts when I allow my mind to quiet, are ones of thankfulness that I am living in a Covid emergency, and that I am not living in Afghanistan, the Caribbean, or Cuba, and yet the quiet question is “if I am a man what should I do today about it?”

Question One

Who am I?  It often hard to give a straight answer. I can define it in my circumstances. I am a retired businessman, not wealthy by Australian standards, but wealthy compared with 80% of the world. I live in a modest house designed by me and substantially built but me to reasonable good environmental design features but yet quite ordinary.  I enjoy books, reading, learning, thinking about ideas. I enjoy binding books, making stuff, working in the garden. I am happily married, for 40+ years.  One daughter and her husband and 2 children live with us, sometimes with tension, most with enjoyment. Another daughter is about to have a first child, and another daughter lives in Qld with three children. In all generally happy families. I still have some business interests, just to keep me connected with the outside world. I have a strong relationship with the local Church, and contacts in many different Churches.  But I am rapidly growing old, and parts of my body are not what they were. But it would be reasonable to assume that I am a comfortable individual, to use the expression of one of the current TV adds,” I just want what I have now”. But is that all there is? Even as a young man I looked ahead, and asked the question who am I and what will I become.  And I have become some thinks I never dreamed of, and done some others that were never on my radar as possibilities. But is that truly all I am? Is my identity, just entertainment?

Question Two.

 Where do I come from? is listed as a separate question, the first question can’t be answered without consideration of it. So lets explore.

One of the boom industries today and especially during lockdown has been in family history. Where do I come from is very popular and family history is a place where we can seek to find ourselves. And there is some benefit in seeking where we fit in history past. Finding convict ancestors has become almost a necessity, and to find an ancestor on the first fleet is like finding gold.  But for some its also a problem because it can be a dead end.  I was a married adult,  long left home when I received a call from my mother and father who had moved to the regions but were in town. “Can we come over? “ I was asked. “ Sure what brings you to town?”  Curiously the reply  “Tell you later!.”    It seems they had been to a funeral, my grandfather on my mother’s side.  I thought we went to his funeral a couple of years ago.  No indeed he was a step grandfather and we had never been told about the real grandfather. This was her real father who had just died.  The story comes out that my mother was the result of a marriage that lasted only a very short while, and my mother was bought up  by grandparents while her mother worked.  The great part of the story is the unveiling of the gravestone during the service. The stone included my mother’s name amongst all the other children’s names. A gasp went up from the congregation “who is this other name”. My mother in the back says “that would be me”. Talk about making an entrance. And we knew nothing of this grandfather other than the marriage didn’t work out but it wasn’t ever talked about when we were children. Even after the funeral my mother wasn’t forthcoming. My great grandparents were of Scottish decent, but of course such matters weren’t discussed lest the secret got out. They are all gone now and we never were given the details to follow up.

And on my Dad’s side, we children  knew Dad was adopted. A good Christian family, with a great heritage as German settlers from the early 1800’s, and a heritage I was always proud of. But as teenagers we were told of Dad being adopted by them, adopted as a 9yo after WW2. But with no knowledge of his parents. Much later in life, Dad tracked down his mother not long before he died, and seem to get a great deal of relief from meeting her. But we never did. Much later after Dad and Mum both passed away a chance encounter in business located the family, and it was arranged we should meet old grandma who was still alive and going strongly. But  on the day, she refused to see us, and the door closed a little later when she passed on as well. So for me where I came from is a pretty mixed up and unknown source. No security or answers there.

My wife on the other hand can trace her ancestors on her mothers side to a convict transported in 1828 for stealing a copper kettle. But like many it was  a misdemeanor rather than a hardened crime, and he was soon freed in Tasmania and took up some lands in the wilds there. On his wife’s side were Tasmanian free settlers, and at that time most were staunch Christians coming to make a new land with new ideals.  And some of the heirlooms from them are still our possession, and are great links to a solid past.

So when I search for meaning as an inheritance, as an anchor for who I am, I strike a blank. All pretty messed up genetically, not much to lean on there.

All I could see was they were all pretty messed up, not too much to be proud of.  Mum and Dad were good church going upright people, that was the respectable thing to do, but away from there, Dad could swear like a trooper if in the right circumstances, and give sage advice about life matters, like don’t be too religious, its nice to know but don’t push it. Mum was a regular church goes at one of the local churches, but it meant wasn’t ever discussed. And the loss of my sister to leukemia at age 9 pretty well shut up the emotional doors on their lives. They never said so, but looking back, they just couldn’t find much meaning in it all, just a lot of heartache. 

I always thought there had to be more to life than what I saw. Yes, I went to Sunday school, like most of my age group, but I was happier with the Sunday excursions to see the visiting navy ships and a Sunday school outing. That was worth being a regular attendee to go on the outings to various places. But never a description of the meaning of life. No answer to the question of “Who am I” except for mixed messages. 

In my mid to late teens (started work at 15), exposed for the first time to the rest of the world, making my way across town on the train every day, and studying telephone stuff, exposed me to a lot of life styles that quit plainly freaked me out. I didn’t know how to act, how to respond to many circumstances. But I discovered the state library and spent a lot of time in there studying anything I wanted. I did some snorkeling and spearfishing during that time, I read every book in the library on sharks. Do you know there were only 6 books on sharks in the library in 1970. I read them all and loved  being able to seek out new information. I also read a lot of other books which purported to tell the meaning of like and our origins.

But a lot of the books  told about how our origins as accidental dots in history. In fact, they said,  the whole human race was the results of just genetic accidents. So I had a dilemma. If this was true,  I had to find a meaning for life for myself, at the same time knowing that ultimately, in the words of Carl Sagan, “we are just the dust of the universe”.

So I set out to do so. But it seemed whatever I read lead to the same way. We are born, we live and sooner or later we die. Lots of fun events, and things that are enjoyable.  But no purpose past ourselves and maybe a few near us, no meaning past what’s near, and the devastation is causes when someone near dies, and then we die and in a few years no one remembers us. 

But I wasn’t placid about it. I proceeded to challenge those who claimed some meaning. I asked them (particularly church people) to prove it. I even went to a Bible study with a group of Uni students (the privileged ones, not like us have to leave school at 15 to earn a living), so I could confound their wonderful fanciful ideas. And one person challenged me to read the Bible, not just discount it, and not just argue it was irrelevant without knowing what it said.  So I did, and I found claims in there that were very different, and challenged me to study more in order to discount its claims. Ultimately I couldn’t.  The historicity of the bible books is beyond dispute, and the transmission of the text impeccable. Everywhere it speaks on history has proved true. So the claims of the bible books made me have to agree that I had a decision to make.  If it was true then there is an ultimate purpose, I do mean something, what I do is seen, and what I do has ramifications past just the moment.

The matters of where I came from started to fit into a pattern and after many years have opened the door the uncomfortable parts of that physical history. And set me on a journey into the unseen world, the spiritual world. An in the end having also explored the alternative spiritual stories, I concluded one was true and historical. And I found that not only was it true, but it offered a relationship with God himself. Suddenly, all of history has meaning, not just because it happened, but because it’s a part of a much bigger unseen picture. And the unseen is just as real as the physical world. And it offers a future not as stardust, but in relationship to the one who says “I created the stardust”. My finite mind cant grasp it all, if it could I would be God. But it is intensely satisfying.

Right about now I am sure there are people going “ religious nutter”. But bear with me, I am not suggesting a sugar sweet soppy religiosity that refuses to answer the hard questions.  I am not sure there are human answers to every question, and again I am not God so I can’t answer them all. But if I  knew everything, then I would not be in a place where the infinite God says “trust me” to very important questions. That is what faith is.

So we arrive at Question 3

 How did the world get  so mixed up?

When we look out at the world everywhere people are screaming out why?  Why is this like it is? Why does that hurt me? Why is it just so hard? And we who have the most in the world (and if you think you are not well off go plug in your income into the “compareyourincome.org” world tracker and see what yours is,  relatively speaking), have no right to complain compared with the rest of the world, but yet we do.

Firstly there is an important question of logic. This is not about what we think and feel but what we are.

If all that exists is the physical, and if we are rationalists (I wont believe it unless it can be seen and measured) then we must conclude that everything happened by chance and can only be explained by forces that just exist and we all just happened by random chance, then there can be no absolute meaning to anything. There can only be what we feel about it, or what we feel about the effects of it (whatever it might be today). There is no right, no wrong, no ethics, no morality, no satisfying explanation. Its all an accident and accidents don’t mean anything.

Now if you are like me, you know that’s not a satisfying way to live.  My mind cries out that there must be some meaning. When I see the news all I see in passionless “reporting” of the events, my mind screams surely not. How horrible! Who made this or allowed this to happen. And I am sure that most whose consciences have not been seared beyond feeling, react to the daily events of this world. If someone walks up to you in the street, and bashes you, do you say “ its ok its just random”? No, your whole being  is asking why, why me? That’s because there is a part of you which refuses to agree there is no meaning in life.

I propose to you that what we are requires an explanation, one which is beyond what we feel, and one which ultimately makes sense of what we feel and allows resolution of what we think and feel.

In todays Pandemic world, we see this highlighted. People protesting because their method of making  sense of the world is the high of the pubs and clubs, or the high of exercise, football, or of shopping. People protesting that they have no freedom because of lockdown. I ask what is freedom? In a deterministic work where everything happens by chance, do we really have any freedom?

Is there a way that many of these questions can be answered perhaps not completely but in a satisfactory, systematic way? One which is satisfactory intellectually, emotionally and practically?

Bear with me and I will make a proposition. Lets assume is an Ultimate Being, non physical, eternal without beginning or end, who is.  Lets call him God and propose that he is able to break into our dimension because he made it.  So he is able to communicate with us because he made us.  And he chose to communicate through testable events in history and made sure the history was recorded.

Secondly, this Being is personal and communicates with us, telling us of his plans and ways has been recorded in a way no other ancient document has been recorded.

Thirdly the history of man is recorded and it enable us to answer many of the questions that keep us awake at night. Questions like who am I, where did I come from, God’s character, and how to live with others.

Fourthly it tackles the really important question of right and wrong. Where did it start, who is responsible, what can I do about it. Can it ever get fixed?

I can answer these in a simple way, but it will leave so many open ends that its better that you read this all yourself. Read the Christian Bible in the book of beginnings called Genesis (which just means beginnings). Read carefully, and ignore the cultural problems of 7 day creation. Happy to discuss at length for you later.  But read, asking  questions, could this be true?, especially when it starts to deal with man and woman. And read in the book of John, as it follows on from there.

And that is where I will leave the discussion today. And judging by the number of reads, I hope you will see fit to carry on and send me some of the questions you want answered to the email.

The Third Installment.

Did you read  the suggested parts of the Christian Bible?  Did you see the answers to the questions of origin, and identity.

If God is there and he made me, and wants to have a relationship with me, then in the words of the current zero beer add, “ this changes everything”. Life has meaning, it has purpose, its not an accident, my feelings have relevance, and the question of identity is resolved. Therefore, I am not an accident, the dust of the universe, but a person made up of two parts, a physical material part, and an immaterial part, what some call spiritual, or soul.  It makes human relationships work as we recognize it not just a set of chemical reactions, but relationships on that immaterial level.

So how does that make it all right? On its own it doesn’t, but if you follow the discussion along, it opens the doors to handle the elephant in the room. The big one. The question of right and wrong.

In the narrative (which for the purpose of the discussion I am asking you to assume might be an actual set of events),  God makes the first man, and the first woman, and walks and talks with them in an intimate relationship. Its not a human relationship, its much more. It’s the relationship of the life giver and the life given. And the life giver establishes the basis for their relationship. He cares and supplies all that is needed physically and emotionally. All the food, all the physical, and all the immaterial or if you like the spiritual.  And the creator says “ But there is one thing you cant have. I want you to trust me on one thing. Don’t go near a certain tree. That’s all I ask. Because if you disobey me on this you will know the difference between good and bad. Simple.”  But the man and woman, chose to disobey, and ever since the world has been messed up. In the same way, “this changes everything” did in fact change everything. Man and woman no knew what right and wrong were, and a special part of the relationship with God was broken. And straight away, man and woman set about trying to fix it. And man and woman have been trying ever since to fix it on their own. But its so hard. No matter how hard I try I cant fix it and I keep messing up the truly human part of me, the relationships with others. No matter how good my intentions, no matter how hard I work, I just keep messing up. Any human relationships all the way from one man and one woman, to family, to local community, to district, state, country and intercountry, no matter how had we try and no matter what our best intentions, it just gets worse.

So the full answer to the question of “why is life so messed up?” is clear. I messed up, and I can’t fix it. It seems I have no capacity to fix it, and yet one of the desires of males particularly, (male and female are not the same)  is to fix it.

And we arrive at the last question “ where will it all end?” or you might say “who will fix it?”

See you next time. Forward your questions This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..