Table of Contents
(Please note: you can click from the contents below and jump to that section,
or you can just scroll down to start from the beginning.)
1: My Childhood Confusion and Loss of Trust
2: Two Amazing Dream Experiences and My Evolving Thoughts About God
END OF FORMATTING
5: Examples of the Misuses of Will
6: Examples of Positive Uses of Will
8: Einstein’s Regret
9: Beyond Relativity to Absolutivity
10: The Big Bang/Sprouting
11: Why no Beginning & No End
12: No Outer Boundary or Time Limit
13: My Conversation with Mom
14: The Happy Marriages of Yin & Yang
15: Male & Female - One’s & Zero’s
16: Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek & Beyond
17: About my Daily Prayer
18: The Axiom of Change
19: All the Horror’s & Why I Still Believe
20: Seven People & Planet Friendly Ideas
21: Ending Social Insecurity for Retired Low Income Seniors
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Introduction
When Einstein was asked, “Do you believe in Miracles,” he said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Later in his life, he became convinced of the likely existence of there being some form of Universal Intelligence as the driving force of creation.
Scientists tell us that Our Universe began as a microscopic concentration of Energy that can only Compress, Expand and Change Form.
We’re also told that everything and everyone that ever was, is now, and will ever be, came from Energy compressed into a space probably smaller than an apple, floating in the Limitlessness and Timelessness of Interstellar Space, for an indeterminate amount of time, before it began its Infinite and probably Eternal Outward Expansion.
Science also tells us that our source goes all the way back to the “so-called” Big Bang, which I think is better called “A Spectacular Sprouting.” After all, an Explosive Bang is a destructive event, whereas a Sprouting is, by definition, both expansive and constructive.
If you’re already convinced that God is the Supreme Source, you will find plenty of ideas here to support your belief. However, on the other hand, if you’re an Atheist or an Agnostic, be assured, you will most certainly not be transformed into a “True Believer.”
My hope, at the very least, is that this relatively Brief Book will inspire you and others with an expanded sense of awe and wonder about the challenges and beauty of us and this amazing Planet and Universe, and the non-destructible energy from which everything and everyone has come.
The original subtitle for this Book was – “Implications from What we Know.” I later realized that what we know, and think we know is growing and so I changed the subtitle to: “Implications from What we Think we Know.”
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Part One
My Childhood Confusion and Loss of Trust:
I was raised in a mixed-up, well-meaning, religious family. My father was raised as an Austrian Jew, and my mother was raised as an Italian Catholic, and I grew up as a confused Half Jew/Half Catholic.
As a young child, I struggled with these opposing religions and customs. Did I want to identify as a Jew and be one of God’s “Special Chosen Few” that rejected Jesus as the Messiah/Savior, or did I want to identify as a Catholic and be spared from the flames of hell as a member of the “One True Religion”?
I could be a Jewish Matzo Ball, or an Italian Catholic Meat Ball, and instead I became a withdrawn and angry atheist, thinking my family members were all crazy and, if there was a God, I hated the SOB! for all the horrible things he allows us to do to ourselves, others and our Home Planet.
Fortunately, along the way, life happened to me, and I had experiences and epiphanies that led to my expanded thinking about God, Good, Evil, Life, and my relationships with Family, Friends and these Temporary Forms of you and me.
My path to believing has been a long painful journey, with many highs and lows, before I became convinced of the existence of an Intelligence in and as the Universe, and possible Multiverses, that is Infinitely Universal and Intimately Personal.
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Part Two
Two Amazing Dream Experiences and My Evolving Thoughts About God:
In the past, when asked, “Do you believe in God?” my answer was, “That depends on what you mean by God.” For me, the question requires much more than a simple yes or no answer.
Seeking the answer to that question for myself, along with others, is one of the main reasons why I’ve written this relatively brief book, which I hope will be helpful to you and others seeking answers that ring true.
Dream # 1 - As a half Jew, half Catholic-raised child, at around age thirteen, I had an unexplainable dream experience. Several years before the dream, I had been an altar boy at my church, where I served with Father Francis at Sunday Masses.
About five years after the last time I had been to church, I was upstairs in my bedroom, taking a Sunday nap, dreaming about my times with Father Francis. I dreamed of lighting candles and doing my part, responding to his sacred outpourings. In the midst of this dream, my mother called out and woke me up. “Richard, you’ve got a visitor, and you’ll never guess who it is.” But I knew.
I came down the stairs, and there he was. He told me that in the middle of mass that Sunday, he had a strong memory of me and felt called to look me up and pay a visit, and he had never been to my house before.
Dream # 2 - Around 20 years ago, I was having a series of recurring dreams. In them, I rescue two furless baby squirrels. One was a male and the other was a female. My wife and son were weirded out by my obsessive telling and retelling my recurring dream which led to the following happenings.
It was the middle of a cold and windy month of March and I was leaving the house to go pick up my son at the bus stop from school.
My neighbor, across the street excitedly called me over. “Richard, come and see this!” On the ground was a tiny furless baby squirrel that had fallen from his palm tree in the wind. I picked it up and realized that it was a female. In awe, I held her carefully in one hand as I drove to get my son.
When I arrived at the bus stop, my son got in the car and noticed the squirrel in my left hand. Having been bombarded, along with my wife, about my recurring squirrel rescue dreams, he was freaked out.
We rode home in an uneasy silence. When we arrived, the neighbor begged me to come back again. There was another baby squirrel on the ground that had fallen from the same tree, and just like in my dream, the second squirrel was an injured male! I took them both into the house and immediately called my wife at work.
When I told her what had happened, she thought I was pulling her leg. I assured her that I was not, and that one of the babies was a boy and the other was a girl, just like in my dreams.
I urged her to come home right away and help me care for them, which she excitedly did, after first stopping at a pet store to figure out what the two babies needed to be fed.
We named the boy Will and the girl Grace. Unfortunately, early on, Will died. However, Gracie lived on with us, inside and outside our house for a few years. After being successfully seduced, twice, by a neighbor boy squirrel, she became a very good mother of two litters that we had the honor to love and play with.
These dream experiences profoundly affected me. I couldn’t come up with any logical explanation, so my mind drifted to the spiritual/mystical.
