Pentecostal Pilfering

The PENTECOSTAL LADY was indeed dismissed from the senior center, maybe a mutual thing. So I'm seventy one years old now and can still be surprised. I'm lucky. Some scientist once said that when you consider the sheer complexity of the human brain and mind, with billions of nerve cells and all, that we should probably never be surprised by anything that anybody ever does.The scientist, I think, was Carl Sagan, and I think he said it in his great book "Broca's Brain". Or maybe we should be surprised by everything that everybody does, or surprised that anybody ever does anything at all. "I'm Amazed I'm Alive", a friend of mine, a singer song writer, titled one of his songs. Since I am retired, live two blocks from the senior center, and go there for lunch five times a week, and pretty much know everyone there, indeed I was and still am surprised at the alleged, evident Pentecostal petty theft, even if, according to logic and common sense, I shouldn't be. Einstein once said that either everything is a miracle, or nothing is. Amazingly, I understand what Einstein meant by that, and I concur wholeheartedly. Why and how does anything exist at all, my father, a lawyer, once asked. Most of us probably ask this same question at one time or another. I certainly hope so. Thinking about the difference between "brain" and "Mind" is interesting, because they should be, must be, essentially the same thing. You begin to understand why some people consider it more valuable to spend their lives meditating in a cave than acdtiviely participating in society. But doesn't it sees as if you could accomplish more in your cave meditations by being well educated, by having studied and learned,and lived many years of life experiences, rather than just entering the cave young and stupid, open mind or not. The truth appears to be that there is no such thing as "free will", that every particle of matter and energy in the universe, ourselves included, obeys the laws of nature, is constrained by and to natural law, and that therefore the human mind, we us, are not the creative free thinking intelligent being we often fancy ourselves, but rather, mere collections of chemicals, obeying, like all matter and energy, the laws of nature. You arrive, don't you, at the conclusion that we must be both, bags of chemicals and creative, intelligent beings, creatures, entities, without the slighets knowledge of how we came into being,and thus limited to our notion of what we call "God". My best effort is to believe that the terms "God", "cosmos", and "universe" are synonimous, regardless of how they are defined in Webster's one millionth edition. Usually, we are surprised by what other people do, but not surprised by what we oursleves think and do. To me, all of my thoughts and actions seem understandable, or so I think. No matter what I do, I think I can, if aked, or if I choose to, explain the reaons for it to somebody else. Of course, I'm deceiving myself. Hell, I don't even know why I exist, let alone something picky like why I like watching "Gunsmoke" or eating tator tots. The fact that life is a complete mystery was a source of inspiration, wonder, and happy rumination for Einstein. He didn't let the fact that he failed to achieve his intended goals in science rain on his parade. For him, it is the process of wonder,thought, and exploration that motivated him, the process itself, rather than outcome. We all need to approve of ourselves, and to live so as to merit our self approval. We are our own ultimate judges. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to be a little less results oriented, and a little bit more amazed and joyful at the process itself.