Contemplations

By Robert O. Doverspike

Contemplations is a collection of works and writings that Robert O. Doverspike wrote throughout his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664182578

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Copyright © 2021 by Robert O. Doverspike.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 08/10/2021

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CONTENTS

The Preface

The Musings

Essay 1     The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth

Essay 2     Virtual Truth, Virtual Reality

Essay 3     My Shame

Essay 4     My-Oh-My, Am I Having Fun!

Essay 5     A Piece of My Mind

Essay 6     How Now Conation?

Essay 7     The Search For a Word—Conation

Essay 8     The Butterfly Caper

Essay 9     Figuring Things Out—The Good and the Bad

Essay 10   Figuring Things Out to Quell Anxieties, Dispel Great Fears

Essay 11   One Man’s Theory Is Another Man’s Myth

Essay 12   Figuring Things Out with Rigor and Power

Essay 13   The Devil Made Me Do It

THE PREFACE

The what and why of these rambles

For many years I wondered about the efficacy of starting and maintaining a journal or diary. What would be the results of such an endeavor? I have been advised that I would reap a harvest of good from carefully planted and attended rows of sentences that tell of the various happenings and attendant attitudes that make up my life. Insight into myself, my inner life, and my relations to God and mankind would grow, bloom, and ripen into healing fruit. Catharsis would ensue. The great command Know thyself would be achieved if I were to keep a journal.

Maybe so, but until now, the promised fruits of such labor did not outweigh the inertia that suspicion, fear, and laziness engendered. I left it to others to point to the cause which had the greatest influence, but I suspect laziness played an important role.

In what form should such an undertaking be framed? A simple diary of entries for each day’s events would, in my case, be extremely dull to write and to read. Most certainly any reader, my self included, would think, What’s the use of going on—stop before Morpheus has his (or is it her?) way with you. No, some other approach is required. So I decided to write some thoughts about my life, both inner and outer, in a sort of stream of consciousness as I explain my believes and understands to myself. As the words increase, I may have to bring some structure to the whole affair. But until confusion grows to be intolerable, I will write without worry about form.

The words increased as time went by. I decided on a two-part form: The first part is a story of my life. It’s not a day-to-day or even year to year, but comments on my life. The second part is a series of essays explaining to myself the physical universe and the sensate creatures that try to understand and control their universe and each other. These are not formal essays written by a scholar. They have no bibliography, no references, none of the hallmarks of a scholar. They are explanations to myself.

THE MUSINGS

29 January 1996

A s of the date shown above, I am approaching my seventy-third birthday (16 March 1923). My life is about over, at least in any beneficial way to society. I now mainly consume and produce little. Some may argue that I deserve rest from my labors of many years, but it is of little consolation. I feel useless. But on the other hand, I cannot make even a weak argument that I need to apologize for being useless. Still, it would be nice to find something I could do to produce something of value for others. If I were not so lazy, I know I could find something. Maybe I could pretend I found something of importance to do, as certain people in our society are doing and getting good pay for doing so.

Born in the days of the flapper, bathtub gin, the speakeasy, and bootlegger—none of which I can remember—I grew up in the Great Depression. Now that I remember! My mother, born in the United States, was of Swiss descent and spoke German until she went to school. Her early life was hard, almost frontierlike. She first lived in Ohio and then in the middle of Michigan. She married my father when she was quite young. Father was mostly of German blood, but about one-quarter English. The German part came from Prussia at the time that William Penn settled Pennsylvania. He was born and reared on a small farm in western Pennsylvania that yielded little more than a subsistence. My paternal grandparents farmed the land, produced lumber to build farm buildings and a church, produced eight male and one female offspring, and supported many bedbugs. I got to know the bedbugs more intimately than I got to know most of my paternal uncles and aunt.

Dad was a traveling evangelist (i.e., a peripatetic teller of good news and perhaps damnation) when he met Mom. It seems that Mom thought that he was the good news. In any event, they married and traveled together until babies were born. Then Dad stopped traveling and became a pastor in the Evangelical Church in western Pennsylvania. This denomination was patterned after the Methodist Church in both polity and doctrine. The original name of the denomination was Evangelische Gemeinschaft. When the Methodist church would not publish literature in German or otherwise meet the needs of the large population of German-speaking people of the northeastern part of the nation, the Evan-gelische Gemeinschaft was born. By the time I was born, German was spoken in only few of the churches and all of the literature was in English. Later, after I left home, the Evangelical Church joined with the United Brethren Church, which has a history similar to the Evangelical Church, to form the Evangelical United Brethren Church, which in turn joined with the Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church.

Pastors in both the old Methodist Church and the Evangelical Church were moved periodically from pastorate to pastorate. The longest we lived in any one place was, I believe, seven years. As a result, I was raised in western Pennsylvania but count no place as my hometown.

So I grew up hearing a type of German spoken in the home. Not often, only when the parents wanted to talk secrets in front of the children or when the family would visit in and around Dad’s old homestead. One of my feel-good memories is hearing the women— hostess and guests—gossip and talk in soft German as I lay in my makeshift bed in a corner of the country kitchen. All was well with my world. Perhaps if I had understood German, I would have been less sanguine but more knowledgeable about the ways of the world.

Which brings to mind an incident that occurred when I was older, say about fourteen. Mom was using German to tell Dad something during the evening meal, which we called supper.¹ I said to Mom that she had better quit talking if she didn’t want me to know what she was talking about. As I was known as a tease and kidder, she kept talking. After supper when she was doing the dishes, she called me into the kitchen and asked if I really knew what she was talking about. I said that she was talking about the unmarried daughter of one of our parishioners who was pregnant and claimed she didn’t know who the father was. Mom replied. Yes, and you keep your mouth shut about it. I didn’t hear much German at home after that. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked Mom to stop talking because my education may have suffered.

I left home after graduating from high school. Went to Newark, New Jersey, to a trade school to learn mechanical drafting. Got a job as draftsman before I finished the schooling, but World War II interfered as I was not married and had insufficient time as a draftsman to be deferred from the draft. I joined the United States Marines, fought in the Pacific Theater, was discharged in California. Soon after (February 3, 1946) married Dolores Yvonne McKee, my high-school sweetheart. Applied to and got accepted by Stanford University, paid for by GI bill. I graduated, class 1951, from Stanford University with a degree in metallurgical engineering, and went to work at Kaiser Steel in Fontana, California. Soon came to the conclusion that management in industry was not for me. I could not get interested in lowering the cost of a ton of steel by using the tools of management as presented to me at that time. When I was offered a job in the aerospace industry as an assistant head of a metallurgical laboratory, I took it. My pay immediately went up by 50 percent. Stayed in the research and development end of high-tech industries till I retired at the age of seventy. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? But I don’t have much to show for it. I do have memories of doing interesting work that I enjoyed, but I repeat, I do not have anything worthwhile to show for it.

Life is uncertain. Although many people believe that they are captains of their lot, they kid themselves for the most part. It is true that those with ambition are more likely to prepare themselves to succeed in obtaining what they want than those without ambition. The opposite is true often enough that the lie is given to those that believe they and they alone are responsible for whatever success they have. For example, I stated above that I went to drafting school in New Jersey. When I entered the marines I had no idea that drafting school would be a positive factor in my life as a marine. The marines sent me to an engineer training outfit where I was schooled as a topographical draftsman. Thus, strange as it may seem, my attendance at the trade school and sojourn as a working draftsman obtained for me an enviable job in the marines. Enviable in the sense that as an enlisted person I had a reasonably safe job, but at the same time I was in the thick of things.

I worked as a topographical draftsman in the G-3 section of the V Corps of Marines. This meant that I prepared the invasion maps for Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and the Japanese island of Kyushu. Although, Gott sei dank, the invasion of Kyushu was not necessary, there was the excitement of preparing for it. Part of the excitement arose from the fact that, as I prepared the maps and charts, I knew that there were only a few people who knew about the plan. I knew the details of most of the invasions before the division commanders knew. I prepared the maps that issued the orders to them. During the actual invasion and ensuing land battles, I and my cohorts kept the official situation battle map. I read all of the messages that pertained to the battle situation and adjusted the map accordingly. After the engagement, we prepared the maps that went into the historical record of the battles, and presumably they are in archives along with other dusty records of glorious deeds written in the dry language of martial correctness.

Now, I did not go to drafting school with the thought of landing a good job in the marines. It just happened that way. But, as many people do, I could claim that by being ambitious, industrious, and sagacious I obtained a desired result. Nonsense! I do believe, however, that if I had not gotten such a job in the marines, there is a good chance I would not have returned, at least not whole. When I went overseas, I anticipated death, but my training in the States paid off because I was assigned to V Corps headquarters. Being in corps headquarters within a block or so of a three-star and two-star general greatly increases one’s chance for survival. As I remember, there was one death and perhaps four injuries within the immediate headquarters area. We lost some of our officers that went out to visit the front lines but no enlisted men, if my memory serves me. The generals always wanted firsthand reports so that headquarters officers were always going forward. The rules were that no one traveled alone, so the officers would usually take an enlisted man along. Sometimes I would be the one.

I do not mention my marine experiences to indicate that they are the central part of my life, as many veterans do. Far from it. Although those experiences contained excitement and touched the very center of my being, they are only one small part of my life. Falling in love, seeing your newborn child for the first time, experiencing the ineffable in certain spiritual situations or exercises can also touch the center of one’s being. Learning, learning, and learning about anything; unrestricted learning makes life interesting and alluring. Many experiences since WWII were more profound than anything that happened to me during the war.

July 13, 1996

After thinking about what I wanted to say in these writings, I finally decided to write essays on various subjects that reflect some of my thinking.

The rationale for this approach was based on the premise that humans tend to hold many attitudes and ideas that are antithetical. Alas, I am human, so I too must harbor contradictory attitudes and ideas. Perhaps by writing about them I will uncover such egregious dichotomies that I will be humiliated and embarrassed. Perhaps I will soothe myself in these cases by saying, To err is human, to forgive divine, and then proceed to forgive myself to achieve some sort of Godlike status, if not immortality.

I propose to create some sort of consistency in my attitudes and world map by looking at my beliefs and attitudes. However, it is my experience that life consists not of yes or no answers, but rather choices that preclude other choices, and answers that lie somewhere in between yes and no. Most of the time the choice is not between good and evil, but rather the choice is to make an effort to find the path that maximizes the chance of achieving desired ends and minimizing the undesired. Further, I believe that there are dichotomies that cannot be resolved. How well an individual handles these contradictions is, I believe, an indication of that individual’s emotional stability and maturity.

Perhaps some of these dichotomies are the result of the method used to define some phenomenon, situation, or moral issue. A different approach or definition might result in the disappearance of the dilemma or changing its character so as to allow a rational solution; or perhaps it may be that there was no problem, only a bad definition. I think this issue will be the subject of another essay somewhere in these scribblings. For the first essay, I chose to discuss truth, even Truth with a capital T. On the one hand, I am aware that this is one of the favorite topics of college undergraduates, especially the wise morons. I am also aware there are many, many written sophistries, extant and mercifully buried, about truth (and Truth). On the other hand, most everyone has an attitude and belief about truth, even though some would find difficulty in expressing it. Some might even think that the answer is so obvious that the discussion is reserved for sophomores. The title of the essay is, The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth.

In ending this particular entry of my musings, I want it noted that I am not writing a scholarly discourse and therefore will give no reference or citations. I acknowledge that what I write is based on reading, discussions with various individuals, formal classwork, informal workshops, much internal dialog, and contemplation. I thank all those who have aided and abetted, but everything I write is what I believe or think I believe at the time I write. All opinions and statements are subject to change. In this regard, I feel comfortable in stating my beliefs now, because there will be no need to justify them in my middle and old age since I am now entering my old age. What is so sad is to see a person who made a name for himself in some discipline when very young and then spends the rest of his life defending his position even in the face of new and compelling challenges to his original works. I think of B. F. Skinner, the fair-haired wunderkind of nurture. He never moved beyond his initial glories in my opinion. But someone had to set straight the believers in eugenics and the superman theory, right?

August 29, 1996

I finished writing the essay on truth in the middle of last month. Just read it to see what I said. Am somewhat disappointed in that I was not able to make my point clearer and with fewer words. The point I tried to make is that there is no such thing as ultimate truth or The Truth, and even if there were such a thing, it would be ineffable so that whether it exists or not is moot. For example, suppose someone said that the ultimate truth is God is love. No one would be so naive as to put forth such a statement as an ultimate truth, at least I hope no one would. But it serves as an illustration because of its simplicity. First off, the noun God would have to be defined and it would be defined by humans. Next, love would have to be defined, and again the definition would be of human origin. Lastly, the verb is would have to be defined. Does it mean existence or what? Most definitions, if not all, are about structure or relationships. All definition would be of human origin, so that the statement, God is love, is of human origin and would require agreement of the terms by those claiming the statement to be the Ultimate Truth. This agreement is highly unlikely. Any Ultimate Truth or Reality, it seems to me, must transcend human definitions, and as a result would be unavailable to us; that is to say, it is ineffable. For all practical purposes, it does not exist.

It does not exist even in the Platonic sense that there is a realm where everything exists in its pure, perfect form, and that all things on earth as perceived by humans are only corrupt and imperfect replicas. I don’t know why such an absurd idea maintained such a following for so long in the western world, but seemingly it did. We sense things, we defined these things as a means for our survival and enjoyment. Notice that I used the past tense. The present and the future tense can be used with equal validity. We sense, we define—there is nothing else for us. All we know is through structure and relationships. But how marvelous is the world we perceive and define. To the extent that we are continually able to bring to our collective minds new things, ideas, objects, or phenomena to be defined; to that extent, I say, we are creators of new worlds. And this is in addition to the strange quantum world where it seems that mankind, the observer, can affect the course of the universe simply by making measurements.

For all my talk about not being able to make the ultimate statement, I do believe that there are other ways of knowing besides that which comes about through our senses and our definitions, which are based on structure and relationships. There are the realms of art, of myth, of transcendental experiences, of faith, of the inner life—if you will allow such a term—that have truths of their own. I believe that the listed items provide for teaching and illuminating truths that are ineffable. They can only be learned and passed on via these rather esoteric means. I use the word esoteric in the sense that only those who are willing or able to be initiated into their secrets can participate in the learning experience. Those that experience such things can talk in ordinary language and be understood only by someone who has had similar experiences. Not that the words have changed their meaning, but that the words invoke sensations or memories of experiences that cannot adequately be described or defined. The participants in such a conversation know what the other is talking about, not because of any agreed-upon definitions but by experiencing similar episodes.

I had a friend, I shall call him Michael, who was an alcoholic but I did not recognize the symptoms. He had, I later learned, entered the late stages of alcoholism wherein the alcoholic needed only a small amount of alcohol each day to remain intoxicated. The liver is no longer capable of processing the alcohol. I went to his apartment one evening and found him in a terrible state. I knew of one alcoholic, let’s call him Tom,