Running from Safety An Adventure of the Spirit

Introduction My truth has been a long time refining. I've explored and drilled for it with hope and intuition, filtered and condensed it the best I could with reflection, then run it through my engines, wary at first, to see what would happen. There have been a few backfires, all right, an explosion or two on the racetrack when I learned how volatile any home-mixed philosophy must be. Sooty but wiser, I blinked a while ago to realize I've been running my mind on this peculiar fuel much of my life. Even today, cautiously reckless, drop by drop, I'm gradually raising the octane. I didn't choose to brew my own facts for the fun of it, however, or because I never filled up on regular. Passionate to discover reasons to be and themes to live by, I surveyed religions as a teenager, studied Aristotle and Descartes and Kant in night-school colleges while I was yet a line pilot in the Air Force. Last course finished, steps heavy and slow on the sidewalk, I was gripped in strange depression. As best I could understand from classrooms, these gentlemen knew less about who we are and why we're here than I did, and I barely had a glimmer. Heavy intellects, they were, cruising stratospheres above the ceiling of my government fighter planes. I was willing to borrow shamelessly from their insight to build my own, yet it was all I could do, listening in class, to keep from screaming,"Whocares?" Practical Socrates I admired for his choice to die for principle when escape would have been easy. Others were not so compelling. All those tight-packed pages, microscopic letters, and at last their wise conclusion: You're on your own, Richard. How can we know what works for you? Studies finished, I walked aimless down the night, footsteps echoing to an empty campus, no place in mind to go. I took this course for guidance, I thought, I needed a compass to take me through jungles. Organized religions for me were teetery bridges, weak-tied twigs that snapped at the first pressure, a child's question turning impossible mystery. Why do religions cling to Unanswerable Questions? Don't they knowThat's unanswerable isno answer? Over and again I'd meet a new theology, and every time would come the test: Do I take this belief to become my life? Each time I asked, tried my weight on it, the spiderstick jackstraws trembled and creaked, then all at once collapsed in front of me, steps tearing off, tumbling down out of sight. I'd grab the world, cringe back from the edge thankful not to have been killed in the fall. How would it feel, to give one's heart to a religion that guarantees the planet will dissolve in fire come December 31, then wake up New Year's Day to songs of snowbirds? Sheepish, is how it would feel. From behind me as I walked, a woman's footsteps in the night. I angled right, to let her pass. Now I've finished my course in twenty philosophies, I thought, history's brightest stars, and every one has failed. All I asked was that they show me a way of thinking about the universe to guide me in daily life--not too hard a task for Thomas Aquinas or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, you'd think. Their answers worked for them, but their daily life was on a different moon from mine. "Was your study for nothing?" she said. "They've just taught you what you've been hoping to find all these years, and you don't even know it?" A flash of vexation...the woman wasn't passing me by, she was listening to my mind! "Excuse me?" I said, cold as could be. Dark hair with a bold streak of blond,Bach, Richard is the author of 'Running from Safety An Adventure of the Spirit' with ISBN 9780385315289 and ISBN 0385315287.