Retreat

[degringolade]

 

Got a call from Eric yesterday.  God, its good to hear from him.  Our lives have taken pretty much the same trajectory.  He is younger than I by a couple, but we are both getting long in the tooth.

I have a sneaking hunch that he is trying to drag me back to the lab with him.  We had a good gig in the long ago when we were young and strong.  Co-Principals on a pretty fair-sized NIH grant.  We did some pretty amazing things with electrostatically spun fibers and cell culture.  Trouble is, like most things during the go-go days of the 80s in the biotech world, what we did violated current scientific dogma and was deemed a failure.  Now our paper is a seminal piece of work and is getting routinely read by folks working on the same thing which he and I "failed" at.

OK.  He tweaked my ego and for a brief shining moment got me thinking about the prospect of "going back in".  My vanity and cupidity both kicked in during the ride down to dinner with Joanie and Tom.  I thought about it last night while listening to my Grateful Dead Tribute band (who were somehow offended that I gave them a rating of "85% of a Grateful Dead Concert") and the more I thought, the less appealing the idea became.  

Then this morning, JMG came in with a timely post over at his Dreamscape site.  Got me thinking even harder about what the hell I am doing here in my sixty-fifth year.  The answer of "going back to the failing model of science" was not even a little in the running.

"The intelligence of individuals is, in regard to the absolute divine intelligence, nothing but the organs by which and through which the great act of revelation is performed."

Letters on Tellurism by Gioacchino de Prati,                               

 

Look, even though people get weird here in the Land o' the free when you state that you are smart, it doesn't detract from the fact that you are.  Since I am qualified to join the society of pretentious poseurs (Mensa) and my resume reflects more than a couple of patents and publications, my intellectual cred is pretty well established.  But I can't say that I want to waste my time on doing science anymore.

I left the field ten years ago.  Haven't really done any science since.  I do make some side-bank coin by being an institutional memory for the projects I headed up in the past, but even that is coming to an end.  I will miss the coin, I won't miss the denouement of an old life that I walked away from.

"The instrument of all human enlightenment is an educated mind illuminated by revelation. [..] Those...by whom the great discoveries in every age are made, are always those who have prepared themselves for revelation by the cultivation of such interests as characterize the natural philosopher."

 

The View Over Atlantis by John Michell     

                                 

I cannot think for a minute that I stand a good chance of an "Illuminated Mind", but I am more than willing to give it a try.  I tend toward the Chinese in my philosophical/mystical leanings.  My main rituals are the I Ching and the related Tao Te Ching, but I am looking around for a path to just that.  There is too much that is beyond science that I want to know to be drug back into the swamp that got us in this mess in the first place.

Comments

Quick thanks

[(Anonymous)]

I came to this via JMG's site. I appreciate you posting. May you know that your older post get read!