Divinity Within Ourselves (Book 2) , livre ebook

Divinity Within Ourselves (Book 2)
D. Derek Lyons
Austin Macauley Publishers
2018-08-31
Divinity Within Ourselves (Book 2) About The Auther About The Book Dedication Copyright Information Introduction 1 My Conversion 2 Uninvited 3 Mystical Experience 4 The Birth Of God 5 Trip Into Neverland 6 The Greatest Superhero 7 Eureka 8 Martyr To Truth 9 Beauty And Truth 10 Romantic Love And God 11 Praising Beethoven 12 Search For Meaning 13 Religion And Salvation 14 The Constant Of Change 15 Religion And Power 16 Awe And Wonder Guilt And Sorrow 17 Good And Evil 18 Paradise Lost 19 Protagorean Pragmatic Prescription
About The Auther
The author has been a patent attorney for over 30 years, now with a practice in the New York City area. He was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1951, the first of seven children. He went to Lehigh University, where he majored in math, physics, and psychology. He has painted in acrylics and sculpted in clay. He currently reads, thinks, and writes. He is married with one child.
About The Book
Divinity within Ourselves proposes that belief in God naturally arises from the operation of the human brain, particularly from consciousness of mind itself. This point of view came four decades after the author weaned himself away from the theology of the Catholic Church. Deeply religious from early childhood, Derek Lyons rebelled from God during a wrenching experience while he was a teenager. Here is the story of his conversion, and how and why it happened.
Dedication
To my daughter, Clara, who said that I would not have written this book if she had been willing to listen to what I had to say.
Copyright Information
Copyright © D. Derek Lyons (2019)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Ordering Information:
Quantity sales: special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publishers cataloging in publishing data
Lyons, D. Derek
Divinity Within Ourselves: A Memoir
ISBN 9781643781709 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781643781716 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781643781723 (Kindle e-book)
ISBN 9781645366669 (ePub e-book)
A memoir: Library of Congress Control Number: 2019935302
The main category of the book — Religion / Christianity / Catholic
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
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New York, NY 10005
USA
mail-usa@austinmacauley.com
+1(646)5125767
Introduction
‘Sometimes, we question who we are and how we came to be.’
I WAS DRIVING to see my father. He was working on a helicopter prototype in Center Moriches, New York, along the southern coast of Long Island. He was a company man, having worked for decades for Boeing, first as an aircraft mechanic for B52 bombers in Wichita, Kansas, where I was born. Later, when I was 11 years old, we moved to the Philadelphia area, where my father began a second phase of his Boeing career, working on Chinook helicopters, those twin-bladed troop carriers one can still see today in new movies, 50 years after the machines were first built.
I was not really going there just to see my father. Rather, I intended to exchange cars with him, a large station wagon for a Volkswagen beetle. He owned both cars, but he was going to give the Beetle to me and my brother.
On my drive from the Long Island Expressway along local roads winding among villages and farmland, I picked up a teenage hitchhiker. He wore nondescript denim pants and a baggy olive green jacket. His long and black hair occasionally fell over his eyes. Sometimes, he brushed the hair away from his eyes when he looked in my direction. He was a solitary person, struggling with his burgeoning self.
I was alone, excavating my thoughts, when I heard him ask, “Are you a priest?”
I looked at him, hard, and knitted my brow. Turning my eyes back to the road, I said, “No.” Emphatically, no. Forever, no.
What was it about me that made him think I was a priest, when I had unequivocally ejected religion from my life, when I had denounced all religion as false? At that time, religion was to me a worship of false gods, or rather a singular false God, according to the prevailing monotheism.
As a child, I had been a fervent Catholic. I memorized the catechism, both questions and answers. I listened intently to the nuns in school and the priests in church. I was a devout altar boy, who thirsted for the mysterious otherworldliness of incense and the crisp happy clarity of the ceremonial bells.
Perhaps, something in my childhood mind still resided in my adult mind, something that I had not excised.
My grandmother had attempted to mold me to her image of goodness. “Oh, you’re going to be a priest,” she said more than a few times. We had two nuns in our extended family on my mother’s side. In addition, my mother’s younger sibling became a Jesuit brother for several years during my childhood.
Perhaps, I had discarded the theology but retained the demeanor and emotional state of a deep believer. Perhaps, the hitchhiker felt this in me, the kindness and tranquility of the true believer. But I was not destined to be a priest, not in any traditional sense. A priestly apostate, perhaps.
***
WHO AM I that I would reject the religion of my parents and their parents before them? What am I that I could do something so senseless as leaving the hearth and the warmth of my ancestral home and venturing out into the secular world, bereft of the blessings of my family?
How could this have happened to a boy whose faith had been so deep that he took the confirmation name of Tarcisius, the name of a Roman child, purportedly martyred, beaten to death by a mob when he was discovered carrying sacramental bread to Christian prisoners in ancient Rome. That storied boy became the hero of my elementary school mind.
I had cast myself out of God’s Garden, outside the warmth and consoling beliefs, rituals and traditions of the Catholic Church. For many years I felt loss and regret, perhaps the kind a person feels who does not have a country. Having no country or no religion was having no place to call home, no place to feel the safety of assured belief.
After nearly a half century of aimless sampling of novel mental constructs and age-old traditions, I found myself reading a number of 1990’s books by neurologists. One provided a personal account of a mind battered by a stroke. My sister-in-law recommended this author to me. My sister-in-law, a Taiwanese woman, had converted from a Tao-Buddhist tradition to Christianity, particularly the Baptist faith. She had found the personal account of a stroke victim to be supportive of her faith. Ironically, I found in the same book a quasi-scientific explanation or rationale for the existence of religious belief, particularly monotheism.
I have reached the end, or at least a long-desired way station, of my wanderings among canyons of confusion and peaks of clarity with respect to religion. This book is an account of the understanding that I needed and could not find in a sporadic neophyte dabbling in various spiritual traditions.
This book forms then a kind of closure for a major part of my life. I had had a decades-long yearning for something to fill the chasm that opened up upon my conversion from religious belief to atheism. Rather than filling the gap, I have perhaps sewn it shut. The yearning still occurs, but I will seek sustenance not in religion but in science, particularly neurology, and in the arts. I have found I can slake my thirst for spiritual feeling by drinking from the well of Art Form.
1

My Conversion
‘Truth and Right find champions in Science and Religion.’
WHEN I GRADUATED from Lehigh University in 1975, up the hill from Bethlehem Steel’s blast furnaces, it was after six years and 210 credits of science and engineering classes, and I had not yet finished college. I lingered on in Bethlehem, auditing philosophy courses on ethics for the 20 th century scientist and the meaning of meaning; I also attended life drawing workshops where I sketched naked models with charcoal.
I supported myself by working as a security guard in a small metal fabrication factory adjacent Bethlehem Steel. Every hour during my nighttime shift, I made my rounds through the premises, stopping to insert metal keys, which hung on chains from walls and columns, into a clock I carried by a leather strap. At each key station, I twisted the key to punch a paper tape winding along a path inside the clock. I knew this about the clock because one of the older full-time career security guards marveled that my key punch holes were nearly in a straight line across the paper tape.
“How do you do that?” he asked, his hairy eyebrows knitted with suspicion.
The secret was: I ran. I ran through the darkened metal cathedralesque buildings, past the theatrically lighted welded-metal geometries, turbines, and engine mountings. I ran so that I had more time to read my books and think my deep thoughts.
When it was time to leave behind me even the appearance of being a student, I interviewed at Bell Labs in New Jersey. A guide led me to a small room in a single-level building, not unlike that of an elementary school, where I talked to a young fellow in a T-shirt and dungarees. His interview technique was simple. He asked me two questions.
“Do you think you can do this work?” he asked.
The work consisted of wiring printed circuit board