ARE YOU GOD?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 15, 2020

REFERENCE

Possible influence on this dream, the long historical work, AUGUSTINE: Conversions and Confessions (2005) that I just completed.

Turns out that St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430 C.E.) was quite an ordinary man in many senses of the word, despite his brilliance, and while he talked to God many of us talk to our own minds. 

Likewise, Augustine was comfortable in rhetoric and made his living as an orator before turning inward and becoming a prolific author, which others in this modern day can relate to as well.

Many of us have lived through The Great Depression, the Second World War and subsequently, the explosion in technology and the emasculation of society, culture and religion, especially Christianity, not realizing that nothing was more contentious, chaotic and uncertain than this religion four centuries after its founding, not to mention the collapse and fall of the Roman Empire occurred in Augustine’s lifetime. 

As St. Paul invented Christianity as he envisioned it, four centuries later, Augustine, who was not baptized Christian until in his thirties, reinvented Christianity again, low born that he was, the son of a pagan father and Christian mother, a man who had a lot of lion as well as lamb in his personality. 

So, as they say, the more things change, it is apparent the more they remain the same, including coming to understand what it is like to be alive for a short time on this blessed planet.

THE DREAM – Background

After I retired from gainful employment in 1990, I turned to writing books, articles, missives and monographs that have swelled to some 1,500 missives and 25 books, mostly in the genre of social psychology. 

A book with which my soul has been gestating, mutating, selectively assimilating and conceptually adapting to my experience over the years, then incrementally written about, ideas presented at conferences, and addressed to leaders in the United States, Canada and Europe has taken the form of The Fisher Paradigm©™ that was formed innocently in my mind in youth, and has grown to fruition over the past 60 years including in a confessional novel, DEVLIN (2019).  This is the background to the dream.

THE DREAM

I am having coffee at MacDonald’s of a weekday morning, where I like to ponder what I had written on The Fisher Paradigm the previous day.  A man in another booth keeps looking over at me, smiling.  He has the incongruous look of either a professor or an engineer, years younger than I am, but with a well lived in face that suggests he has paid his dues to get to this point in his life.

“Pardon,” he says with a broad smile, “if I seem intrusive (which clearly he was being), but I, too, come here often and read my newspapers, but you have an intensity about you that, well, I find fascinating.”

I look up, but say nothing.  He waits.  I still say nothing.

“Mind if I join you?”  What could I say as he already has moved into the booth sitting across from me? 

“I’m professor of physics down the way at the university.  Nuclear fusion is my passion.  Are you familiar with nuclear fusion?”

“As opposed to nuclear fission, you mean?” I say finally.

“Yes, exactly.  Yes, indeed.  Combining rather than splitting to produce energy of a less magnitude of nuclear radioactivity.”

“To imitate the sun’s energy source, I would imagine,” I say sorry for being so pompous.

“Well, yes, in a sense that is the idea,” he ruffles his beard. “Can I tell you something?”

Being somewhat territorial, the privacy of my morning destroyed, my silence was taken for consent, but that was not the wonder of this man.  He told me a story that dovetailed so well with my own that I hoped his commentary would never end.

He had been a university student at 16 with a passion for physics, earning his Ph.D. at a major eastern university before he was 20.  A rather satisfying if not distinguished career followed, and now nearing 65, he was, as he put it, in the “coasting stage,” happy to be employed around young people with bright minds and a kind of confidence he remembered once having.

Over the years, he has kept in touch with a professor he has never met, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum mechanics and nuclear physics.

He confessed to the professor his passion for nuclear fusion with his desire to make the ultimate breakthrough.  He smiled recalling his arrogance, but continued earnestly.  “Every time I would excitedly share an insight into nuclear fusion with him he would write and say it was redundant; that I should apply myself more vigorously.  I took his advice, thinking he knew the answers to what I only dreamed of discovering, but he was keeping them to himself.

“Since you can only win the Nobel Prize once, I suspect he was not of a mind to reveal his secrets.  It sometimes made me angry, but I never let him know that.  I knew he was right.  It was for me to discover on my own.” 

Then he got a sad look on his face and looked nearly as old as me.  For the longest time he said nothing.  Silence is my nature, and listening perhaps my greatest virtue, but I had to know.

“What happened?” I asked anxiously.

“He quit writing; he quit answering my queries.  I thought he may have died, but I checked and he hadn’t.”

“Why do you think he quit writing?”

He shrugged his shoulders, “Who knows.  I suspect it was because I stopped growing; stopped pursuing my passion, was looking for him to relieve me of the burden of discovery.”  He folded and refolded his newspaper.  “He was right of course.  I had surrendered to what I had known; was not of a mind to keep growing.”

A chill went up my spine.  I thought of my friend in Canada whom I have never met; who has worked with me in this computer age of which I am a nincompoop to get my ideas into print.  In fact, unpublished manuscripts, articles, and missives that I have failed to catalogue and keep at my bidding, he has.  He works as hard as I do to get my ideas into a format that will appeal to readers when it is clear that I fail to register equal concern.  He knows this last book, the equivalent of my discovery of nuclear fusion, is a passion of mine.        

“Hello!  Hello!” my booth stranger says.  I look up dreamy eyed.  “Thank goodness!” he says, “I didn’t know what to think as you seemed to have left me.  Do you do this often?”

Instead of answering, I said quickly, “I’ve never met him, my Canadian friend.  I’m not what you would call a social person, yet two people, you and I have never met have had extraordinary impact on our thinking. 

“You have dealt with the idea of nuclear fusion as a more reliable source of energy, primarily in an isolated academic setting, at least essentially from the maddening chaotic conflicting energy which is the social setting of human combustibles.  That, alas, has been my laboratory.   

“My temperament, I suspect, is closer to yours than yours is to my experience.  Would you say that is fair?”

He looked at his watch and got up hurriedly.  “I’m due for a class.”  Then as he turned to leave, after shaking my hand, and said strangely, “Do you think my professor friend I’ve never met and your Canadian friend are God?”

My coffee was cold and tasted like acid.  I looked up and into the parking lot to get my last glimpse of the man who had only left seconds before, and there was no man in sight.  I wondered: Did I imagine all this?  Then I woke up.