When I was 16, I found a diary my dad (now dead) kept when he was an undergrad at Berkeley. At the end of every day, he would list all the time he had wasted that day. It would go something like this:

"20 minutes walking around apartment aimlessly
30 minutes wasted while studying because I was distracted
10 minutes slept in
Added up: I wasted an hour. I MUST do better than that! I am a failure!"

Because I never knew my dad past age 8, I never saw this side of him while he was alive. Yet it scared me, because already at 16 I had the same hyper-critical take on my work habits.

Tuesday I finished my last final - all three were easier than I thought they'd be. If anything, what I've learned this semester is not all in the textbooks.

I would say the most valuable thing I did was my honors project on Donne. I have an odd knack for making different projects come together into a singularity. So while I was working on religious poetry, I ended up dabbling in cognitive psychology. The Police had a song about that: synchronicity.

When my proposal on Donne was rejected for the honors conference, my heart sank. All that work and they didn't care! But then I saw a greater opportunity: to work on the idea more over summer and see if I could get it put out somewhere else. Is that presumptuous? Maybe. But my professor advised me that to get anywhere in the world, one needs a little ego.

That may also be why I have never had a dearth of mentors and advisors around. I am not afraid to approach them for advice. This is my blessing as well as one of my 'signs' that I am being called to my scholarly vocation.

Peace.

AMDG

My stream of consciousness while praying the other day:

When I first had what I would call a "God-experience," I had an intense feeling of joy and happiness surging up in my mind. This mental feeling correlated (or was slightly preceded by) a shiver running up my spine and maybe down my thighs a bit.

Yet during this experience, there was another voice asking: "How do you know this experience of God corresponds to reality?" Somehow this idea that religion is projection, that the concepts only structure the experience beforehand and do not come from the experience - this idea affected the experience itself. It leaves a bittersweet taste to it. The emphasis shifts from God to my concept itself in a new horizon of self-awareness or self-doubt.

Of course, I had heard this God-as-projection idea before (particularly from Freud, but also in modern psychologies of religion) but it had never permeated my prayer life.

Is there any way to know experientially whether or not an experience of God points to something real? That is, is there anything in the experience itself, or must that be discovered by metaphysical arguments? So many questions.

Peace.
AMDG