{"id":3177,"date":"2022-05-28T20:52:19","date_gmt":"2022-05-28T20:52:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/?p=3177"},"modified":"2026-04-07T00:58:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T00:58:19","slug":"make-a-page-belief-system","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/true-life\/1985-1989\/make-a-page-belief-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Developing Skills and Affecting Beliefs"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I’ve always been a generalist, curious about “the big picture”. <\/strong>As I neared adulthood, I told myself that I wanted “to know everything”. Art school seemed to become the channel through which I would try to achieve that lofty goal.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Other Ways of Understanding Things<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

By eighteen, I’d become keenly aware of the disparity between the external world around me, and my internal psychological world.<\/strong> I understood some basic ideas of physics, electronics, and radio, and had read a little about Sigmund Freud. I wanted to understand more.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Externally, I saw sunlight filtering through leaves on the trees outside my bedroom window, and I knew that RF radiation was all around me, resonating through everything on earth, and beaming its way out into space.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Internally, my life was full of contradictions, and the adults I knew appeared to be hypocritical and flawed. I was bright and curious, but my mental network was muddled, conflicted, and complicated. Maybe it could be explored and untangled with enough time and care.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

As I verged on adulthood, I anticipated the freedom and absolute responsibility that I might face in the years ahead. Would I find someone to love me? I was sure it would be a girl, but who would she be? Would there be real love?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Would I find a career that I would enjoy? What would I do? I had no clear idea what I would do for my future career. I only knew that I loved visual art and stories. Fantasy and escapism had practically saved my life, insulating me from hard family realities that faced me too early.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

What was my adult life going to be like in the future? Could life improve and would I be happy? Maybe I really wanted to escape and to take a chance, but I wasn’t quite ready. I didn’t feel like I could ask anyone those sorts of massive philosophical questions about my future and the meaning of life.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Lens of Science<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Looking at things through the lens of science, I’d begun to feel what might be the same wonder that I’d read theologians express when they contemplated what they saw as God’s creation. At the H.R. Macmillan Planetarium, I’d looked at a poster-sized photo showing a densely-packed field of glowing dots of light, and I learned each glowing dot was in fact an entire galaxy. There were thousands of them in the giant photo. That was amazing enough, but the real punchline was that the photo had been blown-up from only one square centimetre piece of film. The vastness of outer space just blew my mind. It still fascinates me.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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“Galaxy Cluster Abell S1063”<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0NASA Hubble<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n

Years later, I read that St. Thomas Aquinas wondered “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”. Whether it was a sarcastic comment or a serious question, I’ve decided that even if science one day could deliver an answer to dear old St. Thomas, in service to Almighty Knowledge, the act of wondering at the vastness of the cosmos is not dissimilar from musing on angel-pin occupancy.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

All of these disparate realms stimulated my curiosity. They made me wonder what mysteries were around the next corner and how much farther humans might go in the future. I realized that everybody – not just me – was on some kind of journey towards meaning.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Having Nothing to Tie it All Together<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

By the age of nineteen, I’d begun to realize that I saw no overarching framework to unify all the different kinds of information and values that I’d collected from disparate sources.<\/strong> Nothing seemed to unite the physical world with the mental or spiritual worlds, and nothing brought the ideas of faith together with logic, or equated belief with common sense. All my little fragments of facts and so-called truths seemed to be spoken in different languages, or measured using incompatible scales.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In art school, the first-year “Foundation” level of my art education helped me to begin integrating aspects of art, science, and psychology. Initially, this blending emerged through my education in the experience of colour.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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“Visible Light Spectrum Experiment, prisms, electromagnetic spectrum”<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0davidsancar<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n

Hearing my art instructors talk about the electromagnetic spectrum was the beginning of my understanding of the integration of art, science, and technology. Seeing how coloured lights mixed to create secondary colours (and even white light) helped me to connect the experience <\/em>of colour with the idea <\/em>of light radiation, wavelengths, and visual perception. The dogmatic divisions that I’d believed to be separating art and science began to feel artificial, and it was a wonderful realization – as if I were privy to a grand unifying secret. I’d start to feel that the integration of new ideas across disciplines could give back more than you realized: the whole truly was bigger than the sum of its parts.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Tendencies, Handed Down, or Cultivated<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The reason that I craved the integration of ideas across disciplines was likely because my world had always felt so fragmentary and disjointed. <\/strong>Life at home seemed so rife with contradictions, and nobody made it all make sense for me.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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“Canadian Science – TRIUMF cyclotron”<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Cargo Cult<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n

My Dad, James, was a technically-minded man who never talked about subjective, interpretive experiences. He tended to talk in absolute terms. Behaviour, morality, ideals were indisputable convictions that must always be held. He spoke as if the laws of physics were the only laws of nature, and that ethics and morality emanated from them in a similarly hard-nosed and absolute manner. Looking back now, I see it as the point of view of someone who dealt primarily with the material world, and not the spiritual. Also, he and I were separated by over forty years – almost two generations. His approach to authority and power was informed by a male-dominated worldview, and perhaps by his previous military career.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Dad at work at TRIUMF, c.1977<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n

Since we’d arrived in Vancouver in 1975, Dad had been an Electronics Technician at the TRIUMF particle accelerator at the University of British Columbia. Every day, he dealt with electricity, mechanics, and proven principles. He preferred ideas that seemed solid, immutable, and reliable, and he believed in math, logic, and common sense. He was the first person who told me about the law of conservation of energy (“energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed”). Whenever I badgered him to tell me about his day at work, he’d grudgingly talk about beam lines that move near the speed of light, gold targets that smash off new particles, ion streams, mesons, and a particle beam that would one day be used to kill cancer cells. It all sounded way cooler to me than he seemed to think it was.<\/p>\r\n

Dad worked with high-powered RF and electrical systems that supported the Cyclotron, TRIUMF’s world-class particle accelerator. To me, it sounded like stuff from one of my Fantastic Four comics.\u00a0Dad spoke about Einstein with the same sense of appreciation that I now have for Stephen Hawking. Dad’s occasional stories helped to convince me that the world is entirely smaller, larger, faster, and more dynamic than I could ever imagine. It was likely because of my father’s influence that I desired a scientific answer to most of my questions.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In contrast, my Mother Angela was a creative person at heart, trained as a singer and musician. In her twenties, she’d had been active on the amateur stage with the Gilbert and Sullivan Society in her home town of Victoria<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

It always seemed like Angela’s best days happened before she met my Dad, back when she was singing, playing piano or violin, or drinking with her friends. She seemed like someone who was more “in the moment” than worried about the future. Put her in front of a piano, and she would come to life and burn up the room with some energetic boogie-woogie.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

An artistic streak ran through Angela from her father, Ernest (my namesake) whom we nicknamed Poppy. Poppy shot thousands of photographs of Angela throughout his life, and he painted landscapes in oils later on in his senior years. Angela was the apple of his eye and his only child.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Nobody at home really talked about art or music, but in the few years that we lived in Poppy’s house, art seemed around us and in the air in little everyday ways. Poppy had a sense of class and style. His furniture was older, upholstered and made out of carved wood. Little cut glass ornaments decorated the mantle over his fireplace. His couch always had some pretty oriental fabric thrown over it, and he dressed himself in a shirt, tie, and leather wingtip shoes every day.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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“Popeye Ed-U-Cards Game”<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0andertoons<\/a>\u00a0is licensed under\u00a0CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n

When we all lived with Poppy in Victoria, humour and creativity seemed to be a part of my Mother’s home language. Being with her father was probably a major factor in my mother’s happiness. Life was treated as something to be enjoyed whenever possible. Seeing my Mother laughing, singing, and acting lively were the best moments that I can think of. Her happiness was rare and infectious to me.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I was never discouraged from comic books, cartoons, colouring, drawing, or daydreaming. Philosophy revealed itself to me in bite-sized chunks, through the funny sayings of Popeye the Sailor or Groucho Marx. Punny poems by J. Ogden Nash would be recited at the kitchen table, or cute little ditties from the forties would be sung by Mum, getting lodged in my young head.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

As I got older, my Mum became more often quiet, perhaps struggling with bouts of depression and saying very little. Later on, reflecting on this would encourage me to wonder about mental illness and psychology, and to wonder if my Mum could maybe be cured one day.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I can’t say that my mother ever really taught me anything directly<\/em>. In fact, she rarely ever even spoke to me or my sister. Instead, I ended up learning about her by listening to the stories my Dad told about her, or by watching her behaviour and listening to her rare words. I guess I grew up watching the performance <\/em>that Angela gave as my Mother. Over the ensuing years as I reflected on her examples, I tried to draw out moments of her that I could enjoy, and a few lessons that I might use.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Me and Mum (Alcazar Hotel, Vancouver)<\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n

Later, I would learn to recognize qualities in her that I saw in myself: we had the same green eyes, we loved music, art, and the movies. In her youth, Mum had acted and sang in musical theatre with the Victoria Gilbert and Sullivan Society, and later in my life, I realized that I loved live theatre and music too. I took to many of the jazz and pop musicians whom Dad had told me that she’d loved in her youth, in particular, Oscar Peterson. We still have a few vinyl LPs that belonged to Mum. I can try to hear her voice by listening to the music that she liked.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The Hybridized Man<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I realized by the age of 20 that I felt like a split human – a hybrid of him and her, of mother and father and their individual qualities.<\/strong> They were such different people in their natures, and I saw a little of each of them in the mirror. I had his lines on my forehead and her colour in my eyes. I knew I was artistic and creative, nervous, and introspective. I was also technical, curious, and resourceful. I had a bit of an ego like him, but could be gentle and insecure like her. If I was pushed, I could generate his power and authority in my voice, all while feeling her nervous butterflies swirling around in my stomach (Mum used to get terrible stage-fright before performing for an audience).<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Between Art and Technology<\/h2>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Finding computer graphics in art school gave me a perfect middle ground between art and technology.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n

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The Convergence of Media (attributed to Stewart Brandt, Media Lab)<\/em><\/figcaption>\r\n<\/figure>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n\r\n

I needed to express my creative and visual design ideas, while gradually learning about the computer graphics, electronics, and the underlying technology that made it all possible.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The world was becoming more digital every day, and by the eighties, media theorists and technology researchers at MIT’s Media Lab were describing the large-scale convergence of all Print, Broadcast, and Computer media.<\/p>\r\n

Thirty years later, that integration has come to pass to an incredible degree, affecting and utterly changing much of modern society. But back in 1987, I was just starting to see the beginning of a brave new world.<\/p>\r\n

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I’ve always been a generalist, curious about “the big picture”. As I neared adulthood, I told myself that I wanted “to know everything”. Art school seemed to become the channel through which I would try to achieve that lofty goal. Other Ways of Understanding Things By eighteen, I’d become keenly aware of the disparity between … Continue reading Developing Skills and Affecting Beliefs<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1930,"parent":1743,"menu_order":120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3177","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3177"}],"version-history":[{"count":36,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4000,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3177\/revisions\/4000"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ejohnlovebooks.com\/true-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}