Inner Life
by
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Journey I've been to the top of the mountain, But when I'm home again
Beauty Somewhere the flowers bloom But here the buildings are so plain, And the light shines through the window pane, Upon my sleeping dog.
* * * The ethical strivings of people today will, through natural selection and the transformation of instincts by the pressures of civilization, give mankind the hereditary possession of a great aversion to war and violence. The time will come when those who wish to make war will find no one who will be their soldiers. the time may come in a few hundred years, when those who advocate war or violence will be placed in mental institutions and given psychiatric help. Help, which will probably not cure such people, but will enable them to live peacefully with others. When I was a student at San Jose State University in California in the late 1960's, the idea seemed prevalent in my science and humanities classes that violent people are "more fit to survive" than peaceable ones. I never agreed with this idea. As technology changes our culture, I think peaceable people are becoming better equipped for life than violent ones. Violence, including war, shortens and impoverishes life. Over a period of hundred of years or more, this trend toward more cooperative and peaceable behavior will lead not to annihilation of mankind, but to a world of peace. Some materialistic biology books teach that only those who survive and reproduce contribute to evolution because only those who have children contribute to the gene pool of the future human race. However, our past is replete with people who did not have children, who influenced spiritual, mental, emotional, and environmental evolution, which certainly influences and probably determines physical evolution. All such people, although they did not contribute directly to the gene pool, determined by their influence which genes would be favored by natural selection. Their influence, as a whole, causes the more peaceable part of human nature to be more and more favored in the struggle for survival. In short, the more civilized and technological society becomes, the greater advantage peaceable behavior has in what Charles Darwin call "the survival of the fittest."
But I came down again,
For my home is the valley,
Among my friends and kin
My thoughts go ever higher,
And I am not the same
As I sit by the fire.
Beside a waterfall.
Somewhere the air is clean;
Somewhere the trees are tall.
And here there's noise and there's smog;
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About the Book
The most important essay in this book considers the advantages peaceable behavior has over violent behavior in the survival of the fittest. Is peaceable behavior favored in the struggle for survival? This should be required reading for young and old alike. Most of the book is poetry. These poems celebrate the beauty of nature and the spiritual aspects of life. They deal with a wide range of subjects, from youth to old age to death. One of the essays presents the idea that just as matter is a form of energy, energy is a form of spirit. There would be no basic building block of matter, but instead, a basic atomic pattern of substance. Three of many possible forms of substance could be matter, energy, and spirit. A third essay raises the question of what patterns of life are found in creation. For instance, could a real Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny exist somewhere in infinite space and sometime in eternity?
About the Author
Larry Ervin Clevenger is a fourth generation Texan and was born a fewmiles from the geographical center of Texas in Brady, which call itself the "Heart of Texas". He spends much of his time contemplating the spiritual side of nature and life. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of the State of New York in Albany and has attended college in Texas and California. His meditations and travels throughout North America inspired him to publish his first book Mystic Messages in 1977. His poems have been published in newspapers, magazines, and numerous anthologies. Beginning in 1960, he worked at Ratheon in Oxnard, California, where he helped make missiles and telemetering equipment. In 1968 the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) granted him a full four year scholarship, and he attended San Jose State University in California until 1972. He returned to Texas in the 1970's, where he worked on his parents' ranch and irrigated peanut farm. He later worked as a training officer helping disabled people and as the manager of his mother's general store. He is a Vietnam era veteran and in the 1990's was the editor of a veterans' newsletter at the VA hospital in Temple, Texas.