Today from the Bunker
Yesterday, I wrote about the path to the present moment:
[
The Way Here
](https://halgill.substack.com/p/the-way-here)Hal Gill
·
May 25
Sometimes, Substack may seem to be too much. I love how much the platform offers and am always discovering some other way of amplifying my signal through the noise of cyberspace. Substack has brought me back to that feeling when I first stepped into the Internet even before the World Wide Web browsers showed up.
[Read full story
](https://halgill.substack.com/p/the-way-here)It was inspired by running across Tuhat.net where I’m likely to do some writing today as well. In fact, this is probably that writing. We shall see how the future unfolds.
If there is anything that I want to talk about from the Bunker on this rainy day in Washington, DC, it is the way in which we are all personally responsible for the future that will unfold. We are so adept at transforming the landscape. We can till the land. We can drag our harrows over the fields, churning up the surface for our creative work, drawing sustenance and abundance from the good earth. Harrowings is all about scratching up the surface to see what emerges, after all.
Every action we take as an impact on everything else. We forget this. I have been exploring the writers of the past several centuries and their ideas along these lines. Why do we go through life so asleep at the wheel. I dreamed last night about being in the back seat of a vehicle going down the highway without a driver and realizing that I was responsible for being in the driver’s seat. Somehow I had gotten in the back and the car was continuing down the highway. I’d abrogated my responsibility. I think this dream was quite symbolic of how I feel as I am going through life.
I don’t know. I just know how things seem to me. It seems to me that we are all co-creating the worlds we perceive. Different people see different worlds. How do you see yours? I’m interested in hearing the answer. When I hear it, if I hear anything, I’ll hear what I believe that I am hearing. Ideally, I’ll listen twice and think again about whether I have really understood what has been said or have I heard just what I think I have heard filtered through the lens of my experience.
We all filter our impressions of what we see and hear, what we feel and taste, what we smell, through our experiences. I don’t know how many of us are aware of that. I don’t know how many of us are, like I was in the dream, asleep at the wheel while believing that we are awake.
The Alchemy of Awakening
Transformation of the raw material encountered in living into the gold of experience; that’s on my mind. It’s what I have been living for sometime. I’m exploring. I’m open-minded. I want to check and recheck the retort to see what has been distilled from the experience of living.
There’s so much to be said about this, but somehow words seem to be insufficient to contain all I wish to say. This is one of the reasons that I do what I do in terms of the tools available in Substack. An example popped up thanks to Tejasvani Thakur liking it earlier this morning:
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I learn through dialogue and Sunny Trippel is one of the generous souls who will actually call me up on the phone just to catch up on her way to another engagement.
Being present with each other is what we do. There are so many selves present within us too. So many voices we amplify through both cyberspace and, when Sunny takes the stage, through the venue. I probably won’t be able to get to her performance as vocalist in Psycho Killers at the 8X10 in Baltimore, but if you can get there, do!
Getting to put all of this and more out on YouTube is also a boon that Substack has provided. The platform is a place to work out the alchemy of awakening. If anyone reads it and gets something out of it, wonderful. Even more wonderful is if someone gets moved to amplify the signal themselves through a restack, a restack with a note, or simply a comment on the substance of the writing. It’s so easy to do too although it is far more common for folks just to hit the “like” button and move on. Generally this is an indication that people have not gone deep but who can fault them in the information glut in which we are immersed?
What is vital to me is that a mark has been left. Harrowings is a signpost for those who may follow. Will it stand the test of time? Only time can tell. So far, it’s grown and is still growing as a body of work. The aim is to tranform myself along with the transformation of our society and all life on this planet. We have created a lot of issues. We have it within our power to address them but we have to lift up our eyes beyond the horizon and view our planet as a whole.
Taking in the View
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Taking the long view, I think about how our art, literature, music, video; all the forms that our creative work takes, will survive to inform life in the cosmos. We need, it seems to me, to start where we are with what we have and focus on our home from which we have emerged like leaves from a tree. If we aren’t to drive ourselves to extinction, we ought to focus and recognize our responsibility as living representatives of the species; living legacies of over a hundred billion lives who didn’t have the chance to get to here now.
For the novella, I selected Pynchon and Melville as the axes of a graph. Then there was another for anarchic charge. It made sense to me. I’m grateful that I saw that not only the works of literature, but all narrative output of our species might be given a place on this matrix. It might help guide us or those who come after. I don’t know. I do know that I am not the first with the idea. Look at the original library at Alexandria.
My first target though were The Great Books of the Western World. I bought these on eBay some years ago and they were delivered to my father’s garage before being packed up and moved here to Washington, DC. It was around then that I got back in touch with Dr. William Stanton Noe about whom I wrote yesterday in the already-cited “The Way Here”. I’d hit one of those gaps in my employment. This led me to moving from one opportunity to the next over the course of a year, but finally settling at a gig as the lead for a small team supporting the Coast Guard’s Enterprise Architecture Program Office, but I digress.
It seemed to me that we ought to be taking in all that we have accumulated as a species and analyzing it to chart a better future for our progeny. It seems to me, still, that we can do this with the technologies we have and even focus on allowing those technologies to emulate our own creativity. Now I’m not so sure, because I believe that our imaginative capability may be only ours and non-transferable, as it were.
I haven’t yet had a chance to read Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, but I see in the news that it has been released and focuses on these matters. It is subtitled:
“On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”
It should be interesting to get a handle on it, so I am taking a short cut by letting one of my AI companions have a crack at it:
Pope Leo XIV critiques the technocratic paradigm that prioritizes efficiency, control, and profit over human values. He warns against transhumanist and posthumanist visions that seek to overcome human limitations through technology, arguing instead that true human grandeur lies in our relational nature, vulnerability, and openness to grace rather than in self-engineered perfection.
Key areas addressed include the defense of truth in the digital ecosystem against misinformation, the future of human work in an AI-driven economy, the protection of personal freedom from data exploitation and algorithmic dependencies, and the urgent need to prevent an arms race involving autonomous weapons.
In the realm of global peace, the document contrasts a prevailing culture of power that normalizes conflict with the Christian vision of a civilization of love. It calls for renewed multilateralism, diplomacy, disarmament efforts, and ethical constraints on AI in warfare.
The encyclical concludes with a hopeful call inspired by the Magnificat, urging believers and all people of goodwill to work together like the builders of Jerusalem—placing the human person at the center, prioritizing the vulnerable, and orienting technological development toward integral human development and genuine communion.
The ongoing evolution of our species will really depend upon how well we steward that with which we have been entrusted. I’m certain of that.
For now, I have written about as much as I care to but I would love to hear your thoughts