LONELINESS

The fear that human kind has had since inception is to be alone and it’s been this fear, borderline to terror that created the idea of the existence of the soul inside each of us and its continuous existence also after death or termination of life on Earth as we know it.

Dante Alighieri collected the stories about what happens to the soul after death and gained immortal importance because in writing about this in his Divine Comedy he used the language spoken by the peasants in the area of Tuscany that solidified the current Italian language over the many different dialects spoken at that time all over modern Italy that was being ruled by the countries on its geographical borders.

While Catholic Church embraced what Dante wrote in his Comedy as what really happens after death and how everything is organized, modern Italian language is solely his making.

However as I was saying the fear to be alone like we are at birth and death is still the fear that distinguishes human kind and even if the hope of the soul to continue a living experience very parallel to earthly living the fear of death remains intact and very much sorrow is still felt by every person who knows the dead one.

Very many philosophers since the ancient Greek’s time dealt with the fear of death and loneliness and I’ve been learning their thoughts and reasoning about this but only if the belief is in personal intelligence and strength of mind.

I’ve accepted that I’m alone also if I’m surrounded by people who care very much of me like for example my parents, family and those who love me dearly so it’s only my determination as a single individual that can make me receive what I want, not a miracle or someone else, just hard personal work with clarity of vision about the goal.

Often it’s the path to reach the goal that is most enjoyable and teaches the most than the goal itself and I must say that even if the path is very long I’ve enjoyed doing it surely more than the goal that’s something so common to be considered borderline trivial.

DANTE SEES GOD

The importance of Dante Alighieri goes beyond the literature and his ability to reunite all the dialects and various languages that were spoken across Italy in the XIV century under the current Italian language. His divine comedy suggested to the Catholics the structure and organization of what happens after our death and in the very last “canto” of the Paradise he described that God is ourselves which to me is beyond literary genius. I can’t believe that someone who lived 700 years ago could write something like this:

And for what I saw

My words are not enough to call them meager.

O everlasting Light, you dwell alone

In yourself, know yourself alone, and known

And knowing, love and smile upon yourself!

That middle circle which appeared in you

To be conceived as a reflected light,

After my eyes had studied it a while,

Within itself and in its coloring
Seemed to be painted with our human likeness
So that my eyes were wholly focused on it.As the geometer who sets himself

To square the circle and who cannot find,

For all his thought, the principle he needs,

Just so was I on seeing this new vision

I wanted to see how our image fuses

Into the circle and finds its place in it,

Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight —

Except that then my mind was struck by lightning

Through which my longing was at last fulfilled.

.

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,

By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Dante’s description of God having “our human likeness” has not had the impact that the rest of his comedy has been having for hundreds of years and this makes me believe that human kind prefers to believe that something superior and not human can control our lives because it’s much easier hoping in this to solve our problems rather than working very hard to figure out what to do about them by ourselves.
The existence of a God and having a soul are themes that have generated some of the best thoughts and pieces of literature since the invention of print and thinkers like Leibnitz and Averroè have produced parts of literature that still today in this second millennium are magnificent, I like very much their distinction between soul and intellect where the first is mortal unlike the second one. There exist very much to read and learn on the subjects that I just mentioned but only having an open intellect and mind is worth going further than what I’m writing here.

MY OWN GENETICS

I just watched for the second time in few days the movie with Benigni titled "life is wonderful" so I had plenty time to think about what I was seeing since I already knew what was going to happen and here's what I realized.
Sixty years ago the Germans under Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews to get rid of them from the earth so many in that period got involved and saw the brutality/perversity of what was being done to people that had nothing different than a last name or descendants that were Jew.
My grandfather was an engineer like my dad is and was in the Fascist army as a colonel sent between Rome and Napoli to reclaim the huge swamps that had been there for many centuries.
After he had done this he was sent to a Greek island to oversee a small battalion of soldiers who were in charge of protecting the population from German attacks, this was when he was captured by the German army and sent by train to Auschwitz where he stayed few months enough to see several thousands of Jews burnt alive or "gasified" in showers where they were told that could wash themselves.
My grandfather Umberto (his name) somehow escaped and returned to Brescia - 900 miles away with the alps in-between - by walking and when he knocked at the door of his home in Brescia his wife - Carolina - didn't recognize him and thought he was a beggar, he was 190 pounds at the beginning of the war and by the time he knocked on the door he was barely 110 pounds, he had suffered multiple strokes (heart attacks) and lived little longer, my father can't remember very much about his own father and once told me that he prefers this because his memories are all happy and good, he says that if he could remember more he probably would have painful and sad memories, when Umberto died my dad had just turned 20 and was living in Milan with his brother Dino to attend the university there.
My own complete inability and refusal to accept how disabled I've gotten is then something part of my genes, it's in my heart and blood in other words and nothing can possibly change this, Umberto walked through wonderful areas of northern Italy and I bet he went through Como and its lake and I'm sure that having a very weak heart he could have stayed in many of the places he walked through but he didn't, something was more important for him to accomplish no matter the pain in his chest and how tired he was.
I can say the same about another Lingiardi ancestor, I don't know the name, just that he lived in Pavia and had an organ making company, the Lingiardi organs were in most of the churches of a specific bandwidth of the north of Italy and were renowned for having the "human voice" and my ancestor was sure that it was him giving this "voice" to his organs because he was the one tuning the organ canes by blowing in them with his own lungs but by putting lead in his mouth he developed mouth cancer that became such a bad metastathasis that while tuning the canes he was bleeding.
Even when the doctors at his time told him to stop to tune canes because even if they didn't know of cancer it was obvious that the injury was provoked by tuning the organ canes he never stopped until he died because in his mind he was doing the most important thing to make his organs appreciated by both players and listeners. Once again one of my ancestors didn't accept his disability developed doing his own job and kept on going till death.
All of these stories and examples of ancestors in my family illustrate medically, genetically and scientifically my inability to accept the way I am now and are my reasons to ask forgiveness and support in my long battle against my conditions now that I know for sure that I can return to be a normal man.

ARISTOTLE ON ETHICS

Aristotle asserted that man had three natures: vegetable (physical), animal (emotional) and rational (mental). Physical nature can be assuaged through exercise and care, emotional nature through indulgence of instinct and urges, and mental through human reason and developed potential. Rational development was considered the most important, as essential to philosophical self-awareness and as uniquely human. Moderation was encouraged, with the extremes seen as degraded and immoral. For example, courage is the moderate virtue between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness. Man should not simply live, but live well with conduct governed by moderate virtue. This is regarded as difficult, as virtue denotes doing the right thing, to the right person, at the right time, to the proper extent, in the correct fashion, for the right reason.

Sexual relationships between doctors and patients can create ethical conflicts, since sexual consent may conflict with fiduciary responsibility of the physician. In the early 1990s it was estimated that 2 to 9% of doctors had violated the rule of sexual relationships between physicians and patients and patients relatives, which may also be prohibited in some jurisdictions, although this prohibition is highly controversial.

IACOPO VETTORI

Iacopo and I have become friends thanks to Dante Alighieri, our passion and understanding of Dante’s work and the metaphysics concepts that are involved to explain narrations in Dante’s Comedy.

The way I encountered Iacopo is through his Italian reading of the Divine Comedy http://www.iacopovettori.it/recitazione/commedia/Default.aspx

Which has arrived at the Paradise Canto VIII. Iacopo has written about the three hypotheses about what we should expect to find at the end of our lives, his intelligent reasoning can be read if you follow this link http://www.iacopovettori.it/laterzaipotesi/eng/The_three_hypotheses.aspx

When I first read it I had many questions to ask Iacopo because I was raised Catholic and I now believe that what Pascal said about believing in God is logic and safe to do.

Iacopo is an atheist even if he has been studying for years the work of Dante who wrote the report of the travel in the outer world which he organized like Christians believe is like and added details that were part of legends of peasants of his time.

Through our email discussions I’ve grown and matured very much so many questions, fears and doubts about my accident and future are now completely resolved.

THE ACTUAL SPECT scans OF MY BRAIN

Earlier I received the CD with the SPECT scan that I’ve done at dr. Uszler office and I put here the two that are easiest to understand for me even if the one where my brain is all gray was done in an hospital near where I live months before the one in color, they show the extent and position of the injury while the colors identify where my brain is over - under reactive or dead, for someone who understand how to look at these kinds of scans the size and gravity of my injury are very evident and this doctor made me understand that brain plasticity and oxygen therapy can work together to take over what’s dead. My biggest learning of talking with the doctor is that if I could have done this test many months ago it would have been clear that doing 40 sessions of HBOT is just the beginning of what also dr. Harch called “long journey” without ever having even seen me in person.

So now the focus is on doing more HBOT breathing pure oxygen at 1.5ATA which is what I haven’t been able to do in months.

Dr. Uszler suggested the use of even higher pressures, he mentioned 1.7, 1.8 but having learned from when I did ten sessions at 1.75 that my sight suffered in width, I prefer to stay within the standard 1.5.

One of the red parts of my brain says that my anxiety is very high and I commented to the doctor that it’s due to my divorce and complete lack of support from my wife. He told me that he had to live through this same experience so he knows why I say that.

MY LOVE FOR MUSIC

The music that J.S. Bach composed has been always very dear to me http://www.goshen.edu/news/pressarchive/04-20-05-bach-temper.html when I discovered the genius of the pianist Glenn Gould who played it in a way unparalleled still to this day by any pianist in the entire world a special kind of love started for me. He was able to turn performance into composition.

I bought everything he ever recorded on CD and I have every movie ever made about this pianist on DVD which I watch often and it relaxes me very much while it reminds me of my own piano playing.

I’ve read plenty about this composer so I know very much about his life and his composing, I too have learned very much about the pianist Gould whose recordings have been best sellers almost fifty years after they were made.

Just like his most famous recording which is the Goldberg Variations http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7LWANJFHEs&feature=related begins and ends with the same piece of music Gould became very well known when at the beginning of his recording career with the Variations that happen to be the very last recording he made shortly before dyeing.

He died when he was fifty years old when he passed away and he could still influence the world of music and not for twenty more years.

DANTE ALIGHIERI: THE DIVINE COMEDY

Dante is primarily important because he wrote the Comedy in his dialect of Tuscany which given the popularity that his Comedy had at the time became the Italian language still spoken today.
The subject of the Comedy wasn’t his mental elaboration; it was just the collection of stories used by normal people when trying to explain what may happen to our soul after death.
This is why his Comedy has been always a “best seller”. The narration of a real man about a travel made to the outer world, or the world of the dead, in which many well known people are met, is very credible and acceptable.
Dante gave a structure to the outer world very acceptable and even intuitive to the point that it became the way the Catholic religion structured its own explanation of question of mankind.
Whoever reads it today in the second millennium reacts exactly like who read it seven hundred years ago, surprise, curiosity and fascination.
Dante explores the outer world in company of Virgilio who was who wrote the bucolic poems about country and simple living.
Together the walk through the Hell where the souls of the people who in life did the unjust and cruel will be forever, each type of what’s called sin is punished with a different penalty and in a different part of this world.
After Hell they go up to Purgatory which is where the souls can be cleaned of the sins that aren’t called mortal but venial sins so they must be purified in different ways and times.
The end of this trip is dedicated to Paradise or heaven where the souls can feel the closeness to God and enjoy absolute freedom that extends to influence earthly matters.
The large number of famous people nominated and met in person by Dante along his trip is omni comprehensive of all the people of notice for the time when it was written so not only it teaches things by examples using well known lives but it does this using a very logical way.
I believe that this is the reason why the Divine Comedy became soon a very popular book to read and study and it still is seven hundred years after having been written.