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This was originally written and posted by Vahram G. Diehl and is re-printed here with permission.

“Thoughts on life… from my early morning sleeplessness;   The river of human minds stretching from the dawn of homo sapiens to ourselves, and flowing into the future. Each consciousness appears, lives, dies, and a few leave a trifle of artifacts (a bone, a button, a chair, a fading photo).  A tiny fraction leaves written or verbal stories (Odysseus, Hypatia, Hemingway), as Omar says, the moving hand writes and having written moves on. A tiny fraction leaves ideas and inventions (the wheel, the calculus, the Porta-Shop, a book on economics or birding or history). Most lives can be likened to all this contained in a small box, like the time capsules in catacombs and mortuaries, and the river flows on into the future.   How seriously we take each moment, each decision, each event.”   –John “Jack” Pugsley 14 March, 2011

John “Jack” Pugsley, 1934 – 2011    Knowing Jack these last two years prior to his death has been intriguing… paradigm enhancing… inspiring… among many other fond descriptive terms.  I always told Jack that he was the youngest old man I had ever met, close to 80 years-old when he died this morning.  I saw much of my future self in him, and I like to imagine he saw much of a younger self in me.  I met him at a time when I was ready and eager to abandon the human race and its modern sort of institutionalized insanity, having reached a point of frustrated hopelessness with the world and its human-imposed complexities.  Through his influence, directly and indirectly,  I slowly came to resolve my frustrations and indeed totally revolve my perspective on human society and my potential role as a functioning part of it.

It is no exaggeration that to say it is because of Jack Pugsley that I have attained extremely high aspirations of creation and building during my life, not in some romanticized ideal notion of a “career path” but as the actualization of my most basic human need to produce and acquire happiness in every conscious moment.  While once I resented the world and its enforced institutions, Jack showed me how to direct that resentment into a positive constructive flow of creation and learning; they morphed into an education that is an inherent part of living itself, not merely a growing phase in a young privileged person’s life.  From the very first moment we began conversing at a dinner, I clearly remember still how his obvious and complete allegiance to the Scientific Method and reason was refreshing to my young skeptical mind.

He had clearly never lost the excitement and enthusiasm which come hand in hand with our most basic childlike curiosity about reality, qualities most people lose after their first several years of institutionalized schooling and exposure to “the real world”.  It gave me hope that some men can live long, joyous, and prosperous lives in this crazy world without losing themselves to its various incarnations of madnesses and mysticisms.

To traverse the storm and come out the other side still being able to think for oneself is the greatest lesson I will take from my encounters with Jack.  His writings have inspired me to seek what influence I can have upon the world through similar outlets, and I have been overtaken by his ever-present outpouring of rationally tempered optimism.  The universe is a machine, and during his life Jack contributed many original intellectual thought seeds which have sprouted in me and surely many others as a part of this machine.  As these ideas bloom into their logical conclusions, Jack’s “ideological offspring” will continue to contribute to the changing of this machine in ways they could not have without his guidance and influence.  I can only hope to have accomplished something of similar quality and importance during my time in the machine, and when I do I will know that such a great amount of my contributions have stemmed from Jack’s original thought seeds which were planted within me during the short but meaningful time that I knew him.

So, once more, thank you kindly Jack for sparing enough time to get to know me while you still could.  I will see to it to ensure that your time spent with me was time well invested. Daniel G. Leonhard, aka Vahram G. Diehl April 9, 2011