Our mutual friend, Mark Sutton, once told me that Kurt was like a partially submerged iceberg: there was much more to him than most people would ever know, that he kept below the surface. As I sort through the papers and pictures and items that constituted his personality life, I discovered this to be true.
I can take spirituality as one metric. I knew Kurt was raised as a Mormon, but he never said anything about it. He practiced no religion but lived by the golden rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. He was thoughtful and kind to others, though he “suffered no fools” as Mark would say. He was infinitely patient with the kids and with me. He was good to his elders and would always make time for his friends. Kurt was one of the few people I know who KEPT the friends from his childhood, high school days, college days and work environment. He was always willing to help out his coworkers, even if to his own detriment. On the last day he went to Systolic, February 26th, 2021, he arrived home and said something that was quite typical–He had spent the day helping other people with their problems at work but hadn’t gotten to any of his own tasks expected to be done. I commented on the necessity of accounting to whoever was relying on his part…that he needed to tend to his own business too. He replied, “But I *like* helping people.” And there you go. That was him, at work, in a nutshell– especially when working with people who spoke the same language developed over years of working in his specific flavor of contractor environment.
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Many people do not know a great deal about Mormons other than that they are family oriented, go to Temple and as my mother thought, the men wear “magical underwear” (to the bemusement of Kurt and friend Mark). These are actually symbols of a covenant and protection from evils of the world.I t is a voluntary demonstration of personal faith and commitment to the vows one makes in the temple, which are basically vows of obedience to the Ten Commandments. The Sikhs have the Kachera, the Jews have the Tallit Khatan. Kurt, of course, did not stay with the Latter Day Saints as he explains the reasons elsewhere, so he did not become a member of the Priesthood. However, those of us who study the Ageless Wisdom may find this of interest:
“We of this Church have been told of the Lord that before we came to this earth we had a life running back to the remotest stretches of eternity; that as spirits we lived out an existence before we came here, in which we prepared ourselves for life on the earth; that then, having kept our first estate, we came to this earth to obtain knowledge, wisdom, and experience, to learn the lessons, suffer the pains, endure the temptations, and gain the victories of mortality; that when our mortal bodies give up life, our spirits return to take up again the spirit life which we left to come to earth life, and we thereafter go on, building upon the achievements of our first spirit-life, our first estate, and of our mortal life, or second estate, progressing through the endless eternities that follow, until we reach the goal the Lord set: “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” [Matthew 5:48.]
This view is very similar to the idea that we esotericists have of the purpose of reincarnation in form. that At death, we slowly return to spiritual state after undergoing a purgatorial period of repentence and dawning acceptance of our true identity as spirit. We return to repeatedly until we know in consciousness that we are indeed spirit that dons a temporary identity and we then serve humanity, not a selfish personal identity. Kurt listened quietly and absorbed all this and understood a sense of mission:
Kurt wrote this to one of his science students explaining his response to a paper she submitted:
“I applaud the desire to have everyone be physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy. This is, I believe, the goal toward which all persons should strive. On the other hand, everyone is on his or her own path in life and at his or her own stage of evolution. Sometimes hardship is required for growth to continue. People can’t, in general, be made healthy, The wholistic type of health of which you speak comes from the system being healthy. When we evolve to the stage where our souls, not our personalities, control our thoughts and actions, we will have learned.”