Today, 28 Oct 2024, marks two years since Bonnie’s passing. It feels like two seconds and two decades simultaneously. A short remembrance video has been posted to Facebook and also to Google Drive where it can be viewed by clicking on this link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aqtfRHsO5cYZXBeqQ2IBiwq8p7Mh5KJ7/view?usp=sharing
It runs about four minutes. I hope you will watch the video to remember and celebrate Bonnie, a most extraordinary and wonderful person. A second video, about six minutes, is located at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WmmSn8T0M6RjF_B4xiEVqUNlsyDFfxMQ/view?usp=sharing
By the time I met Bonnie at age 15, I’d concluded that people are inherently evil. Having come from a violent childhood environment, I believed that, when others acted with honor and kindness, it testified to their strength to overcome basic nature, whether due to fear of religious or societal reprisal or the development of a higher understanding that people *should* be better than their base instinct. Bonnie, however, maintained everyone is born good, that some choose to commit evil acts, a choice that, over time, corrupts them completely.
Bonnie’s faith in humanity — that we’re more spiritual than carnal — did not waver. She never criticized a person’s religious faith, only a person’s hypocrisy when he or she used the faith to harm others. Bonnie believed that individual consciousness, or the soul, becomes part of a collective consciousness following an individual’s death. Since consciousness is energy and energy is eternal, Bonnie’s supposition is as sound, or perhaps more so since it’s science-based, as any religious doctrine.
Through the years because of Bonnie, my early view of people changed, and I’ve concluded that most of us are born neither good nor evil, that we begin as empty vessels to be filled by experience and choice. I’ve also accepted that some among us are indeed born pure and good and remain so throughout their lives, that those people are what Buddhism calls Bodhisattvas. Such individuals teach and lead others primarily by example, void of coercion and hypocrisy, toward a higher level of existence. I believe Bonnie’s such an individual, a notion she dismissed with a chuckle and blush, though she knew I was serious. You most likely know such a person as well.
Far too soon, these extraordinary and wonderful people are taken — unjustly, unfairly, cruelly — even as the most vile among us continue to thrive. Nevertheless, I now accept what Bonnie always believed and taught by the way she lived, that goodness is inherent in some, attainable by all.
Thank you for watching the video. I hope it triggers good memories and joy.