George Bockl has always had a lot on his mind. As a small boy in Russia, he says in his memoir, he had a lot of questions that his beloved grandfather had a lot of patience answering.
Now 94, Bockl still contemplates life’s big questions. For the last 15 years, he has spent his mornings thinking and writing and his afternoons managing his business affairs. He has written eight nonfiction books that have sold about 300,000 copies.
In his latest book, “Our New Spiritual Challenge: A Cross-Fire Conversation on Traditional Religious Values and New Spiritual Wisdom” (2004, DeVorss Publications) Bockl presents his thoughts about spirituality in a Socratic question and answer format.
These ideas have developed from his involvement with the Moral Re-armament, Theosophy and New Universal Thinking movements, in which the focus is on seeking the personal guidance of God though daily meditation and a philosophy of learning about and appreciating all religions. He meditates for about a half hour each day and gets many of his ideas then.
In a recent interview, Bockl said he advises people to “Open your mind. If you don’t keep your mind active, it atrophies; and that’s what I try to do. It’s a little harder now, but it’s very rewarding.”
A combination of what he calls the spiritual and the secular is the key to a fulfilling life, said Bockl. Each of those realms is barren without the other.
Neither religious platitudes without secular wisdom, nor business that is just about grabbing all you can, are enough in life “where bullets are live and human nature is raw,” he said.
Bockl’s books reflect both interests. Four of them deal with how to be successful in real estate. The others are about God and spirituality.
Spiritual infancy
Bockl contends that although the world’s religions have civilized us and taught us how to love each other within the boundaries of our own groups — and we should be grateful for that — they have stopped short of teaching us to love those outside those boundaries and instead have substituted hate. Religions have stopped evolving, he said.
The reason for this, in Bockl’s view, is that while the physical evolution of human beings is millions of years old, human spiritual evolution started only five or six thousand years ago, and we are still in our spiritual infancy. We need to evolve further.
One colossal mistake the religions have made, according to Bockl, was that after Abraham rejected belief in many gods and accepted one god, they separated back into a belief in different gods again. The religions have not learned to share one god; they say “mine is better than yours,” he said.
The solution is not to try to change institutions, but to try to elevate human nature, he said. We should continue to love our religions, but we should take them further.
According to Bockl’s friend, local community and business leader, Ollie Adelman, Bockl had always wanted to be a writer. But when he graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1933, during the Great Depression, writing did not pay enough to live on.
Bockl wrote a novel, which he described as “a magnificent failure,” and some articles for the Milwaukee Journal, but after four years of unemployment he began to try selling houses on commission.
Bockl built a successful real estate business from those humble beginnings and still owns a number of buildings spanning the Milwaukee metropolitan area, including the Chalet on the River downtown and the Landmark and Marshall buildings in the Historic Third Ward.
“He is a solid, wonderful man. He’s a great businessman with great integrity,” said Adelman, who, because of Bockl’s encouragement, recently published his own book.
He married and raised two daughters — Bonnie Bockl Joseph and Judy Bockl, both local businesswomen. Bockl’s wife, Mildred, died 10 years ago and he now lives alone in their Fox Point home. But he has his daughters and four grandchildren “with whom I have very close associations,” not to mention many friends and business associates.
He is currently writing a novel, a love story between an Orthodox Jewish boy and an Arab girl.
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