Millionaire of the mind

Some people are easily fired up, but does that fire cause them to truly change, or just to glow for a while before they return to their previous state?  (Picture from the family-friendly anime “Kimi ni Todoke”.)

Earlier this week, I finished reading through Ryuho Okawa’s book, The Philosophy of Progress. After this, according to the back of the book, I will be a “millionaire in the world of the mind”.

That may not sound like much.  One image that comes to mind is the little old ladies who line up at the lottery counter in the supermarket.  Lotteries are surprisingly popular, considering how small the chances are of winning more than you lose. But I believe these people don’t take part in lotteries because they earnestly believe it is a way to get rich. Rather, it provides them with a sense of excitement. You risk something in the hope of gaining something of far greater value.  Well, I hardly have any need for that, when you realize that I am risking my very soul while I hope for spiritual immortality and enlightenment.

But the world of the mind, as Okawa sees it, is hardly a vague and hazy daydream.  It is the Real World, of which our 3-dimensional world is only a small part. Nor is it a private place.  Billions of spirits are active, far outnumbering the people on Earth, and some of them are watching over us at any time.  (Well, I suppose there may be times when modesty would cause them to look another way, but maybe not. If a spirit is sufficiently high, it is not disturbed by any event of earthly life. Or that’s what the presence in my head seems to tell me. I am not quoting Okawa on this, although the voices in his head and mine seem to agree on a lot of things.)

You will remember that shortly before I heard of Okawa or his organization “Happy Science”, I would eagerly tell you about how this physical world was just one of many world-layers, some of which were higher and some lower.  The lower worlds will be familiar to all who have daydreamed, to take an extreme example.  Such a world is private, easily malleable, and very temporary. In contrast, higher worlds are more permanent than everyday life, but also harder to change. You can vote to change a Democratic senate seat to a Republican, but you cannot vote to change the value of Ï€ or the speed of light. In the same way, you cannot change moral laws even with a filibuster-proof majority. Even though they are “all in the mind”.  Even if you cannot reach the higher worlds with an elevator or even a rocketship, they are in a sense more real than the physical world which they govern.  To learn the laws of nature and adapt to them (rather than trying to change them) is how science has made such great progress in the last few lifetimes.  Now it is time for the Science of Happiness to do the same.

I say this again, you may think that a world we can touch with our fingers must be more real than one we can visit only with our mind.  But this is not always so. It is certainly USUALLY so, because usually we visit worlds of daydream, either private or collective. But there are worlds that are prior to the physical world and rule over it, such as the laws of physics and mathematics.  These laws can not be invented, merely discovered.  In the same way, religion (properly understood) is a science of discovery.  This is why I can read a book centered in Buddhism and find useful commentary on important topics in my life as a Christian.  If religions were simply daydreams of their founders, any overlap between them would be random.  But as it is, the overlap increases the deeper you go into them.

That is not to say that there are not substantial differences of opinion between the Christ and the Buddha.  In one of his other books, Okawa narrows this down to a principal disagreement: The Buddha is far more optimistic about the strength in humans, while the Christ is focused on their weakness.  Okawa, who believes that he and the historical Buddha each come from the same spirit (of which each of them constitute about 20%), obviously sides with the more optimistic view.  He says essentially, I am not going to help you. I am going to tell you how to help yourself.

(Let me add that Jesus would likely agree about the disagreement. After his famous parable about the lost sheep, he says that there is more joy among the angels in Heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous who don’t need repentance.  That is a weird statement, because who are those 99 who don’t need to repent?  Have you ever met any of them?  I have my thoughts about this, but they are not yet mature enough to serve.  In any case, it is with St Paul we really get the doctrine that every human being is a totally, utterly, abominable stinking carcass of irreparable evil.  Paul gathers a selection of the harshest descriptions the Old Testament comes up with for God’s enemies, and declares this to be a full and fair description of every one of us.  I can understand Paul too, because compared to the beauty and majesty and purity of the divine, even glimpsed trough a glass darkly from a great distance, our natural condition certainly seems more like a badly wounded criminal on the run than a millionaire in the world of the mind.)

In any case, I did read the book. Now to read it again. And again, presumably.  It is rare indeed to see a publisher recommend that you read a book several times.  Normally they would want you to buy the next book; after all, that is where their money lies.  So they must have a lot of respect for Okawa to include his recommendation in their blurb.  But they do: “By repeatedly reading this book you will experience this extraordinary feeling that your soul is making great progress.”

Of course, feeling that you are making progress is subtly different from actually making progress, and I will try to bear this in mind.  After all, millions of Americans felt that they were making progress when they elected a progressive President a bit over a year ago. Many of them don’t feel that anymore.  Which of their feelings is the right one?

I believe that human minds are not easily transformed in substance. But they can more easily undergo a phase transition, like when a solid melts into a liquid and perhaps even boils and evaporates.  But when the energy from outside is removed, they condense and congeal again, to solidify in a form that may be somewhat different from before, but similar as it is of the same substance.

If I become a millionaire in knowledge but does not invest that fortune in a small grain of precious selfless love, then I am fooling myself. I am pretty good at that.