Monthly Archives: January 2010

Holosync out, LifeFlow still in

Posted on by
2

I even have a pair of good headphones I bring with me on the commute and wherever I want to listen to brainwave entrainment tracks on the move. It is a pretty good use of such time, don’t you think?

Looking at my tags, it seems I have not written about my brainwave entrainment since last summer. I know I have meant to write about it later, but I may have done so only in my head, or only a draft that I did not upload. Time to fix that. I think some people may benefit from knowing. There is still a good deal of searches for Holosync on my statistics. And reasonably so, for it is a pretty expensive program by the standards of most of the world, especially with the current economy. It is not like everyone lives in Norway where there is no recession and even an underpaid office worker in a part-time job can afford to try out stuff like this and shrug off the bill almost without noticing.

(You know envy will land you in Hell, right? And that’s even before you’re dead. Envy is bad for your spirit, soul and body. Repent, repent!)

Anyway, Holosync. I guess a part of that steep price goes into their enormous marketing budget. Or you may call it “outreach”. If not for them, hundreds of thousands of people would never have heard of brainwave entrainment. That would have been a loss, for it is quite an interesting technology.

Basically, you use sound (or in some other products light pulses) to set up a standing wave in your brain. Unless you put some effort into making other brain waves, this wave will spread from the deeper parts of the brain where it is created, and engulf both hemispheres. This is thought to improve communication between the various parts of the brain, although I am not sure this follows logically. After all, your brain has whole-brain waves each night during dreamless sleep. This happens several times a night, especially early in the night. (Dream sleep makes up an increasing portion of sleep as morning approaches. Brain waves during dream sleep is similar to waking life, only more excited.)

Of course, during sleep you are not conscious, so that may make a difference. In any case, it is definitely a different experience. And as I have said repeatedly, sitting down and shutting up for half an hour or a whole hour each day with a noble intention will surely cause personal growth. This is proven by thousands of years of monks, nuns, sages, gurus etc, whose quiet life actually used to be a backbone of civilization. Whether civilization today has a backbone I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

I’ve stopped using Holosync, though, because I am more impressed with LifeFlow from Project Meditation (warning: sound!). While still a little heavy on the hype, they are more realistic, encouraging a combination of entrainment and meditation, and also not flooding their customers with constant mail (both electronic and paper) promoting largely unrelated new-age and general quackery products like Bill Harris / Centerpointe does. More importantly, I think their product is better (eventually) and I agree with their approach.

LifeFlow starts with entrainment at 10 Hz, a fairly everyday alpha level which most of us experience when we relax. For each month you subscribe, you get a new track that is 1 Hz lower: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and finally two bonus tracks with gamma (very high frequencey) for those who dare experiment with that. These frequencies are associated with religious ecstasy but may also trigger a panic attack, so it is probably a good idea to go through a year of familiarizing yourself with brainwave entrainment first. Me, I prefer to get my religious ecstasy from religion, if at all. Anyway, LifeFlow combines the use of binaural beats (which Holosync also uses) with monaural and isochronic tones. It does not use ramping (sliding frequencies) as the brain anyway uses several minutes to entrain to a frequency unless you are deeply familiar with it.

The different frequencies have somewhat different effect on the brain, although not in great detail: They mostly fall into three groups. But all of them induce synchronization of large parts of the brain. Of special interest is the deepest frequencies, which correspond to the waves of delta sleep, or slow wave sleep. Natural delta waves have a frequency ranging from about 0.5 to 2 Hz, or oscillations per second. So this is quite slow indeed.

During deep, dreamless sleep the brain seems to rest more deeply than otherwise, and this is also where growth hormone is released in adult men (the only group of humans where this has been studied in detail as far as I know). In young adults, delta sleep make up a significant part of the first sleep cycle (about 90 minutes), a smaller part of the next, and very little from then on. In the elderly it is quite common to not have slow waves sleep at all most nights. Being able to induce this state in the brain artificially may have substantial health potential. What I can say is that it certainly seems to let me do with less sleep each night and still be less tired than I used to be during the day.

After I got the deepest levels of LifeFlow, I have had no need for Holosync. I have not sent it back for a refund though (they do have a 1 year money back promise if you don’t buy any higher levels). After all, I used it for several months, so I feel I got my money’s worth. I just think LifeFlow is more effective, once you get to the deeper levels. You also have more levels to choose from, for different purposes. That it also happens to be more affordable is just an added bonus. Recommended. (They also have a great forum where meditators with decades of experience will share their wisdom with newcomers. It’s not quite like having your own guru, but probably better than nothing. Plus, you have me! ^_^)

So that’s how it ended, at least so far. I may write more if I find I have left out anything important.

High Spirits and history

Posted on by
Reply

“The cherry blossoms have not changed at all in the last thousand years….” Some things change daily, some not in a thousand years. Telling these apart is in itself a very useful skill, and can make a fool wise.

If we are to believe Happy Science (the Japanese religion movement, not just any happy scientist) there is a limited number of super high spirits for this planet, like archangels and saviors, and they are being incarnated from time to time to put history right. So this coincides with the conservative view of history I mentioned, that history is largely the work of a relatively few people, while the rest more or less drift with the currents, unaware of their part in the larger picture.

To make it worse, each of the High Spirits will show up repeatedly, making the numbers even smaller. For instance Newton was formerly Archimedes, and Buddha was Hermes (at least to some degree). So even though most of the really important people through history was one of these, there are only about 500 in total. So far Happy Science.

According to the substantially less happy science we know from ordinary history books, things were pretty harsh in the past. Life was poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short. (Not so sure about the solitary part, since people had to crowd together with aunts and cousins in tiny houses or even tents. But nasty for sure. And smelly, let’s not forget smelly. Life was poor, smelly, nasty, brutish and short. The reason Hobbes forgot to include smelly was probably that at his time, life was STILL smelly. It was also still considerably shorter than now, on average, not least on his continent.)

If we go back a few generations from Hobbes, we also have another problem: Eyeglasses were not invented yet. Therefore the few sages who actually existed (and who did not die to war or plague or infected hangnails) were rendered unable to read on their own around the age of 50. Since those who had lived that long were likely to hang on for another 20 years or so, the invention of glasses would effectively double their time as a sage. (You aren’t born a sage, you know. Well most of us aren’t.)

Now what I am trying to say is that having even a limited number of non-idiots in the past is a miracle of Biblical proportions. Even if you could read, how many books were you likely to see in a lifetime before the printing press? And how broad would the background be of those books? What were your chances of gathering the wisdom of two or three or more different cultures or religions? Add to this that some of the great minds of the past were not scribes at all, but warriors or shepherds or some such.

While some of the famous people from the past were more known for their deeds than their thoughts, it is certainly true that some had a very high level of consciousness. They had an overview of life that is rare today, even though we are so well informed. They did not have our encyclopedic knowledge, but from the knowledge they had, they came to insights that have stood the test of time.

In contrast, many people today have a fairly low level of consciousness, even though so much knowledge is readily available. They continue to blame others for problems they could easier fix by changing themselves. They believe in random conspiracy theories that are easily disproved, and their beliefs make them unhappy.

Let me take a random example, not sure if I have mentioned this before. In the western world, a very large number of women (and even some men) believe that women are systematically paid less for their work than men. This would certainly look so if you look simply at the pay checks. But let us take a few seconds to draw this to its logical conclusion. If women were generally paid less for the same work, then you could start a business and hire only women. Businesses who hired only women, or almost only, would constantly earn more money, and eventually squeeze the competition out. This would cause massive joblessness among men and lack of female workers in the private sector, causing the men who were employed at all to mainly work in government-funded jobs where profit didn’t matter. Reality check! Is this your world?

Obviously any individual woman may be underpaid. The way to find out is to look for an employer who is willing to pay more. This is the same for women, men, eunuchs and hermaphrodites. It is also the same as a potato farmer trying to sell his potatoes. He may strongly dislike that people are paying more for wheat, even though potatoes are superior in every way and deserve a much higher price. But reality takes precedence. There is no worldwide conspiracy of billions of potato-haters, and likewise there is actually no such conspiracy of misogynists. Life if tough for everyone. Projecting the cause of our unhappiness on others may seem to help for a short time, but it also keeps us from making the best out of what we actually can change, namely ourselves.

There are many, many such projections. People blame the Jews, the Muslims, the Whites, the Hispanics, the Gypsies, the Republicans, the Democrats, their parents, teachers, employers, neighbors. All of these people who are blamed have actual, real faults. Who hasn’t? But because people have a low level of consciousness, they trip over the various faults of others which they rarely can do anything about, and forget to correct their own faults which are right there for the taking. Seen from a higher perspective, these are much like an animal in a cage, which claws randomly on the walls because it is unable to figure out the fairly simple lock to the cage.

By listening to the words of high spirits, whether you believe they come down from Heaven or grow up from the Earth, you can learn from them and become more and more like them. After all, humans are born with a phenomenal ability to learn. Just to go about your daily life you need to know a large number of things. You need to know how to dress yourself, how to find your way in a town or city, basic economic knowledge like having to pay for food, and of course you probably keep track of a large number of human relationships. By applying this learning ability toward the words and deeds of the people whose lives shine across history like brilliant lights, you can rise up to become a brilliant light yourself.

It’s gonna take its sweet time though, judging by myself. Well, all the more reason to get cracking!

Heroes and history

Posted on by
Reply

If Thomas Edison had not invented the phonograph, would we still have MP3 players today?  Or would there have been no gramophones, no tape recorders, no cassette players, no CDs, a world where canned sound remained as unimaginable as it was to the Founding Fathers?

I think this may be a matter where the world looks very different depending on whether you are a conservative or a socialist. And since most of these have little or no ability to peek over the fence, I shall take it upon myself to give you something at least a bit closer to the truth.

In the conservative view, history is for the most part a result of a few well-known people who have changed its course in one way or another.  Mao, Stalin, Hitler.  Churchill, Lincoln, Washington.  Jesus, Buddha, Moses.  Einstein, Newton, Archimedes. Remove any of these or various other “main characters” and history flows in a completely different direction, leading to a world mind-numbingly different from today.

To the socialist, history is a more or less predictable flow of micro-events adding up, driven primarily by economic conditions. Never mind that Marx’ own predictions were about as accurate as weather forecasts by a five year old. After all, Marx himself was limited by the extreme scarcity of information at the time, thus proving that everyone is a child of their own time. In theory it should still be possible to make a fairly good model of how history unfolds under varying general conditions.

One socialist author wrote with sarcasm about Alexander the Great conquering the known world:  “Did he not even bring a cook?”  The point is, of course, that Alexander would not be able to conquer even a tiny village alone, much less the Persian empire, Egypt and much of India and Afghanistan. This is true enough.  But it is equally true that the thousands of men, whether soldiers and cooks, made no serious attempt at establishing a Hellenistic empire before Alexander showed up.  What he did was give them a focus, a vision, a direction for their abilities.  They did not simply flow like water – someone had to break the dam that held them.

You could say that the most typical political hero is a vessel for the aspirations of the people, acting to contain and concentrate them, directing them toward a goal they may not have been aware of but generally agree with.  This also holds true for the political villain, only with different aspirations.  The difference is not always easy to see if you are very close.  In any case, the aspirations alone are not enough to create the hero. There must also be a vessel of the required stature.  Even with tragic flaws, it is required that you be larger than life.

Cultural heroes seem to be even less predictable than military and political ones. Sometimes they seem to embody a particular age, sometimes to usher one in.  Why do a bunch of them suddenly appear at the same time and in the same cultural area, like in the Renaissance?  What kind of social engineering do you plan to do to create a larger number of people like Mozart or Michelangelo? How do you produce an Einstein? (Apart from having a number of Jews around.)

The thing is, you must be a fool to think history-changing heroes just conveniently appear when the economic “realities” dictate it, kind of like fools of the past believed that flies and rats were spontaneously created in rotting food.  (Pasteur, another hero, proved this wrong.) Then again, you are definitely not going to conquer the world without a cook. And even the greatest teacher of philosophy or faith is of little worth if there is no one to hear. It is the interplay between the guides and the guided that make history advance.  More about that later, perhaps.  It was actually that I wanted to write about, but you see what happened.

Hi, I am on fiber

Posted on by
7

Fiberoptic cable, more exactly. While the water pipes remain frozen and the toilet remains broken, the fiber guys were here as soon as the deadly cold withdrew.  (It is now zero degrees Celsius here, the freezing point of water. Or perhaps melting point of snow, although I see no sign of that.  It’s generally been -3 to -1 most of the week. Feels almost like spring, but the frozen water pipes probably don’t feel the same way.)

So the irony is that now I have super fast Internet access, but not water.  I am a pretty computer-oriented person, but I think it should be obvious which of these is the most important.  So, I won’t be moving in until the water pipes are thawed. The landlord believes that there is no damage except for the broken toilet, which he has promised to get replaced. Hopefully he is right.  This means we won’t break up the floor.  This means it won’t cost any of us a fortune. But it also means the pipes probably won’t thaw until the ground under the house has been above freezing for a few days.  (Having a comfortable room temperature for a few days certainly does not seem to have made an impression.) Which could, in the most extreme case, be until spring.

Luckily the landlord at the old place is no longer in any hurry to get me out.  So if that’s the way fate wants it, I may stay there until spring.  This is attractive in the sense that I get to continue ferrying stuff over, one carrying bag or backpack at a time.  It is repulsive in the sense that I have to pay rent for two houses all winter.  This seems a likely outcome since I have been less than impressed by the economic sense of a friend who ended up owning two houses for several seasons.  It is not something that makes me look down on people, exactly, but I would not hire them as an economic advisor either.  So it only makes sense that I get to walk a few months in their shoes, in a manner of speaking.

I can almost afford it, too.  I will have to borrow a little each month, but it is not like I have to borrow the whole amount for the old rent.  I used to have enough left over to buy a new computer every few months, remember. So it is more an attrition than a disaster.

No, the really bad part is that you can’t access my home server from the super fast optic cable.  You know you want to listen to my music, or watch anime that was never officially released in English.  But for now, not only is my main computer down, but the remaining machine is connected to a router that randomly decides that the Internet is not a good place for young computers to be, and so you just get an error message when you try to connect to trine.itlandm.operaunite.com/ .  Of course, you can always try again later.  But it probably won’t be stable until I move here.

Speaking of which, it is time to log out and wander off to the bus again.  At least I get some time for brainwave entrainment this way.  I did say I wanted a longer commute, right?  Actually it isn’t much longer in time, since most of the road is quite good and there are fewer stops.  But a little more it is. Almost exactly 40 minutes, which is the length of one LifeFlow entrainment track.

Infinite Prosperity

Posted on by
2

Screenshot from the anime “The Laws of Eternity”, also by Ryuho Okawa. The protagonists visits the angelic realm in heaven and is surprised to find a number of famous Japanese industrialists there. Because creating prosperity for others is the will of the Light / God / Buddha. Just in case this wasn’t obvious, he also wrote a book about it.

Infinite prosperity — wouldn’t that be nice around now? What with the move and the frozen water pipes and all. But I am talking about the book I ordered from Amazon.co.UK before Xmas and which I found in my mailbox when I came home late yesterday. Another book by Ryuho Okawa, its full title is The Philosophy of Progress – Higher Thinking for Developing Infinite Prosperity. Both Okawa himself and the publisher inform us that the book will need to be read several times, but what don’t you do for infinite prosperity. Or even for higher thinking, I suppose. Your enthusiasm about thinking may vary. Then again, so may your prosperity.

The book is, as usual, made from several sections that originated as speeches and were later adapted to written form. They vary in tone, more than usual, with one being very simple, as if aimed at children or people with well below the IQ of the average Japanese. Okawa strives to be easy to understand, but this was unusual even for him. Anyway, the different speeches help see things from slightly different angles, which should be helpful.

This is not a New Age book about “attracting” wealth, like the popular understanding of “The Secret” and “Think and grow rich”. The idea of attracting wealth is an abomination to Okawa, as it is to any right-thinking person. On the contrary, the purpose is to CREATE prosperity, so that it flows out from you, not toward you.

In contrast to the right-thinking person, who wants to create prosperity and let it flow out to others, I sometimes talk about “left-thinking” people, who want to draw in prosperity from other people and consume it. This is of course a kick in the shin to socialism, which by historical accident has become associated with the left hand. But it actually goes much further back, to the Old Testament, where Ecclesiastes says that “The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.” (Ecclesiastes 10:2) The idea that we should all divide the cake and not bother about baking it is as foolish as they come. But this is not merely, or even mainly, a political problem.

For instance, you may feel that someone does not give you the respect you expected. A left-thinking person will say, out loud or in their mind: “You better respect me!” They may then go on to treat the other person with disrespect and even encourage others to do the same, to restore the balance. But a right-thinking person will first jump to another conclusion: “Perhaps that person sees some flaw in me that I have overlooked, or perhaps I have just not done enough to merit their respect. I have to do better.” It may of course be that the other person lacks respect and gratitude in general, but unless you are their parent, this is not something you can fix directly. And it could certainly also happen that you just haven’t done anything particularly impressive. (I know this is generally the case for me, but then I don’t expect much above bare civility either.)

Now in all fairness Okawa is mainly a spiritual teacher, and so the prosperity he talks about is mainly spiritual. But he certainly isn’t opposed to a little cash for the true believers. He does discuss Jesus’ warning about rich people, camels and needle eyes. Much like me, Okawa believes the problem was attachment to material things, rather than the things themselves. (Not unexpected, since Okawa claims to be the Buddha reborn and the Buddha was very much about getting rid of attachment.) Unlike me though, Okawa is fairly optimistic about people having lots of money without getting attached to it. That may be doable for someone who vividly remembers being king of Atlantis and stuff like that. But for us commoners, it is hard to not get carried away by riches. I would not be so sanguine about it. I’m more with Jesus on this one. Big surprise, eh?

Okawa does make the valid point that these days, if you go the route of poverty you will be tempted by communism. Jesus presumably did not have that dilemma. Also, according to Okawa, it would be a problem if only bad people got rich and not good people, because the bad people would have way more power compared to their numbers, and there is plenty enough of bad people in power as is. My problem with this is the good people who turn to bad people when they get rich, because they fall in love with the power and prestige and forget their original purpose in life. I tend to hold the attitude of Proverbs 30: Give me neither poverty nor riches, “Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD ?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.” Of course, “not poverty” today is a bit different from 3000 years ago…

Luckily Okawa goes on to focus in great detail on the purpose of progress in this world. It is not to hoard stuff for ourselves, but to expand our mission of causing as much happiness as possible in this world while we are here. And financial progress is only one contribution to that, not the goal. For instance, a company cannot be said to truly make progress if the employees don’t feel joy about working there. A company should be run in such a way that the happiness of the employees and business associates increases over time. The company should also contribute to society through taxes. Okawa foretells continued decline for America as long as the nation continues to see tax evasion as an admirable activity.

(As leader for the Happiness Realization Party, Okawa favors drastic tax cuts in Japan. What he refers to in his book is presumably not having as high taxes as possible, but being as honest as possible and paying the taxes intended by the society you live in.)

The book is quite multifaceted, as are his books in general. One of the unsuspected jewels appears while he discusses the hells relevant to greedy people, the Hell of Hungry Spirits and the Hell of Strife. While there anyway, he stops by the Hell of Lust for a paragraph or two. I think I will write about that in a separate entry, if ever.

Anyway, to not get completely lost in the details: Prosperity is not about having lots of money. That’s incidental, although people who know the Truth cannot possibly become destitute. True prosperity is about manifesting an ever increasing amount of happiness: First in your own life, and as soon as practically possible to begin spreading this happiness to people around you, in ever wider circles, until the whole world is brightly lit with hope and joy.

Okawa should know what he speaks of in this regard. From being a fairly ordinary young man he has brought forth an organization that is dedicated to creating utopia through love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress. Millions of people have bought at least some of his books, and if they enjoyed them as much as I do, that is a good amount of happiness right there.  And take my word for it, it is not easy to write in a way that fills people with hope and strength of will. I’m still working on it though!

As I said when I ordered the book: “When I have infinite prosperity, I’ll be sure to share it with my friends.” Work in progress!

Thawing and fiber

Posted on by
1

The good news first, I guess.  I got a call from the guy who is installing the fiberoptic broadband.  I have not been surprised that they didn’t get it installed before Christmas as promised.  The weather has simply been too cold to work outdoors.  (Not that IT people habitually keep deadlines in any case.) Now they have stretched the cable, and will install the indoors part tomorrow between 7AM and 8AM.  I told him I’m just leaving the door unlocked.  (It is not like there is a lot to steal – a couple space heaters and stacks of used clothes.)

In other fairly good news, the weather is milder.  It is still -3 or so outside, but that’s a huge step from the double-digit minus degrees we had.  And it is supposed to rise to zero the day after tomorrow.  (Then again, it has been supposed to do that for a few days now.)  It has actually been zero or a little above during the day, although it cools a little with the night.

The bad news are not really news at all.  As expected, the thawing of the water pipes showed at least some of them to be broken.  Probably more as more of them thaw.  The toilet is cracked and the bathroom floor was flooded from that.  There is water on the washroom floor too,  and in that room there is no other explanation than a broken pipe.  Although it is just a pool, not a fountain or anything.  So perhaps the breakage is relatively minor.  Even so, it is more likely than not that the floors of the washroom and bathroom will have to be broken up to replace some or all of the water pipes (and hopefully insulate them better this time).  The question is whether it amounts to thousands or tens of thousands, and of course who is going to pay.

Anyway, despite the high-speed internet, it is a good bet I won’t be moving in this weekend.  If ever.

Deep frozen Moth

Posted on by
3

The space heater kinda backfired, I guess.  No, it didn’t catch fire, and I honestly don’t think there is any risk of it, as it is hot only in the front.  On the contrary, the fuse for the bathroom AND hotwater tank was blown when I returned Monday evening, and had probably been blown all weekend.  All water in the house is frozen solid. Luckily the weather has been milder on Sunday and today, but never above zero, and on Saturday morning it was -20C in Nodeland, so it was probably below -15 even here.  That would be around 0F, I guess.  Definitely enough to destroy water pipes, if it had time to enter the house before the milder weather came.

I have mailed and texted the landlord (he did not answer the mobile phone).  I asked if we should get a plumber to look at it.  After all, I am still not living here, so if it thaws while I am away, and the pipes are cracked, the water could go to exciting places.  Not that I think it is likely to thaw any day soon.   It was hard enough to get even some water running even before this. The temperature is predicted to touch 0C (the freezing point of water) briefly on Wednesday, but so far it has been rather colder than predicted.  It could theoretically be until spring before it thaws naturally.  This would be impractical if I live here.  Of course, my moving here may be in some doubt after this episode.  If the landlord blames me for this, I may be evicted before I have even stayed a night here.  This seems eerily familiar.

Moth – heating yet another room

Posted on by
Reply

I returned to the Mothhouse after two days. With the extra space heater in the bathroom, it seemed reasonable that the water pipes would have thawed.  On the contrary, the cold water in the kitchen was gone now.  Only the warm water in the kitchen remained, and in the bathroom neither the faucet nor the shower worked (same as Monday).  Luckily the cold water in the kitchen returned some minutes after I drew some hot water.  I suppose the two water pipes lie so close that the heat from the hot water melted the ice in the cold water. Evidently none of the other pipes are close enough to benefit from that heat, though.  Sucks, but I guess that’s the way the ice crumbles.

I moved the new (small, expensive) space heater to the last room in any way associated with water, namely the washing room.  I have not moved in with the washing machine yet, so the only thing there is the hot water tank. It is not particularly warm on the outside, but that is supposed to be a good thing.  Still, if there is any room on the ground floor that might possibly be below the freezing point, this would be it.  Particularly the floor, walking on it in thin socks was painful.  (The thick wool socks are amazing insulation. I put them on afterwards.) I placed the heater on the floor and it is still running.  You are not supposed to use them in so small room, but then you are not supposed to let your water pipes freeze either.  And luckily the room is long, so there is nothing even remotely near in front of it.

Even so, I don’t think the problem is the air temperature.  I think the problem is that the ground under the house is frozen, and the pipes go through that frozen foundation without enough insulation.  This may have worked when people used them every day several times a day.  This may be the first time the water has actually stood still during a long period of intense cold.

This seem to be all I write about when I am here.  But the truth is that I kind of like the house, even though it is worse than the one in Nodeland in every way I can think of.  It is older, it is smaller, it is less practical, it has an upper floor instead of a basement, it is not furnished and did not even come with a coat rack.  The location is beautiful, but so far I have only seen it twice, otherwise it has been dark.  But it is kind of cozy, and just the right size.  And it is not full of other people’s stuff, so I don’t feel like a guest in someone else’s home.  The other house also had a wood stove, but this has a wood stove AND wood, which means I actually use it to heat the living room rather than just retreat to the home office like I have done the last four winters.

Of course, once I have the computers up in the study, I may retreat there anyway.  But so far I have not even heard from the company that should install fiber-optic cable before Xmas.  And I don’t expect them to do it while the cold is this extreme.  Any outdoors work should be postponed till we get milder weather again… if we ever do. So far, it is just getting colder and colder. Although the long-term forecast still fantasizes about milder weather from this weekend, except it is now expected to suddenly start on Sunday.  I have read, not many years ago, that if the weather is dominated by a high-pressure area (as it is now) the best forecast is always “the same weather as yesterday”.  Sooner or later it will be wrong, of course, but it is impossible to know when, and until then it is right each time…

In other news, I’ve got a bad cough and a sore throat tonight, but I am not convinced that this is Moth-related.  My nose was stuffed with gunk this morning after all, and I had not been here for two days then.  It does not really feel like an allergy:  No running eyes or nose, no sneezing, just  coughing up small lumps from my bronchies.  Perhaps I should get more sleep, but then when would I re-watch Hikaru no Go? At least the bus travel gives me plenty of time for brainwave entrainment.  Using mostly LifeFlow 2 (2Hz delta).

And now it is once again the time when the bus rolls out from Mandal.  7 minutes later it should be on the bus stop. I better be there or there definitely won’t be much sleep tonight!

Space heater day

Posted on by
1

Time for space heaters. Because space is a cold and lonely place… (My rented house, on the other hand, is only cold.) 

No, not space theater, although it was a bit theatrical I guess.Let us start with the cold facts, which is that the cold weather has just gone on and on ever since the Copenhagen Climate Summit reached a vague semblance of agreement. I am not going to comment on the theological implications of this today, just the practical consequences. As it dawns on me and my fellow Norwegian that the cold snap was not a snap but the onset of a serious piece of winter, and as we have put behind us the frantic shopping (for them) and days off from work (for me), there arises the matter of buying an electric space heater. The cold is advancing on all fronts: Gnawing through the walls, creeping through the ground to come up under the floor, even settling in the water pipes. Something must be done. Something, in the Land of Cheap Electricity, means a space heater.

In truth, electricity prices are constantly higher now that we have several thick cables to Europe, but this winter is not the worst, since the hydropower magazines are nearly full from two years of plentiful rain. The electricity backbone net has been upgraded bit by bit lately too, in preparation for more power transfer between the different parts of the country (and between Norway and Sweden and Denmark) as well as in preparation for the new energy sources, mainly windpower, now under construction and/or planning.

In any case, the electricity network is going to be put to the test, because I was not the only one buying a space heater. When I was there a bit after 3, people were swarming around the few remaining space heaters like male beetles around a female, except several of the customers were actually female. Like the one who bought the oil-filled radiator. It is not fueled by oil, it is electric, but it uses oil to store the heat and distribute it around the fairly large surface of the radiator. A nice invention, but oil does not strike some of us as the obvious medium, especially after reading the (very rare) report of them exploding, scattering superheated oil all over the place and setting it on fire. The lady was somewhat wary of this as well, it seemed. The store clerk assured her that accidents were very rare. “Just don’t leave it on when you go away from it.” “So does that mean I can’t leave it on at night?” “No, just don’t leave the house with it on.”

I for one would rather be outside the house when it is suddenly and violently set on fire, rather than sleeping upstairs with only one stairway between me and the world. Your sense of self-preservation may vary. If the house is going to burn down anyway, I would rather it do it without me. Preferably not at all, of course, but this means a bit of a balancing act regarding space heaters. Like balancing it on top of the toilet, since the alternative is halfway hidden by the curtains, and I think that is a truly foolish idea.

Yes, I bought a small “ceramic” space heater. Quite small and quite expensive. I do not mean to imply that the shop is gouging, even though today would be a good day for just that. Rather, I think the earlier customers have bought the cheap and most of the large heaters already, leaving only those that seemed to offer less value for money. I suspect that by the end of the day, they were all sold out anyway. Because you really don’t want your water pipes to freeze and stay frozen, like the ones in the bathroom here. Not that I am sure heating the bathroom will help. The pipes come up from the floor, and hot air is unlikely to have much influence on the ground under the floor. After all, hot air rises up, away from the floor. This is why modern Norwegian houses use heating cables in the floor. That way you only need a moderate heat to feel comfortably warm. Oh well, a bit late for that now.

The temperature today is by the way up to a moderate -7C (just below 20F). It was -16C when I left home this morning, so this is not so bad. Generally Møll is milder than Nodeland, being closer to the coast and near sea level (although none of them are really inland or in the hills). Also on Norway’s south coast, being further west generally means milder weather in winter (and less hot in summer, and more rain overall), although the difference is probably not that great from just half an hour’s bus ride… The weather forecast for tomorrow is the same, then colder again Wednesday (-12/-11C). Beyond that it is probably guesswork as usual. They guess that it goes back up to -7 on Thursday, then slowly up to -3 through the weekend, with cloud cover mostly but without snow. That seems kind of optimistic, but would be nice. Of course, I could just keep buying space heaters, and if I get enough of them the weather will turn warm, like the rain stops if you carry an umbrella, right? After all, I am the main character! Well, of this blog I guess.

Seriously though, it seems like the weather is the main character when I write from the Mothhouse. Hopefully that will change, given time.

***

Oh, and one more thing. I spoke to my immediate boss about my incompetence. I asked that I be given more of the work I can do, until such a time as I can learn more. Right now one of two local coworkers is on sick leave and another on partial sick leave. There is no one to teach me, and no material for self-study, and I don’t know a lot of people so I could call them and ask. I have to do what little I still can. I feel that this all happened because I did not value my work as an opportunity to give help to others. Because I did not appreciate my opportunity, it has been almost all taken away from me by fate. I am not going to just stand by and let that happen. The time for repentance has come, even if I do it badly.

Self-reflection of La Mu

Posted on by
Reply

If you think thoughts like “This isn’t fair”, it is like dark threads attach themselves to your soul. Thoughts are the threads that bind us to actions; actions are the ropes that bind us to habits; habits are the chains that bind us to destiny. If you want to avoid an evil destiny, remove the evil thoughts.

Around the holiday season, I continued nibbling on the book The Science of Happiness by Ryuho Okawa, founder of the religious movement Kofuku-no-Kagaku, which also means “Science of Happiness”. And I finally came to a lucid explanation of self-reflection. I already understood from other books of his that self-reflection is essential in Buddhism, and I was pretty sure I had done some of it already or I would be less happy than I am.

I attribute my happiness to the thorough education I received in the Christian Church popularly known as “Smith’s Friends”, back when they were less organized, fewer and more mystically oriented than today. (They’re still pretty good, by the way, if you can live with less mysticism and more focus on accumulating money for the Church. Which is hard to avoid, no matter where you go today. If you know of any exceptions, write me.)

Self-reflection in the Christian Church was referred to by the Biblical phrases “afterthought” and “judging ourselves”, the latter being somewhat more positive than it sounds. In context, the Bible says “If we judged ourselves, we would not be judged”, and this is certainly a very positive thing. And even if we are judged by God, the purpose even of this is that we not be condemned. So it is not as depressing as it sounds. But I can see how it would not have broad public appeal.

In contrast, the self-reflection of La Mu should have very near universal appeal, except to those who honestly believe that they are just clumps of protoplasm programmed to replicate and die. In which case they are probably not reading this, but out raping Catholic school girls before committing suicide. To the rest of us it should be pretty obvious that much like the amphibians came up from the water and gradually colonized the dry land, so have we humans come up from the material reality and colonized mindspace. While we still need water (matter) we are living most of our lives in this slightly higher world, and there are many even higher places ahead for us to go. Let us enter the gently sloping beach out of the swamp and toward our destiny!

The self-reflection of La Mu can be summed up as simple and universally as this:

-Have I given love to anyone today?
-Has my mind been unwavering today and in tune with my highest aspiration?
-Have I learned anything new today?

You can find a more detailed explanation in the book, available from Amazon.com (and presumably from your nearest Happy Science temple or office, but there are none anywhere near me.) But I think these three questions should be enough to get any well-meaning human out of the swamps, if practiced regularly, simply and honestly.

If I find that my life was not in accordance with these 3 questions, then I need to acknowledge this, and honestly wish that it was different, and resolve to not miss these opportunities in the future. When I do this, according to Okawa, my past is actually rewritten in the Akashic records (the books in Heaven, to use western words for it). The layers of grime that cover the diamond of the soul are removed, but by bit, so we can begin to emit a bright light from within. This is because the diamond of the soul (our spirit, in western thought) is connected to God and has the ability to receive and amplify the divine Light.

Regardless of the theology, there is the psychology of it. Doing these things causes happiness. Not doing them causes lack of happiness. This can be verified by experiment. Secular psychologists, such as Martin Seligman, have confirmed for decades now that at least adults achieve lasting happiness by practicing classical virtues. Not by receiving money or attention from others. This has of course been known for thousands of years, but modern advertising has enormous wealth staked on encouraging infantile behavior long into adult life. And ironically, this cruel form of capitalism is aided and abetted by institutional socialism, which gains strength from our learned helplessness. If people were healthy, happy and prosperous, the role of the state in their lives would necessarily be less.

Unlike many conservatives, I don’t want to confront the modern overgrown state head on and try to trim it down. This would just cause suffering among those who have learned to rely on the state. Rather, if people become strong by practicing self-reflection, there will be less need for society to intervene in a bureaucratic way, as people will take better care of themselves and each other. I think it is good that we have hospitals that work as well for the poor as for the rich, but I think it is bad that the poor stuff themselves with junk food, smoke, drink and stare at the TV for hours each day. By improving your character, whether you are rich or poor, you will achieve greater happiness and consequently better health and a more productive life. And it has never been easier.

Of course, no matter how happy or healthy you are, you will eventually die in the end. But I think we can agree that this is not when you will regret having spent time on self-reflection…

So, this is my way of giving you love today! It may be a harsh love, but it is certainly well intentioned and will be of great help if for some reason you don’t already practice self-reflection already but start now.

Also, by reading this you will be able to say to yourself tonight: I learned something new today! Yay! And feel a warm glow of happiness inside. ^_^