Sims 3 bug: Schools are parks

After installing Sims 3: Ambitions, all my schools became parks.

Since I have been stupid enough to waste time on this, I should post this so others can find it with Google. Perhaps they can get away with less work and lost time than I. After all, that is what I would have wanted someone else to do to me. And they tried, too, but mine was a particularly hard case.

I am not sure if it happened as soon as I upgraded, or sometime later. I am not sure if the two mods played a role (I have Awesomemod and Twallan’s StoryProgression mod).  But in any case, it affected all my schools, in all my neighborhoods. The schools became parks. You could go visit them, but you could not take painting courses. Worse, children and teens could not go to school. The school bus would still come, but the kids did not take it.  If I sent them to school, they would just walk around there like a park, which it was marked as on the map too.  There was no other option to go to school. I used Awesomemod’s Supreme Commander and it tried to send them to school as well, but they dropped the attempt without going anywhere.  Unsurprisingly, their grades were dropped to F.  If this continued, most of them would grow up insane or otherwise mentally deformed.

I have fixed the problem, but it was pretty drastic.  I read that you could fix it by going into neighborhood edit mode (one of the choices in the F5 menu) and save the school to the community bin, then delete it and put the copy back.  This did not work for me, though it has for others.  I recommend backing up your saved games before you try anyway – when I bulldozed the school and then the flat land it was built on, it became impossible to place anything there at all.

I also tried saving the school from Riverview and using that instead, as someone else had succeeded with. Did not work for me.

Eventually I backed up the whole My Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3 folder to another disk, uninstalled both the expansion and the base game, and installed them again.  Now the schools were back.  On the other hand, Riverview was gone.

I tried to download it again from the launcher. It opened the web page in Internet Explorer, but when I clicked “download again” nothing happened. I closed the launcher, and now when I clicked “download again”, the launcher opened again and downloaded the neighborhood. It did not installed though, but quit with an error message.

The solution turned out to be downloading it from within the game. Again using the F5 menu, I used the game’s download manager while I was playing a home in another neighborhood. This worked.  Now I can load my old save games and the schools are there as well.

I hope this was useful to some poor gamer.  It is not exactly the kind of thing I usually write about these days, I guess.

Dreaming of Hitler

Early this morning I had a truly nightmarish dream. It started innocently enough. I was working in this place that I have never seen before.  At the end of the day, the boss went home, and there was only me and a female receptionist left when a VIP client showed up with a complaint.  I could hear the receptionist talking with him and giving him a map of the building before I realized who he was.  It was Hitler, which our company had cloned from some old cells.

In all fairness, I don’t think anyone except perhaps our boss knew who it was, only that it was a Very Important Person.  Even the receptionist did not recognize him, but then again she probably got the job for her cuteness and not her general education level. I recognized him at once, of course, and I also realized why he was complaining.  He was cloned from old body cells that were reaching the end of their lives, so he was in a bad shape, and his mind was as deranged as his body was grotesque.  He was mutating in front of us, becoming more and more misshapen and more and more insane.  We ran away, and he kept chasing us, until he found us and cornered us in the last room upstairs. But just then, his body broke down completely and he dissolved gradually into stinking brown goo.

Shaken, we went downstairs again – and there was another Hitler. The automated cloning machines had thoughtfully made a backup, and I realized that it probably had backups of the backups and there would be coming Hitlers after us till we were dead.  That’s when I clawed my way back to the World Between Worlds.  I was horribly sleepy and I would say it was the hardest exit I have had from a dream, I could see it wide open beneath me and trying to suck me back in, but I just hung on to a shred of consciousness until the world portal finally closed and I could return to sleep in a safe place.

On the bright side, I was not the monster this time!

Diving into 2D worlds

“As if I don’t do enough of this in real life! AAAARRGH!”

One thing that has not changed from The Sims 2 to The Sims 3 is that if I play it for too long, I get upset.  There is not discernible reason for this. It is just a slow simmering discontent that gradually grows toward boiling anger. In so far as I can find features in the game to irritate me, they are not in proportion to the feelings, which anyway seem to come from within and grow independent of the actual playstyle.  (Except for making sure to take long breaks regularly.)

It has been this way for me for a long time, although I am not sure how long. I think it has increased gradually over the last few years, I did not notice it before. It is not just these games.  If I immerse myself in one particular 2-dimensional world for long, I will start feeling discontent.

You may remember that I think of the universe as being layered, or rather having a gradient. As you move upward, it becomes harder and more timeless. (For instance the laws of mathematics must necessarily be at least as old as the universe itself, and have not changed at all in these eons.) As we move downward, the world becomes soft and malleable, but also temporary and less real. Think of a daydream, for instance.  You can do pretty much anything you set your mind to in a daydream, but it disappears more easily than fog before the morning sun.

Lower worlds are the worlds we create, higher worlds are the worlds that create us.

When I dive into lower world for a long time, there is a kind of suffering. Even if I have fun and want to play just five minutes more, there is at the same time a growing discontent inside me. I feel that I do not belong here, it is not right. This is not so much a feeling of guilt – I do this on my own time, and there is no one waiting for me – but more a feeling of loss, I guess you could call it. Or perhaps I am just reading that into it because I know it is true. But it is certainly a feeling of being misplaced.

Interestingly, this feeling is not noticeable if I only visit each world briefly. It is as if I need to immerse myself in them for it to happen. I liken this to diving. If you dive into the sea, an element where you don’t belong, it may be pure fun at first, but you cannot breathe there, so you will start to suffer, and this suffering will increase faster and faster until it is unbearable.  My immersion in lower worlds is a much slower process, as it can take an hour or two before it becomes distinctly unpleasant.  But eventually it becomes worse and worse, and I have to get out of there.

You may have seen YouTube clips of young people who go berserk in front of their computer, but this seems to be when they play competitive games, particularly games in which their characters kill each other.  But I feel this mounting frustration even from the very peaceful, cute and charming Sim games, loved by women and children.  Actually it sometimes takes longer when I play City of Heroes, if I team up with other superheroes. Their players are after all people from the third dimension, so there is a kind of influx of reality from there.

There are people who are known as “otaku”, a Japanese word for geeks of 2-dimensional worlds like games, comics and cartoons. In English this is not a very negative word, it just says that they enjoy Japanese serial arts. But in Japan where the concept arose, it means people who have drowned in the lower worlds. They are no longer able to live meaningfully in the 3-dimensional world.  In my paradigm, you may say they have lost so much mental substance, becoming adapted to the softer world of fantasy, so this ordinary world is too hard for them, to sharp, too unyielding, too demanding.

Conversely there are those who have adapted to higher worlds, but these are few and we don’t hear much about them. To them this so-called real world is like a fog and the people in it like shadows, except for their spirit or inner light. All these familiar forms are only temporary, and cannot make the heart content.  For we were made to be adequate to the ultimate reality, the Light, the Alpha and Omega, Infinity and Eternity. The universe itself is not enough to satisfy us.  This is true, but it is not obvious as we start out.  Even now, it is not exactly a problem for me. Living in the ordinary world does not constrain me the way diving into lower worlds does.  But if I live till I am 120, I will likely find this world gradually more constraining.  Right now I feel like I could enjoy it for millennia, but if I keep growing, there may well come a day when I shall rejoice when exiting this world as well.  That is not to say that I’ll never start another game of physical existence – that is something I don’t know right now.  For now, this one is enough for me, and I feel like I have only recently begun to understand it.

Sims 3 Ambitions – first look

Somewhere in the Sim equivalent of Louisiana, in a small town in the swamps, where most of the roads are dirt roads and most days are foggy days, lives an eccentric inventor in a small shack. He lives off his garden, makes vegetarian food, uses his legs instead of a car, scrounges parts from the junkyard for his newest inventions, and tries to live a sustainable life for the planet.

No other personal computer game has created a legacy quite like The Sims. The original game in 2000 was quickly followed by numerous expansion pack, before The Sims 2 in 2005 made a big leap in both world detail and realism, and again was followed by expansion packs each spring and fall that greatly deepened the gameplay.  The Sims 3 in 2009 was less of a dramatic shift, but preserved many of the favorite activities from its predecessor, and contained a surprising level of detail in gameplay. Still, there were many white spots on the gameplay map, and it was expected that there would once again come many expansion packs.  Sims 3: Ambitions is the second major expansion to this game.

To be honest, I did not buy the previous expansion, The Sims 3: World Adventures. I bought the vacation expansions for The Sims and The Sims 2, and I found both of them forgettable.  I had two sims go on vacation once in The Sims 2, I may have had two or three vacations in the original game. Following the same trend, I would have had zero vacations in this game, and that was how I felt when I read about other people’s experience with it too.

Ambitions however is in my native Norwegian named Drømmejobben, meaning The Dream Job. That seems a lot more interesting to me. Your attitude toward vacation and job may vary – actually, it almost certainly does. I avoid vacations like the plague in real life as well, and I have every intention to go to work until I am 70, Light willing.  So there is some pretty heavy bias here…

The expansion actually only provides a fairly small number of new careers, but they really stand out from the old jobs.  In The Sims 3, you could follow your sims to their workplace but then they went in the door and left you outside. You could give them vague guidelines, like “work hard”, “slack off and have fun”, “meet new people”, “suck up to the boss” etc.  But there were just half a dozen or so instructions, and they were quite generic. In this expansion, the old jobs are still the same, except for doctor.  The new jobs however have a different character.  Here you get tasks you can complete to improve your job rating, and they are not necessarily in an office or some such.  As a firefighter you will visit homes and try to save your fellow sims from fire.  As a ghost hunter you will try to clean out haunted houses. As a detective you will also spend a lot of time in the field. As an architect you will mess around with other people’s homes, and as a stylist you will change their looks.  So it is a completely different gameplay.

In fact, it reminds me a bit of Sims 2: Open for Business, which was probably my favorite expansion in that generation, closely followed by Sims 2: FreeTime. As a matter of fact, Ambitions also has a couple more hobbies as well: Sculpture and invention. In addition, you can now register your hobbies as a profession, and sell your works at a local consignment store.  Not just sculptures and inventions, but also paintings or produce, from the hobbies that were included in the original Sims 3.

So far I have only had the opportunity to test one of the new hobbies, invention. My sim will dig through piles in the junkyards for parts, then make inventions at the workbench at home.  I am not sure if there are public workbenches. Probably, but I have not seen them yet. Most will probably want it at home anyway, if for no other reason than to have a shower nearby when your inventor’s clothes catch fire.  Also, if you have a painter in the family, you can decorate your home with masterworks and get quite powerful bonus moodlets from the beauty.

While you have enough scrap in your inventory, your workbench will have an “invent” option. Using this will improve your new Invention skill, and occasionally pop out a new invention. At first these are frequent but not particularly valuable, small toys and widgets. At higher levels, inventions are few and far between, but each is more substantial. The miner can dig up metals, gems and old objects from your lawn, and may even open a hole to an underground realm where your sim may have adventures. Or that is what my sim wishes to use it for, at least. I have not actually tried this. The time machine… well, we’ll come to that. And the robot is supposedly the final fruit of your invention, much as it was in Open for Business.

One difference from Open for Business is that the workbench is not fun. In the previous generation of the game, crafting was one of the greatest sources of fun around, but very tiring.  Now, it is neither.  It is just work.  I suppose this makes some sense since invention is now a profession and an alternative to clocking in at the office.

You can also read books on invention, and even improve your skill by getting an opportunity (random quest). However, this will not actually create the inventions. You will still need to use the Invent option, but it will take shorter time if you already have the skill.

So, the time machine. I recommend saving before you use any high-end invention, by the way. First my sim went into the past. After watching the teaser video, I had expected my sim actually loading a different landscape and going on some adventure like in the previous expansion, World Adventures. However, there was only a string of text messages.  One of these was how my sim rescued a child, and then a child popped out of the time machine ahead of my sim. It looked very much like my sim would have done as a grade schooler, but had a different personality. And then the game crashed, and my computer spent a couple minutes with just the background picture while recovering. Your computer may vary – mine is pretty fast. When I loaded the game and did it again, a completely different story unfolded, and my sim came back having lost some stuff but gained a lifefruit. It seems you can have a number of adventures in the past and future, and I look forward to it.

I assumed that learning about robots was one of those adventures, because even after having maxed his invention skill and made one of every invention, my sim still does not have that option. However, it seems instead that the Palladium opportunity arc may be the trigger, judging from some of the text there.  I have no idea whether my frequent time travels were necessary to get that started, but probably not.

Before closing this “first look”, I want to mention that there are a couple new personality traits. My sim is Eccentric and Eco-Friendly.  Eccentric sims make discoveries faster, both the discovery and the actual product. It is basically the career-boosting skill for inventors, much like Artistic is for painters and Green Thumb for gardeners etc  in the unexpanded Sims 3.  In contrast, Eco-Friendly is a genuinely new personality type. They get negative mood from driving alone, but positive mood from carpooling or biking. They take short showers and eat organic food. And they feel good when they can use a clothesline instead of a dryer.

Oh, that’s right. Sims can now wash their clothes. If there is a washing machine or hamper on the lot, sims will drop their clothes when they go to bed or shower.  Over time these clothes will begin to stink. If you wash and dry them, however, your sims will get bonus mood from clean clothes and fresh bedsheets.  This is mainly of interest if your sims have not already topped their mood meter:  If you have a positive mood, you get more lifetime happiness points, which can be used to buy various objects or upgrades of your sims. If you are already maxed, laundry is just a chore, just like in real life. The sims on the lots you don’t play certainly seems to think so as well, because after a while their floors are covered with stinking heaps of clothes when you visit them.

In all fairness, I am not sure if this is an artifact of the two behavior mods I have installed, the Awesomemod and Twallan’s StoryProgression, but probably not.  Both Pescado and Twallan are quite good at what they do, and it is more likely that they will eventually fix the problem than that they caused it. Awesomemod in particular is pretty much essential if you want to play The Sims 3, since it fixes a wide range of problems. Electronic Arts tends to just dump their games to the market when they decide the bugs are not bad enough for many players to return their games, or so it seems to me.

So, is the expansion worth buying?  It may be early to say, but it does not have any game-stopping bugs that I can see, and it does add some more variation to the game.  If money is really scarce, you may want to think twice about it, and if you rarely have time to play anyway, you may want to wait until you have played most of the content you already have. Otherwise, it seems like a worthy addition to the series.

Divine intervention?

Sometimes the line between miracles and ordinary life are in the eyes of the beholder.

It would seem I got no fat poisoning this time.  That was a welcome surprise! I have had this condition since around Easter 2005, so I generally have a decent idea of where my limits lie.  But either my limits have moved, or something was different this time.  Divine intervention? Low-fat mayonnaise in the salad? It is kind of sad in itself that I can’t offhand tell the difference between divinity and mayonnaise, in a manner of speaking. But such is life.

On a related note, Ryuho Okawa is now following me on Twitter. At least that was the mail I got from Twitter some days ago. I freely admit that my heart skipped a beat, or a chill ran down my spine or something like that. Actually it is the American branch of Happy Science that maintains his Twitter account, which makes perfect sense to me. I mean, can you imagine the Buddha using Twitter? Or Confusius, or Newton?  OK, perhaps Newton… But generally, I suppose Grand Tathagatas are way too busy for such things.

In any case, I may have my delusions of grandeur, but there are limits. On the other hand, a real God does not mind whether you are a Very Important Person or just an ant in the anthill. We are all pretty similar to Him – and all valuable. But whether this takes the form of outward fortune or misfortune… well, it may not be entirely random, but sometimes we just don’t know.  I’m just glad I’m fine for now.  This body won’t be along forever, but I appreciate it while I have it.

Business trip

I have a feeling I have used this before, but it is distinctly on-topic for today. Well, yesterday really. Or the time period between them.

It is a rare event, but I was away from home last night, on a work conference for our division.  We stayed at a hotel, and a very cute one at that.  I won’t give the name away because this might let you identify my current employer, which is strongly discouraged by said employer.

I can’t say I found the event particularly useful, as it mostly addressed other problems than the real ones, at least my real ones.  My main problem at work is that I don’t have the access rights and the qualifications to solve the cases that we are falling behind on. Learning to ask our customers open-ended questions and inquire whether they are satisfied with our solutions are not bad ideas, but they pale into insignificance compared to actually being able to SOLVE their problems within a reasonable time and using a resource mostly already available (namely me).

On the bright side, I get paid for sleeping and eating free meals. This may not boost my spiritual growth (if any), but it does mean I can go to work a little later, should the need arise. For instance if I get temporarily sick, such as from fat poisoning. It has been quite a while since last time, several months, but I am not too sure about tomorrow.  I accidentally ate more fat today than I have done and avoided a fat poisoning since I got this condition in 2005.

It started harmlessly when I decided to go for some veggie salad along with my jam for breakfast. Of course this stuff contains mayo along with the sliced veggies.  But I made sure to keep it within my limits.  It was quite tasty, and I took a similar portion for lunch.  Then I realized that we were eating lunch barely four hours after breakfast.  That is a lot faster than my body can process fat. I use to allow 8 hours between fat intakes, although I can usually get away with 6-7. But four?  I am not looking forward to this.  This is the kind of events that cause unspeakable TMI along with the dread.  I have survived larger portions of fat than this, before I realized what triggered the attacks, but my survival came as a pleasant surprise each time.  So, tomorrow could get a lot more exciting than I planned for.  Barring divine intervention, and divine intervention tends to happen only after I’ve learned my lesson, if at all. But we’ll see.

While on vaguely health-related topics, the usual tooth is loose again. I wonder if this means I am supposed to buy another laptop? Because these events have clung together so much that I have made it a running joke in my journal: “Every time you buy a laptop, God kills a tooth.”  (Based on a slightly less family-friendly meme, which I am sure Google with help you with if you are lucky enough to not have heard it.) Actually, about half the times it has just been the same tooth falling out again, not actually a new one dying, so it is not to be taken literally.  Still.  The expense of fixing the tooth will be enough, I think, without shelling out for yet another laptop as well. That will have to wait until I have paid off the moving expenses.

Finally, mystery of the day: When I came off the bus today and fetched my mail, I noticed that there were shallow cuts like paper cuts on the back of the fingers on my right hand. They are all on the joints and they all go diagonally, but not all in the same direction. I have no idea when I got them, as they are practically painless. Life is full of mysteries, eh?

Religious and secular meditation

The religiosity of your meditation is not something outsiders can ascertain.

I was already planning to write this entry when I read something eerily related in The Challenge of the Mind by Ryuho Okawa. He says that the purpose of meditation is to contact High Spirits, such as your Guardian Angel. If it was just to sit down and not think, trees and stones would do a much better job of it than us.

That sounds a bit harsh. There are quite a lot of health benefits associated with non-religious meditation: Lower blood pressure, better sleep, better immune functioning, less tendency to smoking and drinking, better memory and a greater or stronger awareness in daily life. I have called it “defragmenting the brain” too, but there is  even more than that. Still, in my experience, there is a clear difference between religious and secular meditation.  I cannot say whether they meet in the end, because I have not come anywhere near the end of any of them, even after many years.

My history with meditation began in my mid teens or so, when I learned it directly from God.(1) I was praying and felt that it was terribly rude to just rattle off my own wish list and then hang up.  God is not a grocer or something. So I respectfully waited after my prayer, in case God had something to say to me as well.  I understand that some people do hear actual voices from Heaven, but I did not.  (Which is good, because I have a more scientific personality and would likely have been scared out of my skin.) Instead, I felt a benevolent Presence.  Kind of, when you pray, you have a distinct impression that there is someone there receiving your prayer.  I suppose some people, perhaps all people sometimes, have to take this on faith.  But I think most of us have had the distinct impression that we have “connection”.  This was like that, only stronger, and it kept growing stronger.  Like there was someone right by me that I could not see, but I could feel the aura of that luminous Presence.

In less religious terms, it was very much like sitting together with a really close friend or family member who you don’t need to engage in conversation. In these cases it is possible to just be together without thinking of what you are going to say next, simply waiting for them to say something or not – it does not really matter.  This was like that, only with awe and majesty thrown in. Kind of like if you could sit silently together with Abraham Lincoln or something. (Requires optional Time Machine.)

From that experience of simply resting silent in the Divine aura, from this grew my religious meditation.  It was an extension of prayer – it was the heart of prayer really.  And it still is to many people, who would regard meditation with deep skepticism.  “Meditation, isn’t that something that heathens do, and those New Age people?  It is probably evil spirits!”  But actually meditation has a long history in Christianity as well, although in the old days it was called contemplation, while meditation was a more active thinking on holy topics. Today these have been transposed, perhaps in the meantime there was a period of confusion where few people thought of such things at all?

It was months later that a more experienced Christian caught me in the act of silent communion and asked me if I was meditating?  So at first opportunity I looked it up.  We did not have the Internet back then, but there was a public library in the town where I went to school.  There I learned about the science of meditation, and I took up that as well. For years I practiced ever deeper meditation, until in my 20es I started having more and more supernatural experiences:  Telepathy, extra-sensory knowledge and the occasional tiny blip of telekinesis.  Scared, I prayed to God to make it stop, and I cut down quite a bit on both the frequency, regularity and depth of my meditation.  The strange experiences pretty much disappeared after that.

I have practiced meditation since then, but irregularly and not so deeply. Religious meditation in particular is something I have done only when drawn to it.

Over the past year and some I have taken up more meditation again, now with the aid of brainwave entrainment.  Using first Centerpointe’s  Holosync and later Project Meditation’s LifeFlow, I have used sound waves to synchronize my brain waves.  LifeFlow in particular has a broad range of different frequencies.  While these tools do not actually cause meditation, they create a state of brain that is well suited for the state of mind that is meditation.  During natural meditation, the brainwaves will smooth out and get slower.  How slow depends on practice and some seemingly random element.  With brainwave entrainment, you can reduce the random element and get there with much less training.  I have not found this useful for the meditation itself, although being able to induce slow-wave instead of REM sleep in the morning has been nifty. Basically, I can’t see that depth (slowness) of brain waves leads to depth of the meditative experience.  Your meditation may vary (and if so, please tell me. Actually, tell me anyway.)

There does not seem to me to be any spiritual benefits to the brainwave entrainment technology at all.  Your spirit may vary.  I find that to me, religious meditation is still a different experience.  Even though LifeFlow 8 induces a “feeling” in the brain that is very similar to deep prayer meditation, it is not it.  It is kind of like visiting the house of a friend and everything is there except your friend.

There are schools of Buddhism that do not relate to a God or spiritual beings, and yet practice meditation religiously. I would think that to them there is no such difference. But I don’t really know.  There is only so much you can experience in one life.  But luckily we have each other to learn from. So perhaps I will know one day, if I find someone who has the relevant experience.

***

“Directly from God”: Well, that was my experience at least.  I have later come to realize that our connection to God may not be quite what it seems:  Each of us seems to have a personal “branch office of God” in our heart, which can differ a bit from that of other people who also believe in God, even those in the same congregation, even those in the same family.  Each of us has a separate “branch office”.  I mean that for instance in each town there used to be a Social Security office, and you could go there for all your ordinary Social Security needs.  It was unlikely that you ever had any other contact with Social Security. To the common man, this office WAS Social Security.  But actually of course Social Security is a much more vast organization, and there are subtle differences in the way you are spoken to in one town and another.  It seems to be the same way with God:  There is much more to God than what any one of us knows, but at the same time God is represented in our hearts with all the Divinity we will ever need.  If our needs for God grows, so does the God within. In this way, we grow toward each other in God, our internal God presence becoming more similar as the Light increases.  If all goes well.

This individual Divine presence is probably what Happy Science calls “High Spirits”, although in Christianity it is customary to only have one, not to chat with a large number of angels, archangels and Saviors.  For us there is only one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus  Christ. It certainly simplifies things.  But of course there are actually many entities in Heaven that are far greater and wiser than we are.  We just don’t play supermarket there, as we already have all the Holy Spirit we need, and then some.  To quote a very old Christian from my home village: “We don’t need more spirit, we need to obey the Spirit we already have!”  Which is of course a pretty good way to get “more”. Or that’s what the Presence in my head tells me…

Broad experience

This is the normal human condition and nothing to be surprised by. We don’t understand anything at all when we have never seen it before and barely even heard about it. How could it be otherwise?

My many-named reader has a question to my previous entry. He asks: “How do you tell the difference between seeing another dimension, divine inspiration and a hallucination?” The short answer is, as I warned at the start of the entry, that you need experience. But as I was about to gently rebuke my reader for forgetting the beginning of the entry before getting to the end (for this could in no way be the fault of my communications skills, of course), I realized that there is more than one dimension even to practice. There is length, of course, but also breadth.

For instance, because I have watched hundreds of hours of anime, I can tell Japanese apart from other languages or from simple babbling, even if I only understand a little and cannot use it. Simply the act of observing means that you will be able to tell things apart eventually. But not without practice, and not after five minutes or even an hour or two. Or at least the ability would not stay long after only an hour or two.

But how can I know that Japanese language does in fact exist and is not an elaborate hoax? Perhaps the Japanese actually speak Chinese, but push this delusion of a separate language on foreigners for political reasons or just to laugh at us behind our backs. (Not that they would need something so elaborate for that – I am sure they do that quite a bit anyway, and with good reason.)

If I had seen only one animated movie in Japanese, then this would certainly be a possible scenario, if not plausible. But as it happens, I have watched a broad range of anime from different publishers, and read about even more that others have watched. This is what we may call a broader experience, in contrast to just longer. For instance if I had only seen The Laws of Eternity, even if I saw it every week, it would not be a very broad experience in Japanese culture. It might have left me a better person than if I had seen all those others, most of which are not very edifying, but I would not have much basis for an opinion about Japanese language, much less the rest of their culture.

This is the case with people who restrain their interests to a very narrow range. In the example of spiritual practices, which I wrote about in my previous entry, there are sects who teach that your only spiritual practice needs to be chanting a particular short phrase over and over for the rest of your life, as often as possible. While this certainly has some effect, it is a narrow approach in the sense that we cannot easily know whether the effect comes from the object of their worship, the particular sounds of the chant, or simply the practice of repeating something an extraordinary number of times.

To further complicate things, sects tend to strongly discourage experimenting with variations of the practice, much less experimenting with the practices of other sects. Sure, members of other sects claim to be happy too, but what do they know about true happiness? And besides, the demons may just be deluding them into thinking that they are happy. After all, if you were a professional demon, wouldn’t you be willing to make people happy for a few years if you could get them to Hell afterwards? (This does not apply to our sect, of course, since we know true happiness when we see it. Besides, it is written in our holy Scripture that we are right, and we know our holy Scripture is true because the Scripture says so.)

The behavior of the sect members is actually quite reasonable. Why risk a good thing for something uncertain? Better the god you know than the devil you don’t. Still, it makes for a narrow experience, not too unlike the fan who only watches the same movie over and over again.

On the other hand, the “butterfly”, “supermarket” or “salad bar” approach to spirituality has its own drawbacks. The most obvious is that people tend to pick only the parts they personally like. But if a child starts to eat only the food he likes best, do only the homework he likes and only show up for P.E. classes if they are fun, he is unlikely to be heading for a long and happy life. If he has parents, they will hopefully tell him to change his ways. Likewise if you use this approach in your spiritual life. If you have a spiritual “father”, he is sure to tell you in no uncertain terms to Eat Your Greens.

Each tradition has its own internal structure or consistency. This is certainly not to say that they are all equal, much less identical. What I mean is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and if you only keep picking parts, you will not get that “more”, that wholeness or totality. Just saying. I am not really the right person to go all out against this, since I have a double helping of curiosity at the very least.

On the bright side, the great religions have each quite a broad range of spiritual tools. For instance if you are a Christian, there is no need to Hare off to Krishna or canter over to El Cantare just to add the spice of variety to your life. (If you go for other reasons, it is not like I could stop you anyway.) You may never have run into all of these in Sunday School in the Church of Our Saints in Middle Littlewick, but actually there is both prayer, meditation, contemplation, Lectio Divina and even chanting (although mostly in liturgy). And of course if you are part of a congregation, there are probably various rituals also trying to drag Eternity into time (or time into Eternity).

On the other extreme, Buddhism has a heap of different meditation schools, many of which are not quite religious in the western sense of the word, although some are. The contrast between some of the techniques taught is staggering, certainly on the same scale as the difference between some branches of different religions.

This was very long, but the short of it is: There are a number of different spiritual practices, a few of which I am familiar with from experience, and many more from the experience of others. While the effects of them differ to some extent, there are also many striking similarities.

Then there is the whole thing about religious versus secular meditation / observation, but I am working on a different entry about that.

So how can we tell things apart? We cannot without practice. The practice can be long or broad or both. It can also differ in depth, so I guess we have 3 dimensions there as well. If you have mainly one of these dimensions, I suppose it may be hard to perceive the others clearly. If you have none of them, I don’t see why you would even try. Humans need years to even learn to dress themselves. There is no way we can become proficient with the mind without watching it firsthand for some time. But I believe it is worth it, for a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

3 time dimensions of the mind

“That’s where the light gets in…”

OK, this will sound seriously weird, especially if you have no practice with meditation or similar spiritual practices. As usual, lots of reading can substitute for actual practice, with the exception that if you get some small detail wrong, you end up with a completely different world. But that is life, I guess. And practice is hard to come by, as timelessness takes time.

Read on, then, and be amazed. Or suspicious or something. For I will tell you that unlike the world of physics, the world of the mind has not just one but at least 3 time dimensions. Or I suppose you could say that the fourth dimension, time, is the entrance to the next two. In any case, please bear in mind that this is about the human mind and how it relates to its world. It is not a substitute for physics, nor is physics a substitute for it.

OK, time is the fourth dimension. I hope we can agree to that. All creatures unfold in time, but humans may be the only who can wander it more or less at will. So you may not remember what you ate for dinner on May 25, 2000. Or perhaps you do. Most of us don’t even remember what weekday it was. But there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of memories we can revisit. Many of them at will, others by surprise. And probably unlike any other animal, we can make elaborate projections of the future and work toward them. In fact, we seem to do this more or less automatically. (OK, perhaps not the “work toward” part, unless it is something very exciting.) We spend so much time in the past and the future – and in futures that will never be, and even pasts that never were – that there is very little time left for now.

But the tiny little pinhole of Now is actually the key to eternity. This may sound counter-intuitive, but thousands of years of experience bears it out. If we just flicker past the now on our way into some other time, we will ever lack depth. This depth is the fifth dimension. You can envision it as follows: The small point in time that is Now, can be extended from the surface consciousness into the unconscious. This is a mental dimension, of course. But it is none the less real, because for the most part it is your unconscious that makes your big decisions, while you run after it and rationalize them.

We could say that the unconscious consists of the subconscious (shadow) and supraconscious (light). In Freud’s coarse terms, the id and the superego, although his idea of both is appallingly simplistic. There is a whole kingdom within. Actually more like a universe, but we have to start small. If you could remember your dreams, chances are there are more people within you than you will get to know in a lifetime. -Of course, remembering dreams is a mixed pleasure, as I have mentioned elsewhere. In your unconscious you may meet your guardian angel, but you will also meet your “guardian devil”. There are forces on both sides keeping you in balance, as if you were chained to each of them with heavy iron, so that any attempt to move in either direction will be painfully slow.

This is intentional: If we could just change ourselves on a whim, we would likely change into someone popular, or someone who excels at work, or someone who we think would be loved by a special someone. And if it was that simple, just snap your fingers and you have changed, then most of us would throw away our real self on a whim and likely an illusion at that. Therefore we are chained this way, so that we can neither fall too fast nor rise speedily. When someone rattles the chains, the laws of nature (not to say society) perceives it as madness and puts on the brakes. Whether the madness consists in attacking your neighbor with an axe or giving your money to the poor, the response is pretty much the same. And so we are fettered, for our own safety. But in truth it is possible to move, though it takes an inordinate amount of energy, or dedication, or time, or any combination of these.

This was a glimpse into the effects of extending the tiny pinhole of time from the surface consciousness into the fifth dimension of the mental substance. By the simple process of abiding in the Now, observing calmly, you will experience things you could not otherwise see, at least not and retain your sanity. Such as it is.

As you open up to what is outside (or should we say inside) the surface consciousness, your personal bubble of Now will begin to grow. The pinprick hole in the dark bowl over your head will widen. This is another dimension of time. You will now not only notice that there are things moving outside (or inside) the wall. As you continue to observe these things in the Now, the opening will slowly widen. I have referred to this as “spiritual aperture”. In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. In the more poetic words of Leonard Cohen:
There is a crack, a crack in everything;
that’s how the light gets in.

As your aperture widens, the tiny hole that became a line into the unknown becomes a column. You can now see more than just light and shadow moving. A vista opens unlike anything we have seen in the outer world, and beyond the words of our languages. Poetry, allegory or the ravings of a lunatic are your choices if you try to share what you have “seen”.

Actually I haven’t seen all that much, because I haven’t taken this practice all that seriously for all that long. This may be convenient for you, or I might have just given up on saying anything at all, since it would be beyond your wildest imagination. Unless, of course, you have been there, as a lot of people have throughout history. But not anything even resembling a majority. Probably not even a multitude, however many that is.

Are there more dimensions? We started with the horizontal time dimension through which our minds habitually run back and forth. Through a tiny hole in this, we shot at right angles into the unconscious, or mental substance. Then we widened this aperture, yet another direction. So beyond these, how many more dimensions are there? Light knows. I have just commenced dabbling in this stuff. It seems that even if I get my full 120 years, it will be hard to get beyond dabbling. But if I do, I will tell you… Light willing. Then again I, or even you, could be gone long before that. So this is it for now.

A perfect day in Paradise

Except in Paradise, you presumably don’t need to worry about ticks even if you literally live in the forest.

As I was walking along the road to the shop (as usual on Saturdays), I noticed how beautiful the scenery was, like I was walking among carefully selected photographs. The sun was bright, but not burning. It was quiet, the farms and homes seeming to rest in the early summer light. Fields still were dark with newly broken soil, and in one of them a flock of seagulls were rooting for worms. Most of the land is grassy fields though, green where not dotted with flowers. In smaller pastures, a few sheep were grazing with their lambs by their side. In the distance, a couple children were playing, their excited voices carrying far in the stillness.

I was thinking about what a friend wrote the other day, that this land was similar to Heaven. It is indeed. It reminds me of the Realm of the Good, the resting place of those who lived their life on Earth with gratitude and in harmony. In Heaven, they are given whatever they wish for, because their wishes are always simple and honest and pleasing to others as well as themselves, if not more so. It is a beautiful place, as is the soul of such people. Seeing it in my mind’s eye, for a moment I thought that I would not mind staying forever in a place like that.

But that is not true, of course, and my heart corrected me quickly. It knows that I cannot avoid looking for that which is beyond even such a place: The Realm of Light, my home, if I can reach it. And for a brief heartbeat or two, the world I saw through my eyes seemed to shimmer, and through it, vaguely, I saw lines or beams of light connecting all things from above. Then, like water lies still when a wave has passed through it, the picture was itself again.

It was such a day that I cannot be sure to see again, no matter where I go, no matter if I live till I am 120. Perhaps I will see sights more beautiful, more paradisaical than this. Or perhaps not. I guess it does not matter all that much. It is also a form of greed, to want the moment to stay. That is not what moments are for. We have eternity for that. And I mean it literally. As I walked the long road that goes like a straight line through the land, there was a temptation to hurry. But immediately I thought: Will I hurry in eternity? Eternity has already begun. It is not like this moment now is separate from eternity. Eternity has always been, we just have not noticed it. And I kept walking.

I guess some days are better for noticing eternity than others. That cannot be helped. We just have to pick those beautiful moments up when we pass through them. There is no other time to live in a moment than when it is there. Like here, now.