The view from right outside my door. It just keeps flowing every day!
Woke up two hours early today thanks to a desperate bumblebee, so here is a morning post!
I recently finished reading Ryuho Okawa’s book The Laws of Courage and I’m dipping my toes in Frithjof Schuon’s Survey of Metaphysics. The latter is much harder to read, as are all his books that I know of. It is extremely dense and precise and uses many long words that are rarely used, including some even I haven’t seen before. His writing is also consistently abstract. Well, I am not really complaining — I know some of my writing may look like that to the random visitor. I’m working on it, though.
Back to the would-be savior from outer space. I often think to myself that Ryuho Okawa truly writes like a god — more exactly Hermes, the god of speed. I mean, writing 500 books in a couple of decades? But that is not enough. In The Laws of Courage, he casually mentions that he reads approximately 1000 books a year. Â (That’s why he didn’t find it unreasonable to say that the first step towards becoming an intellectual is to have read 1000 books. A statement I don’t find it hard to agree with, although I have no idea how many I have read. Probably comes well over that number only if we include fantasy and science fiction, or even worse, western books, of which my brother had at least a couple hundred during my puberty. I don’t really think they should count toward becoming an intellectual though. -_-)
My own attempt at fiction writing this month goes forward very slowly. Ironically, I think I could write much, much faster if I were to write books of the Truth, but at this time I am not qualified to do that. Â Or at the very least I am not allowed to by the source of that Truth. There is just too much responsibility, and I am not yet a very responsible person.
However, I can certainly relate to the extremely prolific writing of people like Ryuho Okawa or Hans Urs von Balthasar. When you try to render a higher-dimensional object in a lower-dimensional world, like for instance a globe on a piece of paper, it just does not fit. You have to unfold it and portray it from different angles to try to let others reconstruct it in their mind. And even then, it largely requires that the recipient has Been There. Â If we were not three-dimensional ourselves, a world map would not give us an approximation (and it is nothing more!) of the globe, but just perpetuate our illusion that it was indeed flat.
Now, spiritual truth (and maths and physics for that matter) is indeed on a higher level than ordinary life, so if we try to explain it in metaphors, allegories and parables, it expands and “splinters” into many details that are actually one on the higher plane where they belong. For this reason, there is “no end to the writing of books” and “even Earth itself could not have room for all the books that would have to be written” to convey even one Heavenly life.
God is by definition unlimited. The whole universe is simply an overflowing of God’s unlimited Being. That follows more or less from the concept of God, so if we are able to imagine the existence of a Supreme Being, this is necessarily one of Its qualities. Â If it is all in our imagination, then just to have that concept we must be to some extent divine (in possibility even if not in actuality), and how did we end up like that? Â Even if I had been born with the first star of the universe, and had been writing ever since, I would still not have come close to exhaust the imagination and intellection of even one soul. Â There are no limits, or at least they exceed this seemingly endless universe.
If Shakespeare was still alive, he would still be writing. If Bach was still alive, he would still be composing. If Buddha was still alive, he would still be teaching. Â If Socrates was still alive, he would still be asking. The spirit taps into something beyond the ordinary, and once that channel is cleansed of the things that blocked it, there is no end to it except death. Â Beethoven kept writing symphonies even after he went deaf.
In short, our spirit taps into the inexhaustible. Â There are levels or grades of doing this, but beyond a certain level, there is no end to it. Â It becomes like a wellspring that gushes forth endlessly.
