Monthly Archives: January 2011

“How can I keep from singing?”

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Of course, not everyone feels the need to keep from singing… It has its place, but not ALL THE TIME!

No, not “how can I keep from sinning” – that is a very good question too, but in that case I should point you to the experts, The Christian Church. “Christianity – more than forgiveness of sin.”

When it comes to singing, however, perhaps you recognize the title. There is a traditional song with this title: “How can I keep from singing?” Here is a link to it in my record collection, for as long as it works. For the time being, you can also find numerous versions on YouTube.

There is also the more practical question: How can I actually keep from singing?  Like today, when my fever is down to around 38C again (100.4 Imperial degrees). My throat is still a bit sore, after coughing up multicolored goo in the morning and a bit onward. But my heart is filled with song and running over as usual.  This is pretty much how it is if I don’t concentrate on anything else.  (Uh, does this mean that this is who I really am? I am really a singer? I doubt that…)

Mostly it is a problem at work though. Most of my work is fairly routine (as I don’t have the licenses nor the knowledge to do much else) so I can don’t need to think hard. That’s exactly when I tend to begin singing. Not good to do at work. We do have offices, but they are not that soundproof!  Besides, there is the practical problem that if I actually sing much, my throat becomes sore, since I don’t talk usually.

So at work I sometimes play something like LifeFlow’s Optimal Learning (also from my CD collection). It helps me concentrate and it takes my brain off the songs it otherwise might run through. If I played actual music, it would just add fuel to the fire.  Well, sufficiently complex classical music works too.  I’ve used Bach a few times.

Having 39C in fever, as I had yesterday and the day before, works too. I am not surprised. The body still influences the soul a lot. But obviously the soul influences the body a lot too.  For instance, influencing it to sing…

Our true nature?

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The precious moment when, somehow, we become able to stand outside our own thoughts and look at them. Treasure these moments, for they are where we learn to know this mysterious, unknown person known as “myself”.

See if this does not resonate in your heart, as it did in mine.  “In the spirit world, what a person thinks about or prays for most strongly reveals their true nature. Awakening to this truth will completely turn your life around.”

I have a hard time imagining how it could possibly be otherwise. What else would more clearly reveal our nature?  Certainly not our title or paycheck. Certainly not our house or car. Not even our looks or our health. Probably not our political affiliation or even, in and of itself, what church or temple we go to, if any. But as the Bible says: “For as he thinks in his heart, so is he”.  (Proverbs 23:7.)

If there is a problem with the original statement, it is that it is obvious. “It says itself” as we often say here in Norway. Well of course we are what we think! Really? Then why do appearances mean anything to us at all? Why does it matter what this or that person thinks about us?

If we want to know who we really are, there is no way around observing ourselves as the days go by. What am I thinking about when I am not thinking about anything else? When I am at rest, perhaps before falling asleep at night? When I am waiting in line and the line is slow, where are my thoughts? And what, if anything, do I wish so much to see happen that I am willing to pray for it when no one on Earth sees me?

It appeared to me, that we might imagine we were taken away to a secret place of power, and there ordered to state the deepest wish of our heart.  (Such an event starts one of my unfinished stories, which may be why I can imagine it easily.) Now, if this our greatest wish was to come true, that would certainly be something.  But what is it?  Do we really know that? And is this, our aspiration as it may be called, what we actually think about when waiting for the bus?

The flu, or something

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I got up early today, wanting to take the early commute bus. But I did not feel quite sure about it:  I had a low-grade head cold lately, moving to the throat, but last night it settled in the bronchi. It stayed there through the night, so I had to wake up a few times to cough to clear them. My coworker had been sneezing a lot so I assumed I had gotten his cold. Well, it may be a bit more than that. I now officially have a fever, although still a moderate one. The headache and the pain in muscles and joints are very flu-like. There is a B influenza going the rounds, generally considered a weaker strain but one many of us don’t have immunity toward. Or so say the news.

As it happened, I got a box from Amazon.com in the mail yesterday. It contained two books by James V. Schall, and are somewhat ironically named “Liberal Learning” and “Another Sort of Learning“.  Actually none of them is Liberal in the political sense of the word: Schall is actually a Jesuit, and his idea of a liberal education is a synthesis of the classical Greco-Roman culture and the great philosophers of Christianity, such as St Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Oh, and P.G. Wodehouse.

The small book, or even pamphlet, Liberal Learning, is also available online if you don’t want to support the printing of such books, or simply want to reduce your carbon footprint without eating less, traveling less, or in any other way restraining your greed. ^_^

So when I found myself staying home from work today, I thought this was a great opportunity to read some Schall. But as my temperature went up, my brainpower went down. So perhaps not the most ideal conditions to be introduced to stacks of heavy tomes…

Right now, I have 39.3C (102.7F) in fever. This should be pretty much ideal for the body, although I do have a headache now. Unfortunately the temperature is still rising, although very slowly.  It may not be a good idea to sleep for 8 hours while my fever is still rising:  By the time my normal sleep is over, I may have too much fever to wake up.  So I’ll try to sleep in shorter durations, so I can cool myself off if I get too weak.

Of course, it is far from certain that the temperature will continue to rise. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Atheism as transitional phenomenon

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“The mind is the work of our brain” – this theory is currently accepted as truth by most Scandinavians. Viewed generously, this can be likened to saying that “Windows is the work of the computer”. Given the many great realms open to the human mind, however, it is more like saying that air is the work of the lungs or that dry land came into being because the fish evolved legs. But when you don’t have a realistic alternative…

This is not the first time in history that atheism is surging here in Scandinavia. Much the same happened a bit over 1000 years ago, as Christianity was replacing the old Norse religion. According to a saga writer who saw the tail end of that period, many of those who had been brought up in the old religion and saw it discredited, did not latch on to the new. Rather, they “believed only in their own strength”.

This is not hard to understand. If there are a lot of people who don’t believe in Odin and Thor, why should I? But if my ancestors lived for generations without even having heard of the White Christ, why should I bother with him?

It is the same today. For the first time in history, many different religions from various times and places all show up at the same time, and people reasonably think that they can’t all be right, so why should any one of them be right? It seems only logical.

But this logic can also be reduced to the absurd. For the same bringing together of the world has also shown us many languages: Some big, some small, some easy to learn and some quite obscure.  If most people in the world don’t speak my language, why should I?  And why should I adopt another language, if most people don’t even understand it, much less use it? Indeed, when humans can’t agree on a language, why should I speak at all?

Now arguably, you cannot survive without speaking (though some monks might disagree). You can survive without religion. But most people don’t speak merely for their survival, but because it is a genuine expression of human nature.

I have a theory – it is not a revelation, merely a speculation – as to why atheism has surged so much more in northern Europe than in the USA. I believe it comes, this time again, from the sudden transition.

If you remember the theory of Spiral Dynamics, you will know that different people have different levels of complex thinking. What we call higher levels are such that can handle a more complex worldview. This change started rather earlier in the USA and has continued at a gradual pace. The USA has, for instance, still a large “Blue” segment that believes in religious myth in a literal way, and values obedience to authorities with no need for understanding. This is generally considered shamefully primitive in the Nordic countries, where the norm now is to be Green (postmodern) in theory and Orange (capitalist) in practice.

Because the Nordic countries (and the Netherlands) have experienced such a rapid “lift” in complex worldview, it is natural that people find their childhood religion primitive and even caricature-like.  Furthermore, the Nordic countries had very little religious diversity to start with. Each had a national Lutheran church that counted some 95% of the population. In this comfortable near-monopoly, the churches may have seen little point in changing until it was too late, and then mainly by becoming generally permissive, rather than attempting to meet intellectual challenges.

People whose heads are now in the postmodern world have available a religion suitable for the 18th century, with God as an enlightened monarch at best. Not that there is anything wrong with that – for the people who have a worldview to fit.  Like water takes the form and size of the container, so also religion will take the form of the mind in which it is contained. But here the water of religion was frozen in a form badly suited to the postmodern mind. Naturally this led to a wholesale rejection of traditional religion.

Lately, New Age spirituality seems to be growing in this area, presumably as an attempt to fill the religious vacuum. But being vague and mixed with many kinds of superstition, it is unlikely to fill the role of religion. What will, I don’t know yet. But history suggests that humans will naturally return to a religion that fits their level of development.

Delta waves and dreams

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Things not to say in public if you are an exchange student living in the same house as a classmate of the opposite sex, part n of (n++): “All right! We’re going to do it tonight too!” -even if you are actually referring to playing computer games, which I can certainly understand.

I went to bed later than I had hoped for, and was wide awake, because of the New Year weekend. But luckily I have moved a used stereo into my bedroom. In it I have a CD with brainwave entrainment tracks (LifeFlow from Project Meditation). With my trusty remote control at hand, I set LifeFlow 2 to repeat and laid back on three pillows.

LifeFlow 2 is, as the name implies, 2 Hz. This is in the delta band, corresponding to the brainwaves of deep dreamless sleep. But inducing sleep is not necessary. Rather, by entraining the brain at this level, it will reap some of the benefits of deep sleep, even if you are awake. Obviously you need to not concentrate very hard on solving problems, and you must avoid the primal emotions such as fear, anger and lust which have the power to block the entrainment.  If you just stare at the ceiling, that is fine. It is originally meant to be used with meditation, but this time we want the option of going to sleep when that becomes convenient.

This also came to pass, after a while. I don’t know about you, but for me, knowing that I don’t NEED to sleep is likely to make me more sleepy!

I’ve done this stunt before a few times, and usually I wake up just a little after something like an hour, or perhaps an hour and a half, which is one full sleep cycle.  I just turn off the stereo and go back to sleep. This time, however, it must have been something like 3-4 hours. I assume the brain did not stay in delta all the time – there is a natural cycle to these things and it probably does its best to run its course – but it probably stayed down there longer than usual.

That would certainly explain the extremely vivid dreams I had for the rest of the morning. The most prosaic of these was eating chocolate for breakfast. Even in my dream I did limit myself and stop before I was full, but it was still more than I could safely have eaten in real life and not become sick.

The next dream, however, was extremely complex and more lifelike than life, in a manner of speaking. I guess my brain had to catch up on REM sleep, which is the opposite pole from deep dreamless delta-sleep.  In my dream I lived in a large apartment in a city house with my little daughter, Danielle, who was a bit crazy.  I had to hide the cheese when she was eating, because if she saw cheese she would freak out and get hysterical.

Despite being just an apartment, the place was big. It was spread on two floors, with the upper floor holding mostly storage rooms of various kinds but also a home office where my computer was connected to the Internet through the military’s intranet, which I had to log on every time I was to use it.  It was possible to get into my apartment through at least two different entrances, one on each floor.  This bothered me since we were in the middle of town, where burglars were sure to be doing their thing.

Well, other people’s imaginary homes are not very interesting. The interesting part is that when I woke up, I had to look around and convince myself that no, I did not live in that place, I lived in this place.  It had been that vivid. That is pretty exceptional for me, and of course I “blame” the brainwave entrainment.

And that was that, really. As usual, my friends can stream the tracks from my music collection when it is up, with reduced quality. To buy the real thing you should go to Project Meditation. (Warning: Background sound.)

Oh, and I woke before the clock, wide awake, and stayed that way through the workday.

Spiritual peeping tom

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“You’ll understand the dazzling world of grownups one day, too.” Let’s hope so.

In reading St Teresa’s  book The Interior Castle, I came to the chapter introducing the Fifth Mansions. After reading a bit of that, I decided to stop. This is beyond me. I feel like a peeping tom looking in at other people’s love life, in this case their love life with God. For now, I think it will do me little good, because I don’t have the experience to relate to it. This is the life of true saints, and I am not one of those.  I am more like a tourist, hoping to become an immigrant, into the spiritual realms. I am not worthy to look at such a thing as the soul’s union with God, much less write about it.

I am quite familiar with the phrase “pearls before swine”. It is a wonderful ‘get out of debate free’ card for us Christians, letting us get the last word and insult others in a most pious manner.  But now I have become the swine.  Or the dog, in the same verse by Jesus, the dog to which one should not give the holy. This is a level of holiness to which I am like a dog. So I slink away – at least for the time being.

Oh, and on my mobile phone Kindle, that’s two dots out of six. (Meaning I got through a third of the book.) That’s pretty humiliating. But probably also pretty accurate, or even generous.

I should stick to things that are relevant for where I am, I think.  Then perhaps later, if there is a later, I may begin to understand the dazzling world of true saints.

A visit of spring

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There used to be about a foot of snow on that table.

After some two months in the deep freezer, with only the occasional day of “normal” winter temperatures and only hours above the freezing point, the weather has changed. It is now the third day I enjoy temperatures of up to +5C for much of the day, and last night did not fall below freezing at all. This was not such a great convenience as you might think for those who were sending up fireworks (a common tradition here in Norway, even on farms). The wind was literally howling at times, so they were probably still chilled to the bone. But I was not, for I stayed indoors.

This morning I came down and it was still above +18C in my home office, even though the heat pump had been off for like 7 hours. Like spring and fall, the place heats with just the many computers that run here day and night. I’ve turned on the heat pump now though, and am now heating the living room with it as well. It will probably be only for one day, though: The temperature is now down to +3C outside.

Still, it was nice to be out of the freezer.  I did not actually believe the weather forecasts, mainly because they have been saying this a lot. Their models are probably based on normal weather, which used to hover around the freezing point from December to sometime in March. The deep freeze of last winter and this are abnormal on the south coast, though this kind of weather is common in the interior and eastern Scandinavia.

Since the forecasts usually fail (and even now it was more like a broken clock being right twice a day), there is no knowing how long it will last. I intend to enjoy it with a vengeance.  I have the doors between my study, the hall and the living room all open, for the first time this winter. ^_^