Feeling sadness

Something strange happened yesterday. I woke up half past five in the morning from the buzzing of a bee in the window near me. These critters have some modest amount of poison and it sounded pretty desperate, so I found it prudent to get away. I got up and went down in the living room, where I put on my headphones and played LifeFlow 1 for 40 minutes.

LifeFlow is a series of brainwave entrainment tracks, and the names of the main tracks are their frequency in Hertz. The 1 Hz track is the deepest in the series, corresponding to deep dreamless sleep. What I usually use is the 2 Hz track, which has a much less disturbing soundscape, vaguely water-themed, whereas number 1 has the sound of whales and possibly some other marine mammals and a few other underwater sounds. It sounds spooky, to put it bluntly, and several people have complained about this on the Project Meditation forums. I however see the point in making this track more disturbing: It is quite hard to stay awake when your brain starts to synchronize at a frequency usually used in deep, dreamless sleep.

Be that as it may, I am not built to get up at this time. While I at least mostly stayed awake through the 40 minutes, I watched random hallucinations behind my closed eyes much of the time, shapes that arose and stayed for a while before disappearing again. This may be normal for humans for all I know, but it is very rare for me. Especially these days, and especially when the images are just meaningless shapes and not women. But actually very rare anyway. So seeing this long parade of random images was weird enough in itself. It was only the beginning though.

When the track ended and I opened my eyes again, I felt a profound feeling of sadness. It was not associated with any person or event or memory. It was just a pure feeling of sadness or perhaps regret or loss.

I suppose the ghost whale sound could have some part in it, but probably not. For one thing, the unpleasant sound these creatures add to the otherwise decent soundscape can actually be said to have lessened my regret over having eaten whale beef in my late teens. The whales are considered more or less saints and sages by the New Age community, but I dare say that their utterances on this recording make them sound edible indeed and not particularly worthy of preservation either. Your ears may vary.

Another clue is that I still feel some degree of that sadness two days and one night later. It is not as strong as it was when it started, but it keeps running in the background much of the time, so that I can be aware of it when I so decide. This fits better with the theory I immediately thought of when I noticed it.

You see, I have written repeatedly in these pages about my immunity to sadness. That I can feel joy, and sometimes fear, but rarely ever sadness. That is not something one would normally miss and want back (I did have it earlier in my adult life), but it is kind of weird for it to be so completely absent. What I think is that perhaps the new connections created in my brain during the entrainment may have unlocked the feeling that was somehow locked away at an earlier point in my life.

It could be a coincidence, of course. Or some spiritual attack, or help, depending on the outcome. If someone keeps going on and on about their happiness, especially someone who has several friends who experience deep sadness, it is only natural if they occasionally quietly wish for me to feel it too. And it is not like I have been praying to God to never experience sadness or anything. It is just something I have noticed, not something I have desired strongly or – I think – taken pride in. Though I suppose it could seem that way, that I have preened exceedingly about it.

Be that as it may, it is not of an intensity that makes me weep or anything. In a sense I actually find it fascinating, even enriching in the short term. If it lasts for the duration of my life I may change my opinion, I suppose. But in any case it is not like I am unable to feel joy.

I certainly felt like whining with joy for a little while this afternoon when I realized that Amazon.com had taken in a new Okawa book: The Moment of Truth, a brand new book from only weeks ago, based on his lectures in Brazil recently. I should not be so excited about books by a man who thinks he is God from Venus, but the thing is that he writes like a god. More exactly like Hermes, the god of speed, given that Master Okawa has published some 700 books by now (!), about one per week last year alone, earning him a place in Guinness Book of Records. And what is more disturbing is that they are generally quite well written. I would not lie if I said, if I could write even one book in my lifetime and it was half as good as the average Okawa book, I would be able to die with a smile, knowing that I had made a significant contribution to the world. But I haven’t, so I can’t. At least not yet.

Of course, some suspicion is in order when someone claims to be God from Venus. Even if he can go entire books without bringing it up. But that does not change that he writes an awesome prose that I hope to get closer to. He practices what he preaches, that you have not truly understood something until you can explain it in common words that even a child can understand. I have a long way to go in the childish writing department, as I am sure you have noticed!

So I pray that what I read may not harm me but rather help me. That is pretty much what I pray about food too. And I habitually add a prayer that I may also be of help and not harm to others. After all, that is what matters. What we feel does not matter so much as what we do. But of course what we feel tends to influence what we do. I certainly expect that for myself. I am still that much human, and I know it. Hopefully with my newfound ability to feel sadness, I will now be able to understand others a little more than I did before.

***

Oh, and happy birthday if you happen to read this. I wish you could be as happy as I have been, since you deserve it so much more. It is strange how fate has sent us down so different paths, from where we once started together.

12 thoughts on “Feeling sadness

  1. “Master Okawa has published some 700 books by now (!)”

    How long does it take to publish a book?

    • Probably not long when you own the publishing company. His Brazil tour was around November 10th and the book is already translated to English and available at Amazon. It was probably out in Japan long ago. What I meant to say was that he has WRITTEN AND published that number of books. That usually takes quite some time, but he has developed a technique that lets him do it much faster than people before him. Basically he uses the text of his own lectures, edited slightly for the book medium. Even so, it is probably a world record.

  2. Gods from Venus should be able to make books appear out of thin air.

    I’m not surprised that he owns his own publishing company.

    Otherwise the publishers would step in and say “Woah man. This is way too freaky. Tone it down or no one will buy it.”

    • Actually some of his books are entirely mainstream self-help books or religious books. Some contain a few references to the 9th dimension and aliens. Only a couple of them look distinctly weird, and probably not to Japanese. Okawa is a hugely popular author, and his movies are box office hits in Japan. This contrasts sharply with his reception in the Christian world, not surprisingly.

    • I am sure he believes it, or he would not be working harder and harder at a time when he could live in luxury for the rest of his life and be worshipped by masses of cute Japanese girls if he so desired. There is nothing more for him to attain except to change the flow of history itself. This has turned out to be a challenge worthy of a god, indeed.

  3. I think the ability to feel sadness is a gift. I believe we actually began speaking (more than just what the hell is an X-Man when Jared was little and wanting them) by you asking what Heather and I thought was wisdom. Ironically, it now seems.

    I do still think that your ability for joy is in inverse proportion to your ability to feel sadness, especially sadness for suffering other than your own.

    Your wisdom/sadness/whatever may vary.

  4. Not inverse proportion! Duh. Direct proportion. My bad brain days are turning into bad brain MONTHS!

    Speaking of brain badness, I had (really pretty cool) migraine aura off and on all day today. Lost almost all vision in my left eye plus part of my right eye at the height of the aura experience. Then smelled roast beef VERY strongly almost all morning. Maybe someone was cooking a roast at school this morning, but somehow I doubt it.

  5. Migraine auras can be pretty cool, if not for the headache and nausea that follow them. It was long assumed that migraine came from contraction and then expansion of the blood vessels in the brain, but lately it has been shown that they are patterns of activity suppression in the actual brain tissue, and the change in the blood vessels (which probably still causes the pain, since brain tissue does not have pain sensors) is a side effect. That means migraine should in theory be treatable with brainwave entrainment if one starts early enough. I tried it last time I had migraine (last year I think?) and it certainly was less painful than usual, although I was still achy and queasy for hours. Further research is needed! But I don’t volunteer to contract migraine for the good cause.

  6. I got a measly little headache, nothing major. Little bit of queasiness, but there is also a stomach bug going around, so I don’t attribute it to anything in particular. It was uncomfortable because of some of the “white noise”, for lack of a better term, that seemed to accompany the worst parts of the visual weirdness, and it is not something that is very good to have in the presence of sixth graders who are, if not necessarily always looking for a chink in your armor, at least not averse to being opportunistic in that direction! If I must have these things, I at least hope to continue with the painless kind! I am very fortunate, indeed!

    • If you can work during a migraine without the risk of killing yourself and others, I’d say most migraine patients will consider you fortunate. Even I find it hard to concentrate during a migraine attack, and mine are pretty mild. I understand most people have to lie down in a dark and quiet room.

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