Monthly Archives: May 2011

I am not worthy

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These flowers are not only white as snow, they also smell wonderful: Sweet as honey but fresher, like a perfume best suited for an innocent young woman in the last spring of her virginity. Unfortunately, my words are not nearly as sweet as that!

If I skip updating a day or two or ten, it is not because I have nothing to write. I have more to write than I could write in a lifetime, is how I feel. In fact, I often write one or two entries on such a day, but I don’t publish them. That’s usually not because I write about some deep, dark secret. Rather these days I tend to write about high, bright secrets.

Regular readers will know that I have what I call a “Voice in my heart”. It is not even a literal voice, but more a guidance or inspiration. Exactly how concrete or voice-like it is varies, actually, but it does not go further than specific thoughts formed into words, and often not even that far.  Anyway! If it were up to that Presence, I could write about spiritual things every day for the rest of my natural life, and never run out of inspiration. Actually, I don’t think the Presence ever said that, but that is my impression. And that is how it works in other people who have acknowledged their Presence, by whatever name. If they stop writing, it is not because everything is said, but perhaps because not everything can be said.

So I could make this into a full-time spiritual blog, and have a pretty exciting time writing it too, since the Presence is really good at explaining things to me. But I am not worthy. That would give a completely wrong picture of me. I am not a spiritual person really. Yes, I have more interest in these things than the average person, and a more relaxed attitude to riches and status in this world. But that does not take much these days, I’m sorry to say. And I am no saint. I play computer games pretty much every day. I have never heard of saints playing City of Heroes or The Sims 2 ! There are various other things I do as well. It is not an extraordinary life. Unusual, for sure, but not impressive.

And that is only part of it. There is also the problem that I am not transparent enough to be absolutely sure I don’t distort the Truth. If I was more pure of heart, in the widest possible sense, I could still be sure that what I wrote would benefit others, even if it had not yet benefited myself. But I may still be mistaken in various things. I may be quietly substituting my own thoughts and not notice it. I cannot risk writing about everything I have not tried or at least seen, and perhaps mislead another soul. The danger is too great.

Finally, there is the risk of capsizing. When a ship has too much sails and not enough ballast, it may capsize, keel over.  This can also happens to humans who don’t have enough ballast.  To be safe, we should (as Ryuho Okawa says, but it is still true) be like an iceberg, with at least 80-90% under the surface. We should in other words only share a fraction of what we truly know, so that if need be, we could expose far more, and so that we can speak with a certainty that come from a wide and deep knowledge, far beyond the few words we share.  Needless to say, this is not always (or even usually) the case for me either.

Even this I have written several times before, in various forms, but I am not sure if I have uploaded it. Probably not for a while at least. But this time I will. So there you have it. The temptation of brightness.

Climate change of mind

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Now that I have your attention – it HAS got a little bit warmer, hasn’t it? Just not in the USA, according to a recent study.

Today I read an article in The Economist, about some scientists who had calculated that food prices were currently around 5% higher than they would have been without the global warming of the latest two decades.

This is a difficult thing to calculate, of course, and was probably wrong. There is a lot of marginal land that becomes worth farming if food prices stay high for a while, whereas if prices remain low, land may be laid fallow more easily. If prices should continue to rise, it may become economically viable to use new forms of agriculture, such as vertical farming. The world could easily feed 20 billion people if these were people who produced valuable goods and services, so that anyone would be bothered to grow the food to sell them. Facing a beggar bowl however does not motivate farmers to invest.

In fact, there is not a lack of food on Earth even today. There is a lack of money to buy food among some people, but less so than ten years ago, not to mention twenty or fifty. Today, obesity is a health risk to more humans than is starvation.

What we most need then, is not to reverse the physical climate change. I would not mind if we did something about that too, but it is not the most urgent. Rather, we should do something about the cultural climate. The climate of the mind, for each of us and for society as a whole.

For instance, we know that producing meat is in most cases far less efficient than growing plants. There are in fact some areas which are best used for pastures, but a large number of the meat animals in the world eat grain, soy and other food that is edible for humans.  While strict vegetarianism does pose some health challenges, most Americans and Europeans could halve their meat intake and halve it again without experiencing any discomfort. In fact, they would probably feel more energetic and enjoy better health and a longer life. And it would lower the food prices in the world, faster than reversing climate change would.

To permanently end starvation, however, there needs to be a culture change in the countries where starvation is widespread. There has to be an end to war and oppression in these places, so people again dare work without fear that their work will be stolen or destroyed by enemies. This is the fundamental requirement. There are various things that can be done after that, but this is what must be done first. You cannot grow food on a battlefield.

When I say that these countries need to change, you may hear it as “blame the victim”.  It is certainly true that the rich world could have dealt better with other parts in the past, and should do so in the future. But there will be no food to the starving by paying reparations to a dictator or by fanning the flames of war. There is only so much outsiders can do until the people themselves can agree on a philosophy of live and let live, at the very least. This is the task of religion, philosophy and art, to teach humans to live in this world without losing control of their own aggression. You cannot simply substitute money for any or all of these factors. There needs to be a widespread change of mind.

***

As you can see, I do not wish to teach something that is entirely remote and out of our hands. There are things that people in poor nations have to do for themselves, and there are things we can do as a society, but there are also things we can do as individuals, even at our dinner table. These things are not different and separate. Whether it is in Norway or the USA or Congo, we all have to cultivate a mind that accepts other people as real and precious.

I think I mentioned when it happened, a few years ago. As I prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and came to the point “give us today our daily bread”, the Lord reminded me that I was not praying “give ME today MY daily bread”. This is the kind of awareness we need to have at the dinner table. What we choose to eat or not eat has effects on us, our families, our society, and the entire world.

Likewise when we come home from work and decide whether to sit down in front of the flat-screen or do some exercise, these decisions made by each of us has a profound effect on the national health care expense.

And of course, our energy use and transportation has some effect on the atmosphere. (Although not necessarily the way you think! For instance, if you are a meat-eater, biking actually causes more greenhouse gas emission than driving a small car, because of the large amount of greenhouse gas that goes into your food. Or to take another example, transport by ship and rail gives off very little CO2 compared to the mass and distance of transportation, so that buying something from halfway around the globe could cause less emissions than something made locally, if it was made more efficiently in the other place.)

There are a lot of things to learn, and there will be disagreement about details. This cannot be avoided. But we need a climate change of the heart, with much more warmth than before. Then we will surely find a way forward for everyone, starting at home and spreading around the world.

Where peaceful waters flow

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It’s getting hard to find a place to go
Where peaceful waters flow…

Or so Chris de Burgh says, in his beautiful song. But for me, that place to go is right at hand, day after day.  And as is my custom on Saturdays (since I have not yet started keeping the Sabbath, despite reading some pretty convincing texts lately about its overflowing goodness), I took a walk to the shop and back, half an hour or so each way. The first part of the walk took me past sights like this, then green fields and pastures. I live in the countryside, even if it is less than ten minutes by car from the nearest town. In midsummer, the river sees a lot of small boats going up and down, but this early my companions are the occasional bird and, probably, fish.

I had my pulse watch on, and noticed that my pulse was quite slow in the beginning. This varies a bit from day to day, but if it is much higher than normal I will know that I harbor some infection that is likely to break out later. Today, however, it almost seemed like the opposite was true, that I was healthier than normal. Just walking fast, my heart rate stayed below the moderate exercise zone (117-133 BPM, as calculated by my pulse watch based on my age and weight).  I had to run a little now and then to stay in the zone. That is rare.  Well, there is no arguing with nature!

After around 25 minutes this way, the body changes gears. It always does at this point. The exact time may vary from person to person, but I am led to believe that it is rarely more than half an hour. At this point, what happens internally is that the body starts burning more fat rather than sugar.  We have only a limited storage of sugar (free-floating and in the form of glycogen in muscles and liver mostly), but fat is both more plentiful (even on me) and more concentrated energy. It is far more complicated to use, though.  As a result, the body needs more oxygen and produces more heat.  Breathing and heart rate both increase.  So after that, I could walk more normally without my watch beeping at me.

Naturally, in light of recent events, I thought a little about the pros and cons of having a body. I am quite impressed with this body and it should not surprise you that I hope to keep it for a long time yet. I am not a fan of spiritism, so I expect the blog to end at the very latest when my body does!  Hopefully that will still be a long time off.

I am however more at ease now than in the past with the fact that this body and this life are temporary. Death may be the end of a whole lot of things, but not all. And, I believe, not of the most important. My will to free your mind and bring you happiness will remain after me, spreading like rings in water. And where I will be, I may or may not watch it; it does not matter. I have to do what I can in this life to plant the seeds that will grow into trees and bear fruit for the future.

And if you don’t know by now, you never will:
Only love can find the door.
If you could see it now, it’s in your hand.
Only love can reach the shore, forever more…
Where peaceful waters flow.
-Chris de Burgh, Where Peaceful Waters Flow. (YouTube)

Personal health challenge

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I have got a doctor appointment for June 10. I expect this to be only the beginning.

Since January or early February my bladder has been shrinking. As late as last year, I could sleep as long as I wanted on weekends. Now, even though I go to the bathroom last thing before sleep, I can rarely sleep 7 hours before I have to get up and urinate again. Sometimes closer to 5 hours. This is not natural. It is like I have aged two decades in five months.

So yeah, I have to assume I have my first cancer. I suppose it could be some kind of hernia putting pressure on the bladder. One thing I am pretty sure it is not, diabetes. I don’t urinate significantly more, or I would have noticed it. Will still check blood sugar too, just to eliminate.
If it is prostate cancer, it should be fairly easy to diagnose and the prognosis is generally good. I don’t have typical prostate symptoms though. The pressure is less than in my youth, but it is far from stop & go. It really seems more like some outside pressure on the bladder itself.

Or I may just be more sensitive, possibly. I can’t say I have seen any general symptoms of cancer spreading, like unnatural weight loss or fatigue. So it seems too early to panic. I will make sure to inform you of any panic if it becomes relevant.

In any case, I should probably not enter into any new long term commitments, financial or otherwise, until this is checked out.

The moment of… truth?

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More than half of the people these days go to a place called “hell”. In order to put an end to this revolting development, Ryuho Okawa traveled all the way to Brazil, halfway around the world.

Screenshot from the movie The Laws of Eternity, which was actually mentioned in the book. To Master Okawa’s dismay, the Japanese generally did not understand it, but evidently it made some impression in Brazil, where people are curious about the spirit world.

The book in question is Ryuho Okawa’s The Moment of Truth, which I have already read through. As usual, the book is fairly short and an easy read. You don’t need to be an intellectual to understand most of his books (those not actually containing the word “challenge” in the title).

Well, actually you need to be Japanese to understand most of his books, since only a couple dozen of them are translated into English, and several of these are only sold at the temples. In Japan, however, there are now over 700 Okawa books. I assume there are actually people who have them all. I wish I could see their bookshelf.

And let me be honest: If Happy Science published a new book in the bookstores each week, as they did in Japan last year, I would probably buy a new book each week too. Certainly if they hold the quality of this one.

The book left me with a stronger want to become a better person: To do my job better, to appreciate other people more, to broaden my knowledge, to deepen my thinking, to increase the brightness of my soul.

I have very mixed emotions about this. As a Christian, I really don’t want to recommend a competing religion, and especially not one that promotes a misunderstanding of the most important concept in theist religions as a whole, namely God.

I don’t have any strong opinion on whether El Cantare actually exists as a 9-dimensional being, of which the Shakyamuni Buddha was an incarnation. That would be nice, I guess. But that is not who we Christians refer to when we talk about God. We specifically mean the Primordial God, the original Creator, the Uncreated and Eternal, who is beyond any human imagination. It may be that at some earlier time, the Hebrew tribes considered God to be humanoid, although modern Jews certainly seem to agree that phrases such as “God’s eyes” or “God’s outreached arm” are purely symbolic and offer no clue as to whether God has a body, does not have a body, both or neither of the above. God is beyond speculation.

So the whole subtle associating this El Cantare (and, by implication, his incarnation Ryuho Okawa) with God… this is quite vexing. It is out of line, it is unseemly in an otherwise inspiring spiritual book that contains heaps of essential Truth, presented in a clear and understandable manner. When speaking to Christians, as Okawa mostly does in this book, you have to understand the difference between God and a god. As Paul says, there are many so-called gods and lords. This is not controversial. But for us, there is only one God, the Father. Hermes Trismegistus may have been referred to as Father by his followers, but that hardly means that he is identical with the Heavenly Father whom we talk about.

If you can eat a delicious soup after having fished out a dead fly, you can probably also enjoy this book. I certainly did. It has a lot of good points.

In the end, I agree with Okawa that his movement should be measured by the yardstick that Jesus gave: Let either the tree be good and its fruits good, or the tree bad and its fruits bad. It shall be very interesting to see how this new religion plays out. But I may not be around long enough to see this for myself.

Feeling sadness

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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.

After “peak everything”

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There will probably be trains for a long, long time. And there will always be light from above, all the more beautiful through the clouds.

It could have been a coincidence that the next two entries after “Peak everything” were a collection of pretty (?) nature pictures and an entry about religious studies. But actually I wanted to come back to this topic again, and I want to point out how these two are continuations of what I ended that entry with: There are many sources of happiness that don’t depend on having lots of oil and copper.

Of course, most people today depend on such limited resources directly or indirectly to do their job, and earn money to pay their bills, buy food and have a place to live. So to varying degree, even the simple pleasures depend on a civilization that is based on excessive consumption. However, this lifestyle is not set in stone. We can adapt sooner and be seen as weirdos, or we can adapt later and with considerable pain.

If your job depends on driving a lot, you may be in trouble. No matter how intensely you wish for cheap gas, it won’t happen, or at least not without some global disaster that makes the recent debt crisis seem like a walk in the park. On the other hand, electric cars are already available, and hybrid cars, and even gas-powered cars that use much less fuel than average.  So it is not obvious that you will have to change your job. However, you will probably have less money left by payday no matter what. And if you plan to change your job or plan to move, travel cost should definitely be on your mind. There is no reason to react with stunned surprise when the gas price doubles again, which you will definitely experience unless you die an untimely death.

Again, it is not like you wake up one day to a post-apocalyptic dystopia from a horror movie. It is a gradual change, where you have to pinch more pennies than last month, where you have to consider things you did not consider before. At some point you may want to make drastic lifestyle changes. Or you may wait for the government to fix it all for you so everything goes back to “normal”, in which case I hope your sanity gets better soon. But by and large, the end of the golden age is like the end of a spring day here in Norway and the onset of night: So slow and gradual that you can never quite say when the day ends and the night begins, but it still comes eventually.

There are those who say you should grow your own food, and there is nothing wrong with that if it is feasible. It is probably good for you and the planet both. There are those who say you should look for a way to work from home, and that is certainly a good idea if your education and skills allow it. But that won’t be possible for all people, certainly not right away. It will gain wider acceptance over time, no doubt, but if you’re a nurse you can’t work over the Internet any time soon.

What is important at this time is to gain a broad insight in the nature and scale of the changes we face. To not blindly believe that the future will be like the past, only more so. That has never been the case, but it will be even less true now.

Barring some global disaster, electricity will still be widely available at an affordable price. Perhaps not as cheap as today, and perhaps the prices will fluctuate very rapidly, with the price twice as high at some times of the day, but overall it should be widely available. So there should be no reason to prepare for a life without electricity.  Silicon is also one of the most common elements on the planet, so it seems likely that computers and similar electronics will be widely available. They may get slightly less efficient as certain rare metals become scarce, but there may also be new inventions that offset this and then some.

Transportation by car and plane are among the things that are going to be worst hit, as peak oil is already a fact and will only get worse over time. Bulk transport by ship and train however are quite efficient in terms of energy use, so don’t expect China to stop shipping stuff across the Pacific. In fact, even if oil disappeared completely, it would still be good business to ship stuff by steamship or even sail rather than make everything locally. Railroads are also highly efficient, and largely use electricity already. Globalization is not going to fall victim to this scarcity, although I suppose it could fall victim to something else, like an actual war.

Electric cars may replace gas and diesel cars at an extra cost that most people can live with. But electric planes are highly unlikely. If you are young, I would not recommend choosing a career closely associated with flight.

By and large, however, what we can expect is a gradual decline in material wealth. Expenses will increase, income stagnate. All people who depend on sales, directly or indirectly, will be affected when people have less money to spend on what they want. Since resources are more expensive, factories and farms will also give less profit. So everywhere there will be stagnation and a gentle slide toward poverty. Unemployment is likely to remain high, and even increase for a while. New jobs will be different from the old and mostly pay less.

In this situation, it is good to keep in mind that we can live happily without being rich. It is a long way from today’s first world standards down to abject poverty, and there is no reason why we should ever hit the bottom if we as a society live with even a little wisdom. If I am alive ten years from now, it is not certain that I can afford to live alone in a house in the countryside anymore. But I can still find sources of happiness, Light willing. Whether it is potted plants, drawing with crayons or reading again books that deserve a second or twentieth reading, it does not require a lot of money to enjoy oneself. Think back to when you were a child, how little it took to bring you joy!  If anything, you should be better at it now, after decades of living and learning. Start thinking this way before need forces you. That way your happiness will be without interruption.

Torah studies then and now

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Actually, I had a good idea why the Jews call God “Lord”, and even “the Name”, but I did not even know that they called God “the Place”, much less why. Live and learn. Or in this case, read and learn.

I’ve invested in yet another e-book, The Torah for Dummies by Arthur Kurzweil. This may seem weird since I am already a ways into my second book by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who may well write a lively and stimulating prose but whose treatment of the Torah is certainly not for dummies.

Kurzweil’s book is for dummies who understands words like “emanate” and “primordial”. (OK, those are kind of rare, but they are in fact there, and early in the book at that.) Dummies like me, then. I may not generally view myself as a dummy, but when facing the Torah, it would take a lot to not be the dummy. Well, if you begin to understand anything about religion at all, I guess. As I found in my first job, it is easy to speak with confidence – even arrogance – about things I don’t know, as long as I still don’t know how much I don’t know.

In any case, I did some free association on Amazon.com after receiving one of their many letters of recommendation, as it were. This book was not one of those recommended, but was bought by people who bought one of the recommended books. As soon as I saw it I felt drawn to it, realizing that I had kind of put the cart before the horse by reading Kabbalist literature without knowing more deeply how the Jews regard the Torah. As a long-time Christian (of sorts, I guess some may say), I felt that I had a decent understanding of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses. But reading the sometimes strange interpretations by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz had made me realize that the Torah looks different to the Jews than it does to us. And so I returned a few days later and bought this book.

It is great for me that it exists in Kindle format. I realize that this transitional, fleeting form can be deemed less than dignified for a book dedicated to eternal truth; but on the other hand, I can now literally have it near my heart every day, in my mobile phone resting in my shirt pocket!

Arthur Kurzweil has a writing style that seems a bit similar to Steinsaltz, and this may not be a coincidence: It turns out that Steinsaltz is his teacher for many years, and has made a deep impact on his life and thinking. They have also collaborated on some writing. What great luck for me! In all fairness, my subconscious may have remembered their association from some casual mention in the forewords or on the Amazon.com web site. It need not be a miracle, or not more than the human mind is in the first place. I am not quite sure. I just enjoy it.

I was already becoming aware that the Torah is very special to observant Jews. We Christians respect the Bible for its content, but the Torah is to Jews more what Jesus is to Christians: The Word of God in physical form. The reverence with which they treat the Torah scrolls is perhaps only matched by the way Christian churches treat the Eucharist, and then especially Catholics and others who believe that the bread and wine literally turn into flesh and blood.

This is not to say that Jews only revere the form and not the content. On the contrary, they revere the content to the extreme. It is said that when God was to create the world, he looked to the Torah as his blueprint. In other words, the original Torah – the Word which was with God in the beginning – includes everything in the universe, even the upper worlds or heavens, if I understood correctly. Without the Word, nothing was created of all that which was created.

As I said, we Christians think of Jesus Christ in much the same way. In fact, Jesus reprimanded the scribes of his age because, as he said: “You examine the Scriptures carefully because you suppose that in them you have eternal life. It is these that testify about me, but you are not willing to come to me to have life.”

I could not help thinking about this when I read about how important, even essential, it is to the observant Jew to study the Torah. It is literally considered the way to learn to know God, to move closer to God, and a work that is certain to be rewarded by God as a generous employer rewards his workers, albeit in the next life mainly.

Seeing the sincerity with which they still keep up this work, I wondered if they are leading themselves astray with this intense dedication to every letter of a book. (Literally – it is said that every letter in the Torah is important and corresponds to a particular person’s life.)

Thinking back, I have seen Christians do seemingly the same thing that Jesus spoke about: Apply their intellect to the written word, but not applying the Word to their own soul, that they may be transformed. I am sure both of these ways of reading are still open to the observant Jew as well.

Jesus is no longer physically among us, and neither is Moses. Yet the words left behind are not simply books intended to impart a certain, specific, limited understanding. Rather, they are LIFE. When read in the right way, they become a wellspring that never stops, expanding into something far more than what meets the eye. There is in fact no limit to what can be drawn from Scripture. Let me entertain you with a passage I found on Wikipedia:

At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was very thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it.

A pretty straightforward description of the Big Bang with the following period of cosmic inflation and the transition to the atomic phase. Written by the Jewish sage known as the Ramban some time before his death in the year 1270. How in God’s Name did he glean that from the Torah??

The world is full of strange and wonderful things. Scripture is evidently one of them. But, being the dummy that I am, I have a hundred other things that I would also like to do.

Pictures of a spring day

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These trees are kind of ordinary around here, but I like them anyway, especially with this sky as backdrop. It was a good sky for photography today.

By the way, larger versions of all pictures except the second are available on request, until either I or my hard disk cease to function. Just in case you want to use them for workspace background (“wallpaper”) on your computer or something. I know I do that sometimes with my pictures.

These flowers grow by the shed. The old couple who lived here before must have planted them, I guess, unless they are even older. They are still hanging on, even though the people who once loved them are gone.

This picture is actually of the hedge, such as it is, that separates this property from one of the neighbors. The flowers there however are basically local wildflowers; perhaps they were planted there or perhaps they just spread there on their own.

This tree is actually on the neighbor’s property, but by the old road along the river. This road is not being maintained anymore, but still exists out of habit. This was supposedly the main road to the house until sometime in the late 1960es. When I was a child, people were still using this road every day, I guess. I wonder if they stopped to look at the trees?

The white “stars” on the ground are wildflowers again. The yellowish green color of the tree comes from the new leaves, which are still folding out, like a butterfly’s wings that have not yet got their final color.

After the sun had set but before the daylight faded, an uncommon calm fell on the river, transforming it into a mirror. Or so I thought, when I took these two pictures. Only after I opened them, did I notice:  The reflection in the water is subtly different. Not distorted or fuzzy, but… different.  As if taken at a slightly different time.

Can you see it here? The trees seem darker, and the cloud formations are different, as if the river showed another time or a parallel world rather than a simple mirror image.

There is a saying that “you can not go into the same river twice”, and this refers subtly to the river of time. Even if you come to the same place and the river looks the same, it is not the same water. And so it is with us all. Form and content do not quite change at the same pace as time passes over us.

I hope you enjoyed the ordinary beauty of this place.  To some of you, this may be as exotic as a desert or jungle is to me. If so, feel free to grab the pictures as long as you don’t sell them.