Monthly Archives: May 2013

THIS is a summary??

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Screenshot anime Date A Live

You probably have many questions, but I am terrible at explanations. And here I prove it once again.

I will try to summarize the thing I have been babbling about most of the month: The Human Operating System version 3.

The operating system on a computer decides what kind of programs it can run, and some are better than others in certain situations. In the same way, humans have a set of basic abilities that are necessary for us to use our brain in the normal way. This “operating system” is not something we are born with, but we acquire it very early in life. The most obvious part of it is language.

Humans like us existed for a long time – a hundred thousand years, perhaps much longer – using an earlier operating system, basically the same as the Neanderthals used. Their culture was focuses squarely on survival, and the tools were fire and the hand axe, which they made exactly the same way for tens of thousands of years. Invention was practically unknown. Any form of art or decoration was absent. And we believe language as we know it was not part of their abilities, although they had the physical ability to make any sounds we can make.

I call the stone axe survival culture “Human Operating System version 1”. It worked: These humans slowly spread all over Africa, and races with the same mindset (Neanderthals and Denisovans) roamed Eurasia in the depths of the last Ice Age.

As you may have noticed, humans are different now. This is because we have a new operating system, which we download when we are infants. We are able to talk, we are creative and imaginative, we cooperate on a larger scale and usually without the use of hand axes.

Outbreaks of the current mindset (Human Operating System version 2) appeared in the most densely populated areas of Africa, first briefly showing some limited aspect of culture, and finally with a broad range of features that seems to have spread like wildfire to all human populations.Those that did not change, went extinct quickly. While we have improved on this steadily, the basic abilities today are still the same.

***

I believe that a great transition is going to happen again, and humanity will once again get a new operating system that is suited to the large number and the power we now wield on Earth. The new operating system will allow us to cooperate much more seamlessly, to use our resources much more efficiently, and to understand our world much more deeply.

And like there were outbreaks of version 2 before it spread everywhere, so I also believe there have been “beta tests” or early deployments of version 3. I believe ancient legends, and the world’s great religions and philosophies, are the memories of individuals and small groups who had this new operating system, this new way of thinking and feeling and relating to everything.

We need to bear in mind that in the form we know these legends, they have been transmitted to us by people like us, who have the version 2 mindset. As such, we tend to “translate” the thoughts of the higher minds into the familiar patterns of our own mind. This is similar to how you translate a globe into a map, and when the globe is lost, you think the map is the real thing, and that the world has four corners and edges from which you will fall off. But when you start to explore the world, you will realize that the map was a projection of a globe all along.

I believe that those with the Human Operating System version 3 also had access to one more dimension of the mind, the fifth dimension. We humans cannot directly sense time: We can only experience moment by moment with our senses. But in our minds, we reconstruct the dimension of time. We are not born like that, it is an ability that gradually becomes solid during our early childhood, and is improved on for a long time. In a similar way, the New Mind has the ability to mentally intuit the fifth dimension, a second time dimension at right angles to the first.

Just as the current Human Operating System version 2 brought amazing, almost miraculous abilities that were not present in version 1, so also version 3. This does not necessarily mean that every miracle reported in every religious tradition of the world is literally true, of course. But something about these people made it perfectly natural for others to expect them to be able to do pretty much anything. So it seems likely that they did show abilities not known before. It may even be that some of our modern technologies are inspired by those stores, and are in effect a kind of “copy”, similar to how the Neanderthals made imperfect but still usable copies of some Cro-Magnon tools just before they died out.

***

I believe the most important trait of the Human Operating System version 3 is openness, or unity as it is more commonly called. Under version 2 we have a lot of walls inside, that divide us into rooms, where different aspects of ourselves hide out and work each toward different goals, sometimes sabotaging each other outright. This can seem useful in the short run, as we can get material benefits by being different people in different situations. In particular, it helps boost reproductive success, especially in men, so it is natural that this trait has persisted so long. But getting rid of those walls frees up a lot of energy, and ending the internal squabbling gives a great strength to accomplish what a divided self could not.

Next is overcoming the walls between ourselves and others. This is rather hard to achieve when we have walls internally in ourselves, and this is why this should be a priority: Before all else, to avoid self-deception.

From time to time there are people who – randomly or after seeking it for years – experience a wordless unity with everyone and everything. They perceive the whole world, the known cosmos and beyond, as a single connected unity of which they are a small part. This changes everything… or so they think. But despite their experience of no-self, or no-distinction, after a passing of time the outside observer will notice that they again manifest egoic traits. The New Mind is not “fire and forget” – it is something that must be worked on, expanded, lived and cultivated. You may think you now have a Buddha mind, but you don’t really have any Buddha accomplishments. People don’t feel a Buddha compassion radiating from you, or sense a Buddha purity of mind. The experience of Enlightenment or Liberation is actually just a break-through into a new and larger open field, into which you will grow for the duration of your lifetime at the very least.

***

I have rambled about this for weeks, and it could be that some of it is just science fiction. The part about the fifth dimension will certainly seem like that. Science cannot even say for sure whether the fourth dimension, time, exists objectively or only in our minds. But the concept is certainly useful. For instance, when I bake a cake, the logical observer will be right to point out that the cake only exists in my head. I imagine a future in which there will be cake, somewhere ahead of me in the mental dimension of time. But the cake does not exist, so the skeptic is right. And imagining it will not make it magically appear. But this imagination allows me to work toward the goal of bringing a cake from the unseen and private “future” of the fourth dimension, into the 3-dimensional now where the cake is edible and delicious.

If you talk to a toddler, skepticism toward the fourth dimension is rampant: “Chocolate later” is almost indistinguishable from “chocolate never”. This is strikingly similar to how adults perceive eternity. “In eternity” means “pie in the sky when you die”, to them. They are not yet aware of eternity as a dimension that exists here and now, a dimension they will be able to intuit as clearly as if they actually perceived it, just like they have come to do with time.

The benefit of having more dimensions in your mind is that your model of the world becomes more realistic. To the toddler, the cake appears in mysterious ways. There was no cake, there may have been mention of cake, the Parent does something and cake appears! And it was good. The toddler may then implore the Parent for more cake, over and over and over again, and eventually more cake appears, so it seems that words do have power to cause cake, when directed at the proper target, often enough and with enough emotional intensity. But sometimes the cake does not appear as expected. Life is full of disappointments! But during this process, the child gradually begins to get an idea of TIME and how it works, and eventually the mental model snaps into place. The child has become One Of Us.

***

Since the wisdom of the current age is to show “newest first”, I shall finally post links to each entry in turn, so as to make it easier to read the ramblings in the almost random order in which they were rambled. Just press Back in your browser to get back here if you actually read any of them.

Human Operating System 3.0

The end of this world

Beta-testing eternity

Caution: Religion!

Surpassing fate while alive

Downloading eternity

Ascesis

The Harbingers

The Open Field

Here to help you – sort of

That said, I still suspect I said it better the first time, during the week-long series starting June 18, 2005:

The Next Big Thing

Here to help you – sort of

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Screenshot anime Oregairu (Yahari Ore no Seishun...)

Why do I have to help you grow as a person? Well, first of all because there is no greater joy than to see you walk on the Way. The faster and the further, the better. We do not compete.

In my previous post, I claimed that people who have expanded far into the Open Field, are able to maintain a presence in the mind of people who resonate with them. This is presumably the reason behind the practice of venerating saints (in Christianity), bodhisattvas and tathagatas (in Buddhism) and “immortals” (in Daoism), as well as similar practices in Hinduism and Shinto. It may even be behind the Chinese practice of ancestor worship, although it hopefully goes without saying that the vast majority of ancestors never expanded into the Open Field in the sense we are using it here.

The way I have understood it, there is actually a sliding scale of this expansion, so there are some whose presence will only extend to a few and perhaps for a limited historical time, while others may extend to a great number of people over the course of thousands of years. Some of the greatest of them may have been worshiped as gods in the past, but today we are kind of wary of assigning that label to anyone other than the Primordial Source of Creation. The Shakyamuni Buddha, for instance, seems to never have considered himself anyone’s god, but a great number of people in the Orient worship him in a way that is not very different from the western worship of God. The Hindu avatar Krishna is worshiped in a way eerily similar to the Christan worship of Jesus Christ. But let us not here go into a debate of which God or Savior is the real one, if any.

What I want to make clear is that non-local operators are always waiting for your call. But if they originate within the paradigm that I have described – if they are have the Human Operating System version 3 – there are certain things they do not do. Most notably, they do not rape your mind. Even though their presence in your mindspace may be stronger than your own in some ways or even in general, they will not force you. They do not try to take over your mind or your body. They also never threaten you in an accusing manner. They may reveal to you consequences of your thoughts and actions, and this can be scary, but only because it is true. They do not try to demean you or belittle you (although you may notice in their presence that you are, in fact, rather small). They seek to help you, and they seek to help others. They will not assist you in causing suffering to yourself or others.

The resonance with the Harbingers is certainly not the only processing that takes place in your brain apart from your own ego. Each of us generates naturally a number of shadow personalities with their own agendas, so it is not like every stray thought that sounds “not like me” is from the fifth dimension or above. That is why I try to make it clear that the agenda of the Harbingers, the Immortals, the Teachers, is to help you and others. Don’t respect every stray thought. If you also have the life aspiration of helping others, every time you center yourself in that aspiration, there is a great chance of resonance with a Helper. If you only want to take and get and receive, the resonance fades.

You may then reasonably ask: “Why would I want helpers who only want me to help others? What’s in it for me?” Well, it helps you flatten those walls that keep you trapped in the current system of thought. A system of thought that is nearing its expiration date. As our power and our numbers increase, the possible outcomes no longer include “business as usual”. Either we transition to a higher level of consciousness, or we die out, or we somehow survive losing our power and our numbers, for instance through a nuclear war or some other massive catastrophe that sets us back hundreds or thousands of years.

It is imperative for the whole world that we prepare for the transition, regardless of whether we come to personally take part in it. But it is also important for ourselves to break down as many of the walls as possible, because it is a happier, light-filled life.

It may hurt for a while, and perhaps in the end we won’t be able to change. There are many who have become enthusiastic, but once there was a challenge, they did not have the strength to continue. There are many who had the best intentions, but the attachments of the current lifestyle gained the upper hand and the upgrade to Version 3 slowly faded to a standstill or less.

This is why it is necessary to remind ourselves that non-local operators are waiting for our call. In so far as history has preserved some of their words and deeds, this can serve as a seed to get our resonance started. And if there is a community of like-minded people (who have not been hijacked by personal ambition, as usually happens after a  while) these local operators are a great help. But be warned that if you aim for transformation, you won’t have a lot of companions locally in time and space. Not yet.

But for each of us who gets a tiny little hole in the cosmic egg, the brightness inside our shared world will increase a little, and it becomes easier for the rest. And the only place to make that little crack in the walls of our mind is in the Now.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the Light gets in.

-Leonard Cohen, Anthem

The Open Field

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke Tadaima

Hopefully your children will live in a future with even more freedom – a freedom that begins within each of us.

If I were to describe the most striking feature of the New Mind, it would be openness. Some call it unity. I would say it is the same thing, a lack of walls that usually divide us both from others and internally in our own mind.

The current mindset, which has dominated since the depth of the last Ice Age, is based on the “technology” of language. We believe this did not exist in its current form during the previous version of the human mind, back when all problems could be solved with a hand axe. Language is an amazing tool, but it also subtly encourages a particular way of thinking, which we may call analysis. It divides the world into things, and each thing has its name. We act and think as if this division is real, whereas it is only a tool for the mind. The head cannot live without the body, even though it has a word that describes it. Likewise a human cannot prevail in the long run without others, and without the entire ecosystem that supports us. But this is easily forgotten when we live in a mental world defined by analytical thinking, a world where each thing has its name and its labels.

In contrast to being locked up in one’s own name, the New Mind sets you free in an open field. At first it is just a crack in the egg where you are the chicken. You begin to realize that other people may be as real as you are. But this does not usually last. They do something stupid and you slam the door shut to protect yourself. This makes perfect sense. But the truth is that they really are real too. The world extends beyond us. I think most of us have had moments where we glimpse that.

There is so much more. Time and eternity. But first things first. Inside ourselves, we also set up barriers and walls. We divide life into different rooms, and may even act and feel and think differently depending on which “room” we are in. We can be a completely different person at work, in church, at home, even in the living room and the bedroom.

It seems reasonable, if we want to become one with the universe and beyond, that we first become one as a person. This does not necessarily mean that we should act the same in all situations. It is possible to do this on a primitive level, like when people plead with their boss like they would with a parent, or with a public servant. This just causes pain for all involved. Likewise when a customer of the opposite sex (or worse) tries to flirt with an employee. These kinds of “unity of self” are not what I talk about, for they come simply from lack of self-awareness.

We must go in the opposite direction, observing the mind relentlessly and objectively until we see the many different parts or aspects for what they are. There is a lot to say about that, but “what I say to you, I say to all: Watch!” Constant awareness of the mind and of the Watcher that watches the mind will definitely begin to pull things together, if we can endure. That’s a big if, admittedly. There are so many times we want to shout: “That’s not me! I am not like that!” Which is true, in a sense, because there is a part of us that is pure and innocent of these things that go through our brain and sometimes our body as well. But we have to take responsibility or we will remain hopelessly fragmented till the end.

If we fail to learn from our mistakes, there will over and over be new opportunities to repeat the same lessons. Until in the end we whisper: “It was me all along. I really am like that.” And the truth will set us free, given half a chance.

The walls within us, then, are usually meant to be the first to fall. But it does not end there. The walls between us and others also begin to break down. You know the saying about loving your neighbor as yourself? That’s because your neighbor is yourself.

Even in the current version of the Human Operating System, no man is an island. We are distributed, parts of us being stored in the brains of other bodies with other names: Parents, siblings, friends, lovers, spouses, children, grandchildren. As we pass through this life, larger and smaller fragments of us reside in the minds of others. The representation of us that resides in any one other individual is usually not balanced. The other person may see only a few of our sides, and these may even include some that we don’t see. (And some that don’t really exist, although this is probably less common than we think.) Taken together, there is quite a bit of processing taking place in other brains on our behalf, and in our brain there is a lot of processing taking place on behalf of others.

In the current Human Operating System, this distributed processing is haphazard. That is not so in the next version, which comes network-ready with a rich range of features. It is a common feature of the Great Teachers that they know what others are thinking, when this is needed. It is not like they go around peeping at people’s thoughts at will, but when the need arises, they are able to glean the content of other people’s minds far more easily than others. Often they show more insight into your mind than you have yourself.

Conversely, the “image” in your psyche of a Great Teacher may be conscious to some degree even in the absence of the physical person, and may even be more conscious than you are. You may find yourself sharing your mental space with a being that physically is no longer in the world (or, at least possibly, one that is not yet in the world) but is still more real to you than people you walk among day by day. This also is an example of the phrase: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” The teacher will appear “in your head”, first perhaps as a mere resonance, but as you download more of him, your invisible friend will be able to help you out in countless ways.

When a person has upgraded to Human Operating System version 3, the attachment to a particular body becomes rather weak. Sure, you are still responsible for that particular body, but you also have many other responsibilities, which may be spread across thousands of bodies and across thousands of years. With the appearance of Version 2, man became a soul or psyche. With the appearance of Version 3, the new man becomes something more, able to give mental abundance to many, outside of his “own” body and his “own” time.

Or that’s what the voices in my head tell me. Do I look like that kind of super-person to you?

The Harbingers

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Screenshot anime Narue no Sekai

Luminous beings of healing, compassion and wisdom will herald the end of the human era as we know it. And they may be your children.

I would assume that there are few enough people who would be interested in reading this strange tale about a new Human Operating System. But you may be passingly familiar with a strand of modern entertainment that is called “superheroes”. Most people in the English-speaking world knows of at least some of these, such as Superman. But why are there more and more of them?

In the early days of superhero comics, the superheroes were few and far between. Superman was the only superpowered being in his world for a while, and rather more realistic than in the later comics. No flying to the stars, just jumping over tall buildings. But anyway, gradually there popped up more of them, and they began to interact. This is mildly interesting, but could be explained from outside sources: Where there is a demand, after all, there will be a supply. People liked to read about superheroes (and now watch them in movies), so the industry supplies more of them. Still, there is more to it than that, and this is relevant to our bizarre little series.

For when the writers of the various comic book universes turn to the future, that future is full of superpowered creatures. They envision a world in which a new breed of man is either taking over the world or coexisting uneasily with the ordinary Homo Sapiens. In the Marvel Universe they are called mutants (though some call themselves Homo Superior); in the DC universe, metahumans, in the Wildstorm universe, gen-actives. But perhaps the most revealing name is that given by Valiant Comics: Here, the new people with miraculous powers are called Harbingers, from the belief that they herald a new step in human evolution.

Western comics (and later movies) have not been alone in envisioning such a future. Japanese manga and anime, while different in many aspects, also often portray a future (or parallel present) in which the number of people with “abilities” or “aura powers” is rising rapidly, as more and more children are born with abilities their parents did not have.

This is perhaps not so surprising, for in real life we have had the Flynn Effect since at least 1914, when the first systematic, large-scale IQ tests were deployed. The Flynn Effect is a steadily rising intelligence in new generations, much faster than biological evolution can provide. The growth has been about 10 points per generation, or 3 points per decade. This means that if your grandparents had an IQ of 100, which is the average, then your parents probably had an IQ of 110, and you one of 120. However, because the average IQ must remain close to 100, new IQ tests are devised and the scale is reset. So chances are that you kids are just 110, your parents 100, and grandparents 90. (On average – this obviously varies from person to person.)

The multitude of low-IQ elders was so common that for a while it was assumed that human intelligence naturally decayed with age. And eventually it does, but as Flynn discovered, the more common problem was that today’s elders have been stupid all their life. There was just not much talk about it because their level of stupid was the normal back then. It is only now that they are being revealed as stupid, because smarter generations have arrived.

So far, the mysterious powers of the gifted children seems to be mostly things like using electronic devices without reading the instruction booklet, not flying and controlling the weather with their mind. Good thing too! But if my theory is right, and humanity is gearing up for the next phase change, the actual “superheroes” of the future will be humans physically like us, but with a new and vastly improved Human Operating System, namely Version 3. And they will quite possibly be as far ahead of us as modern man was ahead of the Neanderthals and his own ancestors who solved all problems with the same hand axe.

I have mentioned that the invention of speech as we know it must have been miraculous by the standards of its time. The new type of human was able to communicate extremely detailed information and make elaborate plans, and they could do so even in darkness or through walls! They were also able to invent new tools and weapons that had never been seen before, and they enjoyed activities that seemed meaningless to their ancestors, like painting images or making instruments sing.

Just like the Version 1 human with his hand axe could not have predicted what his children would be like, so we are also unable to say for sure what will happen after the Singularity, the Armageddon, Ragnarok or whatever we call the birthquake of the new era. We suspect that there will be war and rumors of war, and upheavals in nature that exceed what we have seen before. But we do not know quite what the new world will be like, if it even succeeds in establishing itself.

Still, we have some idea. Because there have been Harbingers already. Few and far between, misunderstood even at their own time, made into legend and then myth with the passing of time. But we know a few things about them, and it seems reasonable to think that the same traits will be found in the future.

They will understand those with the old mindset, but will not be understood by them. Their understanding will be deeper even than our own, not just deeper than our understanding of each other but of ourselves. They will know us better than we know ourselves. This will apply at least to the first generation, those who grew up like us, but it may well last as long as our current mindset still exists on Earth.

They will cooperate far better, almost as if they shared a common mind or at least a telepathic connection. They will seem in some ways like individual limbs on a greater organism, even though they each have their own personality.

They will not be slaves to physical desires or the hunger for status, acceptance or recognition. This is not asceticism like those still aspiring to the New Mind. It is a full clarity of their role as beings of information, centered on a specific body but using it rather than being used by it, and extending far into a virtual space beyond the particular body. Perpetuating their bodily life or their genes will be undertaken in so far as it serves the greater purpose in which they cooperate, not at the cost of it.

They will have a different relationship to time. And more specifically to eternity. Their thoughts will stretch far into the past and the future, but even the current time will flow differently for them. They will seem to know things they could not possibly know.

They will have Abilities that seem supernatural but are not, and these will not be technological in origin (although the future superhumans will almost certainly have technology beyond our imagination). They will specifically be able to influence the bodies and minds of normals, primarily to heal and sometimes to teach, but not to enslave. Still, the normals will fear them until they know them, and some even then.

They will appear to shine at times. It seems likely that this is a perception only and that they are not literally emitting photons, but I don’t know this for sure. I know that radiance is firmly associated with past Harbingers from different continents, cultures and eras.

Luminous beings of knowledge and compassion, the Harbingers will gently herald the end of the world as we know it, the end of Humanity version 2. The gold and the silver, the bronze and the iron and the clay: Everything we knew will become like dust on the wind, and the book of history will be closed.

Ascesis

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Screenshot anime Sakurasou

“I have no interest in most things in this world.” There is a particular detachment that is necessary to install a new operating system to the brain.

Wikipedia is helpful again. Here’s some words from its article on Asceticism: “The founders and earliest practitioners of these religions lived extremely austere lifestyles, refraining from sensual pleasures and the accumulation of material wealth. They practiced asceticism not as a rejection of the enjoyment of life, or because the practices themselves are virtuous, but as an aid in the pursuit of physical and metaphysical health.”

Mostly metaphysical, I think. Let us go back to the metaphor of downloading a new operating system for our computer. We are talking about something really massive here, and there is a limited bandwidth. Now while you are downloading this, you also want to stream a movie, then play an online game, then download a folder full of music. All on the same trickle of a bandwidth that you use for downloading the new operating system. It’s going to take its sweet time, isn’t it? And unless you constantly set that big download on pause or at least low priority, it is going to make a hassle of the other things you want to do, so you don’t get the satisfaction you expected from them either.

It is like this with the new Human Operating System. Life is disturbingly short (despite what you may have thought as a teenager) and our capacity is limited. To first download and then implement the New Mind, replacing part by part of the Old Mind, we always have two alternatives from which to choose: Prioritize the Old, or prioritize the New.

There are two aspects in particular: Time and attention. These are always limited and they give strength to whatever you invest time and attention in. As the saying goes: “Which one will win? The one you feed.”

It is in this perspective we must also see the puzzling practice of celibacy. There are men who are born to sleep alone, there are men who are made to sleep alone, and there are men who have chosen to sleep alone for the sake of the New Mind. It is exceedingly difficult to download and install the New Mind, even in part, while you maintain a mutually interdependent intimate relationship. Of course, it is also difficult to be celibate. If your spouse is as interested in personal transformation as you are, they may even be a help. But then there are your children, if any. Children are an amazing and wonderful project to undertake. But they drain your time and attention like whoosh. Children are not pets. (And even pets are not toys.)

Food is a lot like sex (at least for men) except you actually can actually die from lack of food. So you can’t simply quit. You have to maintain a balance for the rest of your life. If you are too attached to food, you will think about it a lot, spend a lot of time on it, and possibly eat a lot of it and so ruin your health. (Somewhat depending on how physically active you are.) If you eat too little, hunger will keep hammering on the doors of the psyche, disturbing you at all times of the day. So to free up bandwidth, it is best to eat simple food and in moderation.

The ancient practice of fasting is still recommended from time to time. Think of it as a test on how attached we are to our personal body. We may think we have free will, but fasting will tell us something about the matter. Instead of waiting for unexpected tests to jump us, we may take the fight to the enemy, so to speak, testing ourselves under controlled conditions. Or not – unless this is a required part of a Tradition you have chosen to follow, it is voluntary, and it should not be done to excess.

In days of yore, food was scarce. (At the time of writing, the Earth produces enough food for the average person to get just a little chubby, but this has not always been so.) So there was also the element that if you ate less, someone else could eat more. And if you subsisted on gifts (as many monks did) it was just common decency to not fatten yourself.

Entertainment is a bit different from this again. On one hand, it is not really an urgent need. On the other hand, it is not something you bind yourself to with iron chains. Even if you watch a movie tonight, you don’t need to watch one tomorrow, or ever again really. Each case stands alone. Or that is how it looks like. But this also means that you can always, as game reviewers say, “just play five minutes more and then suddenly it is morning”.

There are a lot of things of which we can say: “But it is not a bad thing!” Asceticisms – from the Greek word askesis, meaning training or exercise – basically refers to abstaining from good things for the benefit of something better. It does not refer to abstaining from vices, much less outright evil. To abstain from evil is a necessity even in the current version of the Human Operating System, because evil is corrosive. Evil destroys our harmony with others and within ourselves and comes back to bite us for sure. It is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die, or like picking up burning coals with your bare hands to throw at others. It is utterly insane, but even this is hard to accept when we are excited by our emotions, on the verge of falling back into Human Operating System version 1 (“all problems can be solved with a hand axe.”)

Next to destroying the soul by hate and envy and such straight out poisonous thoughts, there are the lesser vices that erode our health and our relationships, typically greed in its many, many forms. Lust as a vice can be called “sexual greed”, for instance. Gluttony is “food greed”. Greed is a wish to have something that does not belong to us, or to control something (or someone) that is not ours to control. Evils and vices are bad for us in and of themselves, so it is not ascesis to drop those. (And even then it is hard for most of us.)

But the things that are good and praiseworthy in normal life for normal people, but have to be cut out to make room for an even greater good – making that sacrifice is ascesis.  It is not a coincidence that an expression from sports has been chosen, for even humans with no goal beyond the life of their own body still can make such sacrifices to win a sports competition or become a professional.

It is not that the practices themselves are virtuous, as Wikipedia points out. In fact, overdoing them can cause a surge of pride in the old Ego: I am holier than thou, better show me respect or all hell is loose! The Buddha recommended the middle way, and he was not the only one. Modern Judaism frowns on ascetic practices of any sort, encouraging instead the pious to remember the Creator whenever they enjoy anything created.

But if there is no ascesis at all, the Old Mind will happily expand to fill all available time, and all available attention, and the New Mind will never be downloaded, much less installed.

I am obviously not a god or an angel, I am pretty sure I am not even a saint. So if your religion tells you that there is a Higher Being that enjoys to see you suffer, I will not tell you otherwise. I am not a teacher of religion, I think. I just want to share a new branch of psychology, which has been hidden inside of religious and philosophical traditions for thousands of years and has only recently taken on a life of its own, now that many different cultures meet and people can compare their similarities (and their differences).

But if you want to download and install the Human Operating System version 3 beta, it will be necessary to make space for it by reducing the time and attention that goes into the Old Mind, the way of living according to this age which is about to end.

It will be necessary, but not enough. Even a very ascetic life will take you nowhere (in this context) unless you have a reliable source of the New Mind, and it resonates with you inside, and you meditate (or do some other corresponding practice).  “Meditation brings wisdom, lack of meditation leaves ignorance” to quote the Buddha.

You have to download the New Mind (from fellow disciples, Scriptures, or a living Master if you live in an age that has one). Then you have to install it, which requires slowing down the old mind through meditative practice. Then you have to test it in practice and see if the installation has worked, or if the Old Mind still runs the show. This is a process that is repeated over and over, leading to growth over time. If we stop, our progress stops as well. I know this too from experience.

Downloading eternity

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Screenshot anime The Laws of Eternity

Ignoring the text for now, this artist’s image of the Sixth Dimension may symbolize the intricate web of Light and more and less Enlightened souls across the fourth and fifth dimension, the first two time dimensions.

This is part of a series about the Human Operating System version 3, which is slated to replace the current mindset (version 2) much like this again replaced that of our speechless, handaxe-wielding ancestors of 100 000 years ago. Or perhaps not. Think for yourself. It is just a thought experiment, remember.

According to Buddhist tradition, there are three main types of Buddhas: A Buddha who becomes fully enlightened on his own but does not teach others; a Buddha who becomes fully enlightened on his own and teaches others; and a Buddha who becomes fully enlightened after being guided by a previous Buddha. (For more details, Wikipedia has an article on Buddhahood.)

It is not uncommon for a superior mind to have disciples, apprentices, students, sincere followers seeking to obtain the same mind as the Master. Indeed, to establish a great and lasting tradition, this may be essential. But an apprentice is not over his master; if he is perfected, he becomes like the master. This rarely happens to a lot of people for a long time. The tradition starts to falter, losing depth as it grows in numbers. At some point, it becomes a doctrine acceptable to the normal mind.

We have to understand that it is possible to be elevated beyond the usual measure of Human Operating System version 2, and yet be incomplete, partial, in terms of the next level. If there is someone more complete than you, they can guide you, but otherwise you may even miss some of it.

There are those who have an exceptional experience of Enlightenment and change radically. But because they think this is final, this is perfection, this is being “god”, they do not continue to grow, and eventually may trip in the fragments of the old self and fall down. It is not such an easy switch to flip.

Living as an apprentice of someone who is stabilized in H.O.S. version 3 is an extraordinary opportunity. You do not simply get to listen to their teachings, you get to observe them in their daily life, and this is the truly amazing and overwhelming part. To see with your own eyes is an exceptional privilege, and yet for many this is not enough. There must also be a resonance inside.

When there is no such Great Teacher around, but you do have the resonance, the words of the past Masters can still move you, and the stories by those who saw them. It is not a knowledge like memorizing vocabulary or formulas, but more is by nature the knowing of a person, even though that person is long gone from this world.

I mentioned that there is a fifth dimension involved, a second time dimension to be more exact. Through learning about those who went before, and the awakening of a resonance inside yourself, this connection is established. Even if you do not see them, they still see you. In their age and time, they not only “saw” into the past, but also into the future. The link between you and them is mostly of their making, or rather made by That which they incarnate; but there must be a seed, an opening, a hook.

I have used the analogy of the file sharing network BitTorrent. When a file is shared on such a network (for instance a new release of Ubuntu Linux, to take a common example) there must at first be someone who has the whole package. Various people around the world then begin to download, but they don’t all download the same part at the same time. Each downloads many small parts. Once they have done so, they can also upload that part to someone else, but of course they cannot share what they do not have themselves. After a while, the original can stop “seeding” (as it is called) and yet, even though nobody has 100% at the time, they can gradually re-assemble the whole by getting the missing parts from each other.

This is of course not a perfect description of a Tradition, but it is one aspect of it. Even if the Master is no longer present, it is possible to download more than anyone around you, and at least in theory it is possible to regain the fullness of that which has left the world.

As you can see, I believe there is both a “natural” part to this (understandable by someone with a purely Version 2 mind) and a “supernatural” part (which can only be understood by the new mind – I do not mean literally supernatural necessarily, because nature is far more super than most people know.)

You can assemble a certain amount of Version 2 knowledge by hearing, reading and thinking. But to absorb the Version 3 Knowledge (with a capital K), we need to spend time in timelessness – meditation or some other suitable spiritual practice, as it is called. I cannot think of any way in which one can become sensitive to the fifth dimension without such practice.

Once you have begun to sense the fifth dimension, it requires less to maintain that sensitivity than it took to reach it in the first place, but it can be gradually dulled.

Again, if you are familiar with a religion, and you want to explore the Human Operating System version 3, I am not sure you should do so within your own religion. It could destroy your simple faith at a time when you have nothing else to support you.  Of course, if you have already lost your simple faith and now hate that religion with a searing hate, you will definitely not gain anything from it. So I think sometimes it may be useful to explore a different tradition. But also risky, and perhaps best suited for the agnostic.

That is, if you even want to go this path. I am not sure why you would do that. The price is unimaginably high. There is a period during your Awakening when you can still return to the Dream, but it will not last forever.

Surpassing fate while alive

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Screenshot anime Sakurasou Pet

“You can’t move others’ hearts unless you can move your own heart.” Today let us look at the story of three wise men in the East, who each sought to move his own heart and ended up changing the fate of civilization for thousands of years.

(This is a continuation of a series about the Human Operating System version 3, or the New Mind which must replace the mind that is common today. Today we look at the Far East.)

New Age people here in the West find the Eastern concept of reincarnation comforting: Even if we have to leave this world, we’ll be back after a while. But for the original owners of these religions, the concept of reincarnation was a very disturbing thought. It was like a prison in which they were trapped. Even if they did good deeds and were rewarded with a good rebirth, it was not a final solution. They had to keep running just to stay in place. There was no escape from the endless cycle, millions of years of temptation, separation and loss, the pain of birth and the pain of death, over and over for all time. Unless they could somehow reach Liberation. Salvation for them was not to live forever, but to cease living forever.

The Buddha became popular because people believed he had found the answer to ending this eternal cycle of life and death. In East Asia, many revere him or even worship him as a god. But if we look at it from a safe distance, his teachings are not a promise of Salvation after you die. No. This Liberation, the Nirvana (or Nibbana, in Pali) is supposed to happen in this life. If you do not reach Nirvana while alive, you’ll have to enter the ring again. In this sense, Buddhism is not a “faith”: It is experiential, and more of a science. There are methods, and peer review, and you are supposed to make observations. You can’t close your eyes and wish that you’ll get to Nirvana someday. You have to listen to the teachings, temper your desires, restrain your anger, overcome your fear, practice meditation and eventually reach the state of mind that is Nirvana.

(In later times, many of the Buddha’s followers have taken up beliefs and practices that – at least from a  distance – look a lot like closing your eyes and wishing to go to Nirvana someday. I can certainly understand this, but that was hardly how it began.)

If we go even further East to the homeland of Confucius and Lao-Tzu, they seem to have very little interest in the afterlife at all. Confucius certainly recommends venerating your dead ancestors, but I get the impression that this is necessary for your own sake rather than for theirs. To accumulate virtue and improve your soul while alive, this is itself the greatest goal. It is not something you do in order to get bonus points from gods. Indeed, I get the impression that the Sages would reject anyone who came to them with such an underhanded plan. To become a Noble Person, or in the most extreme case a Sage, this is the uttermost goal of earthly life.

The goal of your life must be reached while alive, and the earlier in life, the better. Nor is it a dreamy ecstasy – although ecstasy may happen earlier – but a state of mental clarity, of harmony and of being useful. The Sage is someone who can lead people in a natural way, by means of his example as much as his advice. There is no search for good feelings; if there is happiness, it is in the harmony with our purpose and in the good of many. It is not a life that would appeal much to an egotist, even had such a person been able to reach it.

(This hasn’t stopped later Daoists from fervently chasing after physical immortality, or at least extreme longevity. Belief in Immortals is rampant in folk Daoism, and a number of rituals are in circulation that are supposed to help you towards achieving this honor. I can certainly sympathize with that, but that was hardly what was intended.)

Confucius sums up his own life, early in part 2 of the Analects: “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.” It was this latter stage which was the culmination of his progress, and which is very hard to objectively achieve. You may think what you do is right, of course, but you could simply be morally stunted. But Confucius was not simply some guy who thought highly of himself. He says himself that he did not consider it a loss if no one had heard of him. He was to live only a couple more years after he was seventy, but he changed the fate of the world’s largest empire and is revered even today.

I believe that all these three men – the Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Confucius – were examples of the Human Operating System version 3, where the center of the personality is no longer in the ego or the body-mind. There have been others since, and quite likely before as well, but these are well known and their words are clear and luminous. If you want to hear from the Sage’s own mouth, this is a good place to start.

Caution: Religion!

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Screenshot anime Dororon

“Burn in Hell!” To a lot of westerners, this is a big part of how we consider religion. Hell is not a good place to start looking for Higher Consciousness, I think.

Wikipedia has an unusually good explanation of what Higher Consciousness is, but personally I like the term “meditative consciousness”, as it is more descriptive and objective. I am sure everyone who actually has this consciousness will agree that it is indeed higher – somewhat similar to how being alert is higher than being half asleep, or that adult consciousness is higher than toddler consciousness – but I feel that for newcomers it is better to use a more objective term. Once you know it better, you can know what is higher and what is lower.

Meditation is a practice that can be undertaken in religious or secular context. The world’s great religions all have spiritual practices that include some form of meditation, but you don’t have to be religious to practice meditation in some form. Anyway, meditation or a similar practice is necessary to actually experience this new form of mind rather than just read about it. Hopefully we’ll get back to that. But because meditation is so closely aligned with the New Mind, I like the term “meditative consciousness”.

For the past 2500 years or so, the New Mind – the Human Operating System version 3 – has been mostly found in the esoteric branches of the great world religions. It is important to understand that the esoteric traditions are very different from the first impression you normally get of a religion. When you as an outsider think of religion, perhaps you think of the phrase “pie in the sky when you die”. We have to understand that the comic book version of religion is something far removed from the teaching of the founders, and that even inside each religion the esoteric tradition has often been in danger of persecution.

In the past, each person usually only had access to one religion. Messing around with other religions was not just seen as spiritually dangerous, it could also result in severe burn damage to your body, or the sudden separation of your head from your neck. For this reason, it was hard to notice that the inner traditions of very different religions had one trait in common. That trait is the higher consciousness of which I write.

This is not to say that I reject the other functions and qualities of religion. But I believe that in order to understand what religion is all about, you have to have the same mindset as its founders and first practitioners. Since they had the Human Operating System version 3, any attempt to fully implement the religion in H.O.S v 2 is likely to be like the Neanderthals copying the implements of modern man: Imperfect even as a copy, and without true understanding. A Neanderthal wielding a tool copied from a Homo Sapiens Sapiens would still be a Neanderthal. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But their time was gone, and soon so is ours.

Most of my potential readers will probably be atheists or agnostics, so you may find the smell of religion disgusting. Conversely, if you are a Christian, you will be offended by the thought that Christ had a form of mind also found in some other historical figures. This is misguided. The H.O.S v 3 is just a beginning. To us at our current level it is The End, but if having this was the only noteworthy thing about Christ, he would not have been remembered the way he is. The other founders of the great world religions were likewise not copies of Christ, but had their own qualities that set them apart. Each person who had the New Mind also was responsible for how he used it further, and it is this that separate the sun from the stars and the stars from each other.

What I am saying is simply that the founders and the early followers had a more advanced mind than almost everyone at their time, and almost everyone today. To us that mind is so alien that we might mistake it for their only important quality, but that is not the case. They are also distinct.

But because of our prejudices, I believe that it may not be good to seek H.O.S. v.3 in the religion we are most familiar with, regardless of whether we hate it or love it. We will then too easily fall back to what we think we already know. To realize that we don’t know is the beginning of true knowledge. For this reason, since I write in English, I will recommend that people study the teachings of the Eastern traditions, especially the Far East which is the most different from our own. The teachings of the Buddha, of Confucius and of Lao-Tzu are all lucid and amazing when well translated. And nobody here in the West is likely to feel compelled to worship them, neither by society nor by their own heart. So they are well suited to “download” the H.O.S. v.3 from.

Beta-testing eternity

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The Buddha, from anime The Golden Laws

In the West, Buddhism is known as an agnostic philosophy. But in Asia, millions worship the Buddha as a savior or something similar to a god – seemingly in spite of his best attempts to dissuade them.

In software development, and important phase is the one we call “beta-testing”. After we have tried to code the software correctly, and tested it in-house, outsiders are allowed to test it in a real-life environment. It is not yet ready for final release, but it is very similar to the final version, if all goes as expected.

We saw that something similar seemed to happen with the modern human mind, version 2. There were scattered outbreaks of it here and there over a period of a few tens of thousands of years, where you could see some of the features of the modern mind. But then one day the finished version was rolled out, and in the blink of an eye (at least geologically speaking) everyone adapted the new operating system of the brain, or died out.

If, as I think, we are approaching the final release of Human Operating System version 3, it stands to reason that it has been tested in the field for quite a while already. But what is it? What could it be that makes all things new?

To get an idea of the scale of the change, I want us to think about the difference that the previous major upgrade made. By all accounts, our ancestors 100 000 years ago looked like us (probably dark-skinned since they lived in Africa) and had the same basic instincts as us. But their behavior and thinking (if we can call it that) lacked many of the elements that we now consider essentially human. They seem to have had no learned language, no art, no imagination. Their ability to plan ahead seems to have been quite limited, although there was some. They created stone handaxes ahead of time, after all. But problems that could not be solved with a handaxe were generally just avoided.

The new mind must have seemed like a miracle to those of the old mind, except they had no concept of miracle or the supernatural. But suddenly there appeared people who could communicate with a language of thousands of words, even in the dark and through walls. Their mind was also able to travel in time, making detailed accounts of the past and plans for the future. They were able to create a wide and ever growing range of new and better tools. The amount of change that could take a hundred thousand or even a million years, could now happen in one generation. The magnitude of the change is enormous.

I expect this to happen again. The New Mind is going to be miraculous, able to do things that seem utterly impossible to the old mind. Not just impossible, but unthinkable. Things that are beyond the concepts of the old mind. It is not just that you won’t believe them if told, but there is no way of telling you. You don’t have the holes in which to put this knowledge. In order to have the New Mind explained to you in any way that makes sense in the least, you first need to have the New Mind itself, at least in part.

Human Operating System version 2 added a new dimension, the dimension of Time. Our ancestors, despite their big brains, seem to have had very little understanding of time, since there was no language in which to think about it. Certainly they could remember something from the past when they saw it, and repeat successful actions from the past, and make simple tools before they needed them. But they seem not to have had an understanding of what time was, or the ability to use it to the fullest. We do this from childhood onward as a matter of course. We travel almost too much in time, dwelling on the past or the future or even alternate versions of these. We live in the fourth dimension like fish in water, so to speak.

The New Mind then might have another dimension added, a fifth dimension that we are vaguely aware of now, at least some of us, but are unable to use at will. As it happens, such a fifth dimension is mentioned in esoteric texts. It can be called vertical time, as it is in a sense at right angles with the usual time dimension. Another word for it is eternity, but this word does not mean what you think it means. Because the untrained human mind cannot imagine a second time dimension, they have instead redefined the word to mean “an endless stretch of time”. Perhaps that is the original meaning in some languages even, but the way it is used in esoteric teaching is to refer to the Fifth Dimension.

Now, where can we find people who have beta-tested a dramatically new mind, a completely new approach to life, the universe and everything … people who as a result of this got the ability to perform miracles because they had a second time dimension added to their mind? I think the answer is pretty obvious. The founders of several of the world’s great religions and philosophies match exactly these criteria, and sometimes their students for a limited time. In the cases where enough of the original teachings were preserved in some form, mystics in the same tradition much later would sometimes develop some of the same abilities.

Specifically, if a second time dimension was involved, one of the miraculous abilities would probably relate to time in some way, for instance by having impossible knowledge about the past or the future. Let me give you one example.

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.

The Big Bang for dummies, complete with the rather important notions that the universe itself was expanding and that matter only appeared later in time, things that are still hard to grasp for high school students. It was definitely harder to grasp in the year 1270 when the Ramban died, the Jewish Rabbi who wrote that passage. How in the world could he write an up-to-date description of the Big Bang as we understand it in the 21st century, when he lived in an age where it was generally assumed that the world was less than 6000 years old and there were no more continents west of Spain?

I believe that, apart from any supernatural explanations, mystics are connected across time. This is actually the stance of the Orthodox Church (not affiliated) except they apply it only to the church. But they believe that the church when assembled for service is accompanied not only by the deceased saints, but also by those yet unborn. Obviously most churchgoers even in the Orthodox churches are mainly bench fillers. But to those few who have attained higher consciousness, the experience of co-existing with the past and future is surely more than just theory.

I happen to believe this also applies to mystics of other schools. I also happen to believe that these various schools and branches and mutually suspicious religions and philosophies will vanish with the coming Change. It is the primitive, ego-centered H.O.S. v.2 mind that wants to hoard the truth, like it wants to hoard everything else. An amusing example is found in Christianity, where Jesus’ disciples comes and tells him: “We saw some other guys doing miracles in your name! Tell them to stop it!” Never mind that people who have been suffering for a long time are being helped; it is more important that we maintain our monopoly on Jesus. Ours! Only ours! Not wanna share!

But sharing is at the heart of the New Mind. In fact, the heart is itself shared, its doors thrown recklessly open. But to serve all, you must first be free from all, and who is capable of this? Who can love without attachment, give without keeping a balance, achieve without pride? You can certainly try to copy the effects of the New Mind, and if you are smart and have a strong will, you can get a ways, like the Neanderthals copying the new tools of the Cro-Magnon before dying out.

Or you could download the New Mind now. But not exactly from the Internet.

The end of this world

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Screenshot anime Yuyushiki

“It’s the end of the world!” Well, it is almost certainly the end of anime, tragic as that may seem to some of us.

It is a widespread belief that the world that we know will come to a sticky end. Today it is “global warming”, when I was a child it was “nuclear winter”. We simply don’t know what will do us in, but we feel that the current civilization is living on the edge of the abyss.

Since I write in English, my readers are probably vaguely aware of the Christian “apocalypse” (the Revelation of St John) which predicts a horrifying end to the current world, and the establishment of a new and vastly better. They may even remember that Judaism makes a similar claim (book of Daniel). They may have heard that the ancient Mayans likewise predicted a sudden end to the world, although recent research has found a calendar continuing after 2012, so that date may be off.

But you may not know that the old Norse religion of the Vikings also predicted a future destruction of this world (in Voluspa) and the birth of a new and innocent one. Even the Hindu religion predicts that the world will go to the dogs and start over fresh, although they believe this happens cyclically over immense eons of time; still, the end of the current age should not be that far away.

Perhaps this global agreement simply stems from the observation that young people are not living up to the standards of their parents and grandparents, as already the ancient Egyptians noticed. But in the cases I know the best (Christianity, Judaism and the Norse Asatru) the disaster was foretold by prophets.

Now there are always people going around claiming THE END IS NIGH! so that doesn’t say much.But these prophets were deemed credible by those who listened to them. They seemed otherwise sane or even more than sane: They would predict things that actually came to pass in the near future as well, or reveal secrets, or speak with such clarity and coherence and wide sweep of knowledge that people sensed that not just were these people sane, they had a supernatural wisdom. They were each someone their people looked up to. These were the men and women who foretold a dramatic end to the world.

I believe that mystics through the ages have told of the same event, but it is not actually a physical destruction. Rather, it is the destruction of the human mind as we know it, in the sudden emergence of the New Mind, the Human Operating System version 3, on a global scale.

***

In my previous entry, I pointed out that humans like us once had no culture, no language, no art and seemingly no imagination. Then, at a speed many times faster than biological evolution – so fast that it seems to have spread like a rapid contagion – they either converted to the current way of being human, or died out. Every single one of them. It was the end of their world. I believe it is going to happen again. Not just because the prophets of three continents (at least) have foretold it, but because it is our only hope.

When population density reached a critical level for the hand-axe people, a change happened in their way of thinking that made it possible for them to exist together. Through the new practice of talking, they were able to organize larger groups and more complex societies, with specialization. Their newfound creativity allowed them to use resources that were not available before. We have continued down that path, but no matter what branch of human endeavor you look at, change is happening faster and faster. We are headed for a singularity, as if the river of time has gone from a leisurely flood to foaming rapids and is heading for a waterfall. Or as if the water that was slowly warming is starting to bubble and will soon boil the frog that has adapted to the heat until now.

We no longer need prophets to tell us that the world we know will change beyond recognition. But most of us still don’t know what is going to end and what is going to begin. Like the ancient mystics, I believe that what must necessarily change is our mind, because the old mind cannot handle the world we are beginning to live in. We need to level up.

Why is this a disaster? Isn’t it a good thing if we rise to a higher level of consciousness? Yes, if you ask those who have actually experienced this as an individual, they will tell you that it was the best thing that ever happened to them, without a doubt. But they can also tell you of the fear and confusion they faced, of the total sacrificed they were called to make before entering into the new life. It is hard for almost everyone to give up everything they own. But to give up everything you ARE, this seems like death itself.

The old world will not be happy to just lie down and die. Despite our best preparations, I don’t think we can awaken the New Mind in everyone at the same time. And while at least the early users of Human Operating System version 3 will be able to understand those with H.O.S. v.2, this is not mutual. Watching every institution crumble, every tradition, every nation and power of the old order, they will not feel they have much to lose. They will find themselves in the spot of the Neanderthals, and not everyone will yield their world peacefully.

Add to this the destruction of the natural world which will have been wrought by mankind in the last stages of the current world order. We have already eradicated many species, with new ones following on a more or less daily basis. The climate is getting erratic. Rapid communications means terrifying diseases like Ebola or SARS can spread around the world in weeks, each of them capable of killing a majority of us. It seems that we have to either change or die. And the change, as I said, will seem only marginally less like the end of the world than would death.

The afore mentioned prophet Daniel has a description (based on a dream by someone else, strangely) which describes it better than I could:
“While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken to pieces and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.“

Daniel then explains that the huge statue was the civilization that descended from Babylon. At some point, an outside force of a completely different nature will hit and utterly demolish it, taking its place and growing even much larger.

There can certainly be different interpretations to what this means – the Jews thought it was the nation of Israel which would conquer and destroy the other nations, while various Christian churches have thought it referred to them or to the Return of Christ. Not saying anything against it – a good text should have several layers of meaning – but one understanding that actually makes a lot of sense is that it is the next version of the Human Operating System. For make no mistake: Just as the world of handaxes and simple instinctive language has passed utterly from Earth, so the world of cultures and nations will be forgotten once the next version of humanity becomes the norm.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

***

(Indeed, the reason why I wrote about this in the first place in 2005 was that my world seemed to be nearing its end. I had a temporary cancer diagnosis (was later rescinded) and the relevant hospital staff had summer vacation for a couple months, which would have been plenty of time for a fast-growing cancer to establish itself. So I listened to this Japanese song, The End of the World by Angela, where she says (in Japanese): People are bewildered that life must end, and time strikes them harshly. But even if this world ends today, I will still protect you. And I thought, if my world ends, how can I protect my friends through the time that will come? So I decided to write it down, even though it was still not quite clear to me.)

Here’s the song The End of The World on YouTube, as long as it lasts.