Category Archives: autobiography

“Nobody loves me”

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di0908016

“It is a love from the cosmos that has transcended through the dimensions!” That’s my kind of love.  (Strangely, this screenshot is not made by Happy Science, quite the  contrary.  It sure sounds like something they could have said, though, particularly since their 9th dimension is also called the “cosmic dimension”.)

I said yesterday that I wanted to give you an example of the vast gap between me and most people. (Because of this gap, I gradually have had less and less contact with people except for business.) By reading excerpts of some books by Ryuho Okawa (“El Cantare” among friends), I have realized that I have much to learn about communicating. Perhaps if I improve my communications skill, others will be able to understand a little.  As it stands today, unfortunately, I cannot expect you to understand. You must necessarily misunderstand completely. Today I give you an example of this.

“Nobody loves me.”

When someone says this, you know they are deeply depressed (or otherwise whiny, angsty teenagers, I guess). If the feeling is genuine, it may cause people to even end their lives.  If they are more lucky, they may start doing foolish things to try to attract love.  (Of course, suicide is the most foolish thing of all.) Generally, not being loved is one of the most luckless situations people can think of, worse than poverty and most non-fatal illnesses.  In fact, the fear of losing love is often what scares people the most about disfigurement, crippling disease, mental illness or economic failure.

I sincerely hope nobody loves me.

To me, it has a very precise meaning. And the meaning hinges on the “body”.  If I were to experience that noONE loves me, I would indeed be terrified, as if being swallowed by Hell itself.  (Even if you don’t believe in Hell, you can probably imagine the concept.) A state of utter despair, a loss of meaning, the very core of my being ripped out.  I know this because I briefly experienced it several times in the past, although never for as much as half a day. How anyone would bear it for years is beyond my imagination, and I hope actually that it will always be.

I would be insane to compare myself to Jesus Christ generally, but there were a couple things he said that deeply make sense to me.  One, “I am not alone, He who sent me is with me.”  The other, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  In retrospect I believe that it were those short episodes in my life that made me realize to a deep degree that I am usually NOT forsaken, at least yet.  Not alone, even when no body is around.  Not unloved even if no one loves me in the flesh.

Is it really God – the Father, or the Son, or the Holy Spirit – who maintains this presence in me? Or is it merely some lower instance channeling the love and wisdom from on high?  I have no way to prove one or another, but I would be hard pressed to deny that there is something. Otherwise I could not possibly be so happy for so long under circumstances that would drive many to despair.

Lack of being loved is NOT a problem.  Lack of loving others is.  I have sought to love in a diffuse way, like a saint or bodhisattva, who love mankind in general or even all creatures. But self-observation tells me that I am not a saint or bodhisattva.  I am not doing a very good job of it.  I have my small outlets, but they are small indeed.  Especially compared with the huge influx. This is my worry, when I worry at all.  But not being loved? It is the LEAST of my problems.  And usually I have very small problems, and few at that.

To me, being loved by a human would carry no benefit. My love-getting meter needle is already on full. It would be a pure responsibility.  If a human was attached to me, how would I possibly avoid disappointing it? Even if I somehow managed to live a perfect life (which is unimaginably far from reality), I would not be able to die a perfect death. My passing would cause deep and lasting pain.  So if I can avoid causing pain with my death, and avoid causing pain with my life, that seems to be the best I can hope for.

I try to give people something with my words.  Something to think about, with some stuff around, like the apple seeds are surrounded by apple and the orange seeds surrounded by orange.   So what I hope is that at some future time, something I said will be of help to someone.  They may not remember the exact words (and perhaps the exact words are not quite as good as the words that come up inside them later).  They may not remember where they heard it.  Perhaps they “just thought of something”. Or vaguely remember. That is what I hope for.  When I am gone and forgotten, or even just forgotten.  I don’t want them to think “Wow, that Itland guy really knew how it was!” or “Thank you, Lord, for they great and wise servant Itland who brought Your light to us.”  First, that is not very likely. I am a worse than useless servant, not even doing what is required of me. Second, it would not make a difference, since God – or whatever it is that keeps me company – already knows how things are, and reprimand me or encourage me accordingly, without the need to be told by anyone.

Let us sum it up. If someone were to love me, it would not make me any happier. It would simply be a weight on me, having to constantly think about how not to disappoint. And they would not understand why their love made no difference to me.  It would surely cause them pain.

No, I must somehow find the way of the bodhisattva, even if I suck royally at it. It is the only option I can think of.  As Krishna said in the Bhagavad Gita: “It is better to do your own duty, even if you fail, than to perfectly fulfill the duty of another.”

Sick and worthless

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di0908015

“For what purpose do we live?”  That’s easy for you, Ryuta. You’ve got a girlfriend. You have to live for her, regardless of whether that is actually your highest potential. Such is the requirement of love, you can’t just have it as a hobby.

I had a pretty bad stomach pain today.  Not very sharp but pretty broad, covering much of the actual stomach.  (Not guts, I am pretty sure.)  I suspect this was because I had gone to sleep on a too full stomach on Friday and suffered acid reflux in my sleep.  I got suddenly very tired earlier than expected that night.

Anyway, as usual when I am sick, I took a hard look at my life.  Ironically, two days from now I am going to read in an excerpt from one of Ryuho Okawa’s books that this is one of the primary functions of illness and a valuable service illness serves in our lives. That is, if we have a tendency to not take a good look at our lives otherwise, which successful people often don’t.  I suspect I don’t LOOK successful to you guys, but I sure feel pretty upbeat almost all of the time. Except when I am sick, and look back on my life and realize that I have just had fun almost all the time.  That I have almost never done anything worthwhile.

See, the real problem isn’t that I do anything wrong. It happens occasionally, but lately it has been pretty small stuff.  The real problem isn’t even that I don’t do anything good, although we are homing in now. The real problem is that I don’t even care. I don’t even want to live a life of giving love and selfless service.  I am fine with just having a good time. Obviously not in the booze and night clubs sense, but playing computer games, watching anime, reading or writing a book that interests me, or once in a while sit down and polish my halo a little before I move on to something more fun. I may help someone somehow in some small way if I don’t have to go out of my way to find them.

I guess in a sense I have kind of given up on humans.  The difference between them and me has become so large, they can’t reasonably be expected to understand me at all, or even to not spontaneously misunderstand me completely.

Let me give you an example. For as Okawa (“El Cantare” among friends) says, evil arises when people don’t understand or feel that they are not being understood. In the first case, they should get to learn to know others better; in the second case, they should learn to communicate better.  Well, I seem to understand pretty near anyone (possibly except some particularly demonic or saintly people, I am not eager to put that to the test) but I clearly fail to communicate. Actually, I have almost given up communication.  There is a pop song about that, did you know?  It is called “Communication”  by The Cardigans.  If you don’t know it, you owe it to yourself to listen to it at least once. It is a love song but it has a much deeper layer for those who get it. The chorus goes like this:

But that’s not an invitation
That’s all I get
If this is communication
I disconnect
I’ve seen you, I know you
But I don’t know
How to connect, so I disconnect.

The female singer goes through this for a while, and you’d think she’d eventually take a hint and give up. Certainly that is my natural response. Perhaps it is some fundamental feminine principle in the human soul or something, but she kind of keeps it more open in the last verse:

Well this is an invitation
It’s not a threat
If you want communication
That’s what you get
I’m talking and talking
But I don’t know
How to connect
And I hold a record for being patient
With your kind of hesitation
I need you, you want me
But I don’t know
How to connect, so I disconnect
I disconnect.

I guess I hold a record for being patient too, after more than 10 years of writing an open letter to my unknown friends.  But I don’t know how to connect either.  I just kind of hope that humans – or at least one or two humans – sometime in the future will come where I have been and see my footprints, and know that someone went this way before.

I should give you a good example, but the entry is creeping up on the “tl;dr” limit. (“Too Long; Didn’t Read.) Perhaps later, if there is a later. For now, I feel the urge to just get this post up and think a bit about Hell before I go to bed.

Hell is inside, too

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di0908011

If I were transported to a realm in which my outer appearance matched my inner self, which would it be?  I honestly am not sure.  But I hope it’s not quite as bad as the one to the left – anymore. I remember when it was, though.

I have spent a bit of time piecing together more pages of the Happy Science lore.  It is not like I’m converting or anything, but it is interesting to see what lies beneath when people so remote from me in so many ways still come up with at least some ideas strikingly similar to what I believe too.

The notion of Satan and Hell are a bit different from the Christian version. I am not sure how it goes along with the Buddhist version. Yes, for some reason Buddhism also has a number of hells, some of which I have seen depicted.  Unfortunately, the Chinese Hell of Lust was rather arousing. -_-  I don’t think that painting conveyed reality in any sense or form!  The glimpse of the same Hell in the anime did not have that effect. Anyway! Hell! Who raised Hell, when and where?

According to Happy Science (fiction, most readers would mentally add), it all started when El Cantare, the highest humanoid spirit of Earth, invited a bunch of less evolved humanoids from the Magellanic Cloud.  Because of the prevalence of dinosaurs and such at the time, this hardy race was picked.  But they were rather rash, as were their guiding spirits (gods, if you will).  One of these was incarnated on Earth for some good purpose but got addicted to the pleasures of the mortal realm.  Instead of going back to the Heavens for another round of selfless service, he decided to create a realm in the image of Earth, in the 4th dimension (the one closest above us, the first stop of the afterlife).  This degenerated into Hell, as the people who accumulated there secreted dark thoughts and emotions that clouded the Heavenly Light so it did not reach them.  It also cast its shadow on Earth, with all the troubles this caused.

So far we have a vaguely science-fiction like version of the familiar story.  But the interesting part comes next.  According to their book, Hell is not specifically about the afterlife.  It starts already in this life (as does Heaven, but most of us have heard that already):  It is inside us.  Or at least inside those who haven’t gotten rid of it yet.  The way to avoid demons is to not have any dark recesses in the mind where the Light doesn’t get in.  If I have those, I have a connection to Hell already.

I agree. Unfortunately, having dark recesses is something that comes very easily.  And you don’t even have to believe in Hell to already be there, to some degree.  It is something I notice most blatantly with my liberal acquaintances, although I don’t know for sure whether this is because they are more prone to carry around their private Hell, or I just notice it more easily because it is more different from my own tendencies, so I don’t have the filter of automatic self defense.  Perhaps some of each.

In any case, there is a lot of whining there about how much injustice there is in the world, and not least concerning themselves.  Their idea of being discriminated against is roughly my idea of “that’s human life”:  Having to deal with people who don’t like you and accept you, being looked down at for being different, getting less money than some people who are at best your equals, being misunderstood over and over etc.  Seriously, this is my ordinary life, but it is not Hell for me.  We can’t all be The Real Princess.  People are unlikely to consider us as important as they consider themselves.  The greater problem is when this is mutual, as it all too often is.  That is my Hell: the Evil Inside.

Let’s say you live in Europe or some liberal state in America. You’re gay so you can’t marry in the state where you would prefer to do so.  And it eats you inside and you can’t let it go, because it’s just not fair, and they are repressing you, and you think you have the right to hate them and anyone who tells you to stop whining and get on with living.  You can still live together as if you were married; you can eat together, you can sleep together, you can set up contracts and wills etc to regulate your economy as if you were married etc. But it’s not enough, because you’re still regarded as Not Equal. Well, that’s true, but is it really worth going to Hell for while still alive?

What if you had a sexuality that you simply could not accept because of your conscience, even if it was technically legal?  What if you knew that you could never have one satisfying sexual intercourse over the duration of your earthly life? Or any form of lasting, intimate relationship?  What if you, for good measure, had to always be an outsider, be viewed with suspicion, pay more and earn less, because you did not fit society’s automatic duonormativity?  What if, in addition to all this, you had to listen to the whining of people you would otherwise like, if they could just let go of the pea under their mattress? Would you suffer then?

Hell no! Outrage is something you do, not something that happens to you.  Pain is something that happens to you. I don’t like pain.  And I certainly don’t like to inflict mental and spiritual pain on myself.  The hand I was dealt had some high cards and some low cards. I’m not going to bluff. But I am going to play the hand I was dealt.  And ideally, play it reasonably well.

Of course, this applies to other areas of life as well.  It isn’t all about sex, although it may sometimes feel that way when you don’t get any.  (I hear it becomes pretty trivial pretty fast. But what do I know.) So, someone is earning more than you do, even though they have the same job, because of some triviality.  So, you decide, after thinking this over for a long time and considering all options, that this is a good reason to go to Hell while still alive, to become bitter, to try to enlist other people in your crusade, and to never ever let it go.  Because it just ain’t fair!

Tell me about it, as if I haven’t experienced it firsthand for years and years. But life isn’t fair. Death is fair, probably.  We have a saying in Norwegian: “I døden er vi alle lik.”  This can equally be translated as “In death we are all equal” or “In death we are all corpses”, depending on your mood.  What I don’t believe is that in death we all go to Hell. But I don’t know for sure, I have only faith in this regard.  What I do know for sure, however, is that in life we don’t all go to Hell.

There are many such matters. I only thought of these in particular because there are people I really wish to have as my friends, but there is this chasm set between us. Their life is my hell, and quite possibly the other way around.  I am the kind of loser you would not want to be if you had the choice between being a loser and just die.  But I live most of my time, if not in Heaven, then surely somewhere right outside, where the light is bright, the smell of the flowers reach me, and the faint music from inside.  I may have pain from time to time, and I don’t live up to my own hopes.  (This is probably because I think too highly of myself, but some aspirations are allowed, I think.)  And I probably whine too much about those things, because you never see your own whining as clearly as that of others. But let me say this:  I would not swap even my current, half-baked soul for all the sex, money and fame of the world.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.  And so is the Kingdom of Hell.  May we all choose wisely.

Race: Alien/Other

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di090513

Talking is a very important, basic action in the universe.  In your universe, at least.

This entry is about mobile telephony, not racial issues.  But just for the context, rest assured that Norwegian census data do not include the concept of “race”, and hopefully never will. I get the impression that in the USA this is actually a required field, which makes no sense since people there can have any number of ethnicities in their immediate ancestry. There is probably some ticky box for that too.  But here at least it would be considered unspeakably rude (and probably illegal) to register someone’s “race” anywhere. Also, it would probably be sabotaged.  At the very least, there is a good chance that I would choose “other”, and then only for lack of something more exotic.  Like  “utterly nonhuman”. Read on as to why.

It started a few years ago when my phone company introduced a service called “Free family”.  It allows you to call and message a reasonable number of family members for free. To the best of my knowledge there is not even a flat fee. Which means, unless they get their profit from the Tooth Fairy or some such, people like me pay for other people’s family.  Now, as I believe I have said before, I am not opposed to paying for families, at least reproductive units. Their children are my pension, after all.  People who shack up, with or without papers, for non-reproductive reasons, meet no such sympathy from me.  They already have their reward.  There is no way I want to pay their taxes, and certainly not their mobile phone bill.  Unfortunately the other main (as in not liable to suddenly go into bankruptcy) phone company has the same system.

Today I got the cheerful and photo-illustrated mail from my phone company that they have introduced yet another service: “Best friend”.  You can now call and message for free to the person you call the most. O_O  It really seems like a bad business move, but I could not find any fees this time either.  And I was again slightly miffed, because unless they get their profit from the Tooth Fairy or something, it means people like me are paying for people who have friends.

Wait a minute.  This was the point where my train of thought collided head on with reality and derailed.  There are, to the best of my knowledge, no “people like me”.  Having a family and/or friends is universal for the human race, certainly for anyone coherent enough to actually use a telephone.

You know, even when I considered myself having a best friend, it was someone I talked to perhaps once a month, and saw perhaps twice a year.  Thinking back, I tried to find out when I actually had friends I spent my time with. And the tentative answer is “never”.  I mean, I had my friends in the Church, and better friends you can not wish for.  But we always knew that our friendship was conditional on our religion and indeed simply an effect of that.  Sympathy and antipathy were both reviled and usually in the same breath.

This may sound like a bad thing, but you have to understand that the Church was essentially a mystic university. Left to themselves, virtually all people will pick friends who prop up their ego: Their prejudices, their habits, their existing worldview.  “Friends and relatives do their best to comfort our flesh” to loosely translate one of our most beautiful songs.  Presumably Jesus did not pick his original disciples based on whether they enjoyed hanging out together, either.

Even back then, I never called anyone just to chat, as far as I can remember.  It has been a long time, and “never” is a strong word, but this is how I remember it, and I seem less likely to rewrite my past than most people. (I have written journals going back to the early 1980es actually, so I think I have some authority in saying so. They largely concur with my memories, except the person writing the journal was more confused, afraid and narrowminded than I am today. And purer of heart, although I am not sure it was a good thing since it took the form of not seeing my real nature, but it was a necessary thing at the time. But enough about that.)

As a child, I was chatty at times, but not on the phone. That kind of luxury was beyond us.  The telephone was for necessary communications. We shared a line with four neighboring farms, so you did not bind up the line for no good reason.  It wasn’t exactly cheap either by the standards of the day.  Telephone was a state monopoly at the time, and unimaginably bureaucratic and inefficient.  On the bright side, they did offer some form of phone service even to remote farms on the edge of the wilderness.

Anyway, today I am this person who only uses a telephone in emergency or nearly so. And the chattiest I get is these journal entries.  And the closest I come to having friends in this world would be my couple readers.  That’s “in this world” of course, or should we say “of this world”.  I am hardly to be pitied; for I can call my invisible friend at any time of night and day, and it does not cost me anything.  Except perhaps my humanity, but in this particular regard I am not sure I ever had one.  The idea of calling someone just to chat is to me… utterly alien.

CDs that leave my home

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di090506

Music is difficult to let go of. Especially when cute girls are involved, I guess, and surprisingly often they are.

I have come to the CDs that resist being thrown in the garbage. Even though the song being ripped right now is actually called “Trash”. It is by Suede, from the album “Coming Up”. I have not played it for some time – a couple years, surely. And even when I did, I only played two of the tracks. One was “Trash”, the other was (even more appropriately) “Lazy”. There is a story behind that, of course.

I bought this CD (like so many others) after listening to these tracks repeatedly at the home of my best friend over many years, the amazing Superwoman. (I wrote about remembering this already in 2001. Complete with embarrassing daydream about her. Well, more like embarrassingly safe for work.) Whenever I heard them later, a part of me remembered those times, which were good times indeed. Not that times are bad now. They are good in a different way though. One of the differences is that I can’t sit down with my online friends and listen to music together. At least not yet. I am mildly surprised that this is not yet possible. Perhaps it is, but I just don’t know about it?

In any case, over several years most of my new CDs came from listening to music together with her. She had great taste in music, although she was more omnivorous than I. It took me quite a while to find some music on my own after we parted ways completely. And most of what I’ve bought after that has been Japanese pop that I learned from watching anime.  Eventually I also found some songs via Last.FM, but those are mostly bought via iTunes so I don’t need to rip them and throw away the CDs… Someone did that already.

The previous CD that I ripped today was “luring” by Odd Nordstoga. If you think Odd is an odd name, you are probably not Norwegian. He is one of the few remaining artists that create and sing songs in my native language, Nynorsk (New Norwegian). If you think it looks more like New Norse, that is not far off either. It was created during the time when Norway was awakening to national independence, and its purpose was to gather the heritage from old Norse that had been preserved in our dialects during the centuries of Danish and later Swedish rule. But the pressure from the Danish-Norwegian BokmÃ¥l (Book Language) favored in the cities has gradually polluted the ur-Norwegian language, so that today only a few of us can write it fluently without unwittingly bastardizing it with Danicisms. Among those few are I and Odd Nordstoga. And possibly my friend Zimena (her name changes from time to time, as she has a lot more to protect than I, and anyway her journal is friends-only for a while now). She is a much greater fan of Nordstoga than am I. Truth be told, the only track I played more than once on that CD was the first one, the national smash hit “Kveldssong for deg og meg”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2004.

The first of the tree CDs I throw out today is “Dreamland” by Robert Miles. Again this was one I learned about from my best friend, but while she was taken by the song “Children” (if I remember correctly), having seen a music video of it, I preferred the song “One & One”. Ooh, I wrote about it in 2001. Seems I did remember correctly after all those years. Woo, go me! And I already wrote about it in 1999, one of my entries most worth reading actually, once it finds it was a bit down the page. “Let’s stand still in time” – that was indeed in some ways the high point of my life. A part of me wants to go back and live that year again – and again, and again. Yes wouldn’t that be nice… if I could do it without losing what I have gained since. But I can’t. But at least I don’t need to lose the song, even if I throw away the CD.

Imagine we were not missed

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di090428

The younger we are, the more we depend on others to verify that we are real and valuable. But even when old and gray, we may not want to be just forgotten. Well, most of us.

“But imagine if we were not missed.” That’s what the little old lady on the bus said to the other little old lady. I don’t have my ears on stalks to eavesdrop on my fellow passengers when I ride the bus to work, but especially with the elderly they often talk loudly enough that I hear them anyway, unless I put headphones on and listen to one of the brainwave entrainment tracks on my PSP.

Anyway, I did not follow the conversation, but this line leaped out at me. I suppose when one grows seriously old, this matter comes closer to one’s mind. Knowing that almost certainly we will be the next to leave, we have not only our own sadness to contend with that we shall leave behind all that we loved. After all, whether you believe you go to a better place or simply disappear, it seems unlikely that this sadness will continue after our transition. But there is also the thought that we will leave an emptiness in their lives, and from experience you know that this will last for a long time and never completely disappear. Just kind of fade to a scar.

I assume the other little old lady must have made some reference to this, but I did not hear that. Only this line: “But imagine if we were not missed.” And I thought, or rather knew without needing to think, that this is indeed the case with me. Well, almost. We are few enough people at work that I would probably be a little bit missed there. And one or two readers would miss my journal, I guess. But that is a rather small and abstract degree of missing. Like the bonsai of missing.

Some years ago, this would have seemed to me a bad thing. I might even have been upset, thinking about it. It is a human trait, to want to be important to others, or at the very least to one other human. Possibly even a cat or dog, or so it sometimes seems. I think it is related to our need to feel validated, that is to say, to get feedback telling us that we are real. That we are a valid human, at the very least. I have long thought that this is a major reason for the practice of dating (which is evidently a kind of ritual in the United States, while around here it is so informal that I did not really know it existed for most of my life.) From the descriptions I have seen of it, certainly it seems that a big part of it is having a mirror to verify one’s own existence in. I date, therefore I am.

I know I needed more validation before. More reassurance that I was real and someone knew it. There may still be some, I don’t know – even my near “hermit” life has some of it, after all. I have to work most days of the year, and there are humans. (Much as I prefer to just work with the computers, when possible.) Even when I have some weeks off work, I will still go to the supermarket and buy food. The people at the check-out certainly seem to believe that I am real, since they take my money and even give me change back. So really, I don’t know how I would feel if I were completely without human company for a long time. Probably not very different though. There seriously isn’t much affirmation you can wring out of a stressed cashier, although I occasionally see people try.

I would like to credit my religion here, and I think it must surely be involved, deeply involved. But it cannot be only that. I was quite more fervent in my religious practice when I was younger, as in praying more on my knees and reading the Bible and tracts that exhorted to piety, not to mention regular meetings where both God and fellow believers were present. Of course God is always present, or if not one would definitely notice it, in a hair-raising way to say the least. But anyway, my religion is rather low-key now, although it is never far from my mind. (Perhaps it has sunk deeper in, what there is left of it?) Anyway, long time has passed, and the certainty that I exist (if only as a created being) is pretty much permanent. If I am ignored, or what is more, forgotten, I do not doubt that I am or what I am.

It would still be kind of sad to know that my life has been lived in vain on this planet, true. (If I had only God to worry about, being incarnate would not really be necessary.) But then again, that is why I write here, and there, and around the web. Just the other day I got a comment on a LiveJournal entry written explicitly for the purpose of explaining how to solve a problem with the music player Amarok which failed to recognize .oga sound files. (I had to rename them to .ogg for Amarok to recognize them and the entire directory structure in which they were placed.) So, my life was not completely wasted. ^_^

The Internet is not a very stable place, but then again neither are most of the people who use it. I realize that after my passing, gradually my tracks here will be washed away. But it will take some time now, as I have uploaded my thoughts and my life so thoroughly to the Net, over so many years, and there are various archive systems in place now, especially Google. So there seems to be a good chance that something similar will happen to what Leonard Cohen says near the end of his “Tower of Song“:

Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to the tower down the track,
But you’ll be hearing from me, baby, long after I’m gone:
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.

That’s how I hope my footprints in this world will fade, gently, in the light rain of time. When I am gone, should anyone miss me, they can go online – if nothing else, using Google cache or the Wayback Machine – and I will be there, no more and no less than I was when I enjoyed my bodily existence.

The Pigsty Project

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di090407

New Scientist clutter creep.

I have been thinking back to how my old apartment looked the last years I lived there. It is not that bad here, but the lack of storage rooms (these are still used by the landlord) made it necessary to crowd a couple rooms (bedroom and home office) with ugly stuff like bags and boxes full of various objects. And then there is the clutter creep of popular science magazines, the occasional new CD from Japan, and a couple new computers each year. As the clutter creep advances, it will become harder to keep things reasonably clean, and eventually to find things.

Thinking about this on my way home from work, I came up with what I call the Pigsty Project. Despite the name, the purpose is to reduce the pigsty rating of my home. It is a very modest approach, because grand plans never even start, when I am involved.

Basically, each workday as I return from work, I will throw something away. (Unless I have already done so in the morning, but that is probably not likely, since I am barely conscious in the morning.) It need not be a big thing. It is the fact that there are 200 workdays a year I plan to capitalize on.

Today, I threw away a stack of New Scientist from last year. As I looked on them, each had at least one really interesting article that I just knew I wanted to read again someday. Unfortunately, I also knew that there are only 7 days in a week, and none of them is named Someday. Decades of observing and journaling my life has taught me that no matter how much I love a scientific article, I am not going to read it again – even over the course of a decade or more – until I have to throw it away.

This is consistent with the behavior I observed for many years in my workplace: When given new written information, filing it in a binder served as an alternative to reading it. When given information over e-mail, the procedure was expanded to printing out the mail and putting it in a binder instead of reading it. The binder was never opened again, except to put in more pages. Then when it was full, it was left to gather dust.

I am sorry, New Scientist. But that’s the way it goes. At least I stopped subscribing after one year, and will probably continue that way until they offer online-only subscriptions like The Economist does, where I can access the archives for an acceptable monthly sum without having trees killed and laid on my doorstep as by a vegetarian cat.

One other thing I did today, to prepare for the future, was make a new folder on my almost empty D: drive, named “My old CDs”. So yeah, one of the alternatives I can do when I come home from work is to rip one of the CDs from the plastic bags that have stood around since I moved, and before that stood around for years in the Chaos Node. Each day, unless I find something else worthy of killing, one of the oldest CDs will be ripped to MP3 or some such (FLAC would probably be overkill) and then the physical CD and cover destroyed.

Actually it would probably make more sense to drop it on a bench in the city (instead of destroying it), but that would be piracy, yes?

Now it just remains to remember it each day. Lacking any other enforcement, I can only trust the Invisible Hand to click on me each day as I return from work and select “Unclutter” from the menu. It seems like something the Invisible Hand would happily do. Perhaps even gleefully…

My unusual brain

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di090324

Well, I may be human but I wouldn’t say I’m ordinary…

I was slightly surprised that binaural brainwave entrainment seemed to work on me at all, even if just a tiny little bit. After all, my brain has been unusual as long as I can remember. Most notably, typical “right brain” talents are pretty much missing: The ability to draw, to keep a rhythm, to recognize faces. They are just not there. The rest of the brain can take up the slack to some degree: I will recognize faces eventually after seeing them often, just as I will recognize any other object that I’m around for a long time. But I’m just happy if I can remember my colleagues that I see every day, while others show up after twenty or thirty years and recognize you on the street. And so on.

(Oh, and I can’t sing with other people either. (I can sing alone.) And probably not make love, although I did not try that for years and fail to improve, as with singing. Judging from song and dance, I probably would have continued to fail though, so it was just as well.)

I also strongly favor my right hand. It is not that my left hand is hanging limply by my side. It assists well enough, and I can even touch-type. But it is always the right I rely on, whether for writing or throwing darts or eating. And there are many other indicators of handedness, like what eye you use to aim with a rifle or which way you cross your arms and legs. I did a test of those in one of Desmond Morris’ books once and got a staggering 10 out of 10 right hand (left brain). This is highly unusual. Put that together with the sheer absence of typical right-brain talents, and one could be forgiven for thinking I had been dropped on my head when I was a baby.

On the other side (literally), the typical left-brain talents are highly developed, more so than in the average person. I have a very large vocabulary, for instance. Bear in mind that English is my third language (after the two Norwegian languages) and that I have never visited an English-speaking country. I did learn English in high school, but most of what I know I have picked up later by just reading. On the other hand, I struggle with the Japanese Kanji (characters that symbolize a word or concept) since these rely on visual recognition of a complex pattern, a right-brain skill.

Another anomaly occurs when I go to sleep at night. According to the textbooks, humans first drift through chaotic dreams that seem to consist of thoughts and floating images, not lifelike or intense. There are two stadiums of this, evidently, though I know not the difference between them, and then you have a period of deep dreamless sleep. After that, you go through the same two levels on your way up again, and then have a time of vivid, lifelike and intense dreams (REM sleep) before you go down again. Each cycle lasts about 90 minutes. But I start dreaming the lifelike (only more intense than my daily life) dreams within minutes (possibly moments) after I go to sleep. I have woken up after less than five minutes from these dreams when they were scary enough to wake me.

And it does not end there. My almost autistic lack of social needs, for instance. When I am off from work, I can easily go a day or two literally without seeing another human. (Not even on TV – I don’t have a TV.) During November (which I take off from work whenever possible to take part in National Novel Writing Month) I can literally go a month without talking to anyone except to say “thank you” to the lady in the supermarket when she gives me back my change. In all fairness, I get the occasional e-mail, but my impression is that this kind of life would drive most human to despair. Me, I thoroughly enjoy it. I don’t miss the sight and sound and smell of humans (or cats or dogs).

Of course, part of this is the continuing Presence that I attribute to God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit, or some combination thereof, but I cannot really prove that even to myself. It just seems to fit the description, if you know what I mean. While I’d love for this to be a purely spiritual thing, I suspect that people come with different ability to perceive such a Presence. Certainly there are many, many Christians who are more pious than me (it really doesn’t take all that much) and who don’t sense it in the same way I do. And there seems to be at least some Hindus who have very similar experience, despite worshiping at different deity. So there may be a kind of “sense organ” for this, the infamous “God organ in the brain”. I would not mind if so. After all, the fact that we have a visual cortex has never been a convincing proof that the visible world is all in our mind…

There are probably other differences as well, that I just can’t remember off the top of my head. In truth it is hard to distribute human traits among body, mind and spirit. For me no less since I grew up with my biological parents (and even two grandparents) so “nature and nurture” were often aligned. But perhaps I have given you a glimpse of some differences that may go pretty deep.

Even with that though, I would still say I am “kind of” human. Of course, the proof of belonging to the same species is being able to interbreed, and so far there has been none of that! Still, I think we are similar enough that most any human could become as happy as I am. Come as you are and become like me! Tempting, is it not?

(“Come as you are and become like us” is a fairly well known phrase in Norway, depicting churches that appear inclusive and newbie-friendly in theory but who expect everyone to think and act the same once they are members.)

“Welcome to the family”

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di090319

Your opinion doesn’t really count when people have first decided to be nice.

I came home from work, and checked my physical mailbox. I was mildly surprised to find a package. Less surprised than last time I found a package, which was only yesterday. This one was not priority rush express, so I briefly entertained the notion that it might not be from Centerpointe Research Institute. On the other hand, I can’t think of anyone else who would send me stuff I don’t expect. It was marked as “gift” and “educational material”, which would match my longest reader, who also for a while would send me random books. (This bag was definitely book-sized.) On the other hand, I think I have convinced her to stop with that, after posting photos of my book shelves covered in two layers of books. Plus, I did not recognize the sender town.

Yes, dear reader. It is the amazing Bill Harris, founder and director of Centerpointe Research Institute, who has sent me another book, his own well-received Thresholds of the Mind. I am starting to wonder if he even turns a profit anymore. At least this was ordinary mail, and as such much cheaper than the priority express he normally uses.

The package also contained a letter. It started with “Dear friend” and concluded with “once again, welcome to the Centerpointe family”. Perhaps it was this that made me remember.

Many years ago, in my early days living in the basement apartment that was my original Chaos Node, long before the website or even before the web came to Norway, there was in the neighborhood a girl I liked. There was no romantic relationship between us, not that everyone was absolutely convinced about that, but we were good friends. Her father was also a friend of mine, I was around mid between them in age. One day he suddenly showed up at my apartment with various pieces of furniture. I guess this is a side effect of the golden rule — I can only assume he liked having people show up with furniture without asking whether he needed it. And evidently our dear friend Bill is of the same type. Welcome to the family indeed.

***

And yes, Bill, I am using the Awakening Prologue. Twice a day, actually, because I don’t get enough sleep at night, thanks to my sock allergy. Or whatever it is. I wake up with my feet itching like crazy. But at least I get to remember my dreams by waking up in the middle of the night, so it is good for something. This time I dreamed about a tsunami. But only a small one. Nobody died — none of the people I was with, at least. I am not so sure about the people who were wandering out staring at the starfish and stuff on the exposed sea bottom after the water had pulled out and before it came rolling back in.

I don’t think the dreams have anything to do with HoloSync. It is quite normal for me to have scary dreams in the beginning of the night – in fact, the first often starts within minutes of falling asleep – and then they gradually turn more pleasurable toward the morning.

Anyway, I had wanted to write more about HoloSync today, but then something actually happened in real life, and I remembered something I don-t think I have written about. Perhaps another time!

Oh, and the tooth from yesterday? It hurt less after half an hour with syncing, and was fine in the morning (after five hours of sleep). Yay! But I think it might be wise to try to go to bed earlier or something. I just have to find something really boring to do before bedtime. Perhaps the book Bill sent me can help with that?