Chickening out

"Strive to be infinitely beautiful and good"

Today I actually wrote and uploaded a decent length review of the movie The Laws of the Sun from Happy Science, based on their most loved book, the Happy Science answer to Genesis. Then I went to bed.

A bit over an hour later, I woke up alarmed. It was not quite a panic attack such as I had occasionally through my life (and may well have again, though it has been quite a while). Still, something was definitely wrong, I felt deep within. Reflecting on this, I found that the entry was the one thing I felt troubled about. I could not say whether I had been too critical or not critical enough. In fact, I felt I had no clear mandate from Heaven, so to speak, to opine on it. So I removed my entry from public view.

If you feel that you need to know more about it, feel free to contact me.

Sleeping while still alive

Sometimes I just lie in bed, looking at the shining plumbbob suspended in the air above me – no wait, that’s my sim. Me, I tend to fall asleep almost as soon as I get my headphones on. It is just getting there that takes a long time!

There is a saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, and sometimes I wonder if a part of me is thinking that way. Unfortunately, this attitude is likely to bring on the final sleep much earlier than necessary.

Over the last few days I feel more and more “run down”. It takes less exercise to make me stiff and sore. I believe sleep may be the missing ingredient. I have found in the past that physical exercise requires more sleep. For mental work, such as my job, a nap will do wonders. But when I actually burn off 500-1000 calories and use my muscles in slightly unfamiliar ways, my body needs the downtime to put itself back in full working orders.

Unfortunately, of late my good ideas appear as on cue around 11 PM.  Well, they may not be “good” in the Biblical sense, but they certainly are ideas. Whether journal entries (which may or may not ever be posted) or fiction, they emerge with unprecedented clarity when the clock should have encouraged me to put head to pillow.

I don’t generally suffer from insomnia these days. Well, to some small degree from the insomnia of the asylum seekers upstairs, who still tend to move their shouting closer to the bedroom at 0 – 1- 2 AM, but I have largely gotten used to that. Besides, I have the delta brainwave entrainment. But neither sleep nor delta entrainment go well with writing fiction about magic worlds or unexpected college romance. Or for that matter entries like this, finished around 23:55 European time.

A different discontent

I suck at being ordinary. Without the council of my heart, I am just a middle-aged guy playing The Sims. That is just not much to write home about.

I have installed Spore again, the world’s most epic strategy game ever, where you start as a small simple single-celled organism and evolve to dominate the galaxy, perhaps. I remember thinking, back in 2008, that I would like to play it for many years, filling thousands of planets with life. But this no longer appears to me a great way to spend my old age, if any. At least the Sims are a kind of model of the real world, more or less. Well, mostly less, but still. Perhaps at some point I shall learn to relate to aliens with three arms on their back and a head at each end, but it seems less than urgent at this time.

I made my way through one science fiction novel by the esteemed Vernor Vinge, may he live forever or as long as he wishes. But I got bogged down in the second, well written though it may be. SF kind of feels like a past thing for me now, no offense to the writer.

The different discontent inside me is this, that I am not discontent with my conditions, by and large. I have more than enough food, clothes, space, computers and so on. I thoroughly enjoy being single. I have the 24 hours a day that each mortal is allotted, hard to complain about that.  It is myself I am underwhelmed by.

I really don’t think I can give off much brightness by myself. What I have to share of value seems to come not really from me as such, but from the deeper part in me, from whatever structure has been built there in my subconscious, or from whatever being(s?) have set up camp there. How long has it been that way? Pretty long, I think. But how can I be sure I have got this right? Anyone who has revelations think they are awesome, I am sure. Yet some lead people astray, and some are just dumb, or miss the points that are worthwhile. The true nature of the tree is best deemed by its fruit, and the true nature of revelation is deemed by the virtue it imparts. This is what limits me, but not as much as it should, I fear.

As Elias Aslaksen says somewhere: “The speed of a human is like the lightning when it comes to puff himself up, but slower than the snail when it comes to humbling himself.” And that, when applied to myself, is grounds for discontent. Although a different one from what I had when I grew up, thank the Light.

Still here

I have not disappeared yet. I am writing pretty much every day but mostly I don’t upload it. I am also reading Vernor Vinge on my spare time. Unlike my usual reading, this is science fiction. Vinge was the man who coined the term “singularity” for the logical endpoint of the accelerating acceleration of the the pace of change. If we keep halving the time it takes to double our knowledge, sooner or later we will reach a point when change happens so fast, a human will no longer be able to follow, and it will not be possible to see from this side of it what the world will look like afterwards.

He is also a pretty good writer, for a maths professor.

Mouravieff, me & 3 time dimensions

What’s happening to my life?” When people ask this, they usually wonder why they got a horrible illness or their dog died the day their girlfriend / boyfriend broke up with them, stuff like that. Not that some weird guy beloved by a UFO cult plagiarized their revelations years before they were even born. Is this the power of God or a devil?

Back to the friendly but suspicious person called Boris Mouravieff. While reading his book, I come to a point where I seriously wonder if he may have gone off the deep end, when he starts calculating the lifespans of the astral and mental bodies. And then right after that, I see this:

For the moment, it will be sufficient to say that Time possesses not one but three dimensions, and that these dimensions are strictly analogous to those of Space.

This statement may, to the casual reader, seem even crazier than the 2.4 million year lifespan of the astral body. However, what gave me the creeps was that I wrote roughly the same thing on June 6, 2010: 3 time dimensions of the mind. I went out of my way to explain that these were indeed mental rather than physical, although I seem to remember some further discussion with Llama on that topic. I don’t blame him for being skeptical. What bothers me is not that people don’t know this. What bothers me is that I do.

Mouravieff has been mentioned a few times on the One Cosmos blog, cautiously, but only a couple of his most famous statements. This is not one of them. The only online source that quotes him with any regularity, as far as I can see, is some kind of UFO cult. It is impossible that I could have come upon him long enough ago to have completely forgotten it, I think. I have a healthy respect for cryptomnesia, but in this case I vaguely remember how I made that post, and it was inspired by certain experiences (mine and others’) in meditation and such, rather than anything I had read from the outside. I probably thought in all honesty that I was the first person to come up with that particular way of expressing it.

It does not stop there. Further down the same page, Mouravieff explicitly refers to the name of the fifth dimension as “Eternity”. I know I have written a couple entries – although I am fairly sure I refrained from uploading them (this happens more often than I tell you) – entries in which I explicitly refer to the fifth dimension as “eternity” or “timelessness”. One reason not to upload it was the confusion of using these words which are saturated with a different meaning (especially the first) for common people.

You see, when we use a word like “eternity” in public (and Christianity has gone from being a mystery religion to being very public indeed), then 4-dimensional people, whose understanding of life is completely contained within the four dimensions of time and space, still think they are supposed to understand the word. Usually this happens during childhood, at which point only a very few specially chosen souls could possibly have any idea of the world beyond the fourth dimension. So they don’t think to themselves “this is a strange word and I should not have an opinion on it until I have at least some months of spiritual practice, preferably years”. They think to themselves “I know this from context”. Or, more commonly, they are children and don’t understand this from context, but instead they ask someone who is as ignorant as themselves but much older, and get told that “eternity means a time that never ends” or words to that effect.

I suppose “time that never ends” is one meaning of it, in a certain context. But it is actually more like the sky that is always above us. The four-dimensional world in which we live our mortal lives is like the horizontal world, the ground on which we travel. But at right angles to it is another dimension, and if we for the first time in our life lift our head and look upward, we see the sky. And there is something strange about the sky: It is always above us. Whether we travel to the east or the west, the sky is still there. Whether we walk across plains, climb across mountains or sail across seas, the sky is still there. It is above us the day we start our voyage, and it is still there, the same sky, when we end it, even if we are now on the opposite side of the world. Fog and clouds may obscure it, extensions of the horizontal world, but we know that the sky is still there above the clouds.

Well, that is how I see it, but who knows. What I mean is that there is something beyond time, and this eternity can touch time and infuse it so that it becomes sacred time. This is something I actually picked up from One Cosmos, which again quotes a seeming very sane Rabbi. The part about sacred time, I mean. The purpose of the Sabbath and all that. But this is not really something I should preach, I don’t keep the Sabbath. I have meditated some, though, and that is where I have what I think is direct experience of the pinhole in the roof of time, that lets us peek out in a completely new dimension in the mind.

I am not really sure I should write about such things. It bothers me to see Mouravieff write about something I thought was just my own approximation to something that cannot really be explained unless you have been there. Who am I to talk about such things? Am I immune – or at least resistant – enough to deceit, that I can talk about things that may influence people’s choices of Eternity?

When the Web was new, I wrote one of the early plain and simple introductions to meditation. And one thing I stressed toward the end was that if your meditation practice leads you to realize that you are a Very Important Person in the cosmic hierarchy, you better take a break. I fear that discovering the esoteric science of Mouravieff independently from him may be very close to such an experience. Knowledge inflates, as the Bible says, but that deserves its own entry. Which, incidentally, runs the risk of inflating me even more. As if the pasta is not giving me enough gas.

Intentionally left almost blank

I keep writing entries on spirituality, religion and philosophy and deciding to not upload them, at least not yet. They may not be perfect, or they may be too perfect for me, or I just may have too much of my iceberg above water for its stability. In any case, I am writing but not not uploading. Perhaps it is a mistake, perhaps The World Needs To Know, but I have to make the call.

 

Spiritual asparagus writing

I wrote yet a couple more saintly entries based on the two latest books I am reading. I really need to stop doing that. Reading something is not the same as having absorbed it, even in an intellectual sense. Much less having let the word become flesh.

Asparagus writing. You know, unlike fruits that have matured or vegetables that have grown to maturity, asparagus are picked while they are shots, just coming up from the ground. There is a farm near Riverview where they sell these in the spring. Not a bad word about asparagus (at least if you suffer from constipation, of which they are the antithesis in my experience). But I really should not write about religious metaphysics as soon as the first green shots of it peek up in my mind.

Stupid people don’t read this

“Even if they can’t read the message, they would know what this picture means.” In the days before widespread literacy, there was sacred art, sacred architecture and sacred music. But I can only paint and compose in words.

There is no comma in today’s subject line. There is no need to say “stupid people, don’t read this”, because they can’t. It is too much bother for them, poor things. tl;dr as they say these days.

I know this not just from the level of response I get, but also from this article in Business Insider: Bite-Sized Chunks Of Info Are Best. Here we learn that “Humans can only process small amounts of information at a time” … “There is no chunking here, there is not progressive disclosure. It’s just all the information thrown on the page all at once. The result? You don’t read it, you just leave.” Sounds like one of my regular pages, don’t you think?

Well, there is nothing wrong with just leaving. Even though I write mostly in middle school level language, it may just be too much for ordinary humans. I am not all surprised; I went to school with ordinary humans. They keep the wheels of capitalism turning, but I’d feel rather weird if they started hanging out here in droves. I mean, it would be kind of nice if they could learn happiness from me. But they would probably look mostly at the pictures and headlines and conclude that “the key to happiness is to be single, play computer games and watch anime.”  ^_^

***

As I have said before, I actually have a lot of respect for simple-minded people. Many of them manage to persevere and often accomplish something in this life, even though they walk as if in a fog. Many live morally, even though they are not able to foresee the sorrow and heartbreak that immoral living would cause for themselves and others further ahead in time. I am certainly not all-knowing, but often I can see such things ahead and it is simply practical to drop such temptations as gambling, non-medicinal drinking, pyramid schemes and careless flirtation. They are, past a certain point, not even tempting. But for those who can’t see the world as if from a very high place, these and many other temptations are mostly resisted by faith alone, or fear of getting caught.

I – and you, if you have read this far – are privileged. Written words are our friends, not our enemies. And so we are allowed into the library of the ages, there to learn from the great teachers who have preceded us. They teach us not only facts, but how to think, sometimes even how to think about thought. It is like a kind of superpower, of the type that starts small and grows over time and use. But with great power comes great responsibility, as Jesus Christ said. Wait, that was not exactly what he said… “unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required” is the old-fashioned English version. But the point still stands, and it is a rather sharp point and painful to touch for me.

I don’t want to go to my eternal dwellings yet. I have still so much to learn, and so much to teach. I wish to say all the worlds that should be spoken, before they are lost forever. But how, when I cannot reach those who need it the most?

 

Kind of back. Perhaps.

And again, like a miracle, new life.

I followed the recipe from my webhost, Dreamhost, who were the ones who discovered the hack in the first place and did what they could to clean it out. They could not get at all files though. They advised me rather strongly to follow a procedure for removing the previous installation and installing a new, clean one. I have done so both for this and the Slice of life blogs. After some experimenting, both are back with all the content intact. Sort of.

See, it is no longer possible to comment, or to go to a single post (for instance from the list in the right margin). The posts seem not to be on the server, even though they show up when viewing the blog at its top level / front page.

Even a new post, written after I rebuilt the blog, will appear in the same way. It shows up just fine at the front page, but it cannot be commented on. Which was one of the main benefits of using a blogging platform, I guess. Sorry about that.

EDIT: Found and fixed it. I had to go to the Settings page  “Permalinks” and even though it seemed to remember the chosen format (and indeed it did), I had to save it again. Immediately it sprang back to life.

The extended comment options are currently disabled because these were the only remaining repositories of the infection, in the previous installation. I am not sure if this means some of you will have to register anew. You will not be able to log in using various other popular identities like Google, Facebook etc for the time being. It’s not like I have a crowd here anyway.

Hacked again!

This time it is the Chaos Node that is hacked, not my Google account, which is a relief.  It also looks like they have done nothing to deface my website. They have run some kind of script infecting a huge number of files in my Slice of Life blog. My storage provider, Dreamhost, has cleaned almost all of these. It seems it is a vulnerability in WordPress that has caused this. This is a recurring problem for WordPress, although it is the first time for me. Perhaps I should have continued to hand-code my website after all!

I have changed my password (since some guys in the UK have used it lately, according to Dreamhost) and switched from FTP to SFTP. That is a file transfer protocol where everything is encrypted, although I am not sure whether that will be of any help when WordPress plugins and themes are vulnerable.