Category Archives: philosophy

Blowing on embers

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The raging fire inside translates into a pleasant warmth when you pass by it.

The summer was cooler (in temperature, I mean) than I am used to. Some people blame the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland. Certainly the autumn has also come faster than usual, although we have had no snow yet and only a couple nights of frost. The thermometer in my living room soon went down to 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) and has pretty much stayed there for about a month. It has not gone much below that, even after cold nights. It is as if the house cannot really believe it can get colder in the living room while there are people living in it.

But I don’t live in the living room, I live in the home office. And in the bedroom at night. The home office is still heated enough by the computers, when I keep the door closed. Although today is is just barely.

And today, the living room thermometer went below 14 degrees C (57F). So I fired up the wood stove again.

It is more like a test run, really. I am not going to heat the whole house pleasantly warm throughout winter, but I intend to burn wood every day to help keep the pipes from freezing. That is not really a problem yet, probably not for several weeks.

I first put some balled-up newspaper pages in the stove, then put in an empty yogurt carton filled with other, flattened cartons to a compact mass. This burns like a very porous wood and is a great way to get a fire started. After a while I returned and put wood on.  By then, there was only embers, and they seemed to like it that way. So I found a drinking straw and used it to blow on the embers. Soon they flared into an intense flame, easily igniting the wood. It has been burning since, with the occasional new piece of wood thrown in.

***

And this, dear congregation, is my text today. Because something similar happened to me. I have gotten my hand on the book The Intellectual Life by A G Sertillanges. It is an old book, the last foreword by the author from 1934, and the book had already been in print for a good while by then. It may be around a century old, or nearly so.  It is certainly from a time when there was no contradiction between the words “intellectual” and “Christian”, rather the author seems to assume that any serious intellectual would also be a Catholic or at least a Christian.

How did we get from there to here?  I don’t know. It happened before my time, I believe, or at least before I started thinking about such things.

Be that as it may, the book bears a striking resemblance to parts of the writing of Ryuho Okawa, more exactly his writing about Wisdom, one of the four pillars of the “modern four-fold path”: Love that gives, Wisdom, Self-reflection and Progress.  Okawa’s view of wisdom is so strikingly similar to the older book that I am certain he must have read it, and it must have resonated within his heart as it does in mine.  Then again Mr Okawa supposedly reads about 1000 books a year, so it is no wonder if he has read this. And if he has, it is no wonder it made a deep impression on him. It probably would on anyone able to work through its somewhat dense language.

Yes, Sertillanges writes for the intellectual, and he does not bother to make it easy to read. Why would he? Intellectuals should be accustomed to heavy reading. His writing is quite a bit harder to read than mine, whereas Okawa can probably be read even by 12 year olds if they are interested in the subject matter.

I have not read far yet. I hope to write more about the book once I have finished it, or at least read a goodly part of it.  But the effect was very much like blowing on embers.  My desire for a life of the spirit flared up, and with it a willingness to spend more of my time and my thought on higher matters. That means, among other things, that I won’t be punishing those treacherous Greeks in Civilization V tonight. ^_^ Or anytime soon, I suppose.

Not that there is anything wrong with playing Civ5. To quote Okawa, whose latest book I reread a bit of later today: “For example, if you wish to graduate from university with good grades, find a good job, and be successful in society, you cannot spend all your time gambling. This might be fine if you intend to live the life of a professional gambler or if you want to gamble moderately, work moderately, and live a moderate life. If you have high aspirations and need to concentrate on achieving them, however, you must give up your gambling activities, even if you enjoy them.” If you replace gambling with gaming, you’ll see what I mean. Do I wish to live a moderate life, or do I have higher aspirations? That’s where the fire of the heart comes in.

Life Divine… or not

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Unfortunately, it is not something we can get to by just dreaming about it.

I bought a book again. Despite my earlier criticism of the Kindle, I did buy the Kindle edition. At least it was 55% off, but truly they ought to be 75% off. After all, you can get half the price of a used book back from a used-book store, if it is treated reasonably well. And before that, you can lend it to your friends, if they treat it reasonably well. (And they should, if they want to be your friends!)

Anyway, it was a heavy tome, so if we add the cost of shipping it to Norway, I came pretty close to saving my 75%. Keep moving in this direction, Amazon!

The book this time was The Life Divine, by none less than Sri Aurobindo himself. He is like the Teilhard de Chardin of Hinduism, except with a name I can spell. OK, Teilhard probably did not have a history as a freedom fighter before turning to metaphysics, but they are both famous for integrating evolution into religion. Or perhaps the other way around.

(On a lighter note, I seem to have named my first spacefaring race in Spore “Bindo” in honor of him, last year (?) when I played that. Spore is a game of guided evolution, based on the assumption that nature has an innate drive toward sentience and that a cosmos filled with intelligent and creative life is unavoidable. I am sure Sri Aurobindo would have agreed, though he would surely not have had time to play it himself. Neither have I, these days, although my reasons are less admirable.)

The book is said to be 1100 pages, although it is obviously many more on my mobile phone. The prose is heavy, even to me. (I am not sure if it is heavier than mine, or just heavy in a different way.) Then again he was not a native English speaker, but came from India. Perhaps we foreigners tend to go wild in the language’s immense vocabulary? Luckily I have been assured that the book contains many repetitions, though I have not come to them yet. Repetitions as in saying the same things over in a slightly different way. Apart from that, I suppose we don’t have that much in common, Sri Aurobindo and I.

The thought has struck me that this is a book that would have been nice to have in my bookshelf. Â If nothing else, there is a good chance that my heirs would find it on my bookshelf after my passing (may it yet be far off) and think to themselves: “A thick book about The Life Divine? Surely Uncle Magnus must have passed on to a better place, then, having had such interests in his later years!” And they would feel comforted.

Unfortunately, their comfort would be somewhat exaggerated. Even reading The Life Divine is none too easy, but living one is still much further off. And it is still too early to say for sure whether this book will help me toward that goal. But even should it do so, that alone will not be enough.

I am obviously not talking about good vs evil here. And certainly not spirit vs matter. I am happy to see already in the second chapter of the book, Aurobindo establishes that matter and spirit are different in degree rather than being opposites. This is also the Biblical doctrine: All creation comes from the same One, who also in the end will be All in All. Â For this reason, we pray: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” rather than “Please let us escape this goddamn material world and flee to your spiritual Heaven”.

I was about to apply the usual disclaimers, but I don’t think even I should add disclaimers to the Lord’s Prayer…

It is when it comes to the details that it becomes hard to pray “Thy will be done”. But then again that has never been easy. It was, by all accounts, not easy for Jesus either. But then Jesus presumably did not have a Jesus, while we have.

In any case, the idea for which Aurobindo is famous is not so much theological as just logical. Seeing how matter gave rise to life, and life to mind, we must assume that mind will give rise to supermind, a higher consciousness. Since there have already been some people with a higher consciousness, they can be seen as harbingers or forerunners for the rest of us.

(I wrote vaguely about this in my “Next Big Thing” series of essays, probably my most important writing in this blog. Or it would have been important if others had not said it better before me, but at the time I did not know of that. And this is its value. It is the notes of an explorer, not of a parrot.)

(Ironically, the more I learn about esoteric matters, the harder it becomes to come up with an original thought that I have not already seen elsewhere. But then again, re-inventing the wheel is overrated, especially if you can get a rounder wheel from someone else for free!)

***

My own life is certainly not divine these days. I wake up morning after morning filled with lust, so that it is difficult to not look twice at the women I see on the bus or in the city, and I had to suspend my fiction project as I kept imagining embarrassing things about the main character.

I am not convinced that this is coincidence. It seems to me that in the world of the mind, much like in physics, any action leads to an opposite reaction. So by taking an interest in the higher mind, perhaps I indirectly vitalize the lower mind. The totality of the psyche has a great inertia, I believe.

Then again, your psyche may vary.

Diversity of ignorance

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It may not have turned out the way I planned when I was 12, but at least I got this part right!

Once again, Bjørn Stærk has an astounding little entry in his blog. When thinking of this man, to my mind comes the expression from the Book of Daniel, chapter 5, verse 11: “…illumination, insight and wisdom like the wisdom of the gods were found in him.” (In all fairness, the wisdom of the gods at that time was perhaps less impressive than we might wish for in a god today.) There is, to once again reference the book of Daniel, “a high spirit in him”. This is even though he is not religious in the traditional sense. I am not sure if I have any part in that lack of religion: We have had communication since many years ago, and he may be one of those who picked up my habit of meditation, which is more transformative than I knew at that time.

Be that as it may, you should make a habit of keeping track of this man. Even when I am gone, he is likely to continue to illuminate the world, for he is many years my junior, and yet in some ways ahead of me.

Trying to be ignorant about different things than everyone else is a short and concise argument for diversity of knowledge. He does not belabor the point that we today have an astounding diversity of knowledge in our work, and that a shared knowledge base in our free time may help retain social cohesion. I largely agree with him: There is if anything less diversity in the freetime of the non-knowledge workers, so it seems to me.

I remember when I was about 12 years old, I decided to learn unusual things, so that my future wife and I together would cover a large spectrum of knowledge. I don’t think this decision has contributed much to me still being single nearly 40 years later — there are too many other reasons for that — but it may have contributed to my happiness. Some familiarity with mainstream knowledge is bound to seep in even from basic socialization, so even alone I have some of that spread of insight that I aimed for. And I love it.

But go read at Bearstrong.net, there is indeed light and insight like the wisdom of small gods. Although he has diversified out of writing only that, it is still a good place to graze.

What is a High Spirit?

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Thomas Edison was hardly a saint, but his tireless efforts have helped millions of people even after his death, so he is portrayed as a High Spirit in “The Laws of Eternity”, a book and movie by Happy Science.

In the new Japanese religion Kofuku-no-Kagaku (Science of Happiness, also translated Happy Science) there is an interesting concept called “High Spirits”. Not in the English sense of someone being in high spirits, though I suppose there may be a connection by accident of language.

Let me explain in my own words, since I have never seen it defined.

In this life, a High Spirit is someone who wants to help many, and is also able to do it.

A High Spirit continues to inspire people even after leaving this world.

In the distant past, people may have worshiped such High Spirits as gods. Later they were venerated as saints (in Christianity) or Bodhisattvas (in Buddhism). The many avatars in Hinduism may also have been the same type of person. Outside religion, they may appear as scientists and philosophers.

Obviously not just any philosophy has the ability to help many people. Some may even do the opposite, as do many branches of religion. Even an honest wish to save or help people is not enough, you also need to be qualified to do it. This is not something you can just shrug into like a coat. It must be your being – who you really are.

I think this is an interesting concept because it is non-sectarian. Normally a Christian would only acknowledge Christian saints and try to downplay all other people who have done good in the world, but is this really something Jesus, known as The Truth, would agree with? There are obviously things that you cannot do across religions, but there are also things you can do. Even a Muslim benefits from Newton’s discoveries, even though Newton was certainly not a Muslim to the best of his knowledge. And so on.

In any case, even though I am not a member of Kofuku-no-Kagaku, I have adopted this concept as a useful tool in my toolbox of thought. I can’t say that I am such a High Spirit myself. But (here in Norway at least) we have a true saying: “You will become like those you are together with.” So I suppose it might still happen if I live my 120 years… Well, perhaps a “Slightly Elevated Spirit”?

RPGs and spirituality

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We live in a world bound by rules. And even though we try to push the limits, they are there. But while we are here, we are simultaneously in another, greater world, in which this world is just like a shared dream: Small, limited, not quite real. And the rules that apply to our world are different from those that apply to the greater world, the Real World to which we all return when we log off.

It was around 1964 that I got the basic inspiration for what we today call “role-playing games”, or RPGs. In its basic form, it consisted of a hero, a sword, potions, trolls to be defeated, and leveling up. The levels were counted by the number of heads on the trolls. Admittedly a rather rudimentary design, but then again I was about six years old. The world’s first official RPG was released in Sweden approximately ten years later unbeknown to me. At that time I was already a teenager, but I did not play RPGs. I only learned about these later, and was surprised.

The people who were young when the first wave or RPGs spread around the western world? They are now ruling that world. They are the politicians, the businessmen, the preachers, and the women who bring all of these low when the time comes. Today we live in the first society where RPGs are widespread, a natural part of culture.

Regular playing of RPGs are likely to accustom people to the thought that there are different levels of reality at which a world can exist. Clearly the worlds of City of Heroes or The Sims are much less real than our world, and yet they are quite fleshed out with so many different possibilities that all humans now alive, if they spent as much of their lives as biologically possible just playing these games, would not in a lifetime exhaust all possible combinations, even if there was no new content added (which there is several times a year).

As these virtual worlds become ever more lifelike, there is bound to sneak in a suspicion that our world may not be the most real one. Thus, The Matrix. But Buddhists have claimed for 2500 years or so that this world is illusionary, except perhaps for the mind itself. Other religions also chime in that the Real World is “up there”, not here on Earth.

Clearly spirituality came first, by thousands of years, before roleplaying games. But do these games influence our openness to spiritual beliefs? Or is it the other way around, that people with an earlier, more concrete mindset would not have wanted to play RPGs even if they existed? Have children throughout history discovered the basics of RPGs, only to lay them aside when they grew into the more earthbound spirit of their times?

People are stupid and crazy

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Parental explosions is just one of the things most humans have to contend with. Parents should be filled with inexhaustible love and wisdom, but sometimes the difference between father and toddler is mainly one of physical strength. People are stupid and crazy.

Today I want to write calmly and objectively about the fact that most people are stupid and crazy.

In the past, we were in contact with only a few people. In the village, the same people were our neighbors, friends (or enemies) and more or less distant relatives. Today, I hear from people living in different towns or cities and even different countries. And yet many of them have the same experience: They are surrounded by idiots. Neighbors, customers, coworkers, fellow travelers, even relatives. Usually stupid, sometimes crazy, or both.

The reaction varies, depending on temperament and the actions to which they are exposed: From amusement to disdain to anger. But there is another emotion underlying these, and that is what I want to confront: Surprise. Somehow there is the expectation that ordinary people should not be stupid or crazy, that this should be reserved for a special few. And with that comes the logical question of why these few have decided to cluster around me. Why me? Why must I, of all people, be surrounded by idiots?

The truth is that almost all people are surrounded by idiots, because almost all people are idiots. This is not new. Throughout recorded history, there has never been a time when most people were smart and sane. Historians have simply decided to ignore this for the most part, mercifully. Actually, I believe things were worse in the past. Much worse.

I present to you the fact that around the year 1900, when my maternal grandfather was already born, it was considered perfectly reasonable for men of good breed and classical education to duel to the death over the heart of a lady. The survivor, if any, would then presumably take ownership of the Cattle With Breasts, who generally had no reservations or at least no ability to enforce them. Today, in the upper layers of society, I dare say that people would simply ask her to choose instead. But people were dumber then, impossible as this may seem at times.

Seriously, throughout most of history, most people were illiterate, uneducated, malnourished and forced to work hard from early childhood. Being stupid and crazy came with the territory. The few glaring exceptions are the ones who are remembered today, for the simple reason that they created today’s culture. We are their cultural heirs. Without the exceptions we would not been here.

So what is your neighbor’s excuse today? We are no longer illiterate, malnourished and forced into child labor. Why don’t we all grow up to paragons of wisdom and sanity?

Well, one thing is the purely biological mental capacity. In an age where it was normal to be stupid and crazy, there was no strong selection pressure to weed out the stupid and crazy. Quite possibly the opposite, at times. As long as you could till the soil, milk the cows, and not try to reform religion, you were good to go. You stood an excellent chance to survive long enough to reproduce, especially since you probably started early. Of course, many of your children would die, but being smart or sane would not have changed that, since there was no option to have your children vaccinated or even to learn that drinking uncooked water might kill them.

Then there is the matter of family tradition. If your great-grandparents were stupid and crazy, how do you think they raised your grandparents? And how did your grandparents raise your parents? Somewhere along the road you and I lucked out. Someone intervened, quite likely a teacher, breaking the chain of insanity and tempting someone into thinking more clearly, or more at all. Perhaps someone even just stumbled across a book, and having learned to read in school, found within the book the seeds of sanity. It was no sure thing. I can bring witnesses that not all teachers even today make a big difference in favor of wisdom.

In the last instance, there is also the personal responsibility. Even if you have the opportunity to become a bright light, you may decide not to, or simply not decide at all. Many promising young people decide that there is more fun to be had by taking various drugs or simply getting dangerously drunk repeatedly, even if it impacts their future brain function. Or they just have other hobbies than thinking. The day only has so many hours, after all.

So when we meet a stranger, we should not do so with the expectation that they will be just like us. The very fact that you have been able to wade through this vast text (with long words here and there) is proof that you are not an average person. I am not recommending paranoia, of course. Most people are not actually malicious, just stupid and to some extent mentally unhinged. They don’t particularly want to hurt you. In fact, you are probably not quite real to them, as most people have plenty enough with thinking of themselves and, in the happier cases, their closest family. You are just a bystander that may provide them with money, sex or someone to yell at when angry.

You may think me a misanthrope at this point. And it is true that I have studied misanthropology for a long time, but I have done so largely in my own life. I have studied why I, of all people, fail to live up to my expectations. And so I have concluded that being human is not all that easy, even with a good starting point, which most people don’t have.

We should love and help people, because they need it, and because it is the right thing to do. If the reasonably smart, reasonably sane people don’t try to help keep the wagon on the road, who will? The blind, leading the blind?

To borrow an allegory from Ryuho Okawa’s latest book (Change Your Life, Change the World), a loveless society is like a hospital filled with patients screaming and moaning in pain. If there are no healers of the soul, how will they get better? Should we just quietly hope that they will die so the screaming stops? It is not likely, there will be new patients replacing the old.

Now, I am not well suited to go out among people and spread love and joy. After all, I am a weirdo. But someone who has an established family life, non-ugly looks or an admirable economy may be in a position to impress those around them with the benefits of sanity. Please, consider it, or at least don’t go around with a shaker of salt for their wounds…

“All this time”

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That shadowy figure in your room is not actually shadowy, you just cannot see her, although she can see you. She is actually beautiful and wise, and she is trying to wake you up to the Truth. She is always watching over you with warm eyes, full of hope and love, that she wants you to share with the world.

It was almost bedtime and I was testing the clock radio because this morning my cell phone did not trigger its alarm clock as it should. I got up at normal time anyway, but I may not always be that lucky. So I plugged back in the clock radio from before I got the smartphone. It played a pretty, pretty song. I recognized it, but not completely. It had a phrase that repeated a lot though, so I guessed that was the title of the song. I was right. It was the song “All this time” by Maria Mena.

I was struck by how sweet and light it was, like fluffy low-fat vanilla ice cream. And what I picked up of the text was also amazing to me. Lyrics these days tend to be either trite or indecent or cynical. This… this was like something out of one of Ryuho Okawa’s books. Well, except for the “barefoot and pregnant” quip. Her guiding spirit must have cringed over that one, I imagine. (Not that it isn’t true, necessarily, but it is hardly kind. Or respectful to the barefoot, pregnant women of the world.) It must be what we here call “emergency rhyme”, like you find in doggerel. The rest, though? Sheer sixth-dimensional beauty.

Here is a link to a YouTube video. It is not quite as beautiful visually as I imagined from the song, but still hair-raising in its own way. The more mature looking girl is evidently invisible or at least not quite real to the younger, more casual looking one, but still able to convey her thoughts to some degree – like a guiding spirit! And the unnaturally bright lightning bugs at the end make sense if they symbolize inspiration. So we have a guardian or guiding spirit inspiring someone of extraordinary ability while trying to bring across a message of self-reflection, hope, and gratitude. Whoa.

I don’t know more about Maria Mena than I picked up from a quick search on the Internet. She is born in 1986 and still had (as of last discussions) a boyfriend rather than a husband, so it is almost certain that she is not religious in the sense that I would use the word. Spiritual, almost certainly – postmodern people with accomplishments are spiritual unless they confess to strict apelike materialism.

I don’t expect her other songs to be similar to this. I have not heard any of them yet, but it is obvious from this one that it is a case of inspiration in a pretty much literal sense. Written not so much by her as by her guardian or guiding spirit. That’s why it is superhumanly good – at least to us on a vaguely similar wavelength. Not sure how it feels for ordinary people. I am pretty sure people who love rap etc will suffer pain in their disharmonious souls from something as beautiful as this. (Classical music has proved effective in driving away drug addicts and petty criminals from public places in Britain. Conversely, rap has proved effective in driving me away from record stores before I could buy anything.)

Watching it again, I can also see the more mature woman as the future self of the younger, although they don’t look quite alike enough for that. In either case, the guardian spirit or sister soul is part of the greater self according to Happy Science. Different souls made from the same spirit. (We Christians have some other resources, as you may be aware, but I’m not going to dedicate this entry to Christian theology.) In either case, the exact interpretation is not important and may even get in the way. Just watch it and share in the happiness. Learn it, love it, live it. It is a pretty good introduction to the science of happiness, probably much to her surprise if she ever finds out. With some luck, I am under her radar though. ^_^

Warning: As with all super happy songs and other pleasures, continuous exposure for a long time will use up the happiness neurochemicals in your brain for a while. This is not a joke, the human brain is simply not made for intense joy to go on and on, although how long is too long depends on your baseline level of happiness.

Bookshelves of happiness

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In the computer game The Sims 2, in the Seasons expansion, there is a new career called Education. When reaching the higher levels of this career, the simulated person gets a free bookshelf. But this is not just any old bookshelf. It allows the reader to learn any skill, even those not usually of a bookish nature, at double speed.

In the Sim story I am currently writing, the bookshelf falls into the hands of a newlywed couple, both of which are Knowledge sims. That is to say, their main aspiration in life is knowledge and skills. They constantly want to improve their skills, and because this bookshelf lets them do that quickly, they are constantly in Platinum mood, the highest happiness for a sim.

With the FreeTime expansion, the game got another feature: Lifetime happiness. As long as the sims are happy, they very slowly accumulate lifetime happiness. Over time this lets them gain certain benefits, like needing a little less sleep or being content alone for longer. Eventually the lifetime meter reaches its maximum, and the sim from now on is naturally happy all the time for the rest of his or her life.

By the time I took this picture, Jenny (the sim in the picture) had achieved this “permaplat” – permanent platinum mood – of which I have written occasionally in the past. There were a number of things that contributed to that, including her recent marriage, but the final push came from the bookshelf.

In other news, Ryuho Okawa has now written more than 600 books (used to be more than 500). Hermes Trismegistus supposedly wrote several thousand books, covering virtually all knowledge in the ancient world, so his reincarnation definitely has the work cut out for him. (Only a few books by Hermes are preserved from antiquity, and what I have seen from them is pretty cryptic.)

In other news, I bought my first Kindle e-book on Friday. I don’t much like Amazon’s policy of pricing the virtually costless Kindle books higher than paper books. It is insulting and morally wrong, and the trees would almost certainly vote against it. But being able to read on my mobile phone when I don’t carry with me other books is definitely worth ruffling some principles over. The book I bought was Tao Te Ching, the short compilation of the wisdom of Tao, attributed to Lao-Tzu. English translations of his works are generally more like interpretations, since a vast gap in time and culture and language separate the texts. This one is supposed to be particularly faithful to the text, as testified by actual Chinese readers.

I am not a sim, but I am still trying to build my own bookshelf of happiness. I don’t expect whoever inherits my books to gain much joy from them though. Even for humans, it depends on your aspiration. Books of timeless wisdom is not for everyone, more is the pity. And even for us who aspire to knowledge and insight, not everyone finds the same texts easy or joyful to read. So it takes some experimenting, even if you know others who have found lifelong happiness in their reading. Still, it is certainly worth a try, to build your own bookshelf of lifelong happiness.

Writing like a God

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The view from right outside my door. It just keeps flowing every day!

Woke up two hours early today thanks to a desperate bumblebee, so here is a morning post!

I recently finished reading Ryuho Okawa’s book The Laws of Courage and I’m dipping my toes in Frithjof Schuon’s Survey of Metaphysics. The latter is much harder to read, as are all his books that I know of. It is extremely dense and precise and uses many long words that are rarely used, including some even I haven’t seen before. His writing is also consistently abstract. Well, I am not really complaining — I know some of my writing may look like that to the random visitor. I’m working on it, though.

Back to the would-be savior from outer space. I often think to myself that Ryuho Okawa truly writes like a god — more exactly Hermes, the god of speed. I mean, writing 500 books in a couple of decades? But that is not enough. In The Laws of Courage, he casually mentions that he reads approximately 1000 books a year.  (That’s why he didn’t find it unreasonable to say that the first step towards becoming an intellectual is to have read 1000 books. A statement I don’t find it hard to agree with, although I have no idea how many I have read. Probably comes well over that number only if we include fantasy and science fiction, or even worse, western books, of which my brother had at least a couple hundred during my puberty. I don’t really think they should count toward becoming an intellectual though. -_-)

My own attempt at fiction writing this month goes forward very slowly. Ironically, I think I could write much, much faster if I were to write books of the Truth, but at this time I am not qualified to do that.  Or at the very least I am not allowed to by the source of that Truth. There is just too much responsibility, and I am not yet a very responsible person.

However, I can certainly relate to the extremely prolific writing of people like Ryuho Okawa or Hans Urs von Balthasar. When you try to render a higher-dimensional object in a lower-dimensional world, like for instance a globe on a piece of paper, it just does not fit. You have to unfold it and portray it from different angles to try to let others reconstruct it in their mind. And even then, it largely requires that the recipient has Been There.  If we were not three-dimensional ourselves, a world map would not give us an approximation (and it is nothing more!) of the globe, but just perpetuate our illusion that it was indeed flat.

Now, spiritual truth (and maths and physics for that matter) is indeed on a higher level than ordinary life, so if we try to explain it in metaphors, allegories and parables, it expands and “splinters” into many details that are actually one on the higher plane where they belong. For this reason, there is “no end to the writing of books” and “even Earth itself could not have room for all the books that would have to be written” to convey even one Heavenly life.

God is by definition unlimited. The whole universe is simply an overflowing of God’s unlimited Being. That follows more or less from the concept of God, so if we are able to imagine the existence of a Supreme Being, this is necessarily one of Its qualities.  If it is all in our imagination, then just to have that concept we must be to some extent divine (in possibility even if not in actuality), and how did we end up like that?  Even if I had been born with the first star of the universe, and had been writing ever since, I would still not have come close to exhaust the imagination and intellection of even one soul.   There are no limits, or at least they exceed this seemingly endless universe.

If Shakespeare was still alive, he would still be writing. If Bach was still alive, he would still be composing. If Buddha was still alive, he would still be teaching.  If Socrates was still alive, he would still be asking. The spirit taps into something beyond the ordinary, and once that channel is cleansed of the things that blocked it, there is no end to it except death.  Beethoven kept writing symphonies even after he went deaf.

In short, our spirit taps into the inexhaustible.  There are levels or grades of doing this, but beyond a certain level, there is no end to it.  It becomes like a wellspring that gushes forth endlessly.

Reflections on wisdom

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I am not sure if I have used this picture before, but I am sure I have considered it dozens of times, because it fits with so much of what I write. And then in the meaning “I have to study more”.

When I was little, I loved to learn random things. I grew up in a home filled with books and papers and magazines, and have three older brothers, so I learned to read long before my first school day. I remember withdrawing to the attic with a book often. The place was just used to store things, it was not really finished, but for me it was a special place.  If I remember correctly, I called it “klokingshulen”, a Norwegian pun meaning either “the sage’s cave” or the “the cave of the process of becoming wise”. I cannot remember if I came up with this name or one of my brothers, we were all a creative little bunch. But I remember spending time there alone with textbooks and such.

Knowledge is not wisdom, but it is a good start.  Before you can cook a meal, you need to have ingredients.  And before you can think deeply, you need to have something to think about! I am glad I loved reading, and looking at things, and using my imagination.  When I had read something new, I would afterwards use my imagination and create stories where these things appeared.

In grade school we learned by heart the multiplication table, but soon I understood that multiplication was just repeated addition. It is still kind of awesome to live in a world where two times three gives the same result as three times two, but it is kind of logical if you can count.  I suppose all healthy kids understand this pretty quickly. In the same way, we find patterns in other things as well. This is what I call understanding.  It goes beyond rote learning and provides a sort of shortcut in thinking.  Without learning, we would not find those patterns in things and be able to go forth and multiply our knowledge, so to speak, taking it to a higher order.

Somewhere, sometime, someone must have pondered the relationship between addition and multiplication. And they must have realized that if you could just repeat addition and get multiplication, then you would get something if you repeated multiplication as well.  I don’t know who first thought of it, but already the ancient Egyptians realized that if 3 and 9 were holy numbers, then 27 must be too, and 81 must be really holy.  So someone there was at least dimly aware of the power of “powers”. Today, computers are based on the powers of 2 – binary – and our common way of writing numbers is based on the powers of 10.

Wisdom is kind of like that. You take understanding one step higher, and then you find some way to make it useful.  Well, that is one way of looking at it at least. Wisdom is not just being able to learn, and being able to generalize from what you learn, but it is finding what is really important in what you have learned and understood, and applying that to your life.  Or at least that is part of it.

Anyway, you can kind of learn wisdom from others, by reading books of wisdom etc.  But you cannot just jump to that. You have to have knowledge and understanding first.  You cannot cook without ingredients or build without materials.  Also, I am not sure, but I think you need some hands-on experience of wisdom in order to “get it” when you see it elsewhere.  Still, you can definitely learn wisdom from others. And you should, because life is short.

If you enjoyed learning facts and loved understanding things, if flashes of insight gave you a thrill, then recognizing words of wisdom is likely to fill you with a bliss so overwhelming that it is hard to describe. Sometimes I can hardly contain my joy when finding another piece of the puzzle, opening up another part of the larger picture.

And it is good that I feel this joy, because the book may taste like honey when I eat it, but it burns in my stomach. Digesting wisdom – getting it embodied in my own flesh, so to speak – is the tough part. It usually comes at the expense of something else. I guess sometimes you have to bring out the butcher’s knife. But sometimes all I do is hold on, and the stupidity dies eventually.  Looking at some of the fantasy books I carried this February on the icy, slippery path in the freezing wind, I remember looking at them afterwards and still thinking I would read them again Someday.  But after months of reading a little wisdom most days of the week, the idea of going through those fantasy books again is like drinking from a puddle.  I would have to be pretty desperate.

There is a saying – I think I picked it up in the Christian Church – that “wisdom is none other than seeing the folly”.  Certainly that is a big part of it.  And first and foremost in our own lives.  But then perhaps eventually we can help others solve their problems too. There certainly are enough problems in the world, and it seems to me that the vast majority of them come from thinking that is counter-productive.  That is to say, people think thoughts that make it harder for them to live good, happy, satisfying lives.  If only there was some way to reach them!