Category Archives: philosophy

Randomness and democracy

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Should not the superior man rule the masses, rather than the other way around? But it rarely is that simple, and I hope I shall show why.

In principle, in the ideal world, actions have predictable consequences. Eat right and exercise regularly, and you will live a long and healthy life. Study hard, work conscientiously, live frugally, and you will become rich eventually. Things like that.

But the world we live in down here on Earth, what most people call the real world, is not quite like that. There is an element of randomness, at least as seen from the human perspective. So many principles are active at the same time, many of which are outside of our control, that the simple cause and effect we look for is broken up. We cannot predict the future, much less create it. All we can do is increase the chances of a certain outcome. We cannot ensure it, cannot guarantee it.

Well, jumping from bridges works much as expected, but if you are walking along the road, loose cargo from a truck may hit you and kill you anyway, as happened to a guy not far from here. All our plans, all our hopes, not to say our dreams, are subject to uncertainty. The more complex the chain of cause and effect, and the longer it takes, the more randomness overtakes it.

***

We are all aware of this on the outside, that is to say, what the world does to us. We know there is a random element in what happens to us. But there is another randomness that we generally disregard. This is the randomness inside, the randomness of what we think, feel, say and do. This internal randomness is more or less unofficial, and with good reason.

While randomness from the outside occurs pretty much equally to all of us, randomness from inside varies from person to person. This is problematic.

Some people are just principled. If they decide to not eat snacks, they don’t change their mind when they pass between long shelves of snacks in the supermarket. If they decide to not drink, they don’t change their mind if everyone around them drinks. If they have decided on monogamy, they don’t change their mind when approached by someone extremely attractive. If there is randomness within them, it seems to be weeded out before it even reaches the surface.

On the other extreme, we have the extremely spontaneous people. They want to graduate with honors too, but when they drop by the store for some bread, they somehow end up with beer instead. They want to do well in the job interview tomorrow, but end up playing World of Warcraft till 5 in the morning and oversleeping the whole thing. They may be fun to be around, but not so much when the bills come due.

Even if we follow a course of action firmly, randomness from outside means we can only raise the odds in our favor. But if randomness already intrudes between our aspirations and our actions, we can hardly even raise the odds at all. If what we do is random, what happens to us will be even more random.

***

Based on all this, one may be tempted to reconsider the whole general emancipation thing. You know, the whole thing about letting pretty much everyone vote.

Some states actually don’t let convicted felons vote, and this is a pretty good test of impulsiveness – if you are less impulsive, you probably either don’t commit the crime, or you wait until you can do so without getting caught. But not all people have the same impulses. Why let fat people vote? People with STDs? You can invent endless such tests until you and your friends are the only people left who can vote. Wouldn’t this be a good idea? For the good of all, I mean…

Probably not. To understand this, we should take a look at how people become principled in the first place.

Some people may be born to be principled and strong-willed. Perhaps it is genetic, unless you believe that it lies in the human spirit and each person is given a certain amount of this trait before being sent down to Earth.

Some people may have been raised to become principled. I can’t think of anyone, but this could be because we lack a control group. We don’t know how the kids would have grown up if they had been allowed to run free.

But there is a path for the adult who wants to become less random. It consists on having a living interest in the higher principles, as found in higher religions and philosophies. Those who think of the Eternal Laws  frequently, who meditate on them when alone, who ask about them and seek the companies of those who follow them, these people tend to gradually become drawn toward these Principles, and in time become more principled themselves. It may take its sweet time, depending on their starting position, but that is the trend. That is the direction in which they move, out of chaos and onto a steadier path.

You may think that having an over-representation of these people among the voters would be a great idea. I don’t entirely disagree, but there is something you need to know about these people. Beyond a certain point, there is a tendency that their kingdom is no longer of this world. In short, they may not feel very strongly about politics. If we have greatly reduced the number of other people who can vote, we may end up with mostly political fanatics, who are principled because of their monomaniacal devotion to some (probably unrealistic) cause or dream. These people tend to not understand ordinary people as easily as do those who have been one. They also tend to not consider other people’s lives very important compared to The Cause.

Having general emancipation introduces a great deal of randomness, and thereby inertia, into the political process. This is bad when it impedes rapid progress toward the better, but it is great when it impedes rapid descent into pure madness, which is historically rather likely. After Caesar and Augustus there is sure to come a Nero and a Caligula and a long parade of self-serving or outright insane people. This is why, as Winston Churchill pointed out, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.

I will leave you with another image. Imagine a large and densely packed flock of sheep. You and some other human are at different places in this sea of woolly randomness. If that other person is a friend, you should be able to move toward each other, albeit slowly, and eventually meet. The sheep were an impediment, but not fatally so. But if it is someone you want to avoid, the sheep is as much a hindrance to him as to you, and Light willing he will never catch up with you.

In this way, randomness will eventually yield to persistence, it just takes time and cooperation among those who share a goal. But it gives those who don’t share a goal, time to oppose each other. The strength of democracy is its inertia, which it derives from the randomness of the majority. It makes a liability into a benefit.

“Lifefruit for elders”

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Sim Eating lifefruit

My self-sim eating a lifefruit. There is a deeper meaning to this, if you want there to be.

There is a reason I have categorized this entry as both “games” and “philosophy”. This happens occasionally with me, and you may be curious as to how that happens.

In the computer game The Sims 3, there is a plant called Lifefruit. It is a narrow bush that produces two fruits every few days (depending on the quality and care). When an adult eats one fruit, they become one day younger. Since the default lifespan for a sim is something like 80 days, that’s a pretty big deal. It is particularly the fertile years that could need an extension – teen age is unnaturally long but the adult years are short if you want more than a couple kids, not to mention a career. (In recent updates of the game, you can set the length of individual age groups, which helps with this problem.)

Sims with the “Good” trait can receive lifetime happiness by donating to good causes, and one of the causes I have supported the most is “Lifefruit for elders”. It just seemed like the right thing to do, you know?

Sims with a high gardening skill (level 7 and up) can grow this plant from special seeds that can be found occasionally. It can not be bought. Once in a blue moon you will get a request from an elderly sim (one of the computer-controlled ones) who feels that they are nearing the end of their life, and wants to buy a lifefruit from you. They pay handsomely for it and their your relationship with them goes way up. For as long as it lasts…

I’ve played the game off and on since it came out, but only just recently did I actually play an elder with a lifefruit garden. It turns out that once you have passed the age marker from adult to elder, lifefruit no longer has any effect. The exception is toward the end of your years as an elder – it will then age you several days, taking you to the brink of death.

***

From this we can learn that meaning well is not the same as doing well, although it usually helps. Sometimes you need knowledge and wisdom along with your love. In real life there is no lifefruit, of course, but it is still possible to donate to causes which may do more harm than good, or at least considerable harm along with their good. NGOs (non-government organizations) are some of the most obscure groups on the planet, frequently being tax-exempt and having no audits and a leadership based on the leaders choosing people they like for the highest positions, including the next leaders. Where your money ends up is generally pretty foggy. And even when the intentions of all involved are pure, we know that meddling in cultures strikingly different form your own can have disastrous side effects.

***

Another lesson from the lifefruit is that you cannot always save up something for later. There are things that belong in one life phase but not in another. It is a well known fact that people often have grand plans for traveling the world when they retire; but when they actually do so, many no longer have the health and the energy and the people with whom they wanted to travel. What once was the dream of their life may end up a nightmare and may even, in a few cases, be the end of them.

On a thankfully much smaller level, I have mentioned before that since 2005 I can no longer eat fatty foods except in tiny quantities: For instance, chocolate about the size of my thumb in one workday. If I had known this in my younger years, you can bet that I would have eaten more chocolate. Well, even more chocolate, I mean. (While not quite as potent as the imaginary lifefruit, chocolate has many health benefits – it increases fat burning and makes exercise more effective, balances sex hormones, improves mood, and contains antioxidants that supposedly reduce the risk of cancer slightly and slows aging.)  So dear younger reader: Eat your chocolate while you can, with a grateful heart.

The unexamined life

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Yes, the years just fly by when you’re watching anime, playing games, or doing other things that are mutually exclusive with self-reflection. (Well, actually Lucky*Star is an anime that may give some pause for thought, although not on a Socratic level, I dare say.)

“The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates, but not until today have I reflected on the context of those words: Socrates was threatened by the government to give up his public teaching of philosophy or else be sentenced to death. But he chose rather to die than to go against his “daimon” (or daimonion), the spiritual voice he had obeyed since his childhood and which he considered a gift from Heaven.

Most of us hold the opposite view: The examined life is not worth living. It seems to us so unbearable that we will go to great length, even a high risk of untimely death, to avoid it.

***

What is this examination of which Socrates speaks? We call Socrates a philosopher, which he certainly was. But speculating on whether the Earth originated in water or fire, or any such remote topic, hardly changes the “examination level” of our life. You cannot say that after having discussed how many angels can dance on the tip of a needle, you have examined your life.

In contrast, self-reflection is all about examining our life. When a child in Japan misbehaves, its parent may tell it to sit alone and reflect on what it did. (Well, it happens in non-religious anime, so it is probably widespread.) This awareness of one’s own behavior, as if seen by an outside observer, is also one element in the Jewish and Christian concept of repentance, although this one focuses more on the act of turning away from mistakes rather than on the pure observation.

Boris Mouravieff, claiming to write from an esoteric Orthodox Christian tradition, puts the pure observation of oneself as the primary spiritual practice, the tool of transformation. The act of paying attention to oneself (in particular to the fragmented nature of the personality, which changes like a kaleidoscope with time and opportunity) is in itself the driving force of transcending the fragmented false self, causing a “heat” to develop in the bucket of iron filings with which he likens the natural personality. If this is raised to a high degree, the fire melts the pieces together. Be that as it may, the relentless observation of the personality is in itself the recommended spiritual practice.

There are hints that this may be original Christian teachings. Jesus Christ exhorts his disciples to “watch at all times”. The statement appears repeatedly in the formula “watch and pray”, always in that order, blended with other words but with these being the direct instructions. For some reasons the “pray” has completely overtaken the “watch” in modern Christianity, so that it has fused with the “pray without ceasing” mentioned by St Paul the apostle. However, in the repeated sayings of Jesus – and this is in fact one statement he clearly and intentionally repeats, as if it was a key point of his teaching – there is always a “watch” first.

It is possible that Paul also thinks in this direction when he tells a younger preacher to “pay attention to yourself and the teaching”, which may refer to comparing himself to the measuring rod of the Christian teachings, or it could mean paying attention to the teachings he preached. Perhaps both. But clearly it was necessary to pay attention to himself – that is to say, examine his life. Reflect on himself. Watch.

In some languages (including my native Norwegian) the “watch” of the gospel is translates as “stay awake”. One relative of mine ran into mental disturbances trying to stay awake all night every night to pray. Intriguingly, a few people in this world have the ability to remain conscious even in their sleep, in a purely observing, non-acting mode. This usually appears after a couple decades of daily meditation of the more advanced sorts. It occurs to me today that Jesus may have lived like that, conscious and watching his own mental plane or “innerscape” even in his sleep.

If we translate ye olde phrase of Jesus into the language of the 21st century, we might say “be conscious at all times and stay connected to the Divine”. This sounds a lot less offensive to people with Jesus willies, although I am not sure whether this is a good thing. It also happens to pretty accurately portray good old Socrates, who not only examined his life even in the face of death, but also publicly spoke about the divine presence which had accompanied him since childhood and never let him down. Such faith did he have in his daimonion that when it did not warn him as he was sentenced to drink a deadly poison, he concluded that it was probably no bad thing.

***

Far from consciously observing ourselves even in our sleep, however, most of us do the exact opposite: We look away even when awake. Hold on a minute, my sims need to harvest their watermelons. OK, back. As I was saying, we tend to distract ourselves from the “life examination” by disappearing into engrossing hobbies like computer games or puzzles, or (for the more simpleminded perhaps) basic instincts like FOOD! and SEX! – not sure if socializing with other people also count as basic instinct with humans, quite possibly it does. It certainly is effective at distracting us from observing our own thoughts, words and deeds. So our lives remain unexamined, and that’s the way we like it, uh huh.

Some people cannot stop the relentless intrusion of reality simply by sex and petty crime. They have to drink booze or take hard drugs to try to forget. This is the last step before suicide itself – for in their eyes, the examined life is not worth living. Or at least living through the process of examination is not worth it. But as I pointed out just above, I feel that there is only a difference of degree between them and us.

That is not to say that God hates games as such, or even sex. OK, at least not all sex. But the use of anything as an escape route to avoid self-reflection, to shirk the burden of self-consciousness (much less God-consciousness), to flee from the examined life and stay in the dark – like someone who turns on the light, sees a big spider on the pillow and decides to turn off the light – that is probably not the best idea.

Whatever happens when you examine your life, it made Socrates so happy that he could not stop talking about it, even if it should cost him his life. The same happened to Jesus’ disciples some centuries later. It doesn’t seem to have made the Dalai Lama particularly depressed either. It seems that all true religion, in the sense of spiritual religion rather than just social or ritual religion, must contain this element. But getting there… that is the hard part.

I have watched enough to watch myself flee from my own watchful eye. Because I find the unexamined life quite worth living. And the terrible truth is that the unexamined and the examined life cannot both exist at the same time. For the new, examined life to live, the old unexamined life must die. It may well do so whether we want it to or not, if we keep observing it. This may be one of the cases where looks really can kill. At least they can be quite painful.

But first, my sims need help with their potatoes.

 

Happy time-twisting

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The universe is full of life!

“The infinite space is full of various forms of life.” So there is nothing strange about me writing about a reincarnated Pleiadean. It is a work of fiction, after all. At least I hope so!

The independent thought streams in my head, even the guest writers, can be pretty impressive. Take the muse I wrote about two entries ago, which was telling his story as a TSI (fictive name for Happy Science) member who discovered that he actually came from the Pleiades.

So I just bought a new book that has quietly become available from Happy Science, Secrets of the Everlasting Truths. The book goes in some detail about how Ryuho Okawa has found a way to explore outer space through interviewing humans who are reincarnated aliens. Most of them, he notes, are from the Pleiades and Vega.

Given that I just bought this book, it is not particularly surprising that I write a fanfic in which the main character is a reincarnated Pleiadean. Well, except for the small detail that I wrote that first and discovered the book afterwards.

***

In all fairness, this is not the first time Okawa mentions Pleiadeans and soul migration between planets. I (or my muse) did not simply make this up, there have been mentions in passing in two of his earlier books, although I can’t remember if he actually combined them back then. Now he declares that there is a number of these around already, as it also is in my story, and he spends a whole lecture on this phenomenon. He also mentions that time is not a straight line, but we already knew that.

It is one of those coincidences again. I have those from time to time, and they are usually not religious in nature (if one can call soul interviews of reincarnated aliens “religion” – it is kind of … not what most religions do.) Like one day I was taking a walk and thinking about how the world would have been if the tricycle had take off instead of the bicycle (still not sure why it didn’t, trikes are a lot more stable). While I was still elaborating on this scenario in my mind, the first adult tricycle I had seen in the area came into view. I had lived there for years and never seen an adult tricycle, nor had I thought about them for all those years. But as soon as I think about it… !

Several times I have dreamed about things that would make perfect sense to dream about, if they had only happened the day before instead of the day after the dream. I am not sure this is even supernatural: If we accept that time really is a dimension, then the sequence of past, present and future are necessarily continuous. Each part is “glued” to the parts before and after it. I have used the image of magnetism in the past: A magnet will easily attract a needle, but a needle also attracts the magnet. Usually the magnet does not move toward the needle, because the magnet is heavy and the needle is light. But if the magnet is placed precariously and the needle is stuck to something, once in a blue moon the magnet might move toward the needle instead of the other way around.

Let me take another example, which happened at the workplace where I was making my famous debt collection software suite. It is so long ago that we used cassettes for music. (They were self-enclosed audio tapes, popular before the age of the CD and some way into it, although they quickly disappeared when MP3 players arrived.) I had a combined cassette player and radio, and was playing one of my favorite songs back then, “Why Worry” by Dire Straits. After I finished playing that, I switched to radio. The radio was playing “Why Worry” – the same song I had been playing. I have heard that song only two or three times on radio, to the best of my knowledge. (I think I would have noticed, for it was special to me for many years. I actually bought my first CD player because I wore out the tapes by playing that one song repeatedly, then spooling back to play it again. This is much easier on a CD. ^_^)

So the time-switch between reading the book and writing the fanfiction is not in any way proof that Ryuho Okawa really is what he claims to be, the god of this world, chief of the powers of the invisible realm that surrounds our planet. But it kind of underscores his point that science still has a ways to go, I think.

I may be back with a full review of the book later, perhaps.

Remembering Eternity

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Should I look into my heart from when I was a child?

Sometimes in silence a remembrance comes to us from the depth of our early childhood. In a similar way, a “memo” from Heaven may reach our heart. Or we may not remember it until we are gently reminded by someone who Was There, then suddenly the details spring to mind.

When I say “remembering Eternity”, I don’t mean in the same sense as a religious proverb that was popular in the Christian Church when I was young, “Consider the brevity of life, the certainty of death, and the length of eternity.” I am sure that is useful, if somewhat oppressive to the ordinary human, and some of us not so ordinary humans as well…

I mean something entirely different and much weirder, which probably will make NO SENSE whatsoever to ordinary humans. Well, my apologies in advance if you are one of them. I don’t see many of you here.

There is this tome of esoteric Knowledge, by a much more widely accepted author than Boris. Despite some measure of fame, the author of Meditations on the Tarot preferred to be known simply as “Unknown Friend”. This is not without reason: He had in his younger days written certain books which he could probably not in good conscience rescind, but which would interfere in a negative way with this book, written toward the end of his life and published after his passing. I recommend therefore to not delve into his identity.

I don’t read the book much, just open it now and then. This may well be my loss, but although the book seems to be far more mainstream than Gnosis by Mouravieff, it is still very esoteric. So, I nibble. You know I have a weakness for this stuff and could easily sail up, up and away from consensus reality, which I now at least regularly visit. (Along with the world of the Sims, obviously…)

***

I turned a page and read about contemplation, the practice of which he calls “listening in silence”. I may have mentioned in passing that in my Lightwielder fiction (which is a bit of a metaphor or parable or simile or some such), the spiritual practice of the Servants of the Light is called “listening to the silence”. So he got my attention right there. This silence is an inner silence, of course, and I will explain if you ask how one can attain to it even if living by a high-traffic road or while taking the commute bus or train to work. Just ask if you don’t know.

There are those who hear God speak to them if they listen intently. But I have benefited the most from listening to God’s silence. In so far as I have benefited at all from anything in my life, this would be a big part of it, I believe.

***

But the next part was also super interesting. Unknown Friend claimed that this listening in silence is a form of recall, of remembering. He says that just as we have horizontal memory of the past, so we can also have vertical memory from Above. If you remember me recently speaking of how Eternity is at a right angle to Time, and that we can imagine Time as horizontal and Eternity as vertical… (I forget whether I uploaded that or decided it was above my pray grade.) Anyway, this is the same thing.

He also cites Henri Bergson that “pure memory is a spiritual manifestation. With memory we are in very truth in the domain of the spirit.” Again this is equivalent to my claim that Time is the first spiritual or at least mental dimension, in the sense that we do not perceive time directly, but reconstruct it with our mental powers of memory and anticipation. Animals can remember, sometimes with great clarity over long spans of time (famously elephants have such a memory), but humans have a unique ability to mentally “travel in time” as I call it. Unknown Friend describes it from another angle, that the past travels forward into the present and is reflected as if in a mirror.

In the same way, we can make our brain a mirror to what is Above, to timeless truth as I would call it. (Above corresponds to Eternity, as the horizontal corresponds to Time.)

I m not good with pure contemplation, or perhaps I have not taken enough time for timelessness. But when I read esoteric Knowledge, this is how it works: It resonates in my heart in the same way as a memory. It seems strikingly familiar. It is as if I already knew it, even though I don’t, even when I know I have never heard it before, could not possibly have heard it before. It can be hard for me to know whether I have written about something here in the past or just heard about it for the first time, that is how familiar it sometimes is.

I’d love to write more about all this, but I would go out on tangents and end up so far above my pray grade that I could not upload it. Unfortunately this is not just a memory of the future, this is already my second attempt…

Problems of our time

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She's grown up to be really considerate of other people

If we could grow up to become really considerate of other people, we could overcome the challenges of our time. It is this we lack, more than money or technology.

Modern technology and economics have certainly made life easier for billions of people. But the challenges we face now in the 21st century are mainly challenges of the mind. I don’t mean necessarily insanity and such, although of course mental health problems are widespread and very troubling. Rather I mean what we might call “spiritual problems”, although they should be obvious even to those who don’t believe in spirit. Perhaps we could call them “problems of attitude”?

The error of our times is to try to fix attitude problems with technology, economics or legislation. I will not say that these are entirely ineffective. But they can be compared to fixing a leaky roof by placing umbrellas. Not only does it look absurd to those who see it from outside, but it is a short-sighted “solution”, suitable only for those who have no responsibility for the building and are planning to leave soon with their whole family. Hopefully we won’t all be in that situation with regards to this world.

For example, there is now plenty enough food in the world for everyone to eat their fill, and then some. But that is not exactly what happens. True, obesity is now actually afflicting a greater number of humans than is starvation, but there is still starvation. It usually only happens – at least widely – in countries at war or civil war. So it is certainly a problem of attitude, although not necessarily the attitude of the starving. (Although that can certainly happen too, that they are one of the sides in a war, and have some responsibility for it. That is not always the case, though. And in most wars, it is the stronger who attack the weaker.)

Speaking of obesity and health challenges: I know, I know. There are various hormone and metabolism problems that cause people to gain weight at an unnatural pace. It seems unlikely, however, that a fifth or so of the population have mysteriously mutated over the course of a generation or two. In any case, there are good news from science: Even if you are heavier than recommended, this will do little or no harm if you are physically active, exercising at least at moderate intensity for half an hour a day or so. (Or an hour every other day.) So unless you have a mutated metabolism and also a broken spine, you should be doing fine. If you have the right attitude, that is. The attitude that makes you force your body to do things it does not particularly like sometimes.

Unfortunately, many people really exercise their mind making up excuses instead. If people would eat when they were hungry and stop before they were full, and be physically active at least some minutes each day, that alone would stop the huge growth in health expenses in the rich world. I am not kidding. Sure, there are many expenses that come because we can treat illnesses that were fatal in the past. Treatment for these is typically very expensive. But living a life of moderate self-restraint will dramatically reduce the risk of falling gravely ill. Mind you, we are talking of risks here, possibilities and percentages. It is not like the law of gravity which is very simple and predictable. So you can eat right, exercise regularly and die horribly anyway. But on a large scale, like that of a whole nation, a more responsible lifestyle would have a dramatic impact.

Then there is the whole thing about fearing death. Now, this is an attitude that I sympathize with personally to a very high degree. There are few things I want less than death! But even so, here is something to think of: A very large part of the medical expenses in an average human life happens in its last year. This is independent of the age. If you live to 90, most of the expenses will be in the year from 89 to 90. If you live only to 50, most of the expenses will be from 49 to 50. Of course, this is not without exception, but it is the rule. In other words, a great deal of our hospitals, our doctors and our medicines are employed to prolong life by months or weeks. Of course, in some cases we just can’t know. There is a chance, even if it is small, of survival. And there is nothing we want more, usually.

Still, if we are actually old and we have an illness that is anyway going to end our life within months, I feel that there should be an option to submit to the course of nature. I am told that in America this is what happens if you are poor. But for those who have nothing to fear from death, I feel that it should be an option even if you could afford to stay around for a few months longer. In days of yore, it was not uncommon for old people to feel that they had accomplished what they came to Earth for. “Now let thy servant depart in peace.” I can’t say I feel like that now, but I hope to be able to say that some day. We may long for eternal life, but it is folly to think that science can do that for us, even with tax-financed health care.

Another attitude problem is that we consider our personal luxury more important than the planet. There has been some progress in this, in some parts of the world. But not enough. We are still destroying the biosphere at a terrifying speed. Species go extinct all the time. Fertile soil is washed away or blown away by the wind because of thoughtless agriculture that leaves the soil open to the elements at times when flooding or drought occurs. Forests are cut down that protected the soil, wetlands are drained that absorbed floods. And of course arable land is covered with roads and buildings. So far we have managed to keep food production high enough, higher than ever actually. But we cannot afford to lose more arable land as population is still set to grow. And we should not unravel ecosystems except in the most dire emergency.

***

In short, the great challenges of our times and probably the next generation as well, is our attitude. As long as we think in terms of money and not time, of luxury and not happiness, of receiving and not giving, of being done to and not doing – as long as we think in this way, it will be difficult to solve our problems, and new ones will appear. The roof will leak in more and more places until it collapses on our heads. For now, we have only this one planet, and we must share it with each other better than we do today.

 

Knowledge inflates – me?

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An academic life without love is like a pot with no soup in it. It doesn’t exactly help when the empty pot grows bigger and bigger. 

I will talk about what we may call “deeper thought” (although it is often observation as much as logic). Let us leave alone for now the disturbing topic from yesterday, of how I seem to make discoveries only to find someone plagiarized me before I was even born. That is good or creepy, I guess, depending on who they were. Sometimes I don’t really know whether they are on the side of the angels or the other side, which makes me take a step back and wonder what I am doing.

What I am doing, as I recently wrote about, is studying esoteric Knowledge at a slow but noticeable rate. Apart from reading the One Cosmos blog fairly religiously, I have picked up a number of traditionalist books and other works of timeless wisdom, some of which still surpass me so much that I have had to put them aside while trying to gain experience on easier works. But on the whole, I keep nibbling at these kind of things. I have become wary enough to try to intersperse some hagiology – the lives of the Saints – in between the metaphysics. I want to nourish the heart and not just the mind. But even the mind… well, let me sum up something I have said before. It is relevant here.

There is knowledge, and there is Knowledge. Or more exactly, there are facts and there are Truths. Facts are exterior, fragmented, inert; they can be contained in us. Truths are higher than us, more whole than us, they are alive, they can transform us. Or that is my approximation to this, from my limited vantage point these days, and trying to put it briefly.

These tomes of timeless wisdom, this esoteric Knowledge, it has the potential to not just fill our container, but to expand it and change its shape. The container in this case is the human mind. And this is where I suddenly realized a new meaning of the Biblical proverb: “Knowledge inflates” (… “but Love builds up”, 1. Corinthians 8.)

So this revelation was that Knowledge – higher knowledge, the wisdom of high spirits – expands our mind; but if that is all that happens, we are in fact inflated. When there is more room but no more ballast, no more “mass” or weight, we have become more hollow, and we may not even know it.

***

I have until today only thought of this verse in the connection of external knowledge, theoretical knowledge. It may even be the original meaning. Certainly this happens a lot. There are tenured barbarians who are so filled with theoretical knowledge that they feel qualified to go far beyond their narrow specialty and speak grandly about timeless Truth (or the absolute lack thereof), as if they actually knew. And yet a common farmer may be wiser than them in the things that really count to the human heart.

But what I talk about today is the Higher Knowledge, the words of true geniuses, of High Spirits who see the world as if from a much higher place. It is the deeper teachings that are hidden in plain sight. This Knowledge is not just words in a book.

Now you may point out that I am in fact talking about words in books, “tomes of timeless wisdom” and all that. But it differs greatly from external knowledge like learning Japanese vocabulary or the names of the various bones and sinews of the body. Words of wisdom must be absorbed through the resonance they call out in the heart, a resonance that is remarkably similar to memory. It is like remembering something that you have always known, even though you were never told. Life experience seems to be important in this context, but it may be that some people don’t need this. I know I do, and others who also took up this wander-staff in their middle years. I was exposed to amazing insights when I was young, but many of them I could not comprehend then, despite my best intentions.

This Knowledge with a capital K, the one that is like the heart remembering what it never knew that it knew – I believe this changes our very shape, expanding us. But therein lies the risk of inflation: Of becoming larger but comparatively more hollow, when content does not keep up. In this case, “inflation” is very nearly literal, except transposed into a realm that is not physical.

***

 I do worry that this may be happening to me. I feel changed, but I am not sure it is all for the good. There is a widening, but I seem to also sense a loss of intensity. And given my previous entry, I wonder whether even my revelations (those that are not by way of books, at least directly, that are observations more than remembrances) are safe. This also is Knowledge, and it inflates, it puffs me up like one of those small animals that puff themselves up to look bigger, but have I really grown to that size?

St Paul had to go through considerable trouble so as to not boast of his revelations (which admittedly were orders of magnitude beyond anything I can believe to have experienced, if I have indeed experienced anything through the occasional and undeserved grace-granted glimpse).

“But love builds up” (edifies, to use a fine word.) Ryuho Okawa, of all people, wrote a wonderful little piece about running into devils when he was still in the early expanding phase of his own revelations, when High Spirits from Heaven (or that was his experience of them) came to him frequently and revealed amazing Truths. Be that as it may, due to this superior knowledge that far exceeded that of much older people all around him, he realized that he was beginning to puff up. Devils had begun to gain control of him through his growing psychic powers. What to do?

What he decided was to go back and start over from the ordinary. He asked himself: Without these powers and these revelations, what am I? If I was barred from ever accessing them again – from ever telling anyone about them, from ever experiencing them again, from even dwelling on them in my own heart – would I still be a person who people would look forward to meeting? Would I still, as a perfectly ordinary person, be able to radiate happiness to others, to inspire other ordinary people like myself? When he decided to take this approach, the devils fled from him.

(Let us set aside for now what may have happened to his humility later – it is beyond the scope of this entry, and opinions are divided.)

But this approach, as Okawa describes it from his own youth, resonates with my heart. It sounds definitely like the same thing that the Bible says. Knowledge – or possibly even (small-k) knowledge, if we are easy to deceive – puffs us up. But can we make others happy without brandishing the peacock-tail of amazing insights? To make them happy by our presence would be love (when we talk about their lasting happiness, not their worldly attachments and dubious desires, Light forbid.)

St Teresa mentions that if we want to know whether a revelation is from God or from Hell, we should see whether it makes us more inclined to virtue. No matter what a Divine revelation is about, it has the side effect of making us humble and inclined to virtue. I think she is perfectly in agreement with St Paul on that, at least. Good for him! ^_^ (I hear he is not that popular with women these days.)

But for me, right now, I have to take care. I wonder if my container is not already expanding much faster than the content, the Knowledge faster than the Love, if any.

Mouravieff, me & 3 time dimensions

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“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.

Mouravieff is interesting

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"Space is amazing, isn't it?"

Remember the time when books were amazing?

Generally I don’t read much at home. After all, I have my computer at home, and it tends to take priority. My sims need to live too! Besides, there is the writing, and Google+. OK, I have Google+ on the smartphone too, but responding is easier with a physical keyboard. (Sorry, SwiftKey.)

So for me to actually read a book at home, the book had better be good. These days, most of what I read is non-fiction, or at least it is supposed to be. This is also the case with Boris Mouravieff’s Gnosis, part 1: The Exoteric Cycle. I have written about it once before, when I started reading it. I am still reading it, off and on.

Mouravieff keeps kind of close to the edge of craziness, in a manner of speaking. If you get him wrong, you are likely to go very wrong indeed. To me he makes sense, as long as I read him with good will. But I can see how someone unfamiliar with esoteric teachings, someone with a tendency to take things literally and assign the same meaning to words regardless of context, might tumble into the abyss; for the book is like a house built on the edge of a precipice, itself not falling in but posing a danger to the unwary. Or that is how I see it at this time.

Perhaps providentially, I read his explanation about the “ray of creation” not many days after I read Schuon discuss the Christian concept of the Trinity. Mouravieff adheres to Orthodox Christianity, but he interprets it esoterically, or more exactly as a vehicle of esoteric knowledge that has been hidden for most even among the religious, but hidden in plain sight. It is this esoteric science he tries to restore to view. I wonder how well he succeeds, given that his greatest fans seems to be a UFO cult, at least if one judges from publicity on Google.

To Mouravieff, God is the center of creation, as well as being beyond it. God beyond being comes up with the idea, then God as the Trinity manifests and begins to radiate the universe, more or less, according to Mouravieff. He also seems to think that eternity is limited and perpendicular to time.

But one of the most interesting concepts is that there is a law of nature – “the law of seven” – that is placed in creation to make sure time becomes circular, or as close to this as possible. (The cycles of time will eventually run out, says Mouravieff.) As this law operates on all levels below the Divine, it will cause any straight line of action to deviate eventually, and at some point go in the opposite direction of what it did originally. For instance, Christianity persecuting and killing pagans, when some time had passed after it used to be the other way around. After a while, the deviation will eventually bring you back on the original track for a while, but then you deviate again, running in circles. This is a result of the cyclical nature of time itself.

If you want to make progress, you have to add an impulse at the right time and angle to counteract the deviation and get back on the original track. This is not easy to arrange. Remember, you cannot see yourself deviate. To your own eyes, your road seems to go straight ahead. It is the circular nature of the universe itself that fools you.

So how do you get around this trap? How do you actually accomplish anything? I don’t know yet, because in the meantime Mouravieff has gone on to talk about the Cosmic Octave and the galaxies and star systems as the cosmic body of Christ, or was it the body of the cosmic Christ? And the sun as a representation of the Divine. I am sure at some point the answer is revealed, either in this book or the next. I think it may be time to order that one soon. After all, the first seems to be one of the books I may actually finish … some day.

Into the unimaginable

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If you’ve arrived here at the Chaos Node, you’ve already come to some unthinkable place. The question is, how much more unthinkable can it get?

Over the course of several walks lately, I have been trying to imagine a potential future in which I spend several hours a day studying the lives and teachings of saints, and traditionalist metaphysics. Think of this as a kind of daydream if you will, but with direction and attempted realism. Well, realism within the unrealistic scenario.

I can imagine this a few months ahead, but no more than that. This is not because the future is unpredictable, I get around this by imagining that I travel in time back to January 2010. That doesn’t help much: It is I who become unimaginable after perhaps half a year.

You see, the particular topics are not chosen randomly. I can quite well imagine what would happen if I studied Japanese for half a year, or two years, or five. Or any such mundane study, I think. But studying timeless wisdom is not like studying a skill, it is more like falling in love, I guess. Or having brain surgery with consequent personality change, although these are rarely to the better. It is like moving to a foreign country you don’t really know anything about except rumors. It is, in other words, a life-changing experience, only more gradual than most of them.

I know that much because I have already begun to change. I don’t spend hours a day on timeless wisdom, so far.  Part of the bus ride, mostly, although sometimes I find something so interesting that I will read it at home. Usually not, though. It is just that at this stage of my life, these teachings are so potent, even if they make up a small part of my time, they still matter. Because unlike job skills or gaming skills, these change who I am. And that is what I cannot imagine. Who I could become, if my being – my essence – was to increase. Who is the person that is more me than I am? How can I imagine that, anymore than a child can know who they will be as an adult? There are only daydreams, and even those fail me.

One thing I am pretty sure of is that I would become more stable, in the sense of less sensitive to outside factors. For instance, there are people whose mood depends quite a bit on the weather. When the sun shines, so do they; in the dark season up north here, they become dark as well. That does not necessarily mean they are less mature or less spiritual than others who don’t experience this – some people are just naturally immune, it seems. Likewise there are some who are barely human before their morning coffee. Grumpy may be an understatement in some cases. I am not a morning bird myself, but I could not have a good conscience if I were barking at people at a semi-regular basis. And there are other influences that make the compass needle of our heart go far off the north star of Heaven, influences like our own sex drive (for those who have that) or preferences for particular foods.

But when we grow more essential, more substantial, when our soul grows more real if you will, these things make less impression on us. Where we could easily be blown off our feet, we become able to handle these circumstances more, perhaps becoming one day unshakable. I cannot truly say I am like that, but that is how these influences work, in that direction. I guess we all have our weak points, and there are temptations I sincerely hope I won’t have to face. But one of the certified Good Things of timeless wisdom is to make us more rooted, in a good sense.

But there are other aspects to the change which I cannot really imagine at all. We are not simply dying to one distraction after another. We also come alive to something else. What that would be beyond a certain point, I cannot imagine. And yet, it is a steady pull on me. Of course, I have pulls the other way too, so there is a balance of sorts, or at least the movement is slow and erratic. What would happen if it were not, is something even daydreams don’t tell.

But then again, perhaps I am utterly mistaken. Perhaps there is an upper limit to how fast a person’s thinking can change – in fact, this seems very plausible, barring physical changes in the brain. Or perhaps there is even an upper limit to how much one can change past a certain age or maturity level, and all I’d ever do was amass theoretical information. Or perhaps each of us is born with a personal limit, a size of the spirit, that the soul can grow into but not exceed. Who knows.

But perhaps the limit is exactly that which holds me back now: That I don’t take time even when I have time; that I don’t love timeless Truth all that much compared to all the other things I love. After all, Truth cannot help but judge us even if given in love, much like light cannot avoid scattering the darkness and wakefulness cannot avoid dispersing dreams.