Category Archives: human mind

Atheism as transitional phenomenon

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“The mind is the work of our brain” – this theory is currently accepted as truth by most Scandinavians. Viewed generously, this can be likened to saying that “Windows is the work of the computer”. Given the many great realms open to the human mind, however, it is more like saying that air is the work of the lungs or that dry land came into being because the fish evolved legs. But when you don’t have a realistic alternative…

This is not the first time in history that atheism is surging here in Scandinavia. Much the same happened a bit over 1000 years ago, as Christianity was replacing the old Norse religion. According to a saga writer who saw the tail end of that period, many of those who had been brought up in the old religion and saw it discredited, did not latch on to the new. Rather, they “believed only in their own strength”.

This is not hard to understand. If there are a lot of people who don’t believe in Odin and Thor, why should I? But if my ancestors lived for generations without even having heard of the White Christ, why should I bother with him?

It is the same today. For the first time in history, many different religions from various times and places all show up at the same time, and people reasonably think that they can’t all be right, so why should any one of them be right? It seems only logical.

But this logic can also be reduced to the absurd. For the same bringing together of the world has also shown us many languages: Some big, some small, some easy to learn and some quite obscure.  If most people in the world don’t speak my language, why should I?  And why should I adopt another language, if most people don’t even understand it, much less use it? Indeed, when humans can’t agree on a language, why should I speak at all?

Now arguably, you cannot survive without speaking (though some monks might disagree). You can survive without religion. But most people don’t speak merely for their survival, but because it is a genuine expression of human nature.

I have a theory – it is not a revelation, merely a speculation – as to why atheism has surged so much more in northern Europe than in the USA. I believe it comes, this time again, from the sudden transition.

If you remember the theory of Spiral Dynamics, you will know that different people have different levels of complex thinking. What we call higher levels are such that can handle a more complex worldview. This change started rather earlier in the USA and has continued at a gradual pace. The USA has, for instance, still a large “Blue” segment that believes in religious myth in a literal way, and values obedience to authorities with no need for understanding. This is generally considered shamefully primitive in the Nordic countries, where the norm now is to be Green (postmodern) in theory and Orange (capitalist) in practice.

Because the Nordic countries (and the Netherlands) have experienced such a rapid “lift” in complex worldview, it is natural that people find their childhood religion primitive and even caricature-like.  Furthermore, the Nordic countries had very little religious diversity to start with. Each had a national Lutheran church that counted some 95% of the population. In this comfortable near-monopoly, the churches may have seen little point in changing until it was too late, and then mainly by becoming generally permissive, rather than attempting to meet intellectual challenges.

People whose heads are now in the postmodern world have available a religion suitable for the 18th century, with God as an enlightened monarch at best. Not that there is anything wrong with that – for the people who have a worldview to fit.  Like water takes the form and size of the container, so also religion will take the form of the mind in which it is contained. But here the water of religion was frozen in a form badly suited to the postmodern mind. Naturally this led to a wholesale rejection of traditional religion.

Lately, New Age spirituality seems to be growing in this area, presumably as an attempt to fill the religious vacuum. But being vague and mixed with many kinds of superstition, it is unlikely to fill the role of religion. What will, I don’t know yet. But history suggests that humans will naturally return to a religion that fits their level of development.

Magic and genius

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Screenshot from the anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot. “He was a god-like person.” In Japan’s Shinto tradition, the border between the human and the divine is still more porous than here in the West with our centuries of monotheism. So much so that even a soccer player can be seen as divine.

It is not just soccer players, of course. We all have this wonderful magic called life. Somehow, only dimly knowing how, we are able to control our own bodies to a great extent. Some people, through talent and training, are able to control them even better.

I believe without doubt that there is sports genius, just like there is musical genius or chess genius and others. And like with all of these, the genius cannot truly be brought out and made to shine without effort. Hard work through several years. But the thing is, for the genius it is not just hard work. It is something they feel called to, drawn to.

In the anime Aoki Densetsu Shoot, which set off this train of thought, the genius Kubo had a question for all who wanted to join his soccer club: “Do you like soccer?” And those whose eyes lit up when they answered “yes” were the ones who became his team.

Obviously, there was never a time in my life when I could have said that about soccer, or indeed any sport. But when I was young, you could have asked me: “Do you like programming?” and my eyes would have lit up in just the same way. I would practice it when no one was looking. I would read about it, think about it, even dream about it. And that is how, when the chance unexpectedly came, I was able to create a debt collection software suite that helped companies in Norway save millions. I did not earn millions, of course, though I did earn a few thousand for a little while, which I wasted. But that was not why I did it. I did it out of love.

We don’t think of life as magic, but if we came to a world where stones could move and grow, our first impulse would surely be to see it as magic. But because carbon-based structures do this routinely in our world, it is perfectly natural to us. In a similar way, if we had not seen genius before, we would quite likely be astounded and think it was something supernatural. Or at least our ancestors did just that. In the age before books, we did not have access to the many geniuses of the past. So when a great man (it was usually, not quite always, a man) stood up and did something remarkable, people thought that a god had descended on earth and left his seed among us.

Well, I suppose that can happen too, in a very abstract manner of speaking. But my point is that it is just a matter of perspective. We know for certain that our way of seeing things is right, and their is wrong. But what if not? What if genius really is divine and life really is magic? It is not like we can recreate these under controlled circumstances, after all, which is the essence of scientific practice.

Yes, I have also read that some scientists have recently created life. On a closer look, they have assembled DNA and inserted it into an existing cell from which they had removed the original DNA. That is creating life in much the same way as playing with Lego bricks is creating matter. Not that it is not respectable, but we are still a far cry from even understanding life, much like creating an equivalent of it from scratch. And the same is the case with genius, I think.

That is why I don’t have a problem with the notion that a genius is a “high spirit” who has come down from Heaven. It is just a different way of looking at the same thing. We need to see things from different sides. A world in which there are no wonders is not a world fit for human habitation. There is nothing heroic in creating a mental world in which everything is just the random movements of atoms. Such a world has no room for heroes anyway. Those who lose their sense of wonder lose, in a very real sense, their humanity. They become self-professed animals. What has always raised us far above the beast is our imagination. It creates delusions, but it also creates discoveries. It brings forth the madman and the genius. And sometimes the mad genius…

But genius without work is like water running into the sea, disappearing without having done any good. That is why Edison, one of the greatest geniuses of modernity, said that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes music comes to me. Hauntingly beautiful melodies or even songs, in languages known or unknown, songs that I have never heard before and never hear again. If I were a composer, I could grasp those melodies and bind them to ink and irrigate the world with their beauty. But I am not, and so after a while they join the river Lethe and return to the endless ocean from which they may have come. I sometimes wonder if this happens to almost everyone, most people, or just a few. But it does not matter, I guess. I never felt a call to be a composer. If you asked me: “Do you really like music?” my eyes would not have lit up.

“I have been here”

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“I learned to be kind because of you.” That is how Unlimited Translation Works renders this line from the song “Kimi no mama de” (YouTube link). The line has also been translated as “I was able to be kind because of you”. So anyway, what have you learned or become able to do because of me?

I have been listening several times now to the song “Read my name” (YouTube link) by Chris de Burgh. I have mixed feelings about this song, and those who know me can probably understand why. Here is the chorus and the essence of the song:

“I have been here!
read my name, read my name!
With all I’ve got I’ve taken part,
I’ve made a difference to the world.
I have been here,
just read my name!”

Chris has mentioned in at least three of his earlier songs a practice of going to the graveyards and reading the names on the headstones there. I get the impression that he considers this a kind of sacred act, as service perhaps both to those who lie beneath those stones and him who doesn’t yet. Because for each such name, there was someone whose life was just as important to them as our life is to us. Someone who dreamed, and tried to share those dreams. Where we are, they have been. Where they are, we shall be. They have been here, just read their names.

I read an article on a Norwegian computer related web site the other day. It said that only a small part of the population used Twitter, and of those who did, only half actually read other people’s tweets. The other half were only interested in sending tweets, not reading them.

My reaction was that this was probably better than in the flesh, where it seems the overwhelming majority are in love with their own voice, and will use most of the time when others speak to prepare their next “message”. In contrast, as I believe my brothers can attest, I rarely have anything to say when I converse with people lately. When they speak, I am listening to them, so I usually don’t have much of a rejoinder when they draw their breath.

Yet even I have my “dance” that I wish to perform in front of the other bees, to tell them where I found my sweet flowers. This is the human condition, I think. (And that of worker bees, or so science says.)  But what does it amount to, beyond “I have been here, read my name”? What is the difference I have made to the world?

2000 years ago, when Jesus Christ lived, there was some 200 to 300 million people in the world. A number of them are still known by name, but even your high school teacher would only know 20-30. To get up to 200-300 (one in a million), without resorting to specific books on the topic, you need a classical scholar. And even then, you don’t get much further.

That is not to say that none of the rest made a difference to the world, a tiny and local difference. And due the “butterfly effect”, history might have been drastically different if one of them had made a different choice one day. But most of those lives kind of canceled out, like the waves of a raindrop hitting the sea on a rainy day. And then there was the depth charge that was Jesus Christ, who set off a tsunami that is still making waves 2000 years later. But how many would have followed his twitter in the year 25, compared to any other random raindrop?

Not so much comparing myself to the incarnate sky-god here, as just reflecting on the scope of things, and how hard it is to say who we are until we are forgotten and only the work we did remains.

Someone else’s theory, put quite simply, is this: The Savior is the light of the great saints. The great saint is the light of the other saints. The saint is the light of the heroes. The hero is the light of the good people. The good is the light of the world. -Details may vary, but in the old days, hierarchy was considered natural, and most thinking people would recognize the expression “the great chain of Being” even if they had not heard it before.

Today, we have democracy, and those who vote depending on the color of someone’s necktie have as much influence as you. Or that is the theory. But it is not quite like that. Well, it may be in elections, but most elections are much less important than people believe. If random people elect other random people, the result will not rise above randomness. And if you cannot rule your own home with wisdom, let us not mention your own body, what will you achieve even if you rise to power or fame? Randomness. Some poor forgotten widow whose feeble life has a single direction will accomplish far more.

By resource or talent I could be a hero, one of a hundred. But apart from a brief spurt of software development, my life has mainly been a raindrop on the sea, so far. Or so it seems to me. But we won’t really know until I am forgotten. As the flesh hides the bone, so does the personal life hide a man’s work. But in time it will be all that is left in this world. (I don’t mean “work” in the sense of “employment”, of course, but accomplishment.)

It’s all about me!

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The little guy in the background is the main character and presumed future emperor of the galaxy, but people do whatever they want without considering him at all. With me it is the other way around: I am just some guy, and yet the mighty rivers of the air change their course to accommodate me. I am not sure what is the more disturbing of these two situations.

Well, you could wonder. The weather stayed mild for approximately one day, from Saturday evening to Sunday evening. Then the land went back into the deep freeze, even more than before. It is around -15C now, varying from -13 to -17 (8 to 1 Fahrenheit).

It was enough for my water pipes to thaw though, so I still have water. Even the shower has worked since, though one may wonder how long that can last. It seems unlikely that this whole thing happened over all of southern Norway (and probably some more) just for my sake, though if I had been the main character, it would certainly have made sense.

I think I’ll wait a bit longer before declaring myself the Most Important Person of Scandinavia though. I am reminded of a Christian meeting I was on shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, at which point an elderly man in the congregation got up and told us all that he had prayed for just such an outcome. That was almost certainly true. But I suspect that pray for this also did a large number of the tens of millions who were murdered, directly or indirectly, by the Soviet system, and a goodly number of their relatives as well. And while I cannot say for sure, I would not be surprised if their prayers were at least as fervent.

In fact, being the main character in one’s own eyes is one of the biggest problems of being human. But that said, I do appreciate having running water in my bathroom again, even if I’m not the Main Character except on my blog!

The Xanth effect

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I’m perfectly fine!

Thank you for your prayers and well-wishes! So much time has now passed since the unfortunate double meal, it really seems I will avoid my punishment this time. Of course, just waiting for the ax to fall has been a learning experience in itself.

Today I want to talk about another fascinating aspect of the human mind. I have called it the Xanth effect, after the long series of light fantasy novels by Piers Anthony. I am myself a foreigner to English, learning it as a third language. As an adult, I had my vocabulary extended, expanded and enhanced by the Xanth books like many American youngsters. However, like them I gradually found the later books less appealing than the first. This seems to be quite common. However, there is a big difference: My first Xanth books are not their first Xanth books.

The series debuted in Norway in its middle.  My first Xanth book was Heaven Cent, if I remember correctly. (Somehow I keep remembering it as “Skeleton Key” instead.) It was love at first sight. I had been writing for years, but the mix of puns, magic, drama and just random randomness was something I knew I could do better than anything I had done before. It influenced my own writing for many years. My fiction on the YouthNet BBS network was in my most heavily Piers-influenced phase.

I also loved the next books, Man from Mundania in particular but also parts of Isle of View.  I kept enjoying some of the later books, but eventually I found them lackluster. However, around this time new prints of the earlier books became available, so I bought some of them.  They were even worse.

Yes, dear reader. The quality of the Xanth books declined with the number of Xanth books I read, not with the number of Xanth books Piers Anthony wrote. The order of reading, not the order of writing, determined how good they were. In other words, it was all in my head.

The same effect, only faster, is observed with David Eddings’ epic fantasy books. Then again, they are basically the same book written over and over, if you skip the details. Of course, some people don’t skip the details.

I wonder if the same does not apply to my journal, but it is hard to be objective with oneself.  But just in case, just ask for your money back. ^_^

A dash of hyperlexia?

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While hyperlexia is overwhelmingly more common in boys, here is a fictional depiction of a girl from a Japanese animated movie. Her friend is tied up with a garland of flags, and rather than freeing her, this girl is compulsively identifying the nationality of the flags. OK, that is more “autism spectrum” in general, I guess. 

When I was still young, I half-joked that I must have the opposite of dyslexia. Today I know that there is indeed such an opposite. It is called “hyperlexia”, reasonably enough. And it is not considered a good thing.

If you look up hyperlexia on the Net, you will find it described as a rather debilitating disease. Sure, the kids learn to read while they are 2-3 years old, but they don’t understand what they read, and they spend their time performing rituals instead of asking questions or playing with other kids.

I am sure this is right – for some kids.  The ones that are “reported”, so to speak. If your child just learns to read early, and does well in school, has no disturbing tics and generally does not rock the boat, nobody will ever diagnose it in any way. So the reported cases are probably misleading. Not that they are not true, but they represent only those who lack the ability to adjust to the system, and so badly that they and their relatives can’t cover it.

Of course, that is what the name implies. Hyperlexia means “over-reading” or “too much reading”. Well, roughly. Let us not get into lexical detail. But in medical use, “hyper” is not a good thing. I guess there is a reason why Superboy is not called Hyperboy…

As it happens, I seem to only have a mild form of the same syndrome. I am not sure when I learned to read, but it may not have been until the age of 5. I started school at the age of 6, so I know it was well before that, because when I started school, I could read books and newspaper (and did so for pleasure). I could also write on a typewriter, and my spelling and grammar was – from what I am told – more like what other kids have when they finish compulsory schooling, rather than begin it. The content, however, was the utter drivel you would expect of a small boy, or worse. I was certainly not mature for my age.

There was certainly nothing wrong with my reading comprehension, and if I asked less “why, where and when” than other kids, it would be because I had already read why, where and when in the school books of my three older brothers. I was curious in my own way, but I did much time alone (although I was very vocal when I was together with others).

I did not play well with other children, for sure, but there were a couple reasons for this. One, they were idiots. Two, I was small and weak, having had asthma since I was a toddler. (This was before the current asthma epidemic – I did not have any classmates with asthma until high school, I think. And by then I did not have it anymore.) For the duration of my childhood and the next three decades, I was convince that my physical weakness was the reason why I was constantly bullied. And I was, pretty badly too. I was rather frail even when I started school, but during my first three years in school I lost 3 kg (about 6 pounds, I believe) and did not grow at all. This was in no small amount due to my mental state, I believe. School, which I had looked forward to with the highest expectations, turned out to be a nightmare, an ongoing horror with no end in sight.

Knowing those kids – and kids in general – I still suspect that they would have bullied me mercilessly even if I were a saint, simply because they could, since I was small and weak. However, the truth is that I was weird, arrogant, prone to rages despite my weakness, and reveled in humiliating others. So they would probably have ganged up on me and beaten me up even if I were some kind of child titan, simply because I deserved it. But I had no idea of that back then. I had no self-reflection at all. It was far from me. I would not even pretend humility, even if my health depended on it. No humility. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never humility.

My asthma receded sometime around the age of 10, although I remained smaller and weaker than my classmates for several more years. In high school I gradually began to catch up, and in high school I was no different from average in size, although I still was weaker than others since I had internalized my fear of ever exerting myself. (Exercise would always cause asthma attacks, and indeed still does, although it takes some serious work now.) I also had no physical confidence and was unsure of what I could or could not do, so I remained weak and somewhat clumsy. As an adult I am actually “anti-clumsy” in that I am less likely to collide with people and objects than the average adult, although I may still slip on the ice or stub my toe once in a blue moon.

I had the extremely good luck to go to high school in a place where people still considered academic prowess more important than physical strength. Today, high schoolers are much like children in these matters, and some places it was already like that. But not there. So I had my glory years. I was more or less respected, despite being a bit weird. For example, I did not notice other people’s body language or even facial expression much of the time, and my own facial expressions were exaggerated or disconnected from what I was saying. I have never really understood the need for facial expressions, I guess. After all, books do fine without them.

I have started to use facial expressions later in life though.

So yeah, a dash of hyperlexia, and a dash of being a spoiled brat probably. But it was certainly worth it. Frankly, there is no way those kids I grew up with could have been as good as the books. In truth, they would probably have been a negative influence on my life. Fairly little offense intended, but I don’t think I could possibly been happy living lives like theirs, even lives like they are living now. I was meant for another world, and the bookshelf was my gateway to it.

I guess another word than “hyperlexia” is needed. Perhaps “eulexia”? Good reading? I’m certainly willing to trade a few years of being chased around and bullied for the ability to read well. Even though I have now realized that I may not have had to make that trade in full, as much as I did. But I would probably not have been able to reflect on myself back then, even if I had read about it. Thank the Light that I did read about it later, though.

Work angels and Gaming Jesus

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Various occupations indeed. I actually thought of this picture, as it pretty much shows how I felt. I am not the kind of person who actually does SEE luminous beings though. I would probably have run screaming!

I am not alone in my head. Neither is anyone else, or at least not any normal person, but most are not aware of it, or only very dimly.  I sometimes jokingly write about “the voices in my head”, but they are not actually voices, more like independent thoughts. Today, they helped me at work.

After noon, I ran into two different cases which I could not solve. In one case, others had already tried to solve it too but given up. But while I was talking with the client, I received what I can only call a revelation. In fact, I said so out loud the first time, it was so out of the blue.  I cannot give any details about it, of course, my work being mostly non-disclosure. But it was computer software related.

I trust I have mentioned that for a while I developed software on my spare time for a friend, creating a big database system that let a number of workers register and access information regarding debt collection, and the system would follow up and print various documents and so on. It was really far too complex for a single person to keep in his head, but what happened was that I frequently received sudden insights, as if someone from outside projected into my mind how to do a task, complete and ready to just key it into the computer, or very nearly so.

Today was somewhat similar, only less extreme. I did not follow any logical train of thought. It was more like intuition, or even more than intuition. Jumping to conclusions, but in a good way. And it worked. Of course, perhaps. I mean, either of course because these things do that every time, or of course because I would not have written about it otherwise, given my good relationship with the “silent voices”.

***

The other part of today’s subject header is a bit different. I have mentioned a couple times in the past where I have bought a computer game acting on impulse, and how I had been warned in advanced by the “voice in my head” to not buy it. Each time it turned out to be wasted money. I may have referred to this warning as coming from “Gaming Jesus”, an expression I picked up from the now long gone web comic “Shawn Island”. In this comic there was a vaguely Jesus-like amnesiac who spent much of his time playing computer games and believed he was Jesus, thus he got the nickname “Gaming Jesus”. The phrase must have stuck with me, because I thought of this after I had been warned (in vain) a couple times about bad games.  I defended this idea by saying that perhaps people were saying “Good Lord what a terrible game” or “Jesus, this game sucks!” so obviously the Lord would have heard a lot of these comments already before I came to the shop. ^_^

No actual blasphemy is intended. There could be any number of reason why an independent thought process in my subconscious would know that a game was bad even though it had not heard it or read it until later.  Reasons like, uhm, reasons, I guess. Wait! Like, if it had been that good, I would have heard of it elsewhere?

Anyway, I heard about Civilization V yesterday, though not in a positive way. An online friend said he was not going to buy it.  But the non-voice in my head did not warn me against it. I checked it out a bit online and realized that it would probably be fun.  I don’t really have time to play much, but I used to love the Civilization series from the very start and have spent many happy hours on it. I certainly wish Sid Meier to become (or stay) rich and famous. So I bought it today in my late lunch break.

There was no protest by independent thought processes this time.

I actually forgot about it until a ways into the evening, at which point I installed it and played until it suddenly was close to midnight. It is like the original, and at least most of the sequels: Just a little more!  I remember when I had just got the original game – it may have been the first evening actually – I suddenly noticed that there was a strange light on the curtains. Cautiously I checked out what it was… it was the dawn. I had thought it was still evening. Not quite as bad this time, but I should probably be careful. Life is short enough. While I have gained a kind of perspective and time dilation from playing various games, I have other things to do now that are competing for the time.

Since I did not get any warning against the game, I assume it is not the reason why I got a sunburn.  What? It is October, in Norway, and it has been overcast for about a week, almost year record in this part of the country. But I really have a red triangle in the area where my topmost shirt button has been open. It looks like a redneck sunburn alright. Huh.

I also began freezing and shivering even though it was not particularly cold. It reminded me of a fat poisoning, though I don’t remember eating enough fat for that. It seems to be fading now, after spending time in outdoors winter clothes in a warm room, and before that some physical activity in front of a space heater.  It’s too late to go to bed early in any case, and I will wait a bit longer to see what happens next.

I have no idea whether there is a connection between the shivering and the fake sunburn, much less a connection to Civ5.  But I assume that if it was something bad that was happening to me, the silent voice in my head would have warned me.  OK, so I more or less stole that one from Socrates, but why not. If the independent actors in (or through) my subconscious can help me solve problems at work and be a better judge of computer games than I am, who knows what else they might do.

But if they tell me to kill random people, I’m opting out.

(Seriously, why do some people have voices that tell them to kill their neighbors, while I have the ones who tell me to stop playing games and take the pasta off the stove before it gets burned? It certainly does not go by merit, I can tell you that much.)

Ignorant geniuses

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Footsteps that disclose a higher world, from the family-friendly anime Kimi ni Todoke (Reaching You). Unfortunately, I am not good at reaching you in the way I describe today, but I hope you will still be able to dig out something worthwhile!

Synchronicity is fun! Regular readers may remember my recent entry on diversity of ignorance, inspired almost completely by a short essay by Bjørn Stærk. This was on Tuesday 21. The same day, seemingly out of the blue, a regular reader of the One Cosmos blog recommends the book The Intellectual Life by Sertillanges. Two days later, and probably as a result of the comment, Robert Godwin pulls out a quote from Sertillanges’ book:

“Contact with writers of genius procures us the immediate advantage of lifting us to a higher plane,” which confers “benefit on us even before teaching us anything. They set the tone for us; they accustom us to the air of the mountaintops. We were moving in a lower region; they bring us at one stroke into their own atmosphere”.

This was eerily familiar to me, because Ryuho Okawa (the would-be savior from Venus) recommends exactly the same in at least one of his books. Probably The Laws of Happiness, but possibly one or more of the others where he brings up the connection between wisdom and reading. Okawa uses the expression “high spirit” where Sertillanges uses “genius”, but perhaps we should bear in mind that the Japanese word for genius starts with the kanji for Heaven. Also in ancient Europe, genius was assumed to be a helper spirit that followed certain families, rather than just a measure of high IQ as it is used today.

(I think this needs another paragraph, because I got it wrong when I was young. I thought genius was simply a high IQ, nothing else. I assumed that quantity gradually shifted into quality. I suppose in a way it does at the other end of the scale, at least. However, I have later found that it is possible to have a high IQ and a tediously mundane spirit. The current theory, according to Science Illustrated, is that geniuses lack a kind of “filter” so they observe more of what goes on around them. This is not purely a good thing, it can cause problems as well. I don’t know that it is even so simple. Today’s science puts its pride in never having to resort to spirits to explain anything, but for humans (or at least some of us) our spirit is a pretty big part of life. During the night, you can explain many things without mentioning the sun. In daylight, somewhat fewer.)

Back on track! The important part is that genius can be transferred, at least to some extent. As Sertillanges and Okawa both insist, exposure to this kind of thinking has a chance to change our own way of thinking. Not the content, mind you, but the very form of our thinking.

You can say that we have a capacity for understanding the knowledge that is given to us by life, books, teachers, or whatever. We have a memory to store it, but we also interact with it and process it, consciously or not. Like a liquid takes the form of the container it is in, so also knowledge is formed by the vessel. Now, what happens when we come into contact with true genius / high spirits? Not only a pouring of more knowledge into our vessel, say I, but a change of the container itself. We are expanded; new directions of knowledge or understanding open up. We realize something is possible that we did not know before. This changes us.

Another metaphor that several people (including me) have experienced in a dream, is finding doors in their home that lead to new rooms or whole wings or levels of the house that they had never known about. So, you don’t just bring more stuff into the same living quarters: The place itself is expanded. (Though in those dreams, there are usually already things there.)

Do you see what I mean? There is an ordinary transfer of information, and there is the transfer of capacity for information. Any parrot can do the first, but who is capable of the second? Who can touch your mind and expand it in new directions? These rare and precious moments change our lives.

The reason why I enjoy reading Bjørn Stærk, Robert “Gagdad” Godwin, and Ryuho Okawa is precisely this, they repeatedly unlock new rooms of the mind. The factual content may be more disputable.

This gets even more pronounced when you get to the geniuses of the past. The knowledge in society at that time was not just fairly small, but much of it was Just Plain Wrong. The gender of your children does not depend on which testicle the semen comes from, even though Aristotle is undoubtedly a genius in numerous ways. And Plato may have been more than a bit off with his idea of women as communal property. The cosmology of Moses was extremely simplified, to say the least. Even relatively modern writers are children of their time to an almost shocking degree when it comes to the facts they assume and the acceptance of some values in their society.

This is where we have to keep the baby and the bathwater apart. We have to be able to throw out the false facts and the misunderstandings that are often embedded deep in the thought, and still retain the vibrant spirit of the genius, the heartbeat that can quicken our own and throw open the doors of perception.

Can happiness be shared?

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“I cook because I want to make others happy” says this ideal girl from a Japanese cartoon. I suppose this is more or less why I write as well, it certainly does not pay my bills. But do people actually become happy when you do something for them, or is it the one who does something for others who becomes happy? Both? Depends?

“Can happiness be shared?” sounds like a crazy question, but I do not mean to ask whether two (or more) people can be happy together. Rather, my question is more like “can a happy person give away some of his happiness to others?”

This is not a completely theoretical question for me. I am actually quite happy most of the time, pretty much except when I am sick and getting sicker, or when I have just made a mistake. On the other hand there are many unhappy people in the world, and a few of them are my friends. There are probably many more who are not exactly unhappy, certainly not to the point of complaining about it, but who feel empty and dissatisfied or frequently experience boredom in their everyday life. Could I transfer some happiness to those who need it more?

This seems easy enough if you believe that happiness is a matter of money. Simply give them money, and they will be happier than before they got it. Certainly this seems to be the assumption of most of the world’s governments, and it is not entirely pulled out of Marx’ behind. At a low level of income, where you cannot afford life’s necessities, money makes a huge difference. So if some people have plenty of money and others are starving, it makes a certain sense to steal from the rich and give to the poor, at least if you can somehow convince the rich to continue collecting riches that you can steal. This is a pretty big part of the “art of politics” in our time, but the time for this is probably about to end, because people are gradually realizing that happiness is not quite that simple.

There is a whole new “economics of happiness” being crafted now, based on studies of large numbers of people. For instance, happiness for men is strongly tied to marriage, and somewhat less to employment. For a man, in terms of happiness, a wife is worth years of hard work. This should not really come as a surprise to anyone, I guess. Now as we are moving toward economics of happiness, imagine the chaos if the state were to try to ensure maximum happiness in this regard. Especially since there is no such strong link for women. (Actually, it is totally possible that women marry happy men and avoid the unhappy ones – the statistics would look the same without a control group forced to marry at the behest of the scientists. Let us hope we’ll never know, then.)

Others look at what kind of people are happy. They find that those who do something for others, without getting paid for it, tend to be radically more happy than those who don’t. Again, this is rather old news: “It is more blessed to give than to receive”, as was said almost 2000 year ago. But there is also the possibility that happy people are more likely to volunteer than their depressed brethren, and again the only way to find out for sure is to try it for yourself and see if you feel happier.

So, it would seem that happiness is a bit like stamina: There may be a genetic component, but if you are even vaguely healthy, you can improve it by doing certain things that may seem unpleasant at first. Happiness exercises, in this case. But if that is so, we cannot send other people our happiness, or at least not to a great extent. They will have to grow their own happiness by walking the path that leads to it.

The truth is probably that you can do both: Give a man a fish, and he has food for the day. Teach a man to fish, and he has food for a lifetime.

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EDIT to add: Since some may not be familiar with the research, I will point you to this little BBC article on happiness which drops some names that are useful for your further Googling. In particular, I am thinking of Professor Oswald on the economy of happiness (he assigns price tags to various things not buyable, to compare them) and Martin Seligman on how to live a happy life individually.

The few who know

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I did not even know there was chestnut cream on top of Mont Blanc! What is my head filled with?

I am not even talking about esoteric knowledge here, just plain ordinary things that people supposedly learn in high school:  Does radar use sound waves, do antibiotics cure a common cold? Obviously if you ask 1000 coins about this, you will get about 500 yes and 500 no. If you ask a large number of Americans the same, you will get about 55%, usually but not necessarily of the right answer.

55% may sound a decent number.  If 55% of adult Americans know that radar uses radio waves (electromagnetic waves), then high school teachers may still be able to pat themselves on the back. But unfortunately, it is not so well. Remember how we got almost the same result from flipping a coin? Well, not exactly the same result.  We need to find a number that, together with half of the rest, produces 55%.  Or, for the people who don’t think like normal people, X+(100-X)/2=55.  In any case, we find that if 10% of the population actually know the answer, and half of the other 90% are right by pure luck, this gives the result shown in real life.

This also holds true for more complex equations. For instance, there recently was a study showing that 18% of polled Americans thought President Obama was a Muslim, while half did not know. That leaves about a third knowing that he is officially a Christian.  (There was, as you may remember, quite some controversy about the pastor of the church he used to attend, one Reverend Jeremiah Wright.) So, it is obvious that the “Don’t know” fraction should be larger, but should it be larger by 18%?  No, according to our coin toss theory, it should be larger by about 36%.  If the 18% who got it wrong had bad luck, then there would also be 18% with good luck, as it were, leaving only about 15% actually knowing the professed religion of their president.

(Arguably this may be a good thing, since the US officially has a separation between church and state. But as an expression of the overwhelming ignorance of publicly known facts, as a part of a great pattern of “Don’t know, don’t care as long as I can’t eat it or have sex with it”, it is somewhat more sinister.)

How did it end up like that? Well, as I recently wrote, people are stupid and crazy as part of a long-standing tradition going back as far as we can follow. There has been some pressure on some people to be smart and sane, but not many. For most, it was good enough to till the soil and don’t stand out from the crowd.

Contrary to appearances, modern journalism is not actually trying to fix the problem, but make money off it. If you look objectively at the “news”, you will find that much of it is actually more like pornography, except with Wrath instead of Lust.  Or sometimes both.  But the point is, it aims to excite rather than inform, much less elevate to a higher perspective.

Let me take an example that has made the rounds in social media lately. Evidently a large American retail chain has given a generous donation to a political group that supports a candidate who opposes gay marriage. Outrage abounds.

Now, it so happens that in the US (but not everywhere else) the politicians who oppose gay marriage are generally those who promote business-friendly legislation as well. The history of this goes well beyond the bounds of this essay. The businessmen probably did not even consider that anyone would think they had an opinion on gay marriage. Why should they? It is rare even in the countries where it has been legal for years, and it does not drastically alter the shopping habits of those involved. It is highly unlikely that a supermarket chain would be able to notice the tiniest blip on their bottom line in any case.

But “business donates to business-friendly politician” is not a headline suited to create outrage. And outrage is what people want, so that’s what they get.  The fact is that the journalists and their readers are both immersing themselves in hellish thoughts and creating suffering for themselves. But at least it is exciting. People love that. They would rather suffer than be bored.  How a human can be bored while still having all its limbs and senses is something we will never know, we who write online journals.  If we had the capacity for boredom, we would not have the capacity for writing, and the other way around.

And there you have it: The people who create opinions are somewhere in the range of 1-10% of the population, depending on how generous your definition. It is not a long shot that these are the same people who know random unnecessary things. And write about them.