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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the normal human condition and nothing to be surprised by. We don’t understand anything at all when we have never seen it before and barely even heard about it. How could it be otherwise?

My many-named reader has a question to my previous entry. He asks: “How do you tell the difference between seeing another dimension, divine inspiration and a hallucination?” The short answer is, as I warned at the start of the entry, that you need experience. But as I was about to gently rebuke my reader for forgetting the beginning of the entry before getting to the end (for this could in no way be the fault of my communications skills, of course), I realized that there is more than one dimension even to practice. There is length, of course, but also breadth.

For instance, because I have watched hundreds of hours of anime, I can tell Japanese apart from other languages or from simple babbling, even if I only understand a little and cannot use it. Simply the act of observing means that you will be able to tell things apart eventually. But not without practice, and not after five minutes or even an hour or two. Or at least the ability would not stay long after only an hour or two.

But how can I know that Japanese language does in fact exist and is not an elaborate hoax? Perhaps the Japanese actually speak Chinese, but push this delusion of a separate language on foreigners for political reasons or just to laugh at us behind our backs. (Not that they would need something so elaborate for that – I am sure they do that quite a bit anyway, and with good reason.)

If I had seen only one animated movie in Japanese, then this would certainly be a possible scenario, if not plausible. But as it happens, I have watched a broad range of anime from different publishers, and read about even more that others have watched. This is what we may call a broader experience, in contrast to just longer. For instance if I had only seen The Laws of Eternity, even if I saw it every week, it would not be a very broad experience in Japanese culture. It might have left me a better person than if I had seen all those others, most of which are not very edifying, but I would not have much basis for an opinion about Japanese language, much less the rest of their culture.

This is the case with people who restrain their interests to a very narrow range. In the example of spiritual practices, which I wrote about in my previous entry, there are sects who teach that your only spiritual practice needs to be chanting a particular short phrase over and over for the rest of your life, as often as possible. While this certainly has some effect, it is a narrow approach in the sense that we cannot easily know whether the effect comes from the object of their worship, the particular sounds of the chant, or simply the practice of repeating something an extraordinary number of times.

To further complicate things, sects tend to strongly discourage experimenting with variations of the practice, much less experimenting with the practices of other sects. Sure, members of other sects claim to be happy too, but what do they know about true happiness? And besides, the demons may just be deluding them into thinking that they are happy. After all, if you were a professional demon, wouldn’t you be willing to make people happy for a few years if you could get them to Hell afterwards? (This does not apply to our sect, of course, since we know true happiness when we see it. Besides, it is written in our holy Scripture that we are right, and we know our holy Scripture is true because the Scripture says so.)

The behavior of the sect members is actually quite reasonable. Why risk a good thing for something uncertain? Better the god you know than the devil you don’t. Still, it makes for a narrow experience, not too unlike the fan who only watches the same movie over and over again.

On the other hand, the “butterfly”, “supermarket” or “salad bar” approach to spirituality has its own drawbacks. The most obvious is that people tend to pick only the parts they personally like. But if a child starts to eat only the food he likes best, do only the homework he likes and only show up for P.E. classes if they are fun, he is unlikely to be heading for a long and happy life. If he has parents, they will hopefully tell him to change his ways. Likewise if you use this approach in your spiritual life. If you have a spiritual “father”, he is sure to tell you in no uncertain terms to Eat Your Greens.

Each tradition has its own internal structure or consistency. This is certainly not to say that they are all equal, much less identical. What I mean is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and if you only keep picking parts, you will not get that “more”, that wholeness or totality. Just saying. I am not really the right person to go all out against this, since I have a double helping of curiosity at the very least.

On the bright side, the great religions have each quite a broad range of spiritual tools. For instance if you are a Christian, there is no need to Hare off to Krishna or canter over to El Cantare just to add the spice of variety to your life. (If you go for other reasons, it is not like I could stop you anyway.) You may never have run into all of these in Sunday School in the Church of Our Saints in Middle Littlewick, but actually there is both prayer, meditation, contemplation, Lectio Divina and even chanting (although mostly in liturgy). And of course if you are part of a congregation, there are probably various rituals also trying to drag Eternity into time (or time into Eternity).

On the other extreme, Buddhism has a heap of different meditation schools, many of which are not quite religious in the western sense of the word, although some are. The contrast between some of the techniques taught is staggering, certainly on the same scale as the difference between some branches of different religions.

This was very long, but the short of it is: There are a number of different spiritual practices, a few of which I am familiar with from experience, and many more from the experience of others. While the effects of them differ to some extent, there are also many striking similarities.

Then there is the whole thing about religious versus secular meditation / observation, but I am working on a different entry about that.

So how can we tell things apart? We cannot without practice. The practice can be long or broad or both. It can also differ in depth, so I guess we have 3 dimensions there as well. If you have mainly one of these dimensions, I suppose it may be hard to perceive the others clearly. If you have none of them, I don’t see why you would even try. Humans need years to even learn to dress themselves. There is no way we can become proficient with the mind without watching it firsthand for some time. But I believe it is worth it, for a mind is a terrible thing to waste.