Category Archives: human mind

The “subconscious”

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Sometimes our hidden side can be dramatically different from what we believe about ourselves.

In order for human life to make sense, we have to acknowledge that we are not alone in our head. We are not made of the same stuff all the way through. There are parts of us that we do not fully know, and that may have plans or wants that run contrary to those we claim as our own.

Until a few generations ago, this other activity in our brain was generally attributed to angels or demons, or the blessings and curses of priests and witches.  Today we use other expressions, and generally view them as all being “in your head”.  Carl Gustav Jung coined the term “complex”, which is used today in a narrower meaning. But originally complexes meant all the stuff in our mind that is more complex than a simple thought or feeling.  Even our internal representation of other people is in the form of a complex. All the characters in our dreams, whether they look like someone we know or not, are our complexes.

I put the word “subconscious” in quotes here, because it is not accurate.  The hidden part of us could be both subconscious and supraconscious (“superego” in the misunderstood word of Freud), but often they are neither higher nor lower than our conscious self, but simply off to the side. Something that is conscious in me could be non-conscious in you, or even the other way around.

What I mean to point out is that you have an inner world, and it is big, and it is populated.  It is not just a sack of forgotten memories. A lot of your thinking and feeling goes on outside the narrow scope of your awareness.

There are from time to time people who tell us that the subconscious is capable of amazing feats, and that it can be harnessed for personal success. This is often tied to the notion that we use only 10% or less of our brain.  That is not actually true.  Now that we are able to see living brains as they work, it is clear that we use a good deal of our brain at any time. However, it is correct that part of that activity is not under the control of our conscious self or ego. For instance, when we say something we know is not true, parts of the brain light up that are not active when we tell the truth as we see it.  This activity is not something we can decide.  It may be an “angelic” part of our subconscious that is active outside our control.  In the same way, a man may be exposed to erotic stimuli and not react to them, but in his brain there is a flurry of activity.  This is a less angelic part of his subconscious at work, again regardless of conscious choice.

I mention this because it is common among ordinary people to believe that they know what is going on in their head. They also believe that most of the activity in there is themselves, although they will sometimes admit that “I don’t know what came over me” or “I don’t know what possessed me”. But then they forget it again, or they come up with some theory that makes what they did seem rational.  “It was his fault”, “it was because she was wearing a miniskirt”, “the road was full of idiots today”, “a snake told me to eat it”.

In reality, a whole lot of the thinking of ordinary people consists of attempts to explain to themselves what they already did or thought or felt. And not only to themselves. When people get together, they also try to pull each other into this kind of thinking, as if the agreement of other people mattered.  (Usually it doesn’t, except in court.)

I want you to realize that the world we perceive is a mixture of the outer world and the inner world.  The inner world reflects the outer world, but with changes made by our subconscious. We selectively forget, and change the color of memories over time, or even make them up. Your relationship with your subconscious matters a lot, because over time it shapes your world. “I think, therefore I am. But I remember, therefore I am me.”

This understanding is a great help toward humility, which is simply a subset of realism. Humility is realism about myself.  So just for that reason, being aware of our “subconscious” is a great help.  But this understanding is also necessary for some more advanced observation, which I hope to come back to at a later time.

More on resistance to change

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“If you are going to fight the boss, go after you have leveled enough.” These words, here put in the mouth of Thomas Edison (in background with steam-powered PSP), are probably worth a try. And no, despite featuring Edison, it is actually not made by Happy Science.

When you are 50 years old, writes Ryuho Okawa, the karma of your soul is approximately 80% finished. Or in other words, the person you are going to be in your next life is about 80% decided.

I don’t have any revelation about the “next life” part of this, but it certainly makes sense to me that at as we grow older, we become more set in our ways. You don’t really need to be the Buddha to realize that, although I suppose it helps. Most married women seems to know it as well, at least about their husbands. (Or that was the case in my childhood, when a woman had the same husband for decades. It is probably not as easy to notice if you did not know him when he was young.)

But in addition to the personal inertia of each of us, which usually increases with age, there is also the inertia of society, which has lately lessened. The “consensus reality” is loosening, fragmenting, and expanding. This is a rare opportunity, for good and for bad.

Boris Mouravieff uses the expression “General Law” about the force that keep people mainstream, so to speak. Unfortunately his choice of name for this force did not foresee Google, where any discussion of it is likely to drown in the army of lawyers. It is an interesting concept. It operates on several different levels: The social, where people will obviously treat you differently if you start to become unusual. The personal, where the weight of your own habits and attachments will hold you back if you try to change. And even a seemingly supernatural aspect, in which unlikely events start to line up as you reach the shore of consensus reality and start to dip your toes in the water of the unknown. He insists however that it is simply a law of nature, albeit a very far-reaching one.

I don’t really know more than that. Barely even that, actually. I have so far resisted buying his books, since even the people who praise them readily admit that there seems to be some insanity in them. And those people generally don’t seem too mainstream themselves.

Now as I said before, the times have changed regarding what is mainstream. Society has fractured into subcultures. It is hard to even claim that American liberals and conservatives live in the same world, for instance. To take the perhaps most concrete example, the planet on which the liberals live is heating steadily, and this is a scientific and measurable fact. The planet on which the conservatives live is fairly stable, temperature-wise, but has been cooling for about a decade now, and this is a scientific and measurable fact. Don’t get me started on the worlds in which CIA (with or without alien technology) invented the HIV virus, killed President Kennedy and blew up the World Trade Center.

It is probably next to impossible for a young person today to imagine the social resistance to change in times past, even a couple generations ago. At the time, people would look at you strangely if you did not go to church each Sunday. Now you have to go to the mosque to get that kind of looks and whispering from your neighbors. (In the western world, that is. If you live in a land where the norm is going to the mosque, things are probably quite different.) Another generation or two back, and your career was pretty much decided when you were born, and your marriage not much later. There were only so many farms and fishing boats in your village, after all, and a woman could not survive legally or otherwise without a man to take care of her. Well, unless she was a teacher. A little further back there were no teachers, instead there were witches, and if your pronunciation of the letter R was a little off, you just might end up in hot water, or glowing coals or something. I’d say the peer pressure in today’s high school is not the ultimate pinnacle of its type, bad as it may be.

Today, you are largely free to choose your poison, or your antidote as the case may be. Sure, there may be a price to pay: You may find old friends turning their back on you, and may even miss a promotion at work. But you are unlikely to find yourself homeless unless you are severely out of alignment with the world most of us live in. And you are pretty sure to not get burned on a stake (or get a stake through your heart).

Even then, the personal and subconscious resistance to change remains as strong as ever. And there are a lot of assumptions that are shared by most subcultures, and/or are reinforced daily by advertising and popular entertainment.

This has been a long way of saying it, but: If you think change is easy, you have probably never tried.

I present you the fact that at best 5% of those who go on a diet achieve lasting change in their body mass. (As in, a decade later.) Note that this is 5% of those who actually try, as opposed to 5% of the populace. In other words, if you look at a school class, there is likely to be either one or none who will take charge of their own physical shape beyond what is already natural to them.

Now consider that this example is about something that has obvious health effects and an effort that is lauded by society, encouraged by the medical establishment, and likely to net you personally an economic surplus. Did I mention save your life from a painful early death? And it is still almost impossible to achieve merely by the means of your own willpower and the support of friends, family and your family doctor.

Now, I honestly don’t mean to write about your obesity or lack thereof. My point is simply that even when the odds are stacked grotesquely in favor of changing something glaringly obvious in your life, it is still almost impossible to change. Even before you are 50. What then if you set before you the task to change what is inside, what is invisible to everyone but you and your God (if any). Something that will require sacrifice in this world, will not make you popular, will not make you rich, and will certainly not bring you any hot loving.

I do not mean to discourage those who seek sanctification (or Enlightenment, or whatever you will call it). Well, not any more than my hero Jesus Christ meant to discourage everyone when he said that the path is narrow and there are few who find it. (He did, if translation to several European languages is even vaguely correct, not even talk about whether they actually walked on it, just whether they found it.)

It is not a discouragement. It is merely a fact. Most people will never be able to change even if they want it. Even if they honestly, seriously want it. This is not because it is impossible. It is because people are people. And even if we really, really want to change, there is always something else we want too. Well, that’s my theory at least. Think about it. Isn’t it because there is something else we ALSO want?

In any case, “just do it” won’t do. Inhuman persistence seems to be a minimum requirement. But you’ll never know how hard it is until you try. Until then you can talk with great confidence.

The darker the shadow?

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Myrkemann, my dark/dark tanker in City of Heroes. He is here to represent my dark side, although the Norwegian word Myrkemann (or Mørkemann) actually means someone who tries to discourage levity, entertainment and sensual pleasures in society. I am not sure how well that fits with me…

It seems that my recent commenter has returned, and has a reasonable question regarding my entry two days ago, “STILL evil inside“. He asks: “Why would someone like you get these dreams?” which was what I had already tried to say, namely that I am still evil inside after all these years. However, there is a very similar question that may throw more light on the issue, as it were: Why NOW?

I remember a time in my life where these dreams were particularly common and intense. This was in my twenties, and it was a time when I was trying to become a better person, make progress and become holy. I may have a more realistic view now of just what an immense undertaking that is, even with divine intervention on one’s side. But I’ve still been somewhat active lately, reading books of the Truth and thinking about the Truth and to some extent writing about it as well. I have been concerned about blessing others, doing my work with the purpose of giving back love to the world and so on.

There is a saying: “The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” In natural life this is a bit of an illusion, as the shadow is only darker in contrast. But psychologically, it is quite real. There are forces that are balanced to keep us in our place. This is perfectly natural: At the very least, it generally keeps us from going insane on a whim. Insanity, like sanctification, takes time and immense dedication and energy that already moves in that particular direction. You cannot just sit down and think, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to believe that I was from another planet and had awesome powers to help people” and the next day you start claiming to be Kal-El from Krypton. No, a lot of work happens underground before the madness breaks out, and we cannot expect it to go any faster upward than downward.

“Indeed, to the General Law someone who ‘moves’ looks like a fugitive from collective work, and nature takes immediate steps – a whole series of appropriate measures – to make the rebel fall back into line” writes Boris Mouravieff. And not much later, he says: “But here again, he must be particularly vigilant not to spend the reserve as fast as he accumulates it.” Recall Ryuho Okawa’s rule about the iceberg? At least 80% under the surface? I suspect I have fallen foul of this to some degree. And so when the shape of things to come start to rise up above the surface, a corresponding shift in the center of gravity moves below water. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” as a better man than I said.

This is not something new to me. It happens with alarming regularity. Well, when I make any changes in my life at least. Looking at my bookshelf, there has been some very visible changes: Something like my own weight in fantasy books have been replaced with a modest number of spiritual books. If that were to reflect the status of my heart, things would get hairy indeed. It is not quite that dramatic, but I can see how it would trigger a re-balancing.

I have from the start – or so it seems to me – in this journal striven to draw my own picture in both light and dark colors, because this is the nature of a human and I am still one. I am relentlessly reminded of this whenever I begin to wonder a little, since I seem to have so little in common with each of you. A little here, a little there, but it all adds up. But it may be too little for any one to find much reason to linger. If you come to read about my Sims, chances are you shrink back in horror from both my religious psychology and my nightmares (or especially the nightmares I am in my dreams). Conversely, if you come here for your religious edification, you will no doubt take offense before the week is over. And so on it goes. But at least I try to be “fair and balanced”, as they say in America, about myself.

Not bored to death yet!

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Despite my boring pictures, I have not been bored to death yet. Actually, the headline of that article is misleading.
“BORED TO DEATH? IT COULD HAPPEN
The more bored you are, the more likely you are to die early, according to researchers.”
That is what it says, but as we all know, correlation is not causation. Well, actually it usually means there is something causing something, but not necessarily directly.  In this case, boredom and early death both come from a high Optimum Stimulation level.  I know I wrote about this some years ago, but you may have slept through it, so a short summary:

Some people are born with a high Optimum Stimulation Level.  This means they feel best and function best when there is much excitement.  As babies they laugh when they hear sudden loud sounds or see bright flashes of light. As adults they tend to be curious and try new things, take chances, drink, smoke, drive fast without seat belts (sometimes while smoking and drinking, depending on whether they are also stupid, and this trait is not dependent on intelligence so some of them are). They also tend to avoid stable marriages and vote liberal.  And they tend to die early, probably from some other cause than voting liberal.

Conversely, there are people like me.  As babies they cry if there are sudden sounds or lights.  As schoolkids they have their nose in a book.  As adults they tend to follow the laws, avoid dark streets, pray, and vote conservative if at all. They tend to die old and reasonably content with their life.  They also make for lousy novels, and probably so-so blogs as well…

Over the weekend, I have moved all but a few of my DVDs to two external hard disks (in the hope that they won’t both explode at the same time, but I do intend to get a third just in case).  Each of these black boxes take up the space of perhaps 4 DVD boxes, and easily takes a hundred DVDs.  So I should free up another couple shelves.

As a side effect of this, I have watched some of my old favorite anime.  As a result of this again, I have started the groundwork of yet another novel. Hopefully it won’t feature people like me.  And hopefully you aren’t bored to death yet!

Brainwaves, entrainment & meditation

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Last year I wrote several entries about brainwave entrainment and the two products I have bought and used for this purpose, first Holosync and later LifeFlow. I have tagged this entry with the same tags, so you should be able to use the tag feature of WordPress to quickly get a list of the other entries where I have used those tags.

This is a more basic overview, for those who are absolutely new to this field.

Our brain uses a combination of electricity and chemistry to do its work. Signals traverse the neurons – the nerve cells – as a change in the electric potential. Then in the gap between cells, it is converted to a chemical signal carried by a neurotransmitter. If the receiving cell reacts, it more or less recreates the signal and passes it on. Whether it does this, and whether the signal is stronger or weaker than it first was, depends on other signals the cell may also receive, and its experience with signals from that particular cell.

As you may guess by now, measuring the electromagnetic output of the brain will not allow your doctor to read your thoughts. It can only give a rough outline of what is going on in there. In fact, it is different from an EEG (electro-encephalogram) to say whether a person is dreaming or just thinking hard. But certain conditions show up very clearly, such as an epileptic attack or, on the other hand, sleep.

In sleep, the brainwaves slow down. For historical reasons, the usual thinking waves are called beta. They are quick, jagged and don’t go very far up or down usually, though there may be an occasional spike.

The next type is alpha. This appears when we are about to go to sleep, but also during daydreams and other relaxing situations. You can usually create this type of brainwave by simply sitting comfortably alone, closing your eyes, relaxing and then looking slightly upward inside your closed eyes. Don’t roll them back so hard it hurts. In this state of mind it is almost impossible to solve mathematical or logical problems, or anything else that normally requires concentration. These brainwaves are slower, rounder and more regular.

The alpha state is the one where we start doing meditation. However, the alpha brainwaves are not the meditation. This is extremely important to understand. Why then do we use this state of mind? Because 1) this is something every person experiences every day when they go to sleep and often throughout the day as well, and 2) it is a state of mind where consciousness is somewhat reduced. As I said, you cannot do mental work in this state. Most people will automatically start daydreaming (autists don’t) and their thoughts begin to drift aimlessly. Meditation consists of setting up an anchor (a mantra, a simple sequence of counting, observing your breath or something similar) and binding your awareness to it so it does not drift. Over a period of months or years, you gradually learn to remain fully conscious in a state of mind where you normally are not conscious. This is what meditation really is about: The expansion of consciousness.

Below alpha waves (frequency 12-8 Hz) are theta waves (7-4 Hz). These fill most of the night. Just after you fall asleep, or when you nap on the sofa, you remain vaguely aware of the world around you, even though your brain has already begun to produce mostly theta waves. In this situation you can still be easily roused, but you rather prefer not to unless there is some crisis. However, when you return to the same brainwaves after going into deeper sleep, this awareness has been erased, and you remain more or less unconscious throughout the night. In the elderly, some nights there is no deeper sleep, and they may therefore imagine that they have not slept at all, even though they did so for several hours.

The final level is delta (2-0.5 Hz). The brainwaves here are very slow (0.5 Hz means each wave takes two seconds!) and with a much greater amplitude (that is to say, the electric potentials on both sides are much higher). This is the deep sleep that wipes out the awareness of the mind. It is also associated with restoration of the body and brain, maintenance of the immune system and release of Human Growth Hormone.

All of these states can be induced through brainwave entrainment. You can use light or sound, sound being most used because it has no risk of triggering epilepsy. The human ear cannot hear sounds with a frequency this low, so it is made indirectly. The most popular approach is binaural beats. You need headphones for this, as it sends a different signal to each ear. The difference in frequency becomes the frequency of the resulting brain waves. For instance, a tone of 210 Hz and one of 200 Hz will give rise to a 10 Hz wave in the brain. This was discovered rather by accident. Later other methods have been devised that don’t need headphones, the most effective is probably isochronic tones. Here an audible signal is turned on and off (or from one frequency to another) at a rapid interval that corresponds to the target frequency.

With these techniques it is possible to invite the brain into brainwaves normally only found in sleep. You cannot overwhelm the brain and force it into these states though. On the way from the top of the brain stem where these frequencies are generated from the sound input, the waves have to pass through the limbic system. If this system is aroused (through intense emotions such as fear, anger or lust) the signal will be blocked. Conversely, if you willingly relax and don’t concentrate on anything else, the signal will spread more quickly.

If you play a track designed to cause theta or delta brainwaves, it is normal to fall asleep the first times you listen to it. In fact, if you don’t mind, you may continue that way. But if you strive to be alert, you will normally be able to stay awake longer and longer, and eventually throughout the session.

LifeFlow by Project Meditation takes a slightly different approach, as you get 10 tracks, one for each Hz of frequency from 10 to 1. You are supposed to spend at least a month with each, until you are thoroughly familiar with them, starting with those you recognize from waking life, and getting steadily deeper. This way you should be able to remain conscious even at the lower levels, though it may usually take a couple years for a newbie to get there.

Again, the essence of meditation is the expansion of consciousness. A host of problems in life stem from the fact that our “normal” consciousness is a fragile thing. A simple insult may be enough for it to be swapped out temporarily for an altered state in which you behave like a total stranger. The same goes for hunger, fear, lust or revulsion. Because of this, people find themselves unable to reach their life goals or even to maintain the life they already have. Seen from the perspective of someone more stable, they are like foam on waves on a storm sea, thrown helplessly about, broken apart and formed again, but doomed to once again be ripped to shreds. Anyone who has a deep and stable consciousness is certain to feel compassion when seeing this sorry state of being, but most people are sure this is as good as it gets, this is all there is.

I believe this is how some of the world’s great religions came into being, through the compassion of great souls who had a deep, stable consciousness. But because people tried to understand it without doing the practice (in other words, because of “theology”) the religions degraded into cheat codes for getting health, prosperity and generally tricking the gods into ignoring your destructive behavior and treating you as if you were someone else. As opposed to, you know, becoming that other person, from the inside out.

There is a distinct risk that the same may happen with brainwave entrainment. Already the claims made by various suppliers go a ways beyond what you should reasonably expect. But you should definitely expect some benefits if you use it regularly.

Our 3 bodies & their sleep

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Is this physical body my true form? Well, probably more so than a unicorn (your unicorn may vary), but it is not the only body. In a manner of speaking.

You may be unaware that you have (at least) 3 bodies. I did write about it last year when I worked my way through the ILP book, but you may not have been there, or it may not have made a deep impression on it, perhaps because you have been busy taking care of your family and have not had time to stare intently at your own soul.  (Or navel, though chances are you won’t find your soul there. But at least your navel may remind you of just how much you owe your mother. Hopefully staring at your soul will remind you of your celestial Parent as well.  But not while your own kids are starving. Or, more likely, pulling each other’s hair out.)

So, as I try to say, you can verify this by observing yourself. Or you can just take it on my stubbly face value, because I am going on to the next point. Follow if you dare.  For I venture into the land of sleep.

I said Saturday that dreams are the realm of the subtle body, or at least so say the sages.  The subtle body (or “energy” body) is conscious in your dreams, but you are not conscious of being conscious.  Not very much, at least.  You may still be able to remember fractions of your dreams, if you take the time and strive to memorize them and put them into words before they disappear.

It is possible to have one’s waking consciousness while dreaming. This is called “lucid dreaming”.  This is largely a matter of training (doing reality checks at set points in waking life until you start doing them in your dreams), although it may also become inevitable given enough meditation or similar practices.  However, the lucid dreaming that comes from technique is often used for wish fulfillment, whereas the lucidity that follows from meditation is a passive observation.

This passive observation even takes place in the deep, dreamless sleep.  This sleep is said to be the domain of the “causal body”, which we may also call spirit body.  The individual human spirit (or spirit-soul, as opposed to the mind-soul usually studied in psychology) is the lowest level of us that can be differentiated from the Divine, as far as I know.

((I say this from the perspective that humans are an epiphenomenon of the Divine, somewhat like waves arise from the sea and are not separate from the sea, but the sea is different from the waves and does not have the properties of waves that make them waves.  But that’s just how I see it right now; don’t bet your eternity on it.))

Even if you are a goddamning atheist, you still spend some time in deep, dreamless sleep.  Unless you are old, you do so each night, although the time spent in such slow-wave sleep is fairly short in adults and keeps shrinking with age. This is the deepest, most restful sleep, but strangely it is also when sleepwalking and night terrors (not nightmares, just a formless fear) occur.  In this deep dreamless sleep there is still a kind of knowledge, a faint awareness. Awareness not of name or person, and not of memories of the past.

In a sense you can think of meditation as exercising this “causal body”. As you make progress in this, after some years (decades usually) you start to have a witnessing awareness at all times.  This witnessing awareness is the nature of the causal body.  Usually it is so faint that you don’t really notice it in everyday life, except as a fundamental notion that you are the same person even though your body has exchanged nearly all of its atoms, even though your hopes and dreams have changed, even though your loves and hates have changed, even though your political affiliations have changed, even though your religion has changed.  You are still there, observing all that happens, quietly, silently. This internal “I am” is the most we usually notice of the causal body, but in its field of consciousness all phenomena arise and pass.

As the connection, or identification, with the causal body grows stronger through meditation or other spiritual practices, you may start to experience the same kind of awareness during deep sleep.  I don’t do that, though it happened once by accident. Only a few people have come that far, and they tend to not sleep a lot anymore anyway, as they don’t need it that much.

As I have mentioned, I usually spend some time in delta brainwave entrainment in the morning.  (Delta waves are the slow waves associated with dreamless sleep.) I am for the most part not conscious during that time, although that is what it was originally meant for.  I guess I am just lazy. I use it to induce dreamless sleep in the morning, when such sleep does not occur naturally.  It only happens at the very beginning of the night naturally. But even though I am not awake, I am sometimes present to the degree that if dream fragments arise – pictures or drifting thoughts – I turn them away and go back to the silence.  This is a practice of meditation, where we do just that, detach from images and thoughts. To myself I call this “meditative sleep”. I am not sure if it can happen without entrainment, but I mention it for context.

I hope this was of a little interest.  I suppose I may also mention that according to the Japanese religion “Happy Science”, when you die you wear an “astral body” that looks and feels like the one you used to have. But after some weeks, it has become more idealized.  If you died from wounds, they will heal; if you died from old age, you will grow younger, and you will start wearing your favorite color.  But when you move on upward, you lay off the astral body as well, and ascend in just your soul.  So at the 6th dimension for instance, that is what you wear.  You are still humanoid, but your appearance is more up to you, based on your thoughts rather than just habit.  And a couple more dimensions up, you lay off even that and spend your time as merely rays of sentient energy.  Or that’s what they say.

I don’t know anything for sure about the afterlife myself.  But if we instead look at it as if we look inward in ourselves, it seems pretty reasonable.  First you have your habitual mind, which identifies with your body.  Deeper down you have the spirit-soul, the deeper individual.  And finally you have the actual spirit, which is not really human in the sense that our body is.  It is more like… well, to quote the Bible, “The spirit of a human is a Lamp of the Lord.”  In other words, it is a light source that gets its light from the Light itself.

Now, the spirit is not easily observed.  But through simple scientific meditation you can pick up the rest of the “bodies” fairly easily and within reasonable time. It is not some kind of fable.  It can be verified by anyone who bothers to take the time and keep at it for a while.  We can certainly discuss the wisdom of referring to these layers as “bodies”; I am not too comfortable with it myself, but I am a bit short of good expressions in any European language to describe them, so for now I’m sticking with it.

Land of mass confusion

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Picture from the so-called “real” world today.  Not a bad place, I guess. At least for me.

This morning I woke up before 7.  I am not built to get up at this time, but that’s what happens when I go to bed before midnight. I woke up from a dream, and in the interest of checking on the status of my soul, I tried to remember it.  I only got the last part though:

Together with a female friend, I went into a shop where I hoped to get a job, as they were looking for a new employee and I felt that I might be qualified. However, the woman in charge rejected me out of hand, because I owed them money for stuff I had bought there and not paid.  She immediately produced a paper detailing the goods and the amount.  I had no memory of this, but started to explain that I had not intended to cheat them and of course I would pay it at once.  Then I looked at the amount and did a doubletake.  It was way too high, thousands of dollars, and when I looked at the specification, there were several TVs.  I haven’t had a TV in my lifetime.  In fact, it was all consumer electronics, and the shop was a clothes shop for men. For good measure, there was no name anywhere on the paper.  It had nothing to do with me at all.

At that point, I realized that I had not been rejected for the job – I had disqualified myself.  It was a test:  If I was honest enough for the job, I would immediately have realized that it could not possibly be true under any circumstances, and would not have started to think of excuses or reasons, I would just simply have stated that it could not possibly be true.  Because I had reacted differently, they knew that I was the kind of person who had problems with money, and they could not safely hire a person like that.

By the time this all sank in, I was already awake.

So yeah, still not Heaven I guess.  Although I suppose the Hell of Rejected Job Seekers is rather a pleasant stay compared to the Hells of classic lore with their pitchfork-equipped demons and stuff like that. Still probably depressing if you stay there long – I have a good friend who is depressed and going through that experience in real life now, and I remember collecting a couple hundred rejections myself when I was young.  It wasn’t particularly pleasant in itself, but not a Hell in any meaningful sense.  At least not in Norway, and at least not to me.

The world of dreams reminds me again of the expression “Land of Mass Confusion”, which I heard in Chris de Burgh’s When I think of you, the song where he portrays an infatuated, inexperienced and quite possibly insane (or at least mentally challenged) person in love.  Of course, it is hard enough for normal people to tell infatuation and insanity apart. And in a sense, each of us is also insane every night, unless your dreams are enormously more boring than mine.

Huston Smith is also convinced that our dreams take place in a real but different plane of existence.  Our subtle (“energy”) body parts way with the gross (physical) body and goes on to have its own adventures in its home realm.  Of course I don’t mean energy in the scientific sense, but the word “energy” has been used in the other sense long before modern science.  So let us not mix these up.

Anyway, that is just one way of seeing it.  Biologically, dreams are caused by a bioelectric storm in a small part of the limbic system. As it spreads outward from there, it stirs up all kinds of activity, first in the instinctual deep parts of the brain which we share more or less with reptiles and birds, then with the emotional brain that is approximately like that of our furry friends, and finally all the way to the “big brain”, the neocortex that has our personal memories and tendencies stored.  This is also true.  But this is like looking at how electricity moves through a computer, and make conclusions from this about the nature of Windows or iTunes.  The software is not really part of the computer, and the mind is not really part of the brain, even though each of them would be pretty useless to us without their hardware.

Huston Smith points out that the impact of dreams is largely their intensity, as each dream is the first.  There is no habituation, we experience everything as if for the first time.  Even when a dream repeats, we usually don’t notice until afterwards. Inside the dream, it is still new, whether it be pleasure or terror. They take us unaware, and that is their strength. Their weakness is that they are disconnected, fragmented, unmoored.  They take us away to a land of mass confusion, and we don’t know what to say when they are there.  Like infatuation or insanity.

The same is my impression of childhood, from my memory of it. It was a time of mass confusion, but also of mass novelty.  I am probably still very childish for someone my age, but it is not as if each day is filled with confusion anymore.  But when I look around, I see confused people everywhere. Mostly the young, of course, but not only them.  Some of my best friends are confused on a regular basis. I wish I could do something about it.  I wish I could help them wake up.  But I probably need some more waking up myself first.  “The obscurely spoken is the obscurely thought” after all.

Perhaps I can say something more systematic tomorrow. Then again, that was what I thought today too.

Dreams of Heaven and Hell

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SERVICE WITH A SMITE! Not conductive to visiting Heaven at night, unfortunately. Or so I’ve recently discovered.

In the book “The Essence of Buddha”, Ryuho Okawa has a disturbing and thought-provoking idea. Disturbing because it is so plausible, based on the notion that Heaven and Hell are not “elsewhere” but inside us already in this life. (Christian readers may remember Jesus saying this too.) Okawa’s spiritual bomb is that you can get a good idea from your dreams about which realm you belong to.

If you dream about being happy together with other people in peaceful places, this may be a glimpse of Heaven. But if you dream of darkness, fear and violence, chances are this is what you will experience when you leave your body permanently as well. After all, your dreams are fetching their content from the depths of your own soul: It is not like you are dreaming someone else’s dream, after all. Well, unless you are the prophet Daniel, I guess.

This, regular readers will realize, is bad news for me if true. Probably. Because most of the dreams I remember from my adult life are about either a) being scared out of my skin, b) killing people in war or self-defense, or c) humiliating sexual harassment of other people. This reached its peak in my late twenties, though it continued into my journaling years to some degrees. At least there was no overlap between b and c. I would wake from a dream of grabbing someone’s breasts and feel a sense of joy that at least I had not killed anyone this night!

Over the last years I seem to dream less. This may be a sign that the hellishness is receding. You see, if I actually do dream of being happy and peaceful, I am unlikely to remember it. I wake up if I am terrified, or if extremely excited, and then it is hard to go back to sleep immediately. Therefore I will remember whatever I dreamed just before. But otherwise I tend to sleep until my sleep clock gently wakes me, and in that slow transition from sleep to wakefulness the dream fades out of reach. I may remember that I dreamed something, but not what, unless it made a great impression. This is even more so now that I spend 30-90 minutes in slow-wave brainwave entrainment in the morning. For a dream to still be remembered after this, it better be remarkable.

As it happens, I had such a remarkable dream this morning, causing me to wake up an hour before the clock. Unfortunately for your chance of hanging out with me in The Realm of the Good in some years, it was about war. I dreamed that there was a war of some kind, and we were beset by the enemies, but snatched victory from the jaws of defeat through my supernatural leadership abilities. Talk about mixed messages – but then, that is a pretty accurate representation of how I feel.

Again, it bears mention that I don’t believe any of this “because Master Okawa said so”. That would be an insult to his work, as he strives to explain logically why he thinks we can use dreams as spiritual informants. His argument goes basically: Once you accept that there is an afterlife, the law of causality ensures that it depends on this life. This law is known in Buddhism as karma, and in Christianity by the verse “as a man sows, so shall he harvest”. Unless science, Buddhism and Christianity are all wrong on the same point, the current status of your soul is a pretty good hint of where you are heading at the moment.

(Of course, a major point of religion is to be able to change your future destination, but it is unlikely to just change randomly or through applied ritual without personal transformation. What is the point of going to Heaven if you make it a Hell for yourself and all around you? And if you act and think completely differently in Heaven than here, is it really you who went to Heaven at all, or just someone else looking like you? Do souls even “look” at all, are they not defined by how they think and feel, their attitudes and the assumptions on which they habitually act? If you are bitter and suspicious here, and someone happy and grateful show up on the Other Shore, whatever happened to the real you?)

So yeah, I think the man from Venus is onto something here. Dreams can give us a chance to reflect on ourselves, dredging up feelings and memories that need to be held up toward the Light. But they are probably not representative, unless you have some method to rapidly wake you up at random times and then leave you with enough time to jot down your dreams.

Oh, and about that dream… City of Heroes‘ subscriber expansion number 17 came out yesterday, and I had fun roleplaying my new Lightwielding character, Lord Septim Silver, all evening until bedtime. We totally steamrolled the villains and had tons of fun doing it. SERVICE WITH A SMITE! So, I am not completely sure how representative that dream was…

The immortals will find you

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Mood-setting screenshot from the mostly unrelated anime 07 Ghost, where a song says (approximately): “You must cross over thousands of years worth of time.” Luckily, being immortal does not require you not to die. You just have to live eternally while you are alive, but that is more than hard enough. At least you don’t need to do it alone.

I distinctly remember writing this before, but I cannot find it with the in-journal search function, Google web or Google desktop. So just in case, I will say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

I have earlier said that spiritual practice (such as meditation, deep prayer, chanting, lectio divina, keeping the Sabbath etc) all cause expansion of the Now. Obviously we all live only in the now, since we cannot move our bodies in the past or the future with all our willpower. But at the same time, our mind is constantly visiting the past and the future; and more than that, many alternate pasts and futures. This is useful but also dangerous, as we get spread so thin that the actual, real Now may get too little attention.

The expansion of the Now is of course utterly subjective. We still have only 24 hours a day, no matter what. The difference is how we experience those hours and what we accomplish during those hours. So if you define science as something that can be measured with instruments, then this is not scientific at all. But it is scientific in the sense that it is repeatable and can be peer-reviewed. If you do roughly the same thing, you will get roughly the same results.

One aspect of what I call “spiritual aperture science” is that when the Now is dilated (expanded, made wider, giving more room) it becomes filled with eternity, which flows into time through the opening that is Now. Again, you don’t need to believe this. All you need to do is never set aside any serious time for any kind of spiritual practice, and you are almost guaranteed to never experience any of this. In fact, it will look utterly insane to you, probably. This is as it should be. You have chosen to have no part in eternity in this life. I will not predict what happens when this life is over. I don’t remember anything of the afterlife or the beforelife. What I know about eternity is from this life. And in this life, eternity is only present in the Now. The deeper and wider the Now, the more eternity flows into it.

This, of course, is analogous to the influx of Light in my Lightwielder stories. It depends on practice and the absence of that which is contrary to it. But the real thing has another aspect again. This is the other people who lived in eternity before you. They are still there, because eternity never ends.

The words of ancient saints and sages may seem almost fossilized to those who live the fleeting moment, where the Now is just a pinprick in time. But once you start carrying around a small bubble of Now (which is also a small bubble of eternity), you may meet these words again and something unprecedented may happen. They come to life. Because you and they now live in the same dimension, the timeless Now, they can reach you in a whole new way. As Lao-Tzu said: “When you are ready, the Immortals will find you.”

Did he really say that? I am not sure. I have looked for it on Google, but found no trace of it. I remember it quite clearly, and how similar it was to the famous proverb “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” (Also: “When the disciple is ready, the Master will appear” and any combination of these two.) Perhaps I dreamed it, or perhaps I saw it in the MMORPG which is based on Daoist legend. I know that whether I actually read those words or not, they had a big impact on my life. Not so much as once, more like one of those depth charges that sink down and then go BOOM a while later.

But that is the thing with me and Lao-Tzu. Even if he never said that while alive (and I am still not sure he didn’t), he certainly said it to me. And I have still only a quite small bubble of Now / Eternity, but evidently enough that I can verify by experience that the immortals (eternals) are still there and present in a much more direct way than from the surface of fleeting time.

Also, they will find you. You cannot decide who will speak to you, well at least not in the beginning, I am not sure later. But at first they will find you. The place where I imagine I read that particular quote compared the immortals to angels. (I know that this was before I had heard of Kofuku-no-Kagaku and their tendency to use the words “angel” and “bodhisattva” interchangeably, whereas the obvious translation of “bodhisattva” would be “saint”.) In fact, the veneration of saints in Catholic tradition is clearly related to this effect. It is not a worship (although it will be if you have no idea what is going on and just try to pray to saints as if they were pagan demigods). Rather, at some point one of the saints will come alive to you, to the point where you may well have conversations, or at least certainly know how they felt.

There are no doubt specific rules, or laws of nature in the timeless domain, that decide which nonlocal operators are taking your calls. I don’t know those rules. If I ever find out, I will tell, unless I am ordered not to. Probably I won’t be ordered that way, however. The secret protects itself. Even now, if you read this and you have not dilated your Now, you won’t make heads or tails of it.

Conversely, when I read people who have this experience, even if I don’t agree with them in everything, even if I disagree strongly with them on some things, I can recognize them as soon as I catch a glimpse of this happening to them. They may express it in completely different ways, of course. It will be misunderstood in different ways depending on how you express it. But it will be understood rightly in only one way, because the Now of eternity is one.

To summarize:
-Most people have minds that run all over time, including imaginary time.
-Traditional spiritual practices cause subjective time to change, expanding the timeless Now.
-This causes a subjective experience of eternity that fills this Now. This has a number of effects.
-One effect is a heightened awareness of others who live the same way.
-Many of those people are long dead.
-To the extent that they lived in the eternal Now while alive, they still remain there.

Is that clear? Or should I just write about the weather again?

Beyond mere sanity

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“You are insane” states a llama (!!) in a comment to Saturday’s somewhat controversial entry. At least it is not yet a donkey rebuking me, although I guess a llama is pretty close.

Those are dangerous words to utter, at least in the context of religion, but I cannot be too harsh: I myself once hurled the same words thoughtlessly at a better man than me. (My brother, to be exact.) Words come easy to those who do not need to make account for them before the Light, so it is anybody’s guess how serious is the llama’s concern for my mental health. Is it just a fire-and-forget missile of indignation, or do they truly care about my wellbeing? It would probably help if one knew more about their identity than just the species. But why not take it seriously? I have a lot to say about sanity. Or at least the voices in my head have…

I don’t know many insane people. A couple of them only, although I know well what is called “everyday psychopathology”: Phobias, obsessions, compulsions, projections, quirks and so on. As my father used to tell me when I was just a boy: All are mad, and he who is most sane is just the least mad. But neurosis is one thing, psychosis another. To be insane, you have to pretty much be unable to take care of yourself or at least unable to contribute to society.

Now, I don’t contribute to society genetically, so I am already somewhat dubious in that regard. But I still hold my job, and as a matter of fact, lately I have started loving it and making an effort to become better at it, thanks to the crazy cult, or perhaps thanks to the brainwave entrainment. It is hard to say since both are fairly new in my life, but I think the work thing is largely inspired by Master Okawa’s books, because I remember reading some passages there and realizing that I had completely misunderstood the role of work in my life.

But back to the concept of “mere sanity”. By this I mean that what passes for sanity is hardly worthy of being my highest aspiration, even in this highly advanced corner of the world and at this time of education and plenty.

There is, as I said, the everyday psychopathology. There is rarely a man or woman without some quirk or some disturbance that irks themselves or those around them. Some are afraid of taking the elevator or closing the door to the toilet, for fear that they may be trapped in the small closed space. Some are on the contrary afraid of crossing open places. Some are afraid of other people looking at them, some are afraid of being alone. Some are afraid of silence, some of the sounds they hear in the dark. Human ingenuity in misery is astonishing. And yet, this is not all. It is rather the tip of the iceberg.

When I look at the behavior that is socially accepted, even encouraged, sometimes lauded, I myself hardly find it worthy of envy. There I see people whose joy or lack thereof depends on whether a football team has won or lost a match, and a team where neither they nor anyone in their family is a member at that. There I see people who worry loudly about global warming, but eat mounds of beef and drive large cars. There I see those who bemoan the imperfections of their available health care, but who eat large helpings of fat and synthetic fructose and then sit down in front of the television for the evening.

Does it end there? If only! We are just warming up. There are two enormous delusions that terrorize the current civilization, off the top of my head. One, the most tragic on a personal scale, is the belief that happiness is something others are obliged to give us. This takes many forms, but basically they all amount to this: “If the other person would do what I wanted, I would be happy, but now I cannot be happy because they don’t live up to my expectations.” Of course, this is usually mutual. This is the madness against which Master Okawa and I are allies, though there are precious few others I can call on. It is obvious once you have actually experienced it that happiness comes from within, and depends mostly on our own choices.

The second, which is most tragic for the whole planet, is the insane intertwining of wealth and reproductive success. In a not too distant past, this was actually meaningful, for starvation was never far off for the common man, not to mention the common woman and child. A man who could display his potential as a provider during the next famine was the natural center of female attention. There may also have been an element of the instinct that forces the male weaver bird to spend a long time building a highly elaborate nest to impress the female: If he can do all this and still have time to eat and not be eaten by predators, he must have healthy genes, let’s come get them. This is fine as long as you are a bird making nests from branches, leaves, and discarded plastic foil. But when a highly intelligent species sets out to compete for their bare life to display the most wealth, regardless of the price in natural resources, pollution, species extinction and future environmental collapse… “Love hurts.” It hurts the whole planet.

There are of course the lesser evils I rail against: The notion that you will make friends by chewing gums and drinking soft drinks (I suppose it could happen, but listening to people and remembering their preferences is far more effective). The belief that being born on the right side of some line on a map makes you inherently superior to those on the other side. The rapid exchange of sex partners instead of taking time to cultivate true intimacy. Hell, throw in the whole porn industry, as if people did not have enough imagination or everyday life was not exciting enough. The insanity goes on and on.

I won’t say sanity is overrated. Quite the opposite. There is way too little of it. And I will take any allies I can find to make people stop and think: What the hell am I doing? Even when the “people” in question is myself.