Category Archives: human mind

“Words of wisdom are, uhm, hard”

Posted on by
Reply

The bookshelves used to be flowing over with fantasy books, but lately I have cleared out the fantasy and begin to fill up with books of Truth and timeless wisdom. Now to do the same with my head…

Today’s title comes from an old friend of mine, and I can certainly understand her. After all, we kind of wake up on the outside first, that is to say, the material world. The world inside is more or less completely in shadow unless you are born an introvert, and even then it rarely pays your bills so you need to look outward much of the time.

What do I mean by inside and outside in this case? What happens to us is outside. What we do is also outside.  But what we decide is inside, and how we react to what happens. If we never witness ourselves, our inner space where thoughts and feelings happen, then we will be taken by surprise by what we do.  This is how it is with many people. When others do something to them, they do not make a conscious decision on how to react.  They just do what comes naturally to them.  Depending on their nature, this may not be too bad. But potentially it could result in tragedy, and for many people it does.  Even if they never murder anyone, they may still kill their marriage and their friendships without meaning to or even without knowing why. They may ruin their health and their finances, and then wonder why God let bad things happen to good people like them.  This is what we call an “unreflected life”.

When you reflect on your life, you can start by looking at it from outside, as if seen by a stranger who is neither your friend nor your enemy. If you saw a stranger acting like you do, how would you judge that?  This is the first step, self-reflection for dummies, and we need to keep that up later as well.  But eventually you should be able to observe your own thoughts and feelings arise in your inner space.  Daily meditation will help with this.  If you are not born an introvert, it will likely take some time – months, probably – before it really takes hold.  In that period you will simply need to keep repeating your mantra or count to ten or whatever your form of meditation is.  It will take hold eventually.

Esoteric knowledge requires you to have this space inside, a bubble of time between action and reaction, where you can glimpse yourself.  This is why parents tell their kids to count to ten before answering those who taunt them.  In that space, that tiny bubble of “now”, you can catch yourself.  This is the beginning of esoteric knowledge. Without this, it will never make sense, and you will be confined to the outside of your mind, helplessly watching yourself do things you don’t understand.

This tiny bubble of “now” is what expands over time to become a whole kingdom within, and in this kingdom there have been many travelers through the ages. They left behind notes from their travels, of the things they encountered (or they told others, who wrote it down).  By reading this, you can be prepared for what you have not yet come to.  Obviously the map is not the terrain – if all you do is read about others’ travels, you will never arrive where they did.  But it is still a good preparation.  When you go on a vacation in the outer world, you do read about the place you are going to, right?  How much more if you go to a remote place where few have ever been and that is shrouded in myths and legends.

Even so, some mystics are needlessly obscure. Perhaps they feel that their knowledge should only be given to those who are worthy.  Or perhaps they just don’t have much gift for clarity.  Or perhaps it often is what the Swedish writer Esaias Tegner says: “The obscurely spoken is the obscurely thought.” Or in simpler translation, murky speech means murky thoughts. Even I, even right now, I am writing more hazily than I wish I could, because I don’t have enough clarity of mind.

This is why I am so impressed when I find someone who can explain such things simply.  And yes, that includes Ryuho Okawa. I don’t care that he believes he used to be king of Atlantis, as long as he can put into words the timeless wisdom that I almost knew already but had not consciously been able to form into words.  If believing that you have lived for billions of years is what it takes to hold this kind of insight in your mind until it crystallizes, then so be it.

Rather than just leaving behind words of wisdom, Okawa also patiently explains how he got there in this life.  It is not like he has just been relaxing on the couch and the voices in his head told him everything.  He has been studying since his youth, voraciously devouring the words of the high spirits who have lived throughout history, spitting out that which has mistakenly been called “great” literature but did not fit into the grand puzzle.  His advice is to always be like an iceberg, exposing at most 20% of what you know at any time, preferably much less.

So when I find myself writing something unclear, I realize that I have not understood it to the degree it can be understood.  I may not have learned enough about it, or I may have learned but not yet lived it long enough for it to settle down inside me and crystallize.  When wisdom becomes clear as crystal, it shines brilliantly, and just watching it is joy in itself.  But as the Bible says, the book of prophecy tastes like honey but it hurts in the stomach.  Digesting words of wisdom means having to say “no” to rash impulses.  In a way, it is more of the same as growing up.  As a child we may think that grown-ups can do whatever they will, but when we arrive there we realize that freedom can only live when married to responsibility.

And that, I believe, is why words of wisdom are hard.  Some of them have to become flesh in us before the next level will even start to make sense.  If we stop living wisdom, we will eventually come to a point where we cannot learn more of it in theory either.  In fact, if we never start, we will never come very far. Uhm, that sounds kind  of obvious. But then wisdom is kind of obvious once you’ve been there.

Beyond the Yellow vMeme

Posted on by
Reply

To take the next step and become useful in the world of tomorrow, we need to re-integrate science and spirit.

I have written in the past that I seem to function mostly in the Yellow vMeme (as seen in Spiral Dynamics). I also said that I very much doubt I will ever go beyond that. This is as far as it goes, I thought. I am no longer so sure of that. Given enough lifetime, I think the upward pull may continue to take me onward to the next level. But it is an uncertain thing yet, and will be a close call at best.

In the more religious terminology of Kofuku no Kagaku (Happy Science), the turquoise vMeme is called the 7th dimension, the realm of angels (saints) and bodhisattvas. These are people who live for helping others and keeping the world on the right track. In more psychological terms we may say they have transcended the ego as the center of their life. They obviously still have an ego, without which personal identity would not function. But the ego is no longer the axis on which their lives turn.

During the Yellow vMeme we gain a systemic insight in how the world works, and realize that we are a (not very big) part of it. With this humility and understanding, we can look for the points where we can be useful and help the world (or rather our tiny corner of it, usually) get on the right track. But we still kind of do this at our convenience and for our own reasons. We are not compelled by a deep insight that makes us consider our earthly lives little more than a projection of a higher plan that was in action long before us and will continue to go on long after our passing.

Compare to the Bodhisattva vows, some of which I found listed here. I was particularly smitten with this poem:

May I be a guard for those who are protectorless,
 A guide for those who journey on the road;
 For those who wish to go across the water,
May I be a boat, a raft, a bridge.

May I be an isle for those who yearn for landfall,
 And a lamp for those who long for light;
 For those who need a resting place, a bed,
For all who need a servant, may I be a slave.

May I be the wishing jewel, the vase of plenty,
 A word of power, and the supreme remedy.
 May I be the trees of miracles,
And for every being, the abundant cow.

Like the great earth and the other elements,
 Enduring as the sky itself endures,
 For the boundless multitude of living beings,
May I be the ground and vessel of their life.

Thus, for every single thing that lives,
 In number like the boundless reaches of the sky,
 May I be their sustenance and nourishment
 Until they pass beyond the bounds of suffering.

The last line is the key. As long as there are other beings who live in ignorance, confusion and suffering, those who have found the cause of these things must live to help them. For there is no true difference between us and them, we are merely instances of the same origin, branches of the same tree if you want.

I have had the good luck in my life to meet people who were to some degree such saints. I say “to some degree” because people don’t actually fit into boxes. The levels we talk about are more like milestones along a road. And even that is not right, because humans are not that stable. We are more like waves. The sudden, foaming waves tend to fade as we grow deeper, but there are other, longer waves that I read about in the autobiography of saints. Some of these waves last for years. And there are still “peak experiences”, where for a brief time you see something you cannot understand in your everyday state of mind.

To make things even more complex, humans have different lines of development in their lives, and some lines may be far ahead of others. For most people, the cognitive line – theoretical understanding – is far ahead of the rest. This is why a child can agree and expound on why homework is a good idea in theory, as long as he does not remember that this may mean he has to do his own homework too. This is not actually hypocrisy, because you are on your way to it. The hypocrisy is to consistently pretend that you have already reached the level you have seen ahead of you. Mocking your children in such a situation will cause them to lose courage. This is expressly forbidden in the New Testament. I cannot offhand think of a similar injunction in other religions, but it should come automatically when you understand how the human mind works, whether or not you are religious.

The purpose of religion is of course not to control you, but to bring an understanding of the human world – which is mostly a world of the mind – in a consistent framework. The more you understand how the human mind works, the more your understanding will become similar to a religion. Neither Confucius nor even Gautama the Buddha intended to start a religion; their teachings were philosophies of the mind. But all you need to change that into a religion is to start worshiping the philosopher and add some decorative props.

In any case, whether or not you feel religious, you need to develop a deep understanding of the human mind, because that is where we actually live. The experienced human world is not made of quarks and gluons.

Actually, let us make a short stop right there. According to current scientific knowledge, quarks make up the neutrons and protons in the nucleus of the atom. Two Up quarks and one Down quark make a proton, while one Up quark and tow Down quarks make a neutron. There are many other types of quarks with varying properties and interaction, but only those two are part of ordinary matter and always in those combinations. Now, say that someone is an expert on quarks. He knows them all by name and can list off all their properties and interactions, as well as when they were theorized and by whom and when they were discovered and where. In short, our friend is a veritable quark genius. But unfortunately he has forgotten, or never learned, the rather narrow connection between this “realm of quarks” and the atomic nucleus. While he is surely a genius, his knowledge is not actually connected to the world he lives in.

This is how it is with many people. They know a lot of things but they don’t know how these things connect to the actual life we live as humans. I used to be like that too. I would collect random facts but I did not connect them in an unbroken chain to the actual life I lived.

A characteristic of the Yellow vMeme is the ability to see things as systems, to see them as integrated, to see where they fit together, see one thing as part of another. But there is still often something that is lacking: Seeing oneself in all this. We may see our bodies as part of an unbroken physical structure, but the actual experience of being ourselves is separate from this. We may have learned some theory about the mind being a product of the brain, and since we know a lot about matter and very little about mind (not to say spirit), we kind of take the easy way out by labeling the mind as a kind of by-product of the brain. So the brain, we think, makes mind in much the same way that the kidneys make urine.

If we stop at this stage, a disconnect continues to exist between what we actually experience as true and what we theoretically claim to believe is true. If we explore the world of the mind, we realize that it is very large, very detailed, and governed by its own laws. These laws can not be derived from the physical laws that govern the material brain.

Let me take another example. Let us say you have a coworker who is supposed to analyze data on his computer, but then the boss walks in and finds him playing a computer game instead. The unlucky fellow makes the following excuse: “But it was on the computer!” That’s pretty lame, don’t you think? But the fact is that a lot of people run software on their own brain that everyone with good sense should realize will not get the job done. You cannot just explain that by saying “my brain did it!” This is the kind of disconnect we have a lot of in our age, and we have to get past this to get to the next level.

Our fascination with matter is not quite a bad thing. Thanks to it, we now live longer and healthier lives, we can enjoy pleasures fit for kings, and accomplish what would recently have looked like miracles. Like communicate with people all around the world in the blink of an eye. But at the same time, there are epidemics of problems that stem from the mind: Avoidable depressions, substance abuse, eating disorders, obesity, diabetes and numerous other lifestyle diseases. Statistics show clearly that deeply, actively religious people are less exposed to these.

There has to be a way to integrate these worlds. To gain our spirit back without going back to the middle ages. And those who find the way are obliged to share it.

Sleep! Or not.

Posted on by
Reply

When I was little, I once dreamed that everyone else was eating cake and I didn’t get any of it.  I was grumpy for hours after I woke up.  As an adult, you can probably have all the cake you want, but perhaps you no longer can have all the sleep you want.  And grumpiness is the least of the consequences.

Sleep disorders are not just a “nightmare” for those who suffer from them. They also cost society much in lost workdays.  And not only those days when you are too tired to work, having tossed and turned all night and finally falling asleep when you were about to go to work. I have been there and you have my sympathy, but unfortunately your boss may be less sympathetic. It is common to come up with some more dignified excuse, which already distorts the numbers. And yet even this is only the top of the iceberg.

Lack of sleep, especially deep sleep, opens the body to a host of adverse effects further down the road.  Slow-wave sleep strengthens the immune system and helps rebuild muscles.  So a great number of sick days could have been avoided if you met the environment with a well-rested body.  And yet even this may not be the worst part.  Most of us don’t get sick every day or even every week, so a few days off is just part of what life throws our way.  But an increasing number of people are unable to keep a full job at all, or even a job at all, even though they want to.  And the truth is that mental problems is by far the fastest growing category here. Today’s information age has no room for those who barely can keep their mind together on an ordinary day, much less fill it with complex models of abstract information. Without sufficient sleep (and of sufficient quality) it is hard to remain alert and clearheaded enough for the workplace of tomorrow.

Indeed, sleep disturbances are among the first signs of major mental illnesses.  But they may be more than mere symptoms:  There are studies where healthy volunteers have been kept from dreaming for several days.  They reacted with loss of concentration, then changes in behavior  and attitude, and eventually hallucinations.  In these otherwise healthy people, a good night’s sleep restored their mental health.  But not all people get a good night’s sleep.

But knowing all this will probably cause you to worry even more, and so sleep even less!  Have I come to torment you before the time?  Hardly!  There are some good news, except they are not really new at all. On the contrary, some of them are approximately as old as civilization. Although some progress has also been made in recent years. Perk up your ears, you can sleep later!

“Meditation is not medication.”  This simple fact seems lost on some of those who arrive at places like the Project Meditation Forum. It is common these days to want a quick fix, and seek it out only when things don’t work anymore the old way.  Unfortunately, this is likely to cause disappointment and more frustration.  The effect of meditation is far more subtle, but it is still a solution in the long run.

A number of people find that their sleep becomes healthier after they have taken up the practice of meditation.  Stilling the waves of the mind, the carousel of thoughts and feelings no longer whirl through their heads when that head hits the pillow.  More prosaically, those whirling thoughts will show up when you try to meditate as well.  You will learn to watch them with detachment rather than hate them, fear them or repress them.  You will find that in the eye of the storm there is a calm center, and although it may take time to get settled there, you will find it gradually easier as time passes.  Unfortunately, by “time passes” we are talking months and years rather than this weekend.  Still, if you don’t have some terminal disease now, you will probably want next year to have done the right thing this year!  It is not like you do this for a stranger, but for your future self.

There are ways to speed up the process of meditation, or rather parts of it, with modern technology.  But first let us have a look at traditional meditation and how it interacts with sleep.

As I mentioned, many people will sleep better as soon as the turmoil inside starts to calm down.  But even if your sleep disturbances are physical and incurable, all is not lost!  People who meditate need less sleep too. In the beginning they may be able to get up half an hour earlier and meditate for half an hour, which seems a pretty tame exchange. But gurus and sages who have meditated for decades, can go with extremely little sleep and suffer no ill effects.  This does not happen overnight either:  The longer you keep at it, the greater the benefit.  There are very good reasons for this.

During sleep we use a different set of brainwaves from those we use when awake.  In everyday life, we mostly use beta waves, which are small and irregular but well suited for the constantly shifting attention of everyday life.  When we calm down and relax, we shift to alpha waves, which are slower but more regular.  On the road to falling asleep, these waves replace the beta waves, and eventually get mixed with the even slower theta waves. These take up by far most of our sleep time, especially as we grow older.  In the beginning of the night we also spend some time in delta (or slow-wave) sleep, which has even far larger and slower brain waves.  It is during this sleep phase that the body releases human growth hormone.  In adults this hormone mostly just repairs the body you already have (although nose, ears and sometimes hands and feet very slowly continue to grow even in adult life. It is worth it though.)  During the last part of the night, we instead spend more and more time in REM sleep, with intense dreams. The brainwaves here are much like in waking life. This sleep phase is essential to the mind but somewhat exhausting to the body.

As  we grow older, the pattern changes.  Deep, dreamless sleep is the first to fade. In many elderly several night can pass without any slow-wave sleep whatsoever. This is not only bad news for the immune system and muscles, but also seems to have a negative impact on learning.  Theta sleep expands to take the place of delta, but also dreamsleep suffers: In many cases, when the beta waves begin, instead of dreaming the elderly will simply wake up. They are not at all finished with their sleep for the night, but what are they to do?  The body reacts to REM (dreamsleep) by increasing heart rate and blood pressure.  If you wake up at this time, chances are that you don’t feel much like going back to sleep for a while, even if you are tired.

When you learn to meditate, at first you will spend the time in alpha waves.  That is actually a best-case scenario, because beginners are interrupted by beta a lot.  But time helps with this. Being able to enter alpha waves at will, you can fall asleep more easily.  But of course meditation time is not meant to be spent sleeping.  Rather, meditation causes an expansion of awareness.  With years of practice, you will be able to reach theta waves when you meditate. These deeper, slower waves are normally only active during sleep, but the guru or sage or advanced monk can enter them at will.

Now we remember that theta waves is where we spend most of our sleep, and particularly as adults and beyond.  So having spent hours in this state while conscious, there is no reason why these people should do it all over again while asleep.  Meditation itself is a rather pleasurable activity (although not at all exciting) so it is only natural that for those skilled enough, meditation gradually eats up sleep time.  Although there will always be some left. Probably. But we’re talking a couple hours here for old gurus.   That should make up for pretty much any sleep problems you may have.

Unfortunately, you are probably not a guru.  Well, there are some of them out there, but they probably don’t read this.  So what about the rest?  Well, we could get started with meditation without waiting overlong.  Also, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we could speed up reaching the deeper brainwaves. This is easily done through brainwave entrainment, which I have written about occasionally in the past. Like last week.

You can buy elaborate soundtracks with lots of explanation and support.  I’m a bit of a fan of LifeFlow, from Project Meditation.  This system is meant to work with meditation, and gradually introduces deeper and slower brain waves over a period of 10 months. That’s a lot of time (and some money) but it still beats decades.

I have also used Holosync, from Centerpointe Research Institute.  To be honest, I think they have researched marketing more than brainwave entrainment for the last pretty many years, but they do have a tried and true formula which thousands of people have been willing to pay a substantial amount to continue using for several years.  So it may be worth looking into. In any case, they have a free sample CD.  It is mostly sales pitch, but there is about 10 minutes of pretty good delta entrainment in the middle (at the end of the first track).  That may not sound like much, especially when it takes a few minutes to get the brain entrained (especially the first times).  But remember that there are elderly people who go several nights in a row without delta at all.  So it may be worth the time. Not to mention the price, since it is a free demo.

Or you could download free software and make your own. Some research required. Gnaural is available for several platforms, including Windows and Linux. Certified geeky.

Anyway, to sum it up:  Meditation can replace sleep to a great extent and is generally a pleasant activity (or rather passivity) once you get the hang of it.  If there is just no way you can sleep without eating toxic stuff, you may give it a try.  It will take time, but you are just tossing and turning anyway, so why not use that time?  Works for me.

Holosync out, LifeFlow still in

Posted on by
2

I even have a pair of good headphones I bring with me on the commute and wherever I want to listen to brainwave entrainment tracks on the move. It is a pretty good use of such time, don’t you think?

Looking at my tags, it seems I have not written about my brainwave entrainment since last summer. I know I have meant to write about it later, but I may have done so only in my head, or only a draft that I did not upload. Time to fix that. I think some people may benefit from knowing. There is still a good deal of searches for Holosync on my statistics. And reasonably so, for it is a pretty expensive program by the standards of most of the world, especially with the current economy. It is not like everyone lives in Norway where there is no recession and even an underpaid office worker in a part-time job can afford to try out stuff like this and shrug off the bill almost without noticing.

(You know envy will land you in Hell, right? And that’s even before you’re dead. Envy is bad for your spirit, soul and body. Repent, repent!)

Anyway, Holosync. I guess a part of that steep price goes into their enormous marketing budget. Or you may call it “outreach”. If not for them, hundreds of thousands of people would never have heard of brainwave entrainment. That would have been a loss, for it is quite an interesting technology.

Basically, you use sound (or in some other products light pulses) to set up a standing wave in your brain. Unless you put some effort into making other brain waves, this wave will spread from the deeper parts of the brain where it is created, and engulf both hemispheres. This is thought to improve communication between the various parts of the brain, although I am not sure this follows logically. After all, your brain has whole-brain waves each night during dreamless sleep. This happens several times a night, especially early in the night. (Dream sleep makes up an increasing portion of sleep as morning approaches. Brain waves during dream sleep is similar to waking life, only more excited.)

Of course, during sleep you are not conscious, so that may make a difference. In any case, it is definitely a different experience. And as I have said repeatedly, sitting down and shutting up for half an hour or a whole hour each day with a noble intention will surely cause personal growth. This is proven by thousands of years of monks, nuns, sages, gurus etc, whose quiet life actually used to be a backbone of civilization. Whether civilization today has a backbone I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

I’ve stopped using Holosync, though, because I am more impressed with LifeFlow from Project Meditation (warning: sound!). While still a little heavy on the hype, they are more realistic, encouraging a combination of entrainment and meditation, and also not flooding their customers with constant mail (both electronic and paper) promoting largely unrelated new-age and general quackery products like Bill Harris / Centerpointe does. More importantly, I think their product is better (eventually) and I agree with their approach.

LifeFlow starts with entrainment at 10 Hz, a fairly everyday alpha level which most of us experience when we relax. For each month you subscribe, you get a new track that is 1 Hz lower: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and finally two bonus tracks with gamma (very high frequencey) for those who dare experiment with that. These frequencies are associated with religious ecstasy but may also trigger a panic attack, so it is probably a good idea to go through a year of familiarizing yourself with brainwave entrainment first. Me, I prefer to get my religious ecstasy from religion, if at all. Anyway, LifeFlow combines the use of binaural beats (which Holosync also uses) with monaural and isochronic tones. It does not use ramping (sliding frequencies) as the brain anyway uses several minutes to entrain to a frequency unless you are deeply familiar with it.

The different frequencies have somewhat different effect on the brain, although not in great detail: They mostly fall into three groups. But all of them induce synchronization of large parts of the brain. Of special interest is the deepest frequencies, which correspond to the waves of delta sleep, or slow wave sleep. Natural delta waves have a frequency ranging from about 0.5 to 2 Hz, or oscillations per second. So this is quite slow indeed.

During deep, dreamless sleep the brain seems to rest more deeply than otherwise, and this is also where growth hormone is released in adult men (the only group of humans where this has been studied in detail as far as I know). In young adults, delta sleep make up a significant part of the first sleep cycle (about 90 minutes), a smaller part of the next, and very little from then on. In the elderly it is quite common to not have slow waves sleep at all most nights. Being able to induce this state in the brain artificially may have substantial health potential. What I can say is that it certainly seems to let me do with less sleep each night and still be less tired than I used to be during the day.

After I got the deepest levels of LifeFlow, I have had no need for Holosync. I have not sent it back for a refund though (they do have a 1 year money back promise if you don’t buy any higher levels). After all, I used it for several months, so I feel I got my money’s worth. I just think LifeFlow is more effective, once you get to the deeper levels. You also have more levels to choose from, for different purposes. That it also happens to be more affordable is just an added bonus. Recommended. (They also have a great forum where meditators with decades of experience will share their wisdom with newcomers. It’s not quite like having your own guru, but probably better than nothing. Plus, you have me! ^_^)

So that’s how it ended, at least so far. I may write more if I find I have left out anything important.

Self-reflection of La Mu

Posted on by
Reply

If you think thoughts like “This isn’t fair”, it is like dark threads attach themselves to your soul. Thoughts are the threads that bind us to actions; actions are the ropes that bind us to habits; habits are the chains that bind us to destiny. If you want to avoid an evil destiny, remove the evil thoughts.

Around the holiday season, I continued nibbling on the book The Science of Happiness by Ryuho Okawa, founder of the religious movement Kofuku-no-Kagaku, which also means “Science of Happiness”. And I finally came to a lucid explanation of self-reflection. I already understood from other books of his that self-reflection is essential in Buddhism, and I was pretty sure I had done some of it already or I would be less happy than I am.

I attribute my happiness to the thorough education I received in the Christian Church popularly known as “Smith’s Friends”, back when they were less organized, fewer and more mystically oriented than today. (They’re still pretty good, by the way, if you can live with less mysticism and more focus on accumulating money for the Church. Which is hard to avoid, no matter where you go today. If you know of any exceptions, write me.)

Self-reflection in the Christian Church was referred to by the Biblical phrases “afterthought” and “judging ourselves”, the latter being somewhat more positive than it sounds. In context, the Bible says “If we judged ourselves, we would not be judged”, and this is certainly a very positive thing. And even if we are judged by God, the purpose even of this is that we not be condemned. So it is not as depressing as it sounds. But I can see how it would not have broad public appeal.

In contrast, the self-reflection of La Mu should have very near universal appeal, except to those who honestly believe that they are just clumps of protoplasm programmed to replicate and die. In which case they are probably not reading this, but out raping Catholic school girls before committing suicide. To the rest of us it should be pretty obvious that much like the amphibians came up from the water and gradually colonized the dry land, so have we humans come up from the material reality and colonized mindspace. While we still need water (matter) we are living most of our lives in this slightly higher world, and there are many even higher places ahead for us to go. Let us enter the gently sloping beach out of the swamp and toward our destiny!

The self-reflection of La Mu can be summed up as simple and universally as this:

-Have I given love to anyone today?
-Has my mind been unwavering today and in tune with my highest aspiration?
-Have I learned anything new today?

You can find a more detailed explanation in the book, available from Amazon.com (and presumably from your nearest Happy Science temple or office, but there are none anywhere near me.) But I think these three questions should be enough to get any well-meaning human out of the swamps, if practiced regularly, simply and honestly.

If I find that my life was not in accordance with these 3 questions, then I need to acknowledge this, and honestly wish that it was different, and resolve to not miss these opportunities in the future. When I do this, according to Okawa, my past is actually rewritten in the Akashic records (the books in Heaven, to use western words for it). The layers of grime that cover the diamond of the soul are removed, but by bit, so we can begin to emit a bright light from within. This is because the diamond of the soul (our spirit, in western thought) is connected to God and has the ability to receive and amplify the divine Light.

Regardless of the theology, there is the psychology of it. Doing these things causes happiness. Not doing them causes lack of happiness. This can be verified by experiment. Secular psychologists, such as Martin Seligman, have confirmed for decades now that at least adults achieve lasting happiness by practicing classical virtues. Not by receiving money or attention from others. This has of course been known for thousands of years, but modern advertising has enormous wealth staked on encouraging infantile behavior long into adult life. And ironically, this cruel form of capitalism is aided and abetted by institutional socialism, which gains strength from our learned helplessness. If people were healthy, happy and prosperous, the role of the state in their lives would necessarily be less.

Unlike many conservatives, I don’t want to confront the modern overgrown state head on and try to trim it down. This would just cause suffering among those who have learned to rely on the state. Rather, if people become strong by practicing self-reflection, there will be less need for society to intervene in a bureaucratic way, as people will take better care of themselves and each other. I think it is good that we have hospitals that work as well for the poor as for the rich, but I think it is bad that the poor stuff themselves with junk food, smoke, drink and stare at the TV for hours each day. By improving your character, whether you are rich or poor, you will achieve greater happiness and consequently better health and a more productive life. And it has never been easier.

Of course, no matter how happy or healthy you are, you will eventually die in the end. But I think we can agree that this is not when you will regret having spent time on self-reflection…

So, this is my way of giving you love today! It may be a harsh love, but it is certainly well intentioned and will be of great help if for some reason you don’t already practice self-reflection already but start now.

Also, by reading this you will be able to say to yourself tonight: I learned something new today! Yay! And feel a warm glow of happiness inside. ^_^

50th year come and gone

Posted on by
2

Illustration picture from the anime Kimi ni Todoke, which should mean “Reaching You”.  One can only hope.

So by “coincidence”, as some people believe in, I found this small poem by William Butler Yeats on a friend’s blog last night.  He only uses a few words from it, but it struck me straight in the forehead, because it describes in condensed beauty something I have tried repeatedly to write about, but don’t seem to have uploaded anywhere on this site. So, take it away Yeats!

My fiftieth year had come and gone.
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body for a moment blazed,
And twenty minutes, more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed, and could bless.

Does this sound familiar? Apart from the fact that I turned 51 last week, I mean. What he describes is what I in my old journal entries called “pleasure attacks”, but which Ryuho Okawa more precisely calls “moments of bliss”.  Okawa, author of The Science of Happiness where he also writes about this and much more, has a theory that people start having more and more of these moments if they love knowledge for its own sake, not as a tool.  He specifically mentions reading lots of books as a typical activity for this kind of people.  So it is disturbingly spot on when you see the poem and its open book image.

Of course Okawa may well have read Yeats, but I had not when I first started writing about this phenomenon. At the time I also had no idea about its connection to the love of knowledge and reading, but I have had several online friends verify this.

It is interesting that the moment of bliss (or blaze, as Yeats dubs this barely containable surge of energy) is associated with being blessed and able to bless. It is in other words a deeply spiritual experience, and one aimed beyond the individual who receives it.  This fits with Okawa’s theory that the bliss is an early stage of inspiration, caused by being close to High Spirits (angels, saints, saviors, or at a minimum the spirits of great artists or leaders that have gone before us).  These spirits live in the Realm of Light and above, and this Light and life and joy radiates from them to people who come close to them.  (Not geographically, but by alignment of the mind.)

When inspiration breaks through in a clearer form, its purpose is always to create or bring into the world something of lasting value, some contribution to the beauty or knowledge or virtue that goes beyond the individual.  It is indeed like a Light from above breaking through into this world.

The purpose then is not my pleasure as an ego.  It would anyway be meaningless for me to love knowledge for its own sake in order to experience this bliss, because then it would no longer be for its own sake. This paradox vanishes when I realize that I am not just blessed for my own sake, but on behalf of those around me.

As for why most of us don’t really begin to see these things until we are past the midday of our lives… I guess it may be a natural cycle of life, but there are some few who arrive sooner (and many who die from old age having never reached it). So I just notice that this is how it was for Yeats and me, although Okawa seems to have passed this way before he was 30.  Your mileage may vary.  But as long as you live, it is not to late to be blessed and to bless.  And perhaps even after this life, for some?

In any case, my 50th year was one in which I learned a whole lot about the spiritual dimension of life. That won’t help me unless I actually become transformed, of course. But it is still quite interesting.  It really is as if a new quality is opening to life. It reminds me of when I was in high school and for fun put on my cousin’s glasses. And suddenly realized that it was possible to see the world clearly at a distance. Until then I had thought that humans simply did not see individual leaves on a tree until coming quite close, and that things far away were inherently foggy.  Suddenly everything came into focus, and when I got my own glasses shortly after, I spent weeks just staring at things, amazed at the rich details of the world.

It’s happening again.  I truly am blessed, but do I manage to share that blessing? I wonder.  I should try harder.

Genius and genius

Posted on by
Reply

di091005

( Screenshot from the computer game City of Heroes.)

Being very smart is like being able to run very fast. But true genius is like being able to fly. You see everything from a different angle.

When I was young, I thought that genius was just a matter of IQ.  You had an IQ over 140 or some such, and you were in.  And it is true that the word is used that way (although some say it should be 180 and some say 120.  An IQ of 140 is the requirement for Mensa membership though, a fairly well established institution.)

It is true that the word “genius” is used this way, but I know today that this is misleading.  I have lived and learned.  There is another meaning of “genius”, an older one (albeit not the oldest). I am pleased to see that Wikipedia has, at least at the moment, chosen this as their main definition:  “Genius refers to a person, a body of work, or a singular achievement of surpassing excellence. More than just originality, creativity, or intelligence, genius is associated with achievement of insight which has transformational power. A work of genius fundamentally alters the expectations of its audience.”

This is a bit strict again, I think.  But genius certainly goes beyond the ordinary. My favorite metaphor is that having a very high IQ is like being able to run very fast.  Amazingly fast, for the differences between people’s minds far exceed the differences between their muscles. But no matter how good a runner you are, you arrive at the same places as anyone else, just faster. True genius, however, is like flying.  You go places other people just can’t go, and see things from whole new angles that others can’t see unless you somehow manage to show them.

This “uplift” is what I would call inspiration. Genius and inspiration go together.  Oh, you have the Edison quote that genius was 1% inspiration and 99% transpiration.   But the sad thing is that most people just don’t have the 1% inspiration. Anyway, “inspiration” clearly come from the word “spirit”, and “genius” originally was the name of a spirit associated with a person, a place or perhaps most common, a bloodline.  We don’t take it quite that literally now, but a true work of genius still makes us sense that we are seeing something that comes from a higher world, a different and more deeply “real” world.

Now, if you have the wings of inspiration, you may be able to ascend to somewhere a bit above the mundane world.  But if you want to share that view with others, the transpiration sets in. For you cannot just call on them to join you, and even if you try to tell them what you see, chances are that they will imagine something different, since they have never seen anything from above. You have to somehow create a pinnacle and the stairs for them to get there, to see what you have seen and to be where you have been.  You can just give up on that, and you will never be anything more than a dreamer.  Only those who can share their uplift with the world will be remembered as a genius, and will be of use to the world.  What good would Bach have been if he had just whistled to himself, hearing his music in his own mind?  What good if Einstein had just had the flash of insight that E=MC^2 and never bothered to work out the mathematical foundations to prove it to the world?

But as for me, I’m just a dreamer.

“It ain’t wise to need someone”

Posted on by
Reply

di090918

Why must humans fall in love?  Don’t ask me – I don’t.  But it fascinates me, perhaps in the way childhood must have fascinated Adam:  It is an essential part of life to everyone else, but I was not created that way.  (OK, it is generally accepted that Adam was not a historical person.  Then again, not everyone believes that I am who I am, either…)

I woke up to the clock radio this morning again. It played a song by Bonnie Tyler, It’s a heartache.  Personally I am more familiar with heartburn, but the lady sure put her soul into it. I happen to recognize the name because I already had a song by her in my Love Song Collection. It is called Total Eclipse of the Heart.

Yes, she seems to have a particular ability to perform songs of despair.  Perhaps she should look into a career in politics, preferably on the Left.

All this is later reflections, though. At the time, while deciding whether or not to wake up, I heard Bonnie Tyler singing “It ain’t wise to need someone” and I was like “Amen, Sister!”. Admittedly she modified it after drawing a much needed breath.  “It ain’t wise to need  someone / as much as I depended on / you.”  But my libertarian little soul wants to put a period after the someone.  One should not depend on others and not be depended on by others, is how I feel.

That’s not very realistic, of course.  Something Ryuho Okawa repeatedly points out in his later books is that we are all born with nothing.  We would not even be able to survive without receiving unconditional love to some degree at the start.  Everything we have at the present, we have because of other people.  They may not particularly have helped us out of pure ego-less love:  For instance, our teachers probably got paid for teaching us, and our employers expect us to bring in more money than we take.  But still, we would be in a bad spot without them.

You may feel alone in your car, but numerous people have worked on making it (and making the machines that make it, and mining the ore and so on).  Numerous others are involved in making sure you have gas to fill your tank, from  the geologists planning where to test drill for oil, all the way to the gas station attendant.  In a way, you are never alone in the car: The help of a thousand souls are with you, even though very few of them intended it.

In truth, we mostly live in a world of mirrors: Each of us more or less give back what we receive.  There are very few original thoughts, and most people don’t even try, and are in fact skeptical of anything not already accepted by the masses.  We neither resist the culture around us, nor make an effort to improve it.  Even though the people who eat with chopsticks and the people who eat with forks have known about each other’s habit for generations now, there is still no agreement that one of them is clearly superior.  Well, the fork seems to be making a little progress, but overall people do what they saw their parents do when they were small.  People whose parents were swearing tend to swear; people whose parents were praying tend to pray, and mostly to the same gods.

So we are connected to other people whether we know it or not. In fact, we are interwoven with them. Day by day we depend for the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the words we speak and most of the thoughts we think. And we don’t even notice. Independence, in its radical form, is impossible, even unimaginable. That is not what I think of when I say “It ain’t wise to need someone.”  What I mean is, it is not wise to depend on someone special to provide our happiness, or our meaning with life. Well, unless someone special is God, I guess, and even then it is right only in a certain sense.

But romance has become a false religion. Instead of finding our heart in another, our culture makes us hope that we can avoid finding our heart at all, and just depend on the heart of another.  That won’t work.  You can’t substitute anyone for your soul.  You cannot let anyone replace your conscience.  And you can’t go hand in hand into eternity, poetic as that might have been.

There are limits to how individual we can be, but also there are limits to how much of ourselves we can give up.  These limits vary from person to person.  Very few humans can be as individual as I am, so free to be themselves and think their own thoughts.  And yet most of those who can’t, are convinced that they are almost completely independent, relying only a little on others.  While I realize that I am a more colorful thread in a large tapestry.  I have a little wiggle room, whereas they who move not at all feel no resistance.

But then something happens, and the things we took for granted are suddenly no longer there. And we think: “It wasn’t wise to need someone that much.”  No it wasn’t, but a greater foolishness was to not realize that we needed them when they were still there.

Daemon summoning

Posted on by
Reply

di090909

Demons, unlike animals and plants and stones, don’t exist in this world independently from humans. This is quite a good thing! The bad thing is, people are eager to raise hell, so there is still plenty of deviltry around, even though we have other words for it these days.

Most people these days don’t even believe that demons exist. This is true enough in a physical sense. You can’t put them in a box or take a blood sample of them for your test tube. You can’t take a picture of them, or measure their presence with radiation detection.

And yet, the same things that made our ancestors believe in demons still happen. For instance when someone gets angry or lustful, they may do things they would not normally even think of, and then they say: “I wasn’t myself” or “I don’t know what possessed me”.  In the past, a demon might have been blamed. So in a way it sounds as if we know less these days. But on the other hand, we don’t have the temptation to just blame the demons and pass ourselves off as innocent. This may be uncomfortable, but overall I think it is a good thing. Or would be a good thing, if we actually did take responsibility.

The thing is, we are back to the old metaphor of the rising and setting sun. Today we know full well that it is not the sun that rises and sets, but this knowledge has not caused the sun to stop. The same actual effects are still happening before our eyes, even if we have a different explanation for them. In the same way, blaming complexes instead of demons does not really change the fact that people still suffer.

Despite a very recent origin, Happy Science (Kofuku-no-Kagaku) still believe that stray spirits from Hell can torment people. But they hurry to add that we can avoid this by taking responsibility for our own mind through self-reflection. I would like to say more about this, but I don’t really know as much about it as I want. Anyway, in this religion the stray spirits are attracted to people who have a similar mindset.  So by giving room for dark thoughts, people draw dark spirits to themselves. You may say that they are performing a kind of demon summoning, without wanting to, or even knowing that this is what they do.

The same would probably be the case for someone who harbors perverse sexual lust in secret. In the old days, it was believed that demons of female form would come to men, especially celibate men, and offer them sexual favors. These succubi (succubus in singular form) would arrive in dreams or even when awake if you were celibate and alone. There were also “incubi”, male demons who would intrude on women, though this seems to have been less common and less intense overall.

Today we think of these as figments of our imagination, but the effect is still the same. They may come on their own or we may summon them, and despite their non-corporeal nature, our bodies still react to them. So how much has really changed? We have changed our language but we have not really changed our nature.

So am I saying that people who watch porn are summoning lust demons, or that people who watch racist propaganda are summoning wrath demons? Obviously not in a physical sense. It is a model of reality, not reality itself. It is a way of thinking about things. “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the real Tao.” For a map to be accurate, it must be as large as the terrain.  So the demon paradigm is a way of thinking about things for those who think that way. I can show you another way of thinking about the same thing, just to prove that you can model the same reality in different ways.

A popular way of thinking lately is that the brain is like a computer, and the human psyche is like the software that runs on the computer. This view does away with the most crass and repulsive form of materialism, in which people believe that the mind originates from the brain. That is pretty ignorant, you know. If you know nothing about computers, then you may be excused to believe that Windows is a part of the computer. But then one day you see someone install a new program on their computer, and you realize that it is not as simple as “you start your computer and there are programs”.

Now, you can install programs from a CD or DVD to your computer. Say you install The Sims 2. Before you installed it, it was not there, but your computer always had the capacity to run it, otherwise you could not do it even after installation. Then some time later you install an expansion pack for the game, and now it has some features it did not have before. And then some time later, you go online and download some new things for your game, such as furniture or clothes for the small imaginary people. Each time you are doing this “summoning”, you are changing the content of your hard disk so that it operates a little differently.

Unfortunately, this is not always a good thing. If you follow false leads, you could download a program that harms your computer. For instance, one time I downloaded a program that was supposed to make it possible to play the game without having the CD in the computer; but when I ran my virus checker on the file I had downloaded, it contained a virus that would take control of the computer. Obviously it is a bad idea to just run download anything you find on the Net and run it on your computer! So why do people do this with their brains??

For example, if you have a sexual perversion, and you go online and download pictures or stories that feed this perversion, that will not leave your mind unchanged. It will burrow into your brain and stay there, changing the way you think. If you keep feeding your brain with this kind of stuff, eventually you start thinking that it is normal. Sometimes I discuss anime (Japanese cartoons) with people online, and they are very excited because in this anime there was a picture of a grade school girl in her underwear, and the sight caused their nose to bleed. (This is a way people in Japan say that they become sexually aroused.) If I remind them that it is wrong to think of children that way, they don’t agree with me. I hope these people don’t have children of their own! Their soul has been damaged so that the natural defense mechanism has been disabled.

I hope you can see how this is actually the same thing that I wrote about above. In fact, in the Unix operating system we use the word “daemon” for a small program that runs on its own without user input, such as a clock or the program that fetches mail. So when you download and install a “daemon” in your brain, it changes the way your mind works, even if just a little.

Conversely there are other things that you can install into your brain that works as antivirus. And then you use this “antivirus” to “scan” your brain by reflecting on your life. How are things really, in light of this Truth? Is there a virus here, or is my mind clean in this particular regard? In this way, it is possible to even discover a mind parasite before it has time to explode into disaster.

I hope this was a little food for thought. It is easy to point and laugh at people who believe in demons, but they are still better off than people who believe in NOTHING. Belief in demons can cause unwanted behavior, like trying to buy off the demons or cast them out with magic instead of with truth, so it is certainly not something you should just casually adopt. But the fact still remains: What we summon into our lives will change us. Unfortunately, I know this from experience. Fortunately, not all of my experience is bad. I once allowed a holy spirit from Heaven into my life, who offered wisdom; and he teaches me and reminds me still, many years later.

Hell is inside, too

Posted on by
Reply

di0908011

If I were transported to a realm in which my outer appearance matched my inner self, which would it be?  I honestly am not sure.  But I hope it’s not quite as bad as the one to the left – anymore. I remember when it was, though.

I have spent a bit of time piecing together more pages of the Happy Science lore.  It is not like I’m converting or anything, but it is interesting to see what lies beneath when people so remote from me in so many ways still come up with at least some ideas strikingly similar to what I believe too.

The notion of Satan and Hell are a bit different from the Christian version. I am not sure how it goes along with the Buddhist version. Yes, for some reason Buddhism also has a number of hells, some of which I have seen depicted.  Unfortunately, the Chinese Hell of Lust was rather arousing. -_-  I don’t think that painting conveyed reality in any sense or form!  The glimpse of the same Hell in the anime did not have that effect. Anyway! Hell! Who raised Hell, when and where?

According to Happy Science (fiction, most readers would mentally add), it all started when El Cantare, the highest humanoid spirit of Earth, invited a bunch of less evolved humanoids from the Magellanic Cloud.  Because of the prevalence of dinosaurs and such at the time, this hardy race was picked.  But they were rather rash, as were their guiding spirits (gods, if you will).  One of these was incarnated on Earth for some good purpose but got addicted to the pleasures of the mortal realm.  Instead of going back to the Heavens for another round of selfless service, he decided to create a realm in the image of Earth, in the 4th dimension (the one closest above us, the first stop of the afterlife).  This degenerated into Hell, as the people who accumulated there secreted dark thoughts and emotions that clouded the Heavenly Light so it did not reach them.  It also cast its shadow on Earth, with all the troubles this caused.

So far we have a vaguely science-fiction like version of the familiar story.  But the interesting part comes next.  According to their book, Hell is not specifically about the afterlife.  It starts already in this life (as does Heaven, but most of us have heard that already):  It is inside us.  Or at least inside those who haven’t gotten rid of it yet.  The way to avoid demons is to not have any dark recesses in the mind where the Light doesn’t get in.  If I have those, I have a connection to Hell already.

I agree. Unfortunately, having dark recesses is something that comes very easily.  And you don’t even have to believe in Hell to already be there, to some degree.  It is something I notice most blatantly with my liberal acquaintances, although I don’t know for sure whether this is because they are more prone to carry around their private Hell, or I just notice it more easily because it is more different from my own tendencies, so I don’t have the filter of automatic self defense.  Perhaps some of each.

In any case, there is a lot of whining there about how much injustice there is in the world, and not least concerning themselves.  Their idea of being discriminated against is roughly my idea of “that’s human life”:  Having to deal with people who don’t like you and accept you, being looked down at for being different, getting less money than some people who are at best your equals, being misunderstood over and over etc.  Seriously, this is my ordinary life, but it is not Hell for me.  We can’t all be The Real Princess.  People are unlikely to consider us as important as they consider themselves.  The greater problem is when this is mutual, as it all too often is.  That is my Hell: the Evil Inside.

Let’s say you live in Europe or some liberal state in America. You’re gay so you can’t marry in the state where you would prefer to do so.  And it eats you inside and you can’t let it go, because it’s just not fair, and they are repressing you, and you think you have the right to hate them and anyone who tells you to stop whining and get on with living.  You can still live together as if you were married; you can eat together, you can sleep together, you can set up contracts and wills etc to regulate your economy as if you were married etc. But it’s not enough, because you’re still regarded as Not Equal. Well, that’s true, but is it really worth going to Hell for while still alive?

What if you had a sexuality that you simply could not accept because of your conscience, even if it was technically legal?  What if you knew that you could never have one satisfying sexual intercourse over the duration of your earthly life? Or any form of lasting, intimate relationship?  What if you, for good measure, had to always be an outsider, be viewed with suspicion, pay more and earn less, because you did not fit society’s automatic duonormativity?  What if, in addition to all this, you had to listen to the whining of people you would otherwise like, if they could just let go of the pea under their mattress? Would you suffer then?

Hell no! Outrage is something you do, not something that happens to you.  Pain is something that happens to you. I don’t like pain.  And I certainly don’t like to inflict mental and spiritual pain on myself.  The hand I was dealt had some high cards and some low cards. I’m not going to bluff. But I am going to play the hand I was dealt.  And ideally, play it reasonably well.

Of course, this applies to other areas of life as well.  It isn’t all about sex, although it may sometimes feel that way when you don’t get any.  (I hear it becomes pretty trivial pretty fast. But what do I know.) So, someone is earning more than you do, even though they have the same job, because of some triviality.  So, you decide, after thinking this over for a long time and considering all options, that this is a good reason to go to Hell while still alive, to become bitter, to try to enlist other people in your crusade, and to never ever let it go.  Because it just ain’t fair!

Tell me about it, as if I haven’t experienced it firsthand for years and years. But life isn’t fair. Death is fair, probably.  We have a saying in Norwegian: “I døden er vi alle lik.”  This can equally be translated as “In death we are all equal” or “In death we are all corpses”, depending on your mood.  What I don’t believe is that in death we all go to Hell. But I don’t know for sure, I have only faith in this regard.  What I do know for sure, however, is that in life we don’t all go to Hell.

There are many such matters. I only thought of these in particular because there are people I really wish to have as my friends, but there is this chasm set between us. Their life is my hell, and quite possibly the other way around.  I am the kind of loser you would not want to be if you had the choice between being a loser and just die.  But I live most of my time, if not in Heaven, then surely somewhere right outside, where the light is bright, the smell of the flowers reach me, and the faint music from inside.  I may have pain from time to time, and I don’t live up to my own hopes.  (This is probably because I think too highly of myself, but some aspirations are allowed, I think.)  And I probably whine too much about those things, because you never see your own whining as clearly as that of others. But let me say this:  I would not swap even my current, half-baked soul for all the sex, money and fame of the world.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.  And so is the Kingdom of Hell.  May we all choose wisely.