What must I say to be sincere? The unsolvable question!

I mentioned yesterday that love takes the path that leads to happiness for the other person.  In the case of romance, it is pretty obvious that this also is your own happiness. Or one should at least think that would be pretty obvious.

I mentioned long ago the irony of young men complaining that a nice guy can’t get laid.  How nice are you really if you expect to be rewarded for it? It is for the same reason I don’t go out very actively and preach the Truth that you get deliriously happy by loving knowledge and insight for its own sake. I am glad I am not the only one to notice this, but there is an obvious problem:  If people know this beforehand, they may pursue knowledge simply for the joy that awaits them, and then their motivation is not pure love.  And the relationship between a man and wisdom is very much a love, only not physical.

When I grew up, in Norwegian schools we learned a couple poems to the effect that “the greatest joy you can have is to bring joy to others”.  I wonder if this has not contributed more to the affluence of my country than the oil in the North Sea.  There are plenty of nations with oil resources, and most of them are truly tragic places to live, so that can hardly be it.  However, Norwegians are also the most trustful people in the world.  This has its drawbacks – they have more unprotected sex outside marriage than anybody else, according to statistics compiled by Durex – but it also makes everyday life much smoother. It is only in areas with immigrants that people need to lock their doors, and in the countryside you will still get your wallet back if you remember where you lost it.

The thing is that even a small increase in the people’s care about others will have a great effect on their own happiness.  Self-centered people, which is the ideal in the USA and increasingly here in Norway too, will never be happy.  This almost goes without saying when you have lived a life of personal growth, but it is not really obvious at all until you have tried it.  And if you try it only to increase your own happiness, you have not tried it at all!

This is a difficult situation, is it not? As long as you look for your own happiness, you cannot find it.  But when you love a person or a virtue, you will find that happiness seeks you out. By “love” here I mean in a selfless way, that you experience at least moments where your self becomes transparent and for a little while, silence of the mumbling voice inside you that always says “it is about me, it is all about me”.  You may not think you have such a voice, but then ask yourself:  Why is it all about you?  Who told you that?

Being a parent is a struggle and an unpaid workload that I can not really imagine.  Year after year of work and worry.  And yet, at the end of the day parents rarely curse their fate. Yes, there are times when they will tell you that they would never have had children if they knew how it was.  But it does not last.  Eventually, some kind of satisfaction remains.  I believe this is because of those moments when your self became transparent, and forgetting yourself briefly you could delight in the happiness of another.

If you expect your children to pay you tit for tat, you will definitely die unhappy and unrewarded.  Nobody loves a debt collector.

On the topic of endings, happy or otherwise, I am going to post spoilers for the Happy Ending Oneshot manga, which I came across in my research on happy endings.  In this 41-page comic, Boy has a crush on Girl 1.  He is found out by Girl 2, who promises to keep his secret and teach him the basics of not scaring away girls.  Several times, she saves him from making horrible social blunders.  But in the end while he is telling Girl 1 his feelings, he realizes that she is not the one he loves the most. That is Girl 2, who was only seeking his happiness rather than her own, and so he runs off to seek out her instead.  So cute. ^_^ But it won’t work if you try it, obviously, because selflessness is the one thing you cannot do, until you give it up.

“That’s where the light gets in…”

OK, this will sound seriously weird, especially if you have no practice with meditation or similar spiritual practices. As usual, lots of reading can substitute for actual practice, with the exception that if you get some small detail wrong, you end up with a completely different world. But that is life, I guess. And practice is hard to come by, as timelessness takes time.

Read on, then, and be amazed. Or suspicious or something. For I will tell you that unlike the world of physics, the world of the mind has not just one but at least 3 time dimensions. Or I suppose you could say that the fourth dimension, time, is the entrance to the next two. In any case, please bear in mind that this is about the human mind and how it relates to its world. It is not a substitute for physics, nor is physics a substitute for it.

OK, time is the fourth dimension. I hope we can agree to that. All creatures unfold in time, but humans may be the only who can wander it more or less at will. So you may not remember what you ate for dinner on May 25, 2000. Or perhaps you do. Most of us don’t even remember what weekday it was. But there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of memories we can revisit. Many of them at will, others by surprise. And probably unlike any other animal, we can make elaborate projections of the future and work toward them. In fact, we seem to do this more or less automatically. (OK, perhaps not the “work toward” part, unless it is something very exciting.) We spend so much time in the past and the future – and in futures that will never be, and even pasts that never were – that there is very little time left for now.

But the tiny little pinhole of Now is actually the key to eternity. This may sound counter-intuitive, but thousands of years of experience bears it out. If we just flicker past the now on our way into some other time, we will ever lack depth. This depth is the fifth dimension. You can envision it as follows: The small point in time that is Now, can be extended from the surface consciousness into the unconscious. This is a mental dimension, of course. But it is none the less real, because for the most part it is your unconscious that makes your big decisions, while you run after it and rationalize them.

We could say that the unconscious consists of the subconscious (shadow) and supraconscious (light). In Freud’s coarse terms, the id and the superego, although his idea of both is appallingly simplistic. There is a whole kingdom within. Actually more like a universe, but we have to start small. If you could remember your dreams, chances are there are more people within you than you will get to know in a lifetime. -Of course, remembering dreams is a mixed pleasure, as I have mentioned elsewhere. In your unconscious you may meet your guardian angel, but you will also meet your “guardian devil”. There are forces on both sides keeping you in balance, as if you were chained to each of them with heavy iron, so that any attempt to move in either direction will be painfully slow.

This is intentional: If we could just change ourselves on a whim, we would likely change into someone popular, or someone who excels at work, or someone who we think would be loved by a special someone. And if it was that simple, just snap your fingers and you have changed, then most of us would throw away our real self on a whim and likely an illusion at that. Therefore we are chained this way, so that we can neither fall too fast nor rise speedily. When someone rattles the chains, the laws of nature (not to say society) perceives it as madness and puts on the brakes. Whether the madness consists in attacking your neighbor with an axe or giving your money to the poor, the response is pretty much the same. And so we are fettered, for our own safety. But in truth it is possible to move, though it takes an inordinate amount of energy, or dedication, or time, or any combination of these.

This was a glimpse into the effects of extending the tiny pinhole of time from the surface consciousness into the fifth dimension of the mental substance. By the simple process of abiding in the Now, observing calmly, you will experience things you could not otherwise see, at least not and retain your sanity. Such as it is.

As you open up to what is outside (or should we say inside) the surface consciousness, your personal bubble of Now will begin to grow. The pinprick hole in the dark bowl over your head will widen. This is another dimension of time. You will now not only notice that there are things moving outside (or inside) the wall. As you continue to observe these things in the Now, the opening will slowly widen. I have referred to this as “spiritual aperture”. In optics, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels. In the more poetic words of Leonard Cohen:
There is a crack, a crack in everything;
that’s how the light gets in.

As your aperture widens, the tiny hole that became a line into the unknown becomes a column. You can now see more than just light and shadow moving. A vista opens unlike anything we have seen in the outer world, and beyond the words of our languages. Poetry, allegory or the ravings of a lunatic are your choices if you try to share what you have “seen”.

Actually I haven’t seen all that much, because I haven’t taken this practice all that seriously for all that long. This may be convenient for you, or I might have just given up on saying anything at all, since it would be beyond your wildest imagination. Unless, of course, you have been there, as a lot of people have throughout history. But not anything even resembling a majority. Probably not even a multitude, however many that is.

Are there more dimensions? We started with the horizontal time dimension through which our minds habitually run back and forth. Through a tiny hole in this, we shot at right angles into the unconscious, or mental substance. Then we widened this aperture, yet another direction. So beyond these, how many more dimensions are there? Light knows. I have just commenced dabbling in this stuff. It seems that even if I get my full 120 years, it will be hard to get beyond dabbling. But if I do, I will tell you… Light willing. Then again I, or even you, could be gone long before that. So this is it for now.

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.

“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.