Category Archives: science

“Words of wisdom are, uhm, hard”

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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

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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.

Fructose, corn syrup and doom

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What does carrying heavy stuff through the snow have to do with fructose? Read and find out!

Let us start this with me, as I am after all the main character here! I noticed after moving that I had lost a few pounds. Not surprising, with all the heavy lifting and little time for meals. My calorie intake is suitable for an office worker, not a mover. Now, it was only a few pounds, so I am not waking up in the night with hunger pangs as I did when I lost most of my fat reserves in 2005. And I will no doubt put these pounds back on over the next few months if nothing disastrous happens. But if I had lived in America, I would have put them back on even faster.

The reason is that I have a medical condition that makes it impossible for me to eat fat except in tiny amounts. You don’t realize how much fat there is in everyday food until it makes you spend some time in the bathroom shaking and trying to throw up. But there is another way to build fat without actually eating it. I am talking about fructose. This extra sweet sugar is naturally found in honey and many fruits, but it is not quite the essence of health you would expect from its origin.

Fructose can only be processed by the liver, whereas glucose can be used directly by every cell in the body. As a result, eating a meal rich in fructose will not cause the same sugar spikes – sudden increases in blood sugar – that is feared by diabetics and panicky relatives of diabetics. Due to the pervasive notion that blood sugar is bad, you can actually see fructose advertised as health food. The reality is a bit more gloomy. Also, in reality there is doubt about whether sugar spikes do any harm. It is the constant high blood sugar over months and years that causes damage from diabetes. Most of us don’t live long enough for the sum of our sugar spikes do do irreparable harm, especially since our body does repair itself if it is not under constant attack. But it seems fair to say that the slower processing of fructose gives a more stable blood sugar. It also seems to be widely accepted that sugar spikes cause a “rebound” which in many people cause feelings of hunger, weakness or tiredness as the blood sugar temporarily go below the usual value.

As a matter of fact, after hard work or exercise fructose will mainly be converted to glycogen, the body’s quick energy reserve, which is stored in the liver and the muscles. This is stuff you want to have lots of, but you can’t. The liver stores about enough for a day’s use, so the only way to store more of it is to burn more of it during the day, that is to say, work harder. On a regular basis.

When the liver’s store of glycogen is filled, however, things take a nasty turn. The same liver will now try to transform the sucrose into fat, or at least triglycerids, an important component of fat. As I have said occasionally, humans suck at making fat, but we excel in storing it. However, sucrose has a better chance at becoming fat than has glucose, lactose, maltose etc. It is a slow process, and a portion of the energy is lost as heat, but eventually some fat is produced. When the body attempts the same with glucose, almost all of it is burned up in the process. So sucrose is worth considering if you, like me, can only eat small quantities of fat due to some problem with absorption or processing of fatty foods. In the end, I don’t live an active enough life for lack of fat to become a problem, so my fructose box is still mostly full, but your fat problems may vary.

Actually most people’s fat problems is that they have too much fat, not too little. And fructose won’t help there. Neither will being American, since this country uses a disproportionate amount of High Fructose Corn Syrup which no other part of the world comes near.

Natural corn syrup contains mostly glucose, but Hight Fructose Corn Syrup has added large amounts of chemically refined fructose. The benefit of this is that fructose tastes sweeter than any other digestible sugar. Ordinary table sugar, which is used as a sweetener in most of the world, contains sucrose which tastes less sweet but breaks down in the body to glucose and fructose. Based on this, one would expect HFCS to be healthier than table sugar, as you can get the same sweetness by adding less. This has not happened though: Instead, Americans have gotten used to their sweets just tasting sweeter than elsewhere.

In an age where few people have manual labor (except when moving, evidently…) the conversion of fructose into fat is a risk factor for obesity. But what is perhaps just as disturbing is that it occupies the liver, which has many important tasks to do in body chemistry. Like alcohol, fructose can overtax the liver eventually and cause lasting damage, although outright death from liver failure is exceedingly rare in both cases. Rather, the liver is less effective in its daily task of neutralizing certain mildly toxic compounds, converting various foodstuffs to their optimal form for use by the body and brain, and storing energy between meals.

So all in all, I think I’ll rather live with feeling a bit hungrier for a few weeks.

Sleep! Or not.

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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.

Why sex is love

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If even a flower or tree were to think, “there is no meaning to this body, no purpose”, then they would be sorely mistaken. All higher life is built from selfless love.

OK, this is not quite the angle you would expect from the title, unless you know me. But I’m quite serious. Sex is love, even though most creatures don’t know it. Luckily we are here, so we can understand on behalf of all creation.

You hear a lot about “the selfish gene” these days, but that is an exaggeration, to put it mildly. More like a delusions. Let us zoom back a billion years or so.

Originally all life on Earth was haploid. That is to say, the living cells had only one copy of each gene. If that copy was bad, the cell was in trouble. If it was really good, the cell would use it for all it was worth to get ahead in life and divide and conquer the seas. (Life was mostly in the water at the time, of course.) Actually there are lots and lots of single-celled organisms today who are haploid and very successful in what they are doing. But some of them also hook up briefly and exchange some genes. Let us not dwell too long on that. These are all primitive organisms, after all.

At some point we got complex cells, however. All large plants and all animals are like this, and a number of big single-celled organisms as well. They have a distinct nucleus where they keep their genes. And they don’t randomly hook up with any passing bacterium. And they have two sets of genes, one from mom and one from dad.

Hey, not so quick! There are haploid eukaryotes out there, you know. Well, actually you should not need to know that if you are a normal person doing a normal job. But you may be familiar with yeast, fungus and perhaps even algae. Some of these critters can go around with just a single set of genes for the longest time. And then under certain circumstances they make spores that meet and greet and hook up and become diploid (having two sets of genes) for a while. Evidently this was considered a rousing success by someone (commonly referred to just as “Evolution”), because by the time we come to snails and weeds and upward, everyone is diploid. Well, not male bees, but they are kind of an exception, and they have only one purpose in life. (Amazingly, human males are diploid.)

Now if you were a selfish gene, there is no way you would share your place in the genome with a stranger. Sure, it might be good for the organism in the long run to have a reserve, or for some remote descendant. But for you as a gene, it would be a bad idea. It means half the offspring would not get a copy of you at all. If only one offspring survived, then there would be a 50% chance that you were not there, and would die with your current body. What kind of gene is willing to work hard even knowing that its neighbor may be the one to survive and not itself? Not a selfish gene, that is for sure. A loving gene, we should call it.

Let us take that again. The average frog / grass / human gene loves its neighbor like itself.

This tolerance for another, competing gene would be one thing if the organism reproduced by just making a small copy of itself. There are indeed some creatures who do this. Mostly plants, but some insects and a lizard or two. But for the most part, plants and animals both gladly accept a deal where the next generation has only half its genes from them, and half from someone else. You’d think they would at least pick a close relative (and I guess that happens too) but most go out of their way to find a stranger. You may even be one of those. But from the point of view of the gene, this is the ultimate sacrifice. Half of your genes give up their life so that the other half may live on.

“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” -Jesus Christ.

So basically humans are almost completely packed with Christ genes (metaphorically speaking), as are our furry and feathered and leafy friends. Love abounds in nature; it is the driving force in the evolution of all higher lifeforms. We are made of this stuff nearly from the molecular level.

Holosync out, LifeFlow still in

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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.

High Spirits and history

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“The cherry blossoms have not changed at all in the last thousand years….” Some things change daily, some not in a thousand years. Telling these apart is in itself a very useful skill, and can make a fool wise.

If we are to believe Happy Science (the Japanese religion movement, not just any happy scientist) there is a limited number of super high spirits for this planet, like archangels and saviors, and they are being incarnated from time to time to put history right. So this coincides with the conservative view of history I mentioned, that history is largely the work of a relatively few people, while the rest more or less drift with the currents, unaware of their part in the larger picture.

To make it worse, each of the High Spirits will show up repeatedly, making the numbers even smaller. For instance Newton was formerly Archimedes, and Buddha was Hermes (at least to some degree). So even though most of the really important people through history was one of these, there are only about 500 in total. So far Happy Science.

According to the substantially less happy science we know from ordinary history books, things were pretty harsh in the past. Life was poor, solitary, nasty, brutish and short. (Not so sure about the solitary part, since people had to crowd together with aunts and cousins in tiny houses or even tents. But nasty for sure. And smelly, let’s not forget smelly. Life was poor, smelly, nasty, brutish and short. The reason Hobbes forgot to include smelly was probably that at his time, life was STILL smelly. It was also still considerably shorter than now, on average, not least on his continent.)

If we go back a few generations from Hobbes, we also have another problem: Eyeglasses were not invented yet. Therefore the few sages who actually existed (and who did not die to war or plague or infected hangnails) were rendered unable to read on their own around the age of 50. Since those who had lived that long were likely to hang on for another 20 years or so, the invention of glasses would effectively double their time as a sage. (You aren’t born a sage, you know. Well most of us aren’t.)

Now what I am trying to say is that having even a limited number of non-idiots in the past is a miracle of Biblical proportions. Even if you could read, how many books were you likely to see in a lifetime before the printing press? And how broad would the background be of those books? What were your chances of gathering the wisdom of two or three or more different cultures or religions? Add to this that some of the great minds of the past were not scribes at all, but warriors or shepherds or some such.

While some of the famous people from the past were more known for their deeds than their thoughts, it is certainly true that some had a very high level of consciousness. They had an overview of life that is rare today, even though we are so well informed. They did not have our encyclopedic knowledge, but from the knowledge they had, they came to insights that have stood the test of time.

In contrast, many people today have a fairly low level of consciousness, even though so much knowledge is readily available. They continue to blame others for problems they could easier fix by changing themselves. They believe in random conspiracy theories that are easily disproved, and their beliefs make them unhappy.

Let me take a random example, not sure if I have mentioned this before. In the western world, a very large number of women (and even some men) believe that women are systematically paid less for their work than men. This would certainly look so if you look simply at the pay checks. But let us take a few seconds to draw this to its logical conclusion. If women were generally paid less for the same work, then you could start a business and hire only women. Businesses who hired only women, or almost only, would constantly earn more money, and eventually squeeze the competition out. This would cause massive joblessness among men and lack of female workers in the private sector, causing the men who were employed at all to mainly work in government-funded jobs where profit didn’t matter. Reality check! Is this your world?

Obviously any individual woman may be underpaid. The way to find out is to look for an employer who is willing to pay more. This is the same for women, men, eunuchs and hermaphrodites. It is also the same as a potato farmer trying to sell his potatoes. He may strongly dislike that people are paying more for wheat, even though potatoes are superior in every way and deserve a much higher price. But reality takes precedence. There is no worldwide conspiracy of billions of potato-haters, and likewise there is actually no such conspiracy of misogynists. Life if tough for everyone. Projecting the cause of our unhappiness on others may seem to help for a short time, but it also keeps us from making the best out of what we actually can change, namely ourselves.

There are many, many such projections. People blame the Jews, the Muslims, the Whites, the Hispanics, the Gypsies, the Republicans, the Democrats, their parents, teachers, employers, neighbors. All of these people who are blamed have actual, real faults. Who hasn’t? But because people have a low level of consciousness, they trip over the various faults of others which they rarely can do anything about, and forget to correct their own faults which are right there for the taking. Seen from a higher perspective, these are much like an animal in a cage, which claws randomly on the walls because it is unable to figure out the fairly simple lock to the cage.

By listening to the words of high spirits, whether you believe they come down from Heaven or grow up from the Earth, you can learn from them and become more and more like them. After all, humans are born with a phenomenal ability to learn. Just to go about your daily life you need to know a large number of things. You need to know how to dress yourself, how to find your way in a town or city, basic economic knowledge like having to pay for food, and of course you probably keep track of a large number of human relationships. By applying this learning ability toward the words and deeds of the people whose lives shine across history like brilliant lights, you can rise up to become a brilliant light yourself.

It’s gonna take its sweet time though, judging by myself. Well, all the more reason to get cracking!

Heroes and history

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If Thomas Edison had not invented the phonograph, would we still have MP3 players today?  Or would there have been no gramophones, no tape recorders, no cassette players, no CDs, a world where canned sound remained as unimaginable as it was to the Founding Fathers?

I think this may be a matter where the world looks very different depending on whether you are a conservative or a socialist. And since most of these have little or no ability to peek over the fence, I shall take it upon myself to give you something at least a bit closer to the truth.

In the conservative view, history is for the most part a result of a few well-known people who have changed its course in one way or another.  Mao, Stalin, Hitler.  Churchill, Lincoln, Washington.  Jesus, Buddha, Moses.  Einstein, Newton, Archimedes. Remove any of these or various other “main characters” and history flows in a completely different direction, leading to a world mind-numbingly different from today.

To the socialist, history is a more or less predictable flow of micro-events adding up, driven primarily by economic conditions. Never mind that Marx’ own predictions were about as accurate as weather forecasts by a five year old. After all, Marx himself was limited by the extreme scarcity of information at the time, thus proving that everyone is a child of their own time. In theory it should still be possible to make a fairly good model of how history unfolds under varying general conditions.

One socialist author wrote with sarcasm about Alexander the Great conquering the known world:  “Did he not even bring a cook?”  The point is, of course, that Alexander would not be able to conquer even a tiny village alone, much less the Persian empire, Egypt and much of India and Afghanistan. This is true enough.  But it is equally true that the thousands of men, whether soldiers and cooks, made no serious attempt at establishing a Hellenistic empire before Alexander showed up.  What he did was give them a focus, a vision, a direction for their abilities.  They did not simply flow like water – someone had to break the dam that held them.

You could say that the most typical political hero is a vessel for the aspirations of the people, acting to contain and concentrate them, directing them toward a goal they may not have been aware of but generally agree with.  This also holds true for the political villain, only with different aspirations.  The difference is not always easy to see if you are very close.  In any case, the aspirations alone are not enough to create the hero. There must also be a vessel of the required stature.  Even with tragic flaws, it is required that you be larger than life.

Cultural heroes seem to be even less predictable than military and political ones. Sometimes they seem to embody a particular age, sometimes to usher one in.  Why do a bunch of them suddenly appear at the same time and in the same cultural area, like in the Renaissance?  What kind of social engineering do you plan to do to create a larger number of people like Mozart or Michelangelo? How do you produce an Einstein? (Apart from having a number of Jews around.)

The thing is, you must be a fool to think history-changing heroes just conveniently appear when the economic “realities” dictate it, kind of like fools of the past believed that flies and rats were spontaneously created in rotting food.  (Pasteur, another hero, proved this wrong.) Then again, you are definitely not going to conquer the world without a cook. And even the greatest teacher of philosophy or faith is of little worth if there is no one to hear. It is the interplay between the guides and the guided that make history advance.  More about that later, perhaps.  It was actually that I wanted to write about, but you see what happened.

Self-reflection of La Mu

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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

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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.