Catholic books?!

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Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi

“Catastrophe shall befall you if you continue your association with the minions of the church.” I suspect a good portion of my acquaintances would come to a similar conclusion. Or for that matter my relatives. I better explain myself!

Intriguingly, the books of wisdom and piety that manage to capture my attention these last few months are Catholic. That may not surprise everyone, but it sure surprises me.

I grew up in a Norway that was recently started to become post-Christian (I think my generation was the first that never even pretended to be religious except for the minority who actually were). But before that, Lutheran Protestantism had been almost alone and universal in the land. And it did not think highly of Catholicism. In Norwegian  there is no separate word for “venerate”, so we were told that Catholics worshiped saints. They had specific saints for specific careers or situations; I am not sure whether we were pointed out that this was similar to the pagan pantheons, or whether I found that out by myself. But it was kind of obvious.

Then there was the whole inquisition thing and the massive burning of witches and heretics. Like most young people I thought the witch burnings happened in the Middle Ages (the vast majority of the cases were much later, and Protestant countries were not exactly better). I may even for a few years have believed the ridiculous claims of millions of witches being killed. (There were a few thousand, each of them meticulously documented. While more women than men were accused, the percentage of death sentences was higher for male witches. But enough about that – the fact that it was popular in Protestant countries shows that it was not a Catholic thing as such. I did not know that until recent years though.)

Then there is the whole thing about bribing God with coin to free relatives from Purgatory. According to what church history was still taught, this was what caused Luther to break with the Pope and form a purer branch of Christianity. The absurdity of priestly celibacy was also pretty damning here in Scandinavia, I suspect.

Even after I found that some of what I believed was caricature, that does not mean I automatically agree with the Catholic Church. The fact remains that it has been and to some degree still remains a political and economic force to reckon with, something that is utterly opposite of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. And there is still some doctrine that is very hard to align with the Bible. For instance, the Bible makes no mention of Purgatory as such. And to prohibit people from marrying or bidding them to refrain from food are labeled as “demonic teachings” in the Bible. There better be better reasons for this than I have seen so far.

The reason why I came to even look at Catholic books is that they were mentioned and quoted at the One Cosmos blog, a curious place but one that caters to the religious intellectual. That is not something you see often, but the again I suspect it is not a large audience either. Not many wise in this world were called, after all. That said, you’d think some would become wise later, under the influence of religion. It certainly has helped me in that regard, as I am sure anyone will confirm who knew me when I was much younger.

Be that as it may, I came across quotes by intellectual authors like A.G. Sertillanges and soon after James V. Schall, who are very much non-preachy and excellent writers of universal wisdom. But evidently both Catholic, somewhat to my surprise. I ended up buying books by them both, and rather enjoying them (although the writing is not exactly beach literature). Hans Urs von Balthasar also seems interesting, although I have yet to buy any of his massive tomes. Perhaps if I suddenly stop aging. It might well take a lifetime to get through all his lifetomes, if one were to give them due consideration.

And now there’s Meditation on the Tarot by our would-be Unknown Friend. A bit heterodox in places, I would say, but the basics seem to be sound and very inspiring. It is rare for religious literature to be outright exciting, I think, but this can be, at least to some of us. It does require some time to immerse oneself in, though.

And then there’s Fire Within, the Kindle version of which I read on my commute. It is a treatise on the life and teachings of St Teresa of Avila (who is certified awesome, as I have said before) and St John of the Cross (who is kind of scary, what with the Dark Night of the Soul and all). The two of them evidently have a lot in common, including knowing each other, St Teresa being the first of them. Anyway, fascinating stuff. I recognize myself in the beginning of it, even though no one had told me any of it. That’s kind of disturbing, when you realize that the only person who has spoken to you of this before is God. Or whoever the voice in my heart is, I am pretty sure it at the very least channels God if it is not the Most High himself. This was how I learned meditation (or “contemplation” as it is evidently still called in Catholic tradition). It also throws light on the great difference I perceive between neo-Buddhist (technical) and Christian (devotional) meditation.

I may have just dumped into these particular writers by the luck of the draw. Perhaps there are just as excellent Protestant or Methodist books that I simply have not been exposed to. But given that even the current Pope has written a couple likable books, I can see how Amazon is now offering me a long list of Catholic classics when I visit them. I think I’ll take it slow though – the books I already have are such as deserve to be read slowly, and then, I believe, be read slowly again. We’ll see how that pans out – I am not exactly a monk, although my female friends may never know the difference. Unless they read my journal.

Back from Skyrim, sort of

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"If only I could live in a game world!"

If only I could live in a game world… With Skyrim, you get pretty close to that. But I assume you still need to eat in the real world occasionally.

My vacation in Skyrim amounted to about 300 hours, although some of these were pretty passive, my avatar chopping wood or being target practice for bandits while I was doing other things.

In Skyrim I’ve picked flowers and caught butterflies, chopped wood and mined ore, skinned wolves and bears and tanned their hides, made weapons and armor and jewelry,  climbed the 7000 steps to a mountain monastery, and of course slain a fair number of dragons. And much, much more.

I am not anywhere near bored of it, and I am not sure I would ever be. As I said about Daggerfall, I could play it for a thousand years. I actually played that for about five years, I think, probably a little more.

But the thing is, I have other interests as well now. For reasons that I myself don’t quite understand, I start to miss the books of timeless wisdom and piety. I’m not that pious a person really, but I kind of miss it when I spend too much things doing shallow things. And by that standard, Skyrim counts as shallow, although it is certainly one of the “deepest” games around.

It is not like the Light is absent when I play computer games, or whatever else I do. But obviously there are limits to what level of spiritual contemplation  I will find while trying to defend myself and my imaginary companion against a dragon as big as a house and much angrier.

And of course, it is good to be back to work, even though I am still not very useful there. It is better than getting money for nothing, at least!

I’ll still continue to play Skyrim for a while, I guess, but there are other things that also lay claim to my time and my attention. And that’s a good thing, I’d say.

The changes are a-changin’

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Screenshot anime Nichijou

In the near future, we will have to run like a flash just to stand still. Or so it seems.

We should have acted. It was already here. But nobody wanted to believe, believe it even existed.

The technological singularity has begun to pull us in. Like a whirlpool, spinning faster and faster, gradually it becomes unavoidable. The speed at which changes change is changing faster. As Einstein said, compound interest is the strongest force in the universe. Meaning, when you keep adding to something and then keep adding to the addition to the addition, there is no limit to how far you can go, and it can only go faster and faster. And it goes faster and faster at an ever faster rate.

In the year 2000, I wrote the entry “Datapad 2010“, predicting that in 2010, it would be common to have handheld devices doing many of the things we in 2000 did with computers, but anywhere, at any time. In reality, 2010 was indeed the year of the iPad, but the iPhone (2007) was at least as close to what I had predicted. TV and movie on the datapad I predicted would happen  “perhaps 2020”. It is already here. Not quite impressive yet, a bit of a “because we can” really. But we can. I can rent movies on my Samsung Galaxy (also from 2010). And I can easily afford the wireless bandwidth to do so, at least in moderation.

I was 3 years wrong with the datapad, 10 years with the movie streaming. Admittedly these were more like first mainstream appearance, and it takes a bit for them to spread to most of the populace. Still, iPads and Tablets are pretty mainstream now in the old developed world. Not just for geeks or the rich. Still, look at these numbers again. What I predicted for 2010 came in 2007, but what I predicted for 2020 came in 2010. I am not the only one who make these mistakes. The acceleration of the accelerating change is accelerating. Time is compressed, more the further ahead we look.

In the year 2000, most of you did not even know what I was talking about with the “datapad”, or why anyone other than sci-fi geeks would have any interest in them. Today, there are also many things you don’t even think about, that I think about but don’t grasp fully.

This also affects the world economy, which I used to write about in great detail. Now, I cannot write fast enough – by the time someone stumbles on my website, it will likely have happened already.

The crisis in the Euro zone. The collapse of the dollar. Will they happen in a year, or in a week? I cannot say. The future is becoming hazy. Probably not because of tachyons from Antarctica. Probably because a middle-aged man like me has a hard time believing the speed at which things happen, now in the waning years of mankind as we have known it.

The boss of a large multinational oil company recently mentions that the world is expected to need two-thirds more energy by 2050, or the equivalent of another OPEC in addition to the one we have. Again, my first reaction is “That’s after the singularity, so not something humans should worry about”. More importantly, it is far after Peak Oil, which is now, more or less. New oil is being found here and there, but it is generally more expensive to extract than before. Despite the economic stagnation in the rich world, oil prices have risen again. You cannot simply put the ruler on the current development and say “in 2050 we will be… there!”

I’ve mentioned before that around 2040 we are expected to know millions, probably billions of times more than we know today, and the knowledge will double every day or so. Perhaps most of that knowledge will be the equivalent of  teenager Twitter messages, but it would surprise me if somewhere in those millions of times our current knowledge there isn’t something that will make our current oil companies seem obsolete, our current railroads, our current schools even.

The obvious problem is, we don’t know WHAT. It may already be there, buried in some data file in one of Google’s big computer halls. Something that changes our energy economy as much as the bow changed hunting in the Stone Age, perhaps. But how would we know? When will we find it, if ever, and how? All we know is that we know less and less of what there is to know, because knowledge is covering our world now like water is covering the bottom of the sea. And it is only the beginning. Soon everything will change. Even we.

But for now, we shall have to live with being shortsighted. Because beyond that short sight, everything becomes a blur of movement.

Rain and hydropower

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Small waterfall in the computer game Skyrim

This picture is actually from the computer game Skyrim, which is based on Norwegian nature. There’s a lot of water here in real life too, I assure you, but if I were to try to photograph it, my camera would become wet.

It’s been raining… well, I am not sure it is two days out of three, this fall, but I would be very surprised if it was less than one out of two. That is quite rare, even in fall, here on the south coast of Norway. It also rained copiously during summer, more so than in a long time. Nor is this the only part of the country that has received plenty of rainfall this year.

The last couple winters, the hydropower magazines have been near empty, and the price of electricity has been abnormally high here in Norway. Well, abnormal for Norway. Other European countries are used to paying more for their electricity than we are. Hydropower is a quite affordable energy source, once the dams and turbines are in place. And usually rain is plentiful here in Norway. So we have gotten used to even heating with electricity – some modern houses were literally built without chimneys. And then we had several years with very little rainfall, and at the same time Swedish nuclear reactors were down for repairs much longer than expected, so we could not import electricity from there during the winter either.

Now it has rained and rained for months. It hadn’t rained many weeks when people started getting suspicious: Norwegian power companies were exporting large amounts of hydropower to Europe. The prevailing theory on this was that they were worried the dams might not be empty this winter, and then they would not be able to charge extremely high prices as they had done the last couple years. So they had to hurry to get rid of that water during the summer.

The power companies tried to explain that this was not how it worked: The empty lakes were the huge reservoirs up in the mountains, which took many years to refill and many years to empty. The power they now generated were from smaller dams in the lower valleys, which would otherwise overflow and the energy be wasted. This is generally consistent with the structure of Norwegian water reservoirs. But a lot of people still hold on to the conspiracy theory.

This just goes to show that Norwegian too are stupid and ridden by mind parasites, much like our cousins around the world. Well, not quite as badly as some places, where your life is in danger if you are not insane. But still pretty bad.

Of course, power companies are not saints; they seek to maximize their profit. But the best way to do that in northern Europe is to produce as much as possible of your power in winter. Remember, Norway is about as far north as Alaska. That means the neighboring countries we may export to are roughly comparable to Canada. Air conditioning in summer is a luxury, but heating in winter is a matter of life or death in all these countries. There are several countries between here and Spain or Italy, the “south states” of Europe.

Over the last couple decades, new large-capacity power cables have been laid from Norway to neighboring countries, not just Sweden which we border on directly, but also under the sea to the south: the Netherlands, and at least indirectly, Denmark and Germany. But all of these countries also have icy cold winters, so there is a lot more money to gain from producing all of your power in winter, if possible.

But yeah, the ability to export large quantities of hydropower means we will never again have the comfortably low prices on electricity that we had when I was young. We don’t live in that kind of world anymore. Luckily we also have a lot more money than we did back then. And generally better insulated houses.

It will still take many years of rain before the large hydropower reservoirs are filled, if it ever happens. But nature is certainly doing its best on our behalf. And I, for one, am not complaining.

 

Insane terrorists and others

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Photo: Jon-Are Berg-Jacobsen/Aftenposten/REUTERS/SCANPIX

This picture is all most Norwegians have seen of our worst terrorist since WW2. Not a lot to base a judgment on. But since when has that stopped any of us?

Norwegian public debate ran into an ice berg a couple days ago, when a psychiatric report concluded that Anders Behring Breivik, the supposedly right-wing terrorist who blew up government buildings and massacred teenagers at a political camp this summer, was actually insane. “Paranoid schizophrenia.”

Very few had expected this. Certainly not Behring Breivik.

The public reacts generally with disbelief and anger. The general opinion is that these experts don’t know what they are talking about. Their scientific report should be overruled by people who have never met Behring Breivik, much less actually talked with him for hours and hours on end, and who have not even begun to read his own “manifesto” even though it is freely available on the Net. After all, they have seen the news on TV. That is all you need to know everything in the world, and have absolutely infallible judgment.

Yes, I’m putting the irony on here. My respect for actual humans is, generally, extremely low. This may not be obvious because my respect for the human potential is enormous. We have the capacity to become, fairly precisely put, godlike. In practice however we pay little attention to the soul and so we live and die as a writhing mass of mind parasites, largely unaware of reality beyond what is necessary to survive and procreate. Sometimes we may also fall short of this.

Thus, public opinion about terrorists in Norway and bankers in the USA only matters because we have some degree of democracy. Luckily it is mostly “opiate of the masses”, giving people an illusion of having real power. Long may this last. When the masses awaken, mass murder is sure to follow, since approximately 5% of the population are utterly devoid of conscience, and the remaining 95% generally have no idea how to constrain this minority without the rule of law. That’s, you know, why we have the rule of law in the first place.

So chances are that despite the loud wailing, the court of law will listen to the extremely tiny minority who actually know what they are talking about, and ignore the overwhelming majority who don’t. This is as good as it gets. One day perhaps we will in great numbers realize our human potential. But until then, most live and die only a few steps from insanity, and some will fall off the edge.

 

Narnia, Skyrim and me

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Skyrim landscape

Looks pretty empty, until you look more closely (to the right, on the horizon).

I say that the video game Skyrim was the major inspiration for my current work in progress, working title Oktagonien. But looking at it, I realized that a blurb version would be more likely to compare it to Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, in that the main character is unexpectedly transported from our world (or one nearly identical to it) to a magical world where time flows much faster. In both cases, the possibility is held open that the whole thing may be taking place inside the main character’s head, although it seems increasingly unlikely.

However, the Chronicles were published from 1977 onward, more than a generation after C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia. The books are strikingly different in their tone: Chronicles of Narnia are mostly known as children’s books, despite more violence than is common in such books today, or were common before Harry Potter. In contrast, Covenant is a surly misanthrope who rapes the first person who befriends him in the dreamlike world he arrives in, and it takes most of the first three books for him to redeem himself, in so far as that is possible. Saving the world should help somewhat, I guess. Not that I would know.

Yet the Narnia books also featured real-world protagonists being transported to a magical land where time passes very much faster, where magic is common and there are different races of sentient creatures. My main character in Oktagonien is a pretty normal teenager, more similar to the Pevensies than to Thomas Covenant. On the other hand, being alone in the strange world he also lacks the assurance that his world is real, and it does not help that he enters it in a dream at night.

I am not sure if Narnia is the first to use this meme, of people being transported to a magic, fast-moving world. I for one cannot remember any earlier examples, although I’d be happy to hear of any. Given that the tone of my story is a lot less hard-boiled adult than in Covenant, it is just as likely that a blurb would include phrases like “in the tradition of Narnia”.

***

So what about Skyrim? I said that this was my main inspiration. And I think it is. Not in the concept of people from the real world landing in a more fluid (and therefore “lower”) world, I guess. If anything, the Elder Scrolls games and the Ultima games before them may have borrowed from the older fantasy literature.

But what I meant is that I wanted my world to invoke the same feeling as Tamriel of The Elder Scrolls:  A world that is at first sight somewhat different from ours, but still comprehensible, with a few unusual features but apart from that pretty bland and bare… for the first few minutes. Then, almost incidentally, we find something magic, and rumors of a lost civilization. As time passes, more and more features begin to fill the land: Other races, different types of magic, several lost civilizations one after another leaving artifacts and ruins. Eventually you cannot throw an old book without hitting some hidden remnant of the past, and it becomes evident that the current Iron Age civilization is literally built on top of layers and layers of older civilizations fading back into the dawn of time. And, this is my unique (?) twist on it, all of them created by people like our protagonist.

When playing Skyrim, the world map is pretty bland at the outset. There are a few towns, which you can travel to by renting a horse carriage. Once you’re level 35, as my current character, there are a lot of spots on the map, especially in the parts of the land around the starting area.  Some are current villages, some are old forts, some are ruins, dungeons or caves. The various points of interest span a period of a few thousand years.

Also in Skyrim (as in earlier games) you start with plain iron or at best steel armor and weapons and very limited magic. As the story progresses, you learn new spells, come across more and more superior materials, and magical items – at first a rare occurrence – become so common you just sell them for cash or store the most powerful in your house for a rainy day. Only a few are better than you can make yourself before breakfast.

My intention is to make Oktagonien even more like this. As the story progresses, we learn of other races, other continents, other historical epochs, other types of magic. It is as if the world has been reinvented again and again, and the current visitor from the Real World has to not just discover these things but somehow find the underlying principle that made them all possible, so that he can harness the basic magic of the world – not primarily to save it, but to save himself.

There is to be no Aslan in Oktagonien. No eternal savior showing up physically at the crucial moment. Rather, the main character – a pretty ordinary teenager – is the only supernatural being currently in the world. But that does not mean the traveler is left orphaned. Luckily there are hints left behind by those who descended from a higher world in ages past. Although they are faded to myth for the common people, their works indistinguishable from myth, the desperate seeker will eventually find the true meaning of the heritage they left behind and be able to continue their work.

That said, it is not really an autobiography.

Losing NaNoWriMo (again)

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Skyrim - night with northern lights at High Hrotgar

A land of magic, borderline beauty and weathered remnants of golden ages long past, faded into myth. Skyrim – or my current writing project?

I could still “win” the National Novel Writing Month, if I were to write a “supernarrative” tying together my disparate (not desperate) stories. Say, a few paragraphs in which the main character is bored and drops by the library. He starts reading a fantasy book (insert story 1) but grows bored and picks another (insert story 2), but after a few chapters puts it back and starts reading a third. After the fourth, he gives up and goes home. :p

Not doing that, though. I am pretty happy with what I have learned from my stories, but none of them got anywhere close to 50 000 words this time.

***

I could blame Skyrim, I guess, although it is anybody’s guess whether I had just come up with more new stories instead of extending the old. Certainly the last (and still ongoing story, Oktagonien, is inspired by Skyrim. When I say “inspired by”, as usual I don’t mean some kind of fanfic. Rather, as I have described before, what happens when I make a derivative work is roughly as follows:

1) I get acquainted with the original work, which is usually not a book but some other medium.

2) I condense the story down to a short paragraph or even a long sentence.

3) I expand that short paragraph into a whole new story, which has little in common with the original work except for that paragraph. In other words, you could boil both of the stories down to the same paragraph, if you approached them from just that angle. But you would probably not think of the original story while reading my story. The forest may have roughly the same shape when seen from a plane, but the trees are all different.

In the case of Oktagonien and Skyrim, this really happened subconsciously, so I don’t actually have that paragraph. Let’s see if I can reconstruct it.

A continent where several sentient humanoid races live, mostly in separate territories, filled with magic and the remnants of civilizations dating far back into prehistory and fading into myth, is visited at key points of its history by heroes from a higher, more real world, who change the flow of history forever. This is the story of one of them.

The lore of the Tamriel (the continent where all the Elder Scrolls games take place) has grown steadily over the course of the series, and the latest game has a large number of books written at different times, some of them more reliable than others. This is one of the things I like about it, and a major inspiration for my Oktagonien story. In my story, the main character needs to delve into the prehistory of the land in order to learn what happened to the earlier visitors, so he can find out how to get back to the real world. The question not asked from the beginning is: Once he has learned the history of this world, will he still want to leave it?

Of course, the same could be asked about a lot of people and Skyrim, these days. It seems to be amazingly popular. I think this may be the first time in a great many years that I am actually having the same fad as other people at the same time. I did not really discover lolcats, caramelldansen or numa numa until they were already very nearly a blockable offense on the social networks. -_- But I think I had the Rubik’s Cube reasonably on time…

LED day

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LED lamp, dark blue light

A light in the darkness – in the dark blueness in the non-darkness… what is this, I don’t even…

It is no secret that I have loved LED (light-emitting diode) lamps almost since they were in the labs. They appeal to my “because it can be done” side. I latched on to LED flashlights and head lamps almost as sure as they came in the shop. But only this year have LED bulbs become reasonably affordable and available here in Norway, and this is the first house I systematically set out to replace incandescent bulbs with them when the former attain their planned obsolescence. This summer I replaced the one in the bathroom, then in fall one in the kitchen, and today one in the bath and one in the living room. They still cannot replace the main light in a working room, such as my home office, but are great for smaller lamps.

While in the shop I came across one LED lamp with 768 colors and remote control. Needless to say, there is no reason to buy that. It probably requires illegal drugs to fully enjoy even if one is young*. But I bought it anyway. Because it could be done. A lightbulb with uncountably many colors and a remote. I love living in an alternate future.

*) I still have my lava lamp. But I only enjoy it partially!

 

Your stupidity, my rent

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Skyrim - Khajiit chopping wood

What happened to honest gold for honest work, or simple, affordable housing? Oh, they both moved to Skyrim, leaving the real world to the money-movers.

If you are reading this shortly after I write it, you can hardly have avoided all the talk about financial crisis. Both the USA and the EU are teetering on the brink of a breakdown, after the governments decided to bail out various large banks and similar institutions. The roots of this goes deep into the past, but it should be obvious around the turn of the century, with the “dotcom bubble”. People invested in shares in companies that barely even existed, much less ran a profit. Some of these companies went on to fame and fortune (Amazon and Google found their place in this time), but most did not.

When the bubble burst, the central banks decided to keep interest rates low to avoid a painful recession. Looking back, a painful recession was probably what was needed. Certainly I predicted it beforehand. But instead, we got permanent low interest rates, and the housing bubble. Now people grew richer simply by selling the same houses to each other. Even a child could have seen that this could not last. But people kept hoping that it would last at least long enough that they could take their profit. It didn’t.

Then came the next misjudgment, in my opinion at least. Governments decided that the economy could not survive if the banks were forced to take their losses from the rotten loans. (You may remember the word “subprime”, loans that would normally not have a chance to get paid back, but were given anyway since everyone thought the rising prices would pay back the loan.) People left their homes or were evicted, but there were few new buyers and prices collapsed. This influenced those homes that were not being sold as well, their value fell dramatically. The governments decided that to avoid disaster, they had to bail out the various banks and such.

They did not have to. There were a couple other alternatives. When Scandinavia met the same challenge in the late 1980es, the State generously offered to buy the failing banks for 20 cent each. Not 20 cent for each share, but 20 cent for each bank. The banks that could in any way refinance without this, did, obviously. There were a number of mergers. Those that couldn’t were bought up by the State, which fired the leadership and slimmed the staff, but kept operations running until the crisis was over. The banks were later partly privatized at a nice profit for the State, which always can use money for one thing or another.

Another alternative is to lend, rather than give, the necessary money. In that case, people would obviously be reluctant to buy stock in the banks for quite some while, since all their profit would go to paying off their loans. But such is life. At least they would have the chance to continue. And at least ordinary people’s tax money would not be given as a gift to people who were used to living in luxury both before and after the crisis.

Now we have, after the “dotcom bubble” and the “housing bubble”, a new “government bubble”. Now it is the governments which are mired in debt and can’t find their way out. And who are they going to go to? Well, Greece is going to the EU, but where will the EU go? Or the USA? In God you trust, but will He lend you trillions of dollars? So far the Chinese, the Arabs and of course my native Norway have had that dubious honor. But it won’t last forever when you show no plan, not even a vague idea, of ever paying back or even to ever stop borrowing and spending on yourself.

So the rich world is in a well-deserved crisis.  And because of this, interest rates are just above zero. And because this is the case among all our allies, we have these ultra low interest rates here in Norway too, even though our economy is overheated and direly needs sky high interest rates to cool things down. But we can’t, because the market would immediately buy up our currency. We may be a rich little country, but we are still a small country, with a population half that of Greater London.  Drawing too much attention would disrupt our economy completely.

And so the interest rates stay ridiculously low while people keep feeling richer, and doing the exact same thing as the Americans and Spaniards did before the crisis: Selling the houses to each other for ever higher prices. This again runs over into the rent market, so I have to pay more and more rent for each passing year for the same standard of housing. For years now, the rent has been taking up more and more of my disposable income, doubling in about a decade. This is to no small extent thanks to the stupidity of people in completely different parts of the world.

I can handle it. I am working longer hours, I have moved further and further from the city, and am ready to move to a smaller apartment or a house out in the woods the next time the rent goes up. My desires are pretty easy to fulfill at this stage of my life. But the irony of the situation is still there. I am paying the price for the stupidity of people around the world. Consider my eyes very, very dry when the USA and the EU get the fate they have been hurrying toward for quite a while now.

Grace & the Alpha Point

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Early cosmos, from anime Ah My Goddess

This great space, in what form was it created?

When we believers talk about “grace”, it is probably just a sound to the outsider, a word devoid of meaning. Traditionally we understand grace with the heart. But as I discussed the topic with my Invisible Friend on the bus today (silently, for the benefit of my fellow passengers), I think we found a partial aspect of grace that can be understood mostly with the head, without too much heavy lifting by the heart. Here we go.

You may perhaps have heard about the “Omega Point”, a concept associated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a point at the end of time and the collapse of space where everything will be accomplished. But my topic today is the opposite “Alpha Point” at the very beginning, where time and space explode out of an unimaginably small particle that contained all that would ever exist. At this point, everything was literally one: Not just in the same point of space in the same point of time, but of the same nature. There was no difference between energy and matter, nor between the tree that falls in the forest and the ear that doesn’t hear it, nor us and the farthest star. Yet everything we see, everything we are, everything that has been and will ever be, was contained in that moment.

This was the first moment of everything we know and much we don’t, for according to the most respected theories today, energy and mass barely make up 5% of the universe, the rest being dark matter (of which we know nothing) and dark energy (of which we know less – it should not really exists by all we otherwise know). It is as if the whole visible universe with even the most remote galaxies, billions and billions of them, is just The Sims running in windowed mode on a cosmic computer mostly dedicated to something unfathomable. The reality we inhabit, of matter and energy in all their forms, is not even a particularly significant part of this one universe, the only one we can even hope to know anything about.

All this, the known and the unknown and the unknowable, were contained in that tiny point, far smaller than a mustard seed, at the first moment of time, beyond which we cannot ever see, anymore than we can go further inward than to the center of a sphere. It is not that there is nothing beyond there, there is no “there” beyond there.  And yet, from that arises everything, in a singular moment.

This is a breathtaking moment even if you are a goddamning atheist. Or perhaps especially then. For the moment we mention “God”, unbidden jumps to the modern mind the cartoon image of some jolly white-bearded fellow, and this seriously spoils the magnificent image we just had. It is not for nothing that Judaism and Islam prohibit religious imagery, very strongly, ranking the practice alongside idolatry and blasphemy. I think they have a point, although I officially oppose the practice of beheading everyone who practices it. I do understand the sentiment though, for the damage these cartoonists have done to the modern soul is horrifying. To teach religion in the west today has become similar to trying to convince people to accept Spiderman as their personal savior. Most will laugh at you, and those who don’t are the ones you should worry about.

That said, there still live people who have met the Living God, the personification of the Supreme Being if you will, and have some kind of personal relationship to this. I have no problem with that either, seeing how that was pretty much all I had for the first decades of my spiritual adventures, and I would probably have thought that anyone not having roughly the same experience would be doomed to a very sad life in this world and the next. But that is beside today’s topic. Today’s topic is how to understand a particular aspect of grace.

What we need to zoom in on is the possibility, the overwhelming energy that is, at the moment of the Alpha Point, quite ready to in an instant bring into being anything and everything, although some of those anythings would take 13.7 billion years to unpack into their particular form.

This readiness to make the impossible come true is one of the key elements of grace, as perceived by us believers. Even if some of us express it as  a kind and loving father (of which there are some) giving us something reasonably useful, it is really the same thing. The overwhelming creative force utterly unfazed by the sheer impossibility of what lies ahead. The bringing about of that which was not and could not be without it.

Another important element when we talk about grace is that it is really a one-way thing. The universe could for obvious reasons not ask to come into being, and neither could any of us. It is the same with what we call grace: It already exists in its full form. It does not come into existence due to our asking, rather what we can ask for is to become able to attune to it, to perceive it, to find it and to latch on to it. A human can no more produce grace than the universe can produce its own Big Bang. This is the lesson of the Alpha Point.

To believe in grace is voluntary, and requires at least a minimal exertion of the heart. As such I cannot, and probably should not if I could, convince you. But I hope the brightness of the first mystery of the universe will remain with you for a while even if you choose the path of oblivion, as is your right.