Tag Archives: Happy Science

JulNoWriMo has started

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Regular readers will know that I each year take the month of November off, more or less, to participate in NaNoWriMo, the (inter)National Novel Writing Month. Tens of thousands of people do this now, after the movement has grown year by year. But some are not satisfied with just one novel writing month, or they may have all or some of July off and are not spending it traveling. So some years ago JulNoWriMo was born. It has never really taken off the way NaNoWriMo did, and may well be headed for extinction: NaNoWriMo has now expanded with “Camp NaNoWriMo” in June and August. It is NaNoWriMo with fewer participants and a different atmosphere, people join into small virtual groups (if they so desire) rather than a “zerg” (stampede).

On the first day, I have written 8343 words, so that is a pretty good start. (Except it was Sunday so I didn’t need to work.) It’s a new story, but yes, it has lots of amazing books. ^_^

“2012” by Ryuho Okawa

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The end of the world? Not if Ryuho Okawa has anything to say about it! And he has quite a bit to say, as usual. Although this time most of the talking is done by the spirits of Montezuma and Quetzalcoatl. That’s how they appear in this book, at least.

The book 2012 is one of two I recently discovered on Smashwords. I tend to buy any books from Happy Science, although I have had a couple disappointments, even they have been interesting at least.  Happy Science is a Japanese new religion. Technically it is a cult, in the same way as Christianity, a religion centered on one man who is believed to be divine. Unlike Jesus Christ, Japanese author Ryuho Okawa is neither dead nor resurrected, but he obviously has some other qualities to inspire his followers. Like having written over 800 books in less than 30 years. This is one of them.

The book is a bit overpriced compared to its length. This seems to be a trend now that IRH press has taken over publishing the English versions themselves rather than licensing them to overseas spiritual publishers. Perhaps they feel that people should be expected to pay this much for books by a god? Or perhaps they just are unfamiliar with the price level in the English-speaking market. This is quite possible. I know from my own homeland, Norway, that book prices here are several times higher than in America, so much so that I prefer buying Norwegian books in English translations. Perhaps the same is true for Japan? Japanese anime certainly is expensive compared to American cartoons, so that may explain it. Anyway, prepare your wallets, I paid around 15 bucks for some 25000 words. Of course, being Norwegian, I don’t have a problem paying 15 dollars for a book, but your economy may vary.

Now for the book itself. It is sold as non-fiction, but I think some will disagree.

***

There is a prophecy that the world will end in 2012, more exactly on December 22. This is because the end of the Mayan calendar happens at this time. That seems a pretty flimsy excuse for ending the world. The world of the Mayans has already ended, so to speak, when their kingdom dissolved shortly after the year 900, even though their descendants still live in the area. The Aztec empire was to some extent inspired by the Mayans who preceded them. The Aztecs lived further north, in today’s Mexico.

Earlier this year, a calendar was found that included the next cycle, showing that Mayans did not actually expect the world to end this year after all. But the book I review was written in 2011, so this information is lacking.

Ryuho Okawa may be considered the greatest god on Earth, but even gods can’t know everything when they are incarnate. So he used his powers as the world’s greatest spiritual medium to place a general call to the spirit world, asking for whichever spirit was most involved with the 2012 prophecy. He then acted as host for the spirit, while his assistants interviewed it. They got quite a surprise. The spirit was that of the last Aztec king, Montezuma. But more worrying, he claimed to now be the guardian spirit of Barack Obama, and planned to use him to fulfill the Mayan curse in December 2012.

The book includes the full interview with the spirit of Montezuma. He does not seem all that impressive to me, and probably not to the Japanese either. He insisted that he did not want revenge on the Caucasians or the Christians, he just wanted to get the karma back to the middle by ending their dominance. He spent a good deal of his time talking about aliens and an expected alien invasion, but the connection between this and what he said before about ending the Christian calendar was pretty vague. All in all, for a great statesman he did not seem all that enlightened.

The more the contrast to the second interview in the book, where Okawa summons Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god, whom Montezuma had mentioned a couple times. Montezuma believed that Quetzalcoatl was actually Jesus Christ. Now, a while after the previous interview, Quetzalcoatl had contacted Okawa saying that he wanted to give a message. This happens from time to time. So Okawa let the spirit of Quetzalcoatl enter his body and let his assistants interview him.

This was a very different and somewhat hair-raising read. The spirit of Quetzalcoatl appears far more intelligent, coherent and spiritual. First, he confirmed that he was Jesus, but did not make an issue of it. In fact, he seemed surprised that he had lived a long life without being killed this time.

(In the lore of Happy Science, there are ten 9-dimensional spirits or Saviors, of which Amor (Jesus Christ) is one and El Cantare (Ryuho Okawa) another, but due to the vast spiritual power of these beings they can only pack up to 1/5 of their consciousness into one mortal body at a time. They can however send less, and there is also a difference of how “core” the personality is that they incarnate. Okawa is the very core of El Cantare, the most exact representation of his being and the most powerful. Jesus Christ was supposedly something similar for Amor. Still, it seems to have baffled everyone that Jesus would send even a fringe incarnation to Meso-America without telling his good friend Ryuho Okawa. There is no mention of this in The Golden Laws, which details the appearance of the Great Spirits in human history. Then again, Japanese generally don’t consider Latin America and Africa “human history”, more like pre-history I guess. Actually Quetzalcoatl took them to task for that.)

Quetzalcoatl does not consider the aliens much of a problem. His worry is something else entirely: Japan is about to get destroyed by a human army, and Okawa’s life is in danger. It is of the utmost importance that Okawa completes his message to the world before he dies and gets it to Latin America, where it will survive after the fall of Japan. Quetzalcoatl scolds Okawa’s disciples for their lack of devotion, saying that they treat Happy Science as a business and don’t see the importance of saving souls. He also takes the religion to task for its focus on material progress. God does not particularly care about material progress, says Quetzalcoatl: People are often more likely to seek salvation in hard times. Civilizations rise and fall because that is the way they were designed to work. To the gods, this is comparable to a washing machine, that shakes things up and down to get rid of the dirt. So there are good times and hard times, you cannot escape that. You need to save the souls, that is the purpose of religion, not to run a successful business.

Quetzalcoatl also states that the failure of the Happiness Realization Party to win political influence in Japan was due to the poor quality of Okawa’s disciples, they are 20 years behind the curve and it may be too late to save the country now. Thus his invitation to bring Happy Science to Latin America, where he will watch over it after Okawa is gone. You are only thinking about Japan, he scolds the Happy Science staff: We are trying to save souls in countries you don’t even know the name of!

Okawa seems taken aback after the end of the interview. Still, the afterword of the book states once again that the future will be bright if you believe in him and improve your mind. As humans, we have the divine ability to create, and together we can create a better future.

But it does not escape my notice that he has just this summer released a movie in Japan detailing the invasion by a superior Asian military power, and how in that case the nation can only be saved by spiritual means. I look forward to seeing it. Is this the legacy of Quetzalcoatl?

Happy time-twisting

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The universe is full of life!

“The infinite space is full of various forms of life.” So there is nothing strange about me writing about a reincarnated Pleiadean. It is a work of fiction, after all. At least I hope so!

The independent thought streams in my head, even the guest writers, can be pretty impressive. Take the muse I wrote about two entries ago, which was telling his story as a TSI (fictive name for Happy Science) member who discovered that he actually came from the Pleiades.

So I just bought a new book that has quietly become available from Happy Science, Secrets of the Everlasting Truths. The book goes in some detail about how Ryuho Okawa has found a way to explore outer space through interviewing humans who are reincarnated aliens. Most of them, he notes, are from the Pleiades and Vega.

Given that I just bought this book, it is not particularly surprising that I write a fanfic in which the main character is a reincarnated Pleiadean. Well, except for the small detail that I wrote that first and discovered the book afterwards.

***

In all fairness, this is not the first time Okawa mentions Pleiadeans and soul migration between planets. I (or my muse) did not simply make this up, there have been mentions in passing in two of his earlier books, although I can’t remember if he actually combined them back then. Now he declares that there is a number of these around already, as it also is in my story, and he spends a whole lecture on this phenomenon. He also mentions that time is not a straight line, but we already knew that.

It is one of those coincidences again. I have those from time to time, and they are usually not religious in nature (if one can call soul interviews of reincarnated aliens “religion” – it is kind of … not what most religions do.) Like one day I was taking a walk and thinking about how the world would have been if the tricycle had take off instead of the bicycle (still not sure why it didn’t, trikes are a lot more stable). While I was still elaborating on this scenario in my mind, the first adult tricycle I had seen in the area came into view. I had lived there for years and never seen an adult tricycle, nor had I thought about them for all those years. But as soon as I think about it… !

Several times I have dreamed about things that would make perfect sense to dream about, if they had only happened the day before instead of the day after the dream. I am not sure this is even supernatural: If we accept that time really is a dimension, then the sequence of past, present and future are necessarily continuous. Each part is “glued” to the parts before and after it. I have used the image of magnetism in the past: A magnet will easily attract a needle, but a needle also attracts the magnet. Usually the magnet does not move toward the needle, because the magnet is heavy and the needle is light. But if the magnet is placed precariously and the needle is stuck to something, once in a blue moon the magnet might move toward the needle instead of the other way around.

Let me take another example, which happened at the workplace where I was making my famous debt collection software suite. It is so long ago that we used cassettes for music. (They were self-enclosed audio tapes, popular before the age of the CD and some way into it, although they quickly disappeared when MP3 players arrived.) I had a combined cassette player and radio, and was playing one of my favorite songs back then, “Why Worry” by Dire Straits. After I finished playing that, I switched to radio. The radio was playing “Why Worry” – the same song I had been playing. I have heard that song only two or three times on radio, to the best of my knowledge. (I think I would have noticed, for it was special to me for many years. I actually bought my first CD player because I wore out the tapes by playing that one song repeatedly, then spooling back to play it again. This is much easier on a CD. ^_^)

So the time-switch between reading the book and writing the fanfiction is not in any way proof that Ryuho Okawa really is what he claims to be, the god of this world, chief of the powers of the invisible realm that surrounds our planet. But it kind of underscores his point that science still has a ways to go, I think.

I may be back with a full review of the book later, perhaps.

More Happy Science fanfic

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My Sims 3 self-sim during his late years, going on about his bookshelf. I would not be surprised if I do the same, if I live to be white-haired (or nearly so).

Whatever else you may say about the Japanese new religion “Happy Science”, it works wonders for my creativity. A year and a half ago I wrote a fanfic very loosely based on their movie “The Rebirth of Buddha”, or rather the world in which that movie took place. None of the characters from the movie appeared in person in my 50 000 words story. As I wrote back then, the story more or less wrote itself, to the point where even my wrists did not hurt the way they usually do when I write a lot. Not quite a miracle, I guess, but certainly unusual.

I’ve tried this two times later, the last being now. It really is baffling. I start with basically nothing – no plot, not even a character – and just invite this imaginary person to tell his story in first person limited view, the way a friend would tell a story to another friend. And there they go. The first one was pretty unstructured in that he would come with hints of things that happened later, and suddenly would get distracted by some point of doctrine that he would eagerly expound on. That was actually rather charming, I thought, and fun to write.

The one this summer is more systematic, more restrained, telling things in chronological order, sticking to what is relevant to the story. So it is a bit less exciting but more polished. Well, less exciting at the start. Things definitely take a turn for the exotic when he discovers that he is a reincarnated alien from the Pleiades, where he lived and died. After going to Heaven he and several others volunteered to incarnate as humans on Earth. He still has some trouble getting used to it.

This is a work of fiction and has nothing to do with my habit of referring to people as “humans” and “earthlings” and not understanding their obsession with romance and amassing property. Just thought you’d want to know. ^_^

There seems to be a  new personality each time I start one of these stories. Even the way they speak, although they do have certain common traits that they may have picked up from their common source material, the books of Master Taiyou Sorano, containing his Teachings of the Mind.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit… spooky? That I seem to have a bunch of voices from an imaginary parallel world in my subconscious?

***

I do consider that the reason for this effect is that there is a great deal of this type of personality in myself. It is not autobiographical as such, but I think I have the tendency. If I had been a little different, and Happy Science had been a little different (in particular not referring to the founder as God), I might have become a Happy Scientist in fact if not in name. It comes down to the books, you see.

There is in me a deep wish for there to be books so filled with light and life and power that they change the understanding and even the very personality of those who read them. There is the Bible, of course, but the Christian Church also had some books written by a few holy men, explaining the teachings in more detail and exhorting the faithful. I tried to read them all. And they worked, too! I was changed greatly. At first it was a confusing process, taking a few shortcuts through the wilderness outside of sanity as we know it, but I soon got into the light which grew brighter and brighter. I became the genius you all know and love.

It really worked – up to a point. There were changes that were never effected. There were limits never overcome. And a part of me has secretly hoped that somewhere I would find The Books, the ones that would unlock more doors and let the sunshine in. The Books that would change me without me having to go through strict discipline, without having to make great sacrifices. Simply by learning the Truth I would be set free – a rather optimistic interpretation of the Lord’s words perhaps, but why not? The words of Jesus were spirit and were life, as he himself attested. And he said to his disciples: “You are already clean [or pure] because of the words I have spoken to you.”

If Jesus had written hundreds of books, certainly that alone would suffice? By reading them, I could have become transformed into a being of immeasurable light, right? But for some reason he never did so. Neither did his disciples; one of them admitted that the world would not have space for all the books that would have to be written. Still, I would have appreciated a few hundred…

From time to time I come across another book that is so luminous, it changes the way I think, either temporarily or even permanently. (Well, so far.) Mainly books of timeless esoteric wisdom, these days, or hagiology (the lore of saints). So the dream remains alive.

So the TSI members who have a library of hundreds of luminous books, they are each in their own way an expression of my own dream.  Indeed, most of the few books of Ryuho Okawa that are in public sale in English have to some degree this effect on me, to increase my inner brightness, or so it feels. Am I wrong? Or are these exceptions? Am I the exception? There are supposedly sold millions of some of these books. Why has not Japan become transfixed with the glory of the Buddha or something? Of course, there have been sold millions of Bibles, and one may wonder how that worked out. Then again, we don’t know what society would have been without them. If something like the Viking Age, which was my direct ancestors before they got Bibles, I think we should keep the Bibles coming.

But in part I banish my relentless optimism to the realm of fiction, in which the whole libraries of miraculous books really exist and those who read them repeatedly become filled with unquenchable light that surpasses the normal limitations of the human condition. Even more than I have seen in this life, I mean. Of course, I sincerely encourage anyone who actually has become filled with celestial brightness through the reading of books to comment with their recommendations.

The moment of… truth?

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More than half of the people these days go to a place called “hell”. In order to put an end to this revolting development, Ryuho Okawa traveled all the way to Brazil, halfway around the world.

Screenshot from the movie The Laws of Eternity, which was actually mentioned in the book. To Master Okawa’s dismay, the Japanese generally did not understand it, but evidently it made some impression in Brazil, where people are curious about the spirit world.

The book in question is Ryuho Okawa’s The Moment of Truth, which I have already read through. As usual, the book is fairly short and an easy read. You don’t need to be an intellectual to understand most of his books (those not actually containing the word “challenge” in the title).

Well, actually you need to be Japanese to understand most of his books, since only a couple dozen of them are translated into English, and several of these are only sold at the temples. In Japan, however, there are now over 700 Okawa books. I assume there are actually people who have them all. I wish I could see their bookshelf.

And let me be honest: If Happy Science published a new book in the bookstores each week, as they did in Japan last year, I would probably buy a new book each week too. Certainly if they hold the quality of this one.

The book left me with a stronger want to become a better person: To do my job better, to appreciate other people more, to broaden my knowledge, to deepen my thinking, to increase the brightness of my soul.

I have very mixed emotions about this. As a Christian, I really don’t want to recommend a competing religion, and especially not one that promotes a misunderstanding of the most important concept in theist religions as a whole, namely God.

I don’t have any strong opinion on whether El Cantare actually exists as a 9-dimensional being, of which the Shakyamuni Buddha was an incarnation. That would be nice, I guess. But that is not who we Christians refer to when we talk about God. We specifically mean the Primordial God, the original Creator, the Uncreated and Eternal, who is beyond any human imagination. It may be that at some earlier time, the Hebrew tribes considered God to be humanoid, although modern Jews certainly seem to agree that phrases such as “God’s eyes” or “God’s outreached arm” are purely symbolic and offer no clue as to whether God has a body, does not have a body, both or neither of the above. God is beyond speculation.

So the whole subtle associating this El Cantare (and, by implication, his incarnation Ryuho Okawa) with God… this is quite vexing. It is out of line, it is unseemly in an otherwise inspiring spiritual book that contains heaps of essential Truth, presented in a clear and understandable manner. When speaking to Christians, as Okawa mostly does in this book, you have to understand the difference between God and a god. As Paul says, there are many so-called gods and lords. This is not controversial. But for us, there is only one God, the Father. Hermes Trismegistus may have been referred to as Father by his followers, but that hardly means that he is identical with the Heavenly Father whom we talk about.

If you can eat a delicious soup after having fished out a dead fly, you can probably also enjoy this book. I certainly did. It has a lot of good points.

In the end, I agree with Okawa that his movement should be measured by the yardstick that Jesus gave: Let either the tree be good and its fruits good, or the tree bad and its fruits bad. It shall be very interesting to see how this new religion plays out. But I may not be around long enough to see this for myself.

Feeling sadness

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Something strange happened yesterday. I woke up half past five in the morning from the buzzing of a bee in the window near me. These critters have some modest amount of poison and it sounded pretty desperate, so I found it prudent to get away. I got up and went down in the living room, where I put on my headphones and played LifeFlow 1 for 40 minutes.

LifeFlow is a series of brainwave entrainment tracks, and the names of the main tracks are their frequency in Hertz. The 1 Hz track is the deepest in the series, corresponding to deep dreamless sleep. What I usually use is the 2 Hz track, which has a much less disturbing soundscape, vaguely water-themed, whereas number 1 has the sound of whales and possibly some other marine mammals and a few other underwater sounds. It sounds spooky, to put it bluntly, and several people have complained about this on the Project Meditation forums. I however see the point in making this track more disturbing: It is quite hard to stay awake when your brain starts to synchronize at a frequency usually used in deep, dreamless sleep.

Be that as it may, I am not built to get up at this time. While I at least mostly stayed awake through the 40 minutes, I watched random hallucinations behind my closed eyes much of the time, shapes that arose and stayed for a while before disappearing again. This may be normal for humans for all I know, but it is very rare for me. Especially these days, and especially when the images are just meaningless shapes and not women. But actually very rare anyway. So seeing this long parade of random images was weird enough in itself. It was only the beginning though.

When the track ended and I opened my eyes again, I felt a profound feeling of sadness. It was not associated with any person or event or memory. It was just a pure feeling of sadness or perhaps regret or loss.

I suppose the ghost whale sound could have some part in it, but probably not. For one thing, the unpleasant sound these creatures add to the otherwise decent soundscape can actually be said to have lessened my regret over having eaten whale beef in my late teens. The whales are considered more or less saints and sages by the New Age community, but I dare say that their utterances on this recording make them sound edible indeed and not particularly worthy of preservation either. Your ears may vary.

Another clue is that I still feel some degree of that sadness two days and one night later. It is not as strong as it was when it started, but it keeps running in the background much of the time, so that I can be aware of it when I so decide. This fits better with the theory I immediately thought of when I noticed it.

You see, I have written repeatedly in these pages about my immunity to sadness. That I can feel joy, and sometimes fear, but rarely ever sadness. That is not something one would normally miss and want back (I did have it earlier in my adult life), but it is kind of weird for it to be so completely absent. What I think is that perhaps the new connections created in my brain during the entrainment may have unlocked the feeling that was somehow locked away at an earlier point in my life.

It could be a coincidence, of course. Or some spiritual attack, or help, depending on the outcome. If someone keeps going on and on about their happiness, especially someone who has several friends who experience deep sadness, it is only natural if they occasionally quietly wish for me to feel it too. And it is not like I have been praying to God to never experience sadness or anything. It is just something I have noticed, not something I have desired strongly or – I think – taken pride in. Though I suppose it could seem that way, that I have preened exceedingly about it.

Be that as it may, it is not of an intensity that makes me weep or anything. In a sense I actually find it fascinating, even enriching in the short term. If it lasts for the duration of my life I may change my opinion, I suppose. But in any case it is not like I am unable to feel joy.

I certainly felt like whining with joy for a little while this afternoon when I realized that Amazon.com had taken in a new Okawa book: The Moment of Truth, a brand new book from only weeks ago, based on his lectures in Brazil recently. I should not be so excited about books by a man who thinks he is God from Venus, but the thing is that he writes like a god. More exactly like Hermes, the god of speed, given that Master Okawa has published some 700 books by now (!), about one per week last year alone, earning him a place in Guinness Book of Records. And what is more disturbing is that they are generally quite well written. I would not lie if I said, if I could write even one book in my lifetime and it was half as good as the average Okawa book, I would be able to die with a smile, knowing that I had made a significant contribution to the world. But I haven’t, so I can’t. At least not yet.

Of course, some suspicion is in order when someone claims to be God from Venus. Even if he can go entire books without bringing it up. But that does not change that he writes an awesome prose that I hope to get closer to. He practices what he preaches, that you have not truly understood something until you can explain it in common words that even a child can understand. I have a long way to go in the childish writing department, as I am sure you have noticed!

So I pray that what I read may not harm me but rather help me. That is pretty much what I pray about food too. And I habitually add a prayer that I may also be of help and not harm to others. After all, that is what matters. What we feel does not matter so much as what we do. But of course what we feel tends to influence what we do. I certainly expect that for myself. I am still that much human, and I know it. Hopefully with my newfound ability to feel sadness, I will now be able to understand others a little more than I did before.

***

Oh, and happy birthday if you happen to read this. I wish you could be as happy as I have been, since you deserve it so much more. It is strange how fate has sent us down so different paths, from where we once started together.

“The Next Great Awakening” review

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The Next Great Awakening? Let’s hope not.

For the love of Buddha, don’t buy this book as your first Okawa book, because in that case it will probably also be your last. That would be a pity, I think. Even if you don’t believe that Ryuho Okawa is a god from Venus, there is still a reason why he is a bestselling author in Japan. Unfortunately for the expansion of his new religion abroad, Japan is a bit different from the West when it comes to UFOs and such. Or perhaps I am different from both Japan and the West, but let us hope not.

For the new reader, Ryuho Okawa is the founder and leader and god of the Japanese new religion Happy Science. Technically Happy Science (Kofuku-no-Kagaku, more literally the Science of Happiness) is clearly a cult, in that the members actually worship their founder as divine. Most of us would not do that. But that said, this is not your average loon. He is clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, and has read several tens of thousands of books during his lifetime, from different cultures and ages in history. From these he has distilled the tenets that everywhere and in every age have led to happiness, harmony and prosperity. Given the quality and quantity of his work, it is kind of understandable that he feels like he belongs not just on another planet, but in a completely different order of being from the usual “expert” who has simply attended a socialist university, read a few hundred books and never reflected much on ultimate reality.

Mr Okawa’s self-help books are quite thoughtful and inspirational, in my opinion. Unfortunately, this latest book reads like something written by a random jobless person who has spent too much time in the dark and refuse-strewn back alleys of the Internet. Or more charitably, as a science fiction novel set in an alternate history where Erich von Däniken’s space gods were not only real, but are still around and messing with people’s heads.

The plot is that Earth (and other backwater planets) are protected by a Galactic Treaty. Eerily similar to the Prime Directive of Star Trek, it forbids spacefaring aliens from interfering with non-spacefaring civilizations, although small-scale research expeditions are allowed, as long as these happen in secret and with as little influence on the planet as possible. There are two exceptions though. One is if the aliens are invited by the local god, in Earth’s case called El Cantare.

The other exception is if the local civilization is in the process of exterminating all intelligent life on the planet, for instance through atomic war or worse. In that case, other civilizations are allowed to intervene to stop the madness and save the species. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Earthlings have been on the endangered species list. There are currently two opinions on how to save them.

A minority, but with a heavy local presence, advocates basically bombing us back to the stone age. Using terraforming tools like tsunamis, volcanoes and mass crust movement, looking like natural disasters to the locals, they are thinking of erasing civilization to the ground. If this is not approved, they will punish advanced societies by inducing large-scale mental disorders. (There is no reference to the Tower of Babel episode, strangely enough.)

The larger faction wants to give humans a chance, by encouraging them toward love and tolerance so that they may refrain from actually using their weapons. The tentative plan is to get the world’s religions to cooperate about their shared values, rather than fight over details. Unfortunately, the more warlike aliens are fanning the flames of conflict, currently between Christians and Muslims, conveniently for the more draconian solution.

If this had been a novel, it would actually had been a pretty good one. Unfortunately, there is nothing to imply that Mr Okawa and his followers don’t actually believe it all, and then some. UFOs and various more or less humanoid aliens are already among us, and more are on their way. We have to make haste to create a civilization that is not only found worthy to survive, but is also able to integrate visitors and immigrants from numerous star systems in a galactic melting pot. The plan is to make Earth into a cosmic “Planet of Love”, where aliens from technologically advanced but culturally less refined planets can come and learn religion and politics.

So there you have it. Definitely a break from the usual self-help books. And there is more to come. Okawa is currently studying the Laws of the Universe, and will be back with a book detailing Truth that surpasses this single planet.

Warmly recommended if you actually believe there are UFOs and aliens on Earth now. Otherwise… well, I suppose you may want to read it if you think Happy Science is a crazy cult and you are looking for indications of this. I fear this will be its most common use. Alas for the many years of hard work that Okawa and his followers have put into making an organization based on universal principles of love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress.

Of course, once the aliens show up, I will have to reconsider…

The aliens are coming! Oh dear.

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Illustration not from the book, but from the movie “Rebirth of Buddha”, also by Ryuho Okawa. As usual it was a hit in Japan, but in the West… not so much. More or less “members only” here. With the very occasional exception. *whistles innocently*

Ryuho Okawa has really pulled out the stops. He is publishing “The Next Great Awakening” in the USA. It stands out from most of his books translated so far by having a substantial section on space aliens. According to Mr Okawa, there have been several waves of these in the past, and there are several new alien races living among us today. His plan is for Earth to become an interstellar Planet of Love. (One may remember his foretelling, already in one of his first books, that Jesus will return to preach the message of love for the galactic age, in a future where tensions between earthlings and aliens will be running high.)

This is unlikely to do much good for Happy Science’s public image in the West, where people are far more skeptical to aliens than in Japan.

I’ll give the requisite thought to loving my alien neighbors as myself once I actually meet them. Until then, I shall have to work on my relationship to you Earthlings. That may well be enough for this lifetime, I fear.

At least this goes a long way toward putting to rest my fears that Ryuho Okawa might be the Antichrist (with a capital A). I cannot imagine the capital A making a PR blunder like that.

Of course, the book is not all about aliens. But I have a feeling that they are going to get most of the attention. That is kind of sad, because Mr Okawa usually has lots of useful advice. He is known to read 1000 books a year, and have distilled from them some of the most useful advice given to mankind through the ages. I have found similar advice in books of religion and philosophy, often decades or centuries old, and more often than not hard to read unless you are an intellectual. It would be a loss if people rejected all of that just because of a few UFOs.

Happy Science fanfic

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This screenshot, found on the Internet, shows that TSI members can be pretty in kimono. Hopefully this will figure in the story at some point. The glowing in the dark part, probably not so much, or only figuratively.

I suppose it had to happen. I started on my fifth novel so far this month. While my main story, “Shadow of Yggdrasil”, was inspired in part by Ryuho Okawa’s claim to be the World Tree, most of the story was to be about other things. The new story, however, is an all-out fanfic. It is set in the world of the movie “Buddha Saitan”, which does not actually mean “Buddha is Satan” but something possibly even more blasphemous to the Theravada Buddhist: The Rebirth of Buddha.

Now, the Buddha was most of all famous for breaking the cycle of birth and death and attaining Nirvana, the endless peace. So the notion that he might return is approximately like someone claiming to have found Jesus’ skeleton. However, the movie portrays it in a different light: The Buddha returns, not because he needs to refine his soul or learn anything more, but because he so loved the world.

I am not going to spoil the movie, which you should be able to see occasionally at your local Happy Science temple. But the movie equivalent of Happy Science, more or less, is called TSI. This is short for “Taiyou Sorano Institute”. The reborn Buddha is named Taiyou Sorano. While Sorano is an actual European surname (and the movie character does look half European, half Japanese), if you write his name in the Japanese naming order with family name first, it becomes “Sorano Taiyou”, which is pronounced like the Japanese phrase “sora no taiyou”, the sun in the sky. I could not stop laughing when I first figured that out.

So, my fifth story has the working title TSI, until I find something better. I started with what I thought would be a short piece, a guy telling a bit about his background and how he came to join the TSI. My plan was to have each chapter be such a story, since I suck at long stories.  But the character unexpectedly came to life and I now have over 10 000 words in a couple days, the fastest I have written in… I am not sure how long. Years, probably.

Strangely writing this story seems to be less tiring on my wrist than the others, even though I am writing more over a shorter time. I do not claim divine intervention for this, however. I think I was just more relaxed because this fellow more or less wrote himself.

It is also fun because he randomly inserts pieces of TSI / HS lore and also the occasional reference to Christianity (he is a Japanese raised in America, so he is familiar with Christianity as well, although not from personal experience.)

Since this is basically fanfiction, there is no way I could ever sell it, but then again National Novel Writing Month is mostly a practice run anyway. There are a few people each year who actually write something they can sell (after months of editing, of course), but I have no such ambition this year. I already have a job where I get paid to help people, so I hope to the Light that I can continue working until I am 75, like my ancestors. But in any case, having some writing skill is no sin. Probably. Although I don’t aspire to publishing 600 books and numerous movie manuscript, like the man behind Buddha Saitan.