Valley of humility

St Teresa is awesome as usual.
"One fall is not sufficient for a person to be lost, nor are many, if he loves You and not the things of the world. He journeys in the valley of humility."

That's an amazing visual. The prideful walks on the ridge, where a single misstep can send him tumbling downward. But he that walks in the bottom of the valley, even if he stumbles, he only falls to his knees.

On the nature of nature

"If we were to present to an aboriginal tribe a portable computer without giving any explanation of it, the men and women could handle, touch, shake and visually examine it at great length and yet could reach no knowledge of computers in general or of this one in particular. Because they have no idea of its origin and purposes, they are almost completely ignorant of its actual reality, So also, if we know creation only on a natural level and aside from its divine Author and purpose, we are next to totally in the dark about it."
-Fr. Thomas Dubay, Fire Within.

The Power of Now (and then)

I think this Tolle guy has understood something with his idea of living in the Now, rightly understood. So, it is kind of amazing that this just suddenly was revealed to him after just sitting around. It is also kind of amazing that he didn't know it already, since it's been part of any number of religious traditions - even in the wider sense of religion - for thousands of years. But such are the times. I guess you really can reinvent the wheel of Dharma.

We can see how unfamiliar this is when we are in any social gathering (of non-Raccoons, obviously). There will usually be one or more or a whole lot of people who are not quite there. Or rather, you are not right there in their mind. Instead, the room is populated by that person and any number of cardboard signs depicting types of humans. They are the only person that is really real. And because of this, you just cannot connect to them. You are not really there to them, even if you are right there. That is why there is no connection, no matter how much you'd want there to be. You are there, listening to them talk to those cardboard signs. It is an unsettling feeling.

(I am pretty sure I was one of those guys when I was younger, by the way. I guess people just took it for granted, because I don't think anyone ever told me. Or perhaps I just did not notice.)

This is what happens when people are not really present in the Now. The pinprick size of their Now has dwindled to near extinction.

The opposite happens through spiritual growth, or the influx of eternity into mundane time, creating sacred time, which is both personal and at the same time freely shared, wide open. As the "bubble" of personal Now-time increases, a person becomes ever more present. So someone who is spiritually advanced, even if it is in a different tradition than yours, will be almost disturbingly present. Even ordinary people will notice it.

I believe that the greater someone's presence, the less presence does it take to recognize it. So if a person was filled with unimaginable amounts of eternity, even the complete amateur in all things spiritual would be able to connect to them even thousands of years later. Well, that is easy for me to speculate since it already happened. ^_^

Saying grace?

Do Americans still say grace at meals? My guess would be not, since I notice that the average American has grown a lot fatter over the last generation. This has happened here in Norway too after most people stopped saying grace. Saying grace was a common behavior when I was a child; in Norway it was called "praying for the food", which caused some confusion since a) the food was already there, or alternatively b) the food was probably beyond rescue. In any case, already in my teens this practice was growing rare outside small conservative sects. And not long after, Norwegians began to grow fatter and fatter until this day.

I am not sure about cause and effect here, actually. I think if I was obese from overindulgence, I might find it hard to commune with the Light at mealtime. Kind of like it is hard to pray before going to bed if there are steadily new people in your bed. But also the other way around, it is probably hard to get ever new people into your bed if you keep praying there. So again, cause and effect is a strange couple. It would be kind of interesting to gather a bunch of obese people and record them saying grace on a regular basis and see what happened to their weight and general health. But I suspect the current government would not fund the research. So how are things over on the west side of the sea?

A collective hallucination

Somehow I had never heard until this week that St Symeon (the New Theologian) actually had seen the Light on a more or less regular basis. The Light, of course, being Jesus Christ or God in general. There is evidently a lot to this and it baffles me that this is not considered a big thing by at least the Christian world. While seeing the Light is not entirely unheard of, it seems to be rare indeed. I can't say I have seen it in any literal way. This is to be expected, given Jesus' words that the pure of heart shall see God.

(Purity of heart obviously - well obviously to some of us - is not really about virginity, least of all in any bodily sense. It is to become transparent, like fine glass, so that the mind does not stop or overly distort the image of what is on the other side. And who is capable of this?)

One would at first thought assume that someone who literally saw the Light was having a hallucination. And this is in some way true, I guess, since it probably is not photons striking the retina. Probably. But in a more straightforward definition of hallucination as seeing something that isn't there, it would be right to say that the rest of us are hallucinating. We are seeing a world without the manifest presence of the Light. Even though we know that this ain't so.

Ah, but as the saying goes: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is a freak.

Leisurely digging for saints

As the always helpful Norwegian government will start collecting 25% sales tax on e-books from abroad starting July 1st, I have stocked up liberally from my own recommendation list. One such book, that I just opened today, is called "Holiness is always in season" by a certain Benedict XVI.

The main appeal however is that it supposedly presents a generous heaping of certified saints, an area that I have formerly explored only haphazardly. This brings to mind a reflection by my old friend Al Schroeder: In days of yore, people studied hagiology, while these days we study criminology. He did not see that as an improvement, and neither do I.

In the introduction are these encouraging words: "If we were more familiar with the saints, we too might become more faithful, more loving, more Christian." Wouldn't that be nice. I assume however that they did not have that effect on everyone who was exposed to them, considering the large proportion of them who were brutally killed.

Still, I like the idea that the Light is somehow becoming... if not amplified, then at least made more accessible, by its passing through certain people. I have experienced this even with the living, but I am still no closer to knowing what qualifies one person to mediate light or grace for a specific other person. Still, it seems worth a look.

Young people these days

A recent Norwegian study of middle school students shows that compared to 1992, they show more discipline, quarrel less with teachers, have less truancy and are happier at school. They are also closer to their parents, says Tormod Øia at the NOVA institute.

Uhm, I wonder if that last part is not the explanation for the first... I have noticed that fathers in particular spend more time with their children than a generation ago.