Harmless Wereporcupine Play

Valley of humility

2012-01-02T17:31:00.001+01:00

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

2011-12-25T15:56:00.003+01:00

"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)

2011-10-30T13:23:00.003+01:00

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?

2011-10-08T15:58:00.002+02:00

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

2011-09-30T00:27:00.003+02:00

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

2011-06-29T20:38:00.003+02:00

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

2011-05-04T16:27:00.002+02:00

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.

Days of reluxation

2011-04-14T18:41:00.002+02:00

I bought another Kindle book by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, this one called The Candle of God. It seems to be a collection of essays or some such, spanning a few different topics. I thoroughly enjoyed his book The Thirteen-petalled Rose, which was more of a unified work, but I don't expect that to stop me. I am at chapter 2 and already enjoying it greatly. As in palpably missing the physical ability to whine like a slightly underage teen fangirl. There are some phrases there that I just read, then stop, then read again several times, not willing to read on for a while because that would mean having to let them out of my sight.

I don't really think any random raccoon would have the same experience with the same book, though you never know. It may be another book that makes you go wheee in the night.

There is some exclusively Jewish stuff, of course. And then some, given that the Rabbi is a kabbalist. But he is not sneaky about it, so it bothers me not.

About the Sabbath, the Rabbi writes: "The essence of Shabbat is really a trickle, an infiltration, of the next world into this world. It is a percolation and diffusion of an existing Divine Reality." So now I better understand the Gag: "Relux and call it a Diety." It is not merely a day of relaxation, as common people have thought, but a day of reluxation, to draw the Divine Light into the soul of man which is the Candle (or lamp) of God.

Literature like this is actually a kind of reluxation in itself, at least the books that happen to find us home, wherever that may for each of us.

Who the hell would do that?

2011-02-13T16:18:00.003+01:00

After reading recent entries about Dante's Divine Comedy over at One Cosmos, I became ashamed of never having read one of the most influential works in western literature, so I downloaded it to my mobile phone's Kindle reader. I may have made a mistake in picking a poetic translation for my first read through, as it is rather old-fashioned and I am not a native English speaker. But I am pretty sure I understand almost everything and misunderstand nothing, at least linguistically. The deeper meaning may be another matter.

The other day I came to the part where Dante accuses romance novels of leading people in perdition. As proof, his literary self interviews an otherwise nice couple who were reading a Camelot novel together and, as the novel neared its climax, they fell into the same mood and ended up in the Hell of Lust together.

My immediate reaction on reading this: "Who the hell would read a romance novel alone together if they did not already plan to do the deed?"

But this, of course, is just one example. The truth is that very often, it requires careful planning to fail properly. Or in other words, picking the wrong battle ground and sticking to it is half the lost battle. Or three quarters, more likely. A kind of perverse patience may even be required, as in the above example, "Ofttimes by that reading our eyes were drawn together, and the hue fled for our alter'd cheek." Ofttimes, huh? Each of which times would cause another person to go "What the Hell are we doing??" and hastily arrange for some diversion. It requires perseverance to sin properly. But it is definitely doable. I can tell that by experience, albeit not such a romantic experience as that.

The thing is, this does not apply to lust alone, of course. The habitually angry will seek out sources of anger like a hungry looking for food, and the fearful will seek out what scares them, and the cynical that which confirms their low opinion of others. It is hard to explain modern news media in any other way. Who in their right mind would spend large portions of the day following that litany of ill, if their mind was filled with Light?

And so on. The voice in your heart knows better than I what applies to each.

"Parasites on the holy"

2011-01-31T19:37:00.002+01:00

I've been reading a bit in Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz' Thirteen Petalled Rose, a surprisingly approachable book. (At least after having rammed my head against the walls of Schuon and Aurobindo repeatedly...) Some things, I can see, are not right for me. But other things seem quite helpful. Anyway, I came across a drive-by mention in his chapter on holiness, that there exist entities that are parasites on the holy.*

At this point, of course, my thoughts went to One Cosmos Under God (another fairly easy read), where Robert Godwin uses the phrase "mind parasites" to describe the unhelpful complexes that plague our species. Given that Rabbi Steinsaltz considers the human being a line or ray that stretches all the way from the Holy One to the material plane and beyond, or that humans are said to be in the image of God, it makes perfect sense to have parasitic entities swarming us. This is not a purely religious observation: The very fact that we have creativity and imagination is what makes it possible for us to also play host to all kinds of weirdness.

(* Steinsaltz believes that approaching holy places or times without proper preparation, or at the very least proper attitude, may be worse than nothing. The New Testament expresses a similar view in regards to the Eucharist, to the point where indifference to its spiritual nature may even be life-threatening. In light of this we may surmise that Jesus' warning to not give dogs what is holy is also an expression of concern for the dogs. On the Internet, nobody can see that you are a dog, so take care.)

A long canvas to bleach

2011-01-18T02:09:00.002+01:00

That is a common expression here in Norway, or at least it used to be, back when patience still was considered a virtue. It means a project that takes an inordinate amount of time. (Bleaching canvas was presumably a familiar drudgery back in the age of sails.)

Analects of Confusius, Book 2.

The Master said, "At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning.

"At thirty, I stood firm.

"At forty, I had no doubts.

"At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.

"At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.

"At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right."

Confusius died at the age of 74 according to one history book (or 71-72 according to Wikipedia). Was it worth it? I think so.

When someone is transformed into his highest aspiration, something is created that transcends time. That's what I mean when I say, you have to open the present to open the future and the past. The only way to make our past better is by making progress in the "reception of truth", so that the things that made no sense begin to make sense.

I hope to also live to an age where I can follow what my heart desires, in every way, without transgressing. But in any case, whenever our journey comes to its end, I believe we will not regret a single step of it. We may however regret the steps we did not take. In fact, I do that pretty much each night.

"There is plenty of love"

2010-12-16T09:26:00.002+01:00

This morning as I was slowly waking up, I was lamenting the lack of love in the world and particularly in my contribution to the world. At least, I said to myself, I have heard of God. Where would an atheist get love from? There are limits to how much love you can make, after all.

"There is plenty of love" said the voice in my heart. "Everyone has lots of it. But much of it is misguided: You love your own desires, or attachments, rather than other people. The old classics like lust and gluttony, sure, but in this age people particularly love status, or respect. If they worked as tirelessly for others as they now work to be recognized, respected and looked up to, the world would be overflowing with love. Just like everyone has got a certain number of hours a day, so each has got a certain amount of love, but it too can be wasted on yourself."

There is more to this, like, once your love runs in the right direction, its quality can still be improved. But this is a start, to recognize that everyone loves, but to a large degree we love "in the wrong direction", toward ourselves rather than toward others.

St Teresa the Awesome

2010-12-04T21:49:00.004+01:00

Awesome! That is my first impression of Saint Teresa of Avila. I recently got a mail from Amazon.com recommending her book, "The Interior Castle". Since that is a concept which I have thought and written occasionally over the last couple years, in my more touristly than saintly way, I was intrigued.

(I first saw the concept of an interior castle in a Japanese martial arts TV series and it struck me as profoundly true. I have not taken much interest in Catholic literature until just lately, since Catholic countries suck.)

I have a problem with St Teresa's work. The problem is that I stop at the beginning and don't want to go on, because her words are so awesome I just want to stop and read them again and laugh with joy at the brightness of it all. I can only hope this improves further into the book. Probably, since it is supposedly for the most part about things that are too high and holy for me at this time. But the beginning. Whoa.

Would it not be gross ignorance, my daughters, if, when a man was questioned about his name, or country, or parents, he could not answer? Stupid as this would be, it is unspeakably more foolish to care to learn nothing of our nature except that we possess bodies, and only to realize vaguely that we have souls, because people say so and it is a doctrine of faith.

St Teresa, where have you been all my life?

(PS: The book is available for free download elsewhere, legally, being out of copyright for centuries.)

At home and work, as it is done in Heaven

2010-12-01T19:20:00.004+01:00

I began to think: Should we not strive to make each our own country "God's own country"? And not in a tribal or warlike sense, but a theocracy (God-rule) of the heart, by each of us pointing the compass needle of our mind toward the highest spiritual entity of which we can conceive. (This will necessarily vary from person to person, even within the same religion or philosophy. Your God is greater than my God if and in so far as the love and purity that flows from God through you is greater.) And then, with our mind so ordered, seek to promote the happiness of all, on Earth as it is done in Heaven. For there is no doubt, is there, that Heaven is a place of immense, overwhelming blessing upon every soul that abides there? Or do you think the angels or the saints fly around whacking each other with a rulebook and scolding: "You must do better!"

If there must be a Hell, let it be of their own creation who reside there. We are hardly obliged to add anything to it. Not even a single word. (Sometimes hard words need to be said, in exceptional circumstances, but only when they are meant to cause happiness in the end, and as soon as possible.)

World without end

2010-11-26T09:49:00.002+01:00

I live in a far greater world than I used to,a world which I fear is beyond the imagination of my old friends. And surrounding my world are even greater worlds, in which the world where I live is like a bubble. This is the nature of the universe. It has not only quantities but also qualities, and we can hold only so much, each of us. The limit of the world is set by the limit of each mind. What you perceive to be the limit is not the limit of the universe, but of your mind. In the timeless words of Solar: “We fail to imagine and are punished with reality.” (Namely with a smaller, more meager reality that we think is it all.)

Salvation through self-reflection

2010-11-25T10:06:00.003+01:00

If I told you that you can save yourself through self-reflection, you would surely believe I had gone over to the Eastern side. After all, this is one of the main topics of Blasphemous Tax-cutting Buddhist. That's not who I first heard it from, though. As unlikely as it sounds, I read it in the Bible.

"Pay attention to yourself and the doctrine, keep doing that; for when you do so, you shall save yourself and those who hear you."

That's actually re-translated from the Norwegian translation of the first letter to Timothy, chapter 4, verse 16. That was how I heard in my heart this morning. Here are some other translations:

"Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers."

"Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee."

"take heed to thyself, and to the teaching; remain in them, for this thing doing, both thyself thou shalt save, and those hearing thee."

Paying attention to yourself and the Truth may be two simple things to do, but I never said they were easy. The average human has actually a pretty low level of consciousness. Even concentrating on a clerical job, as most people do these days, can wear you out. Observing yourself while doing this seems utterly impossible. We tend to forget ourselves when we work, when we socialize, when we eat, when we play, when we read, when we watch movies or even when we listen to music. We tend to even consider this a good thing. Even if we sit down and just observe our own thoughts meditatively, we usually find that within seconds or (in rare cases) minutes, they have wandered off and so has our attention.

Observing ourselves is a lifetime project, I think. It is difficult. It can be boring. And occasionally it can be terrifying. But the strangest thing of all is that it seems to be Biblical.

B influences and WTF influences

2010-11-19T02:41:00.002+01:00

I recently responded to a blog post over at One Cosmos that had a brief mention of Boris Mouravieff and his theory of A and B influences. This is something that, when explained simply, made a wonderful take-away when I first saw it. Basically, A influences are those that relate to our life as a smart ape; B influences are those that relate to our being as an eternal spirit.

I have not yet actually bought Mouravieff's books. The reason for this is that even the most glowing reviews tend to cheerfully agree that his thoughts are pretty far outside what most people think of as sanity.

Of course, that is partly the point. Because most people are heavily dominated by A influences, anything that cannot be eaten or mated with is already pretty close to the border of their world. Music and some art is generally accepted, but from there on things get dicey. Religion is OK as long as it does not rock the boat and does not go too far beyond "let's be nice to nice people and hope that we can be apes in our next life too."

So those who want to build a castle keep of the heart from gathered B influences have to fight against an enormous restraining force that tries to keep them within consensus reality. Unfortunately, this struggle is necessary. Unfortunately, the restraining force is also necessary, because it is what keeps ordinary people from going off the deep end. Basically it is the same force that keeps you safe from clinical insanity.

It follows from this that a large number of those who live outside the common ground of A, are actually not in the common ground of B, but floating around in the great void that surrounds them both. Thus my division into A influences, B influences and WTF influences, which are simply insanity with little or no value to either our life in the society of Really Great Apes, nor our life in the Fifth Dimension and above.

What makes this more problematic is that even the individuals who have broken through from A to B, tend to have various degree of WTF residue. And until one is extremely well settled into the B world, it can be hard to keep these apart, especially when they come from someone who has dramatically improved your life and given you some of the most valuable insights ever.

Mouravieff himself seems to have a lot of this, but it is pretty widespread. For instance, the man I usually refer to here as Blasphemous Tax-cutting Buddhist. He has written a large body of very enlightening stuff, most of it eminently practical and with a great positive overlight, like being taken upstairs and shown the rat maze from above. He also thinks he is a god from Venus. I still think I'll sort these claim in the WTF bin until further notice.

Of course, Jesus Christ and Vasudeva Krishna both claimed to be basically God as well, or at least that is the impression people got. And while it was none too well received at the time, a lot of people these days think it adds greatly to their appeal. On the other hand, almost everyone agree that they can't both be right.

Compared to this, the notion that Nancy Pelosi is possessed by demons seems ... almost mundane. Though I am pretty sure she would file that under WTF if she ever heard about it. For now, I'm trying to collect some obvious B influences and leave the rest to the experts.

Cumulative time

2010-11-16T17:08:00.003+01:00

If someone spent a day of your precious lifetime saying just one sentence, it better be good.

I have been on the other end of that. When I was young and more naïve (for better and for worse), I would speak to groups of people. Not only in my job, but in religious context. On a couple occasions this was thousands of people. An interesting thing applies when you do this: Each second you use, may use an hour or more of your listeners' time, when you add them together.

Imagine that. One second is an hour. A single sentence the equivalent of a day of human lifetime that never comes back.

Something similar applies to popular books. Thank the Light I have not done that yet, despite writing for decades. At least it is easier to put down a book than to walk away from a speech. On the other hand people have usually paid for books.

"Quick to listen, slow to speak" seems to be a good idea for the karma account.

In other's words...

2010-11-09T06:54:00.002+01:00

"The purpose of religion is ultimately to help us grow as human beings. Through that growth, we can overcome and eliminate the problems, strife, frustration and suffering that right now might appear unsurmountable to us. Part of growing involves finding answers to the problems themselves, but another part of it involves all of us developing to a higher level. When we do that, our problems become comparatively smaller."

Yes, that sounds like a rewrite of my previous post. However, I just today found this quote in a magazine (translated from Japanese, so it may have appeared even clearer in original).

Another fascinating data point is that the quote is the first paragraph of the main article in the October issue, which was being read by people around the world shortly before and during the time I wrote my little piece.

Don't solve your problems

2010-10-31T06:06:00.002+01:00

Of course, there are times when we must solve our problems, because they can be solved and good things are urgently needed on the other side of those problems. So this is not a rule without exception. But it is still a nifty and useful rule.

Don't solve your problems. Outgrow them.

By this I specifically mean to increase in wisdom, to get an ever higher perspective. This is nifty because the people who compulsively read blogs tend to be most strongly developed cognitively, that is to say, in their thinking. There are other ways to grow, for instance through heartfelt use of ritual, or enlightened ascesis. But for people like me and probably you (since you are here), wisdom is the key. Not pure theory, it must constantly be grounded back to practical life, otherwise it may run off and become unhinged. There is a lot of that on the web, in case you had not noticed.

By reading the words of the wise, wherever we can find them, we can feel the joy of truth, and are lifted up to a higher perspective. Here we can see clearly what seemed such a maze from below.

It is easy to see that humans have a higher perspective than animals, which are easily trapped and snared. It is easy to see that our perspective widens as we grow older: A toddler cannot see the connection between his stomach pain and recently stuffing himself with sweets, but an adult is aware of such things normally. A teenager may not see the connection between dropping out of school and living a life of poverty, but the connection is there, and poverty is not very romantic and heroic for most people. In the same way, many adults suffer from a low perspective, and this causes problems. Oh no! What shall I do? On one hand I want this, on the other hand I want that. Even at an arm's length, a small coin seems larger than a distant palace.

Simply living and observing calmly will give wisdom eventually. But it can't hurt to get a helping hand from the accumulated wisdom of the past. If it becomes too distant and abstract, double back till you find something that connects to life, your own or that of others. That is what we need it for.

A lot of problems don't need solving: They become trivial, forgettable, once we look at things from a higher point of view.

I still have some problems, so I still need to grow. But other things have fallen by the wayside, and I expect that to continue... if I continue.

Love and power

2010-10-12T21:54:00.003+02:00

Another mental postcard from a strange land. This "came to me" as my teachers would say, while I was out walking some days ago.

Some people may desire to be like God out of envy, and some out of love. The first desire God's power, but not His nature. The others desire God's nature, but do not consider themselves worthy of His power. But in reality, the two are not separate, God's love and God's power.

We are obviously not talking about any random Iron Age deity here, but the Absolute and Infinite, the Prime Mover, the Tao if you want. Or the O of the Bionic Raccoons.

Because the Supreme God is self-sufficient and not in need of anyone or anything, the "overflowing of God" that creates the universe is pure selfless love. At the same time, this is the primary power from which all power is derived. It is one and the same thing. Thus, you cannot actually have one without the other.

This is certainly not to say that if you love selflessly, you will have magical superpowers to do miracles. (Although historically there certainly are treasure troves of such stories.) For one thing, even the great saint or bodhisattva has only a partial glimpse of the Original Love. But also because the creative power of the One is exceedingly subtle. Apart perhaps from the first Fiat Lux! (and I am not so sure about even that), it has all flowed so natural that it almost seemed logical, almost unavoidable, that it would have to run all the way to us.

This reminds me of what Lao-Tzu says: "When the sage has led a great work to completion, the people say: We did it ourselves!"

And with that we should certainly be satisfied, if even the Ultimate is.

Not that I know what I'm talking about or anything. I just heard it on the road, but it makes sense to me.

Different readings

2010-09-22T22:31:00.002+02:00

Feeling a little peckish for some real religion, I checked out Psalm 119, which I vaguely remembered having looked at in the past. There I came upon verse 41:

"May your unfailing love come to me, O LORD, your salvation according to your promise;"

and my first impression of it was to mean: This was the salvation the Lord promised, that I should be filled with His unfailing love.

That is certainly not the only way to read it, and may not even have been what was intended. I believe it is not so long ago that I would have read it as a plea for God to love me and save me, which are in fact both sorely needed. I am not actually yet overflowing with love and practicing it at every opportunity. But at some point my focus has changed, so that this now seems like an obvious goal and a salvation in itself.

Now, the practice... that is lagging badly. Although at least I have no enemies that I know of, so there is that difference from my youth. At the time, I would read the Bible repeatedly and pray at length, sometimes with tears; but I was also ready to dismember any man who would belittle my person. So I doubt I would have read the verse in the same manner back then.

Action and reaction

2010-09-18T22:13:00.002+02:00

I just wanted to share a thought that I have found encouraging.

In psychology, somewhat like in physics, an action is likely to be met with a reaction in the opposite direction. The psyche has a kind of "elastic inertia" - when you pull it in one direction, it may seem to budge, but then it snaps back.

This implies that when we feel a particular strong pull toward evil or selfish or pointless things, we are likely to have made some amount of progress recently. Or perhaps in the near future - the psyche is not too picky about such details. It just wants to restore the balance. Of course, if we allow that, if we don't resist at all and get whisked back to our equilibrium, we have kind of wasted our time both in moving forward and backward. But at least there is a chance of genuine progress, when temptations flare. It is not entirely a bad sign. It can in fact be a reason for joy - as better men than I have said, but I did not understand it back then.

Higher is not always better

2010-09-11T12:47:00.004+02:00

I'm rereading parts of Huston Smith's Forgotten Truth, an exposition of the shared worldview of the traditional religions. One thing I notice is that he places the demonic realm also in the sphere that transcends and includes the ordinary world - basically demons are of the same category as angels. Fr Seraphim Rose in The Soul After Death also referred to the demons usually as "the powers of the air", and portrayed them as superior to us humans in our earthly lives. Likewise Ryuho Okawa places hell in the 4th dimension (compared to the third dimension of the mortal world). In his book The Challenge of the Mind he strongly warns against opening the mind to the spirit world without first repenting our wrong thoughts of the day and as far back as we reasonably can remember. Otherwise our mind will be in tune with "stray spirits" (their name for demons) rather than High Spirits (angels, saints etc).

If you are a materialist, none of this matters. In a manner of speaking you are lucky then, for the damage you can do to yourself is also limited. But today there is a wave of spirituality, in which people reject outright materialism but also organized religion, and seek personal spiritual experiences. Unfortunately newbies on this path may be unaware that some things are higher than us but not better than us - quite the opposite.

In psychological terms - which the religious person will see as the shadow play on the cave wall cast by a higher reality - you venture into your subconscious through such practices as meditation. Your subconscious is probably not a nice place. This depends on your life up to now, and your upbringing, but there is also a common human element. It is certain that you have a shadow. This is the human condition. And depending on your mental disposition, venturing alone and weaponless into the subconscious is a dangerous undertaking.

I am a big fan of trust in God, but although God is spirit, not every spirit is God. There won't be just flowers and kittens if you embark on a spiritual path, at least if you go beyond the slightly stoned feeling of just letting go of your everyday thoughts. And sometimes that is enough. When I was young, I eagerly proselytized for meditation, but most of those friends who tried did not enjoy it. In fact, found it creepy. I realize now why. And I no longer recommend meditation without some framework of theory and preferably a community.

As you travel past this intermediate realm, however, goodness predominates, closer toward the Source, the Ground of Being, or just plain God. But will you find your way there? The only reliable way I know of is being pure at heart. But that has proved surprisingly difficult, even with a good upbringing.

"The Soul After Death"

2010-08-23T18:56:00.005+02:00

Some time ago, I bought the book "The Soul After Death" by Fr. Seraphim Rose. It arrived about a week ago, and I have been reading it. I kind of regret that.

The book is disturbing, which is not a bad thing: I know all too well that it is easy to get complacent in the matter of our eternal life.

The book is also discouraging, for which I honestly struggle to find an excuse. The impression it gives when I put it aside a bit past half-way is that I am sure to go to Hell, it is too late to do anything about it, and neither Fr. Rose nor his God has a problem with that.

I think I should have stopped at Chapter 4, at the paragraph where he dismisses out of hand the possibility that a Protestant may have caught a glimpse of Heaven. Actually I agree that the vision used as example is unlikely to be of the Heaven of saints; that is not the problem. The problem is the unreflected and unconcerned certainty that you have to be an official member of an earthly organization to not be condemned collectively. Actually it soon becomes clear that even if you are a member of the Orthodox Church, your chances are pretty slim, but at least you may get a fair trial. This is simply taken as an axiom, a starting point, though I suppose it may be elaborated on in other works.

Unless you follow the particulars of the Orthodox path (in this work not specified, but hinted to be some sort of asceticism), you can be assured that any impulse you receive, even if it is toward gratitude and love for others, comes from evil spirits. Any comfort and bliss you may experience is sure to come from demons.

If I were to take this book seriously, I would conclude that the Presence that has been with me since my youth, which once made the Scriptures come alive to me, which has advised me against evil and encouraged me toward good, which has forgiven me and comforted me through the years, must certainly be a demon. I find that hard to believe.

I may be harsh, but that is the impression the book leaves with me, and I suspect it could be even worse for those not already favorably inclined toward Orthodoxy. Strongly dis-recommended for those not in the choir he is preaching to.

It is rare that I even consider burning a book, but the risk of this work falling into the hand of a doubting soul after my passing is something I am not sure I want to have on my conscience. I have someone with depression in my close family who might inherit my bookshelf if I were to pass away soon. I don't want to risk their life. While I assume the book must have some positive value for some people, I fear that it may be too dangerous for outsiders.

I think I should say that I actually agree with Fr Rose on his main points, I am just horrified by his vision of a world where God has basically lost against Satan, being content with getting a few elite souls while the rest of mankind is and remains completely under the thumbs of demons, the good people with the bad. The word "dystopia" is far too mild. It is more like "second-worst case scenario" and one would tend to agree with the sci-fi author that "In the beginning God created the universe; this was widely considered a bad move."

First-world problems?

2010-08-11T09:47:00.003+02:00

With all due respect for Maslow, his hierarchy of needs imply that higher needs such as the need to realize truth, beauty and virtue come as an afterthought after you've got everything you ever wanted. History shows that this is not true.

1) History shows that through the times, there have been people living under pretty harsh conditions by our standards, who have gone on to bring Heaven down to Earth to an extent that is baffling just to look at.

2) Recent history shows that an increase in affluence has not really led to a mass migration up the pyramid to a more refined soul. Rather, people seem to become more active at or near their original level. Those at the basic level eat more (although some throw up afterwards), they have more sex (even if they need to take medication to keep it up) and they do it with more people. The vast majority, though, seem to be stuck at the "belonging" level: They can't ever get enough recognition from others, and their life becomes a desperate and endless fight to show that they are Good Enough and then some. In so far that some people transcend the lower levels and take an interest in spirituality, they will likely as not simply end up as paying consumers of spiritual entertainment, in which any superstition is as good as any other, if the wrapping is pretty.

My conclusion is not that poverty is cool. I am glad people live longer, healthier lives. But I think history shows us that money does not change people for the better, rather they just become more of what they already are.

As seen from the spirit world

2010-07-29T21:43:00.003+02:00

I don't think I have said this before. Even if I did, it is still important.

Things don't look the same from the spirit world. Or that's what the voice in my head tells me, along with hints from various people, not least among them Jesus Christ. He clearly had a spiritual sight even while he was incarnate, which explains some of the things he said.

If you are a spirit and are looking at this world, you don't see photons reflecting off the surface of things, the way our natural eyes do. You see things more the way they are. Most notably, you can see a person's mind clearly, more clearly than their body if my source is to be believed. And it probably is, because this suddenly makes sense of the Sermon on the Mount.

"You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment." Now, let's say you are a bodiless spirit watching someone who is angry but manages to ball his fists behind his back and restrain himself. Watched in the natural light of the electromagnetic rays from the sun, he looks OK. But if you see his body kind of like a wavering image through water, but see his mind clearly, you will see him actually attacking his brother and bashing his brains in, or choking him to death or whatever brutal fantasies flicker through his mind at the moment. I am not talking about someone who feels anger rise but immediately reflects on himself, but the kind of person who gives the anger room in his heart but fears the police / retaliation / public disgrace. If his anger is murder-level, then this is what fills his mind, and the whole horror of it is plainly visible to any spirit that may be watching. Given that "God is spirit", this is pretty serious.

We have the same thing with lust. I don't think I even need to quote that one! Here again, there is a difference from recognizing that a woman is sexually attractive, and make a choice to not let that matter, except perhaps to look elsewhere. But if you give the desire room to unfold a scenario, this will be plainly visible in the spirit world. In the physical world, it is only your gaze that runs all over the other person, but seen from the other world, you are literally all over her like some kind of tentacle monster. O_O

In the same way if you are alone, and you construct elaborate scenarios of lust or revenge or deceit or whatever your forte is, the whole pocket universe where this happens is wide open to the spirit world.

Actually I suppose this might spur some people on, but they are not really my target audience.

This also answers the old question of whether your angel is watching you when you go to the toilet. The answer is yes, but he (or she) is not watching your lower body but your heart. If you're sitting on the potty and your heart is filled with gratitude and beautiful thought, you are a beautiful sight indeed. But if you are sitting in the church and your mind is full of shit, you're a truly disgusting sight. Either of these is quite possible.

I don't have any miracles or clear-cut scriptural references saying that this is how it is, but I cannot see how it could be otherwise. In any case, I am not a spiritual teacher, at my best moment perhaps I am like a tourist sending home postcards. This is more of a curiosity that may help us retain a higher awareness in everyday situations.

Belief vs resonance

2010-07-19T09:03:00.002+02:00

It is true that I read religious or spiritual books that range pretty far, including the holy scriptures of foreign religions. There is however a difference between the way I read these and the way I read what I believe to be my own faith. When I read something else, I test the spirit of what I read: Does it make my heart resonate? Does it strengthen the life within that I believe already is from Heaven? I am not a "seeker" looking for a new faith to give myself over to, but I am seeking to deepen what is already there. Unless I can say "I wish I had said this" or something like that, it goes in the "diverse mythologies and mythunderstandings" compartment, at least for now.

I would not say I read critically: By the time we write religious books, or even blogs, I assume we are seeking to share our happiness with other people. But neither am I looking to make a fresh start in my life: I already have something in my heart that I treasure and that I hope to retain for eternity.

Two ways of not being alone

2010-06-30T09:27:00.004+02:00

"You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me" says Jesus Christ in John 16:32. When I say I could have said the same (though perhaps not in the same situation!), it is not to blaspheme. I realize that the unity of the Father and the Son was of a much higher quality, because of the purity. But on the face of it, on the bare words, it is also my normal condition to never be alone even when I am all alone.

For me, it is due to grace or mercy, a gift not deserved. But due to the Divine Presence in my heart or mind, I can spend days without seeing a human being and I hardly notice. Even when the Internet is down for a couple weeks, it does not cause me to become lonely - if anything, less so - although it certainly disrupts my daily routine otherwise. For many years, I go to work with computers, come home and stay home except for a walk or two. For so many years have I been alone that my voice has physically atrophied. When our job was recently changed to incorporate two hours of taking phone calls twice a week, I could not do it. My throat is sore after 15 minutes and my voice gives out. I had a specialist check me out and he found no other reason than the fact that I simply have forgotten how to talk. I don't need to, for the One who is always with me knows my heart.

Interestingly, this seems to have conferred on me a small amount of wisdom, even though I lack the purity of heart of a saint. It is just that the small nuggets are not washed away by a flood of useless words anymore. So that is good.

But children who grow up today will probably never be lonely either, for they are given a cell phone as soon as they don't need a babysitter anymore, if not before. There is no need for them to commune with their heart on their bed, for they can always send text messages or at least update their Twitter. I do get these from younger friends sporadically. "It is 2 AM, why am I even awake?" The answer is: So you can commune with your heart. But who even knows what that means anymore? "Yet I am not alone, for my iPhone is with me." Not the same thing. I wonder, will this age bring enough blessings to make up for such an unspeakable loss, to never know from experience the meaning of the word "alone"?

In other worlds

2010-06-12T18:05:00.002+02:00

To say that the spirit world is created by the human brain is like saying that the atmosphere and the dry land are created by our lungs. Certainly to the tadpole the dry land is an unknown unknown, beyond comprehension and imagination. As he grows older, something changes within him and because of this he becomes able to learn of the world above water, not merely from a distance but firsthand. So to him, the lungs have indeed "created" a new reality. But objectively speaking, he is a newcomer in a world that has long been. It is likewise with the human mind and its ability to travel to worlds beyond the senses. This is the reason we can, for instance, come there and find something new, only to learn later that others found the same millennia ago.

Only selfish people have selfish genes

2010-02-13T11:54:00.003+01:00

My genes live in stable, lifelong monogamous relationships. No, really. My chromosomes are all paired up and cooperate seamlessly with their partners, even the X and Y chromosomes that are strikingly different. Each of my genes knows when to act, so that they don't flood the body with enzymes trying to out-compete their partner, or refuse to do their part when the need arises.

How you see nature is how we see you. Thus it is written: "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God." And again, "To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure."

Known unknown unknowns

2009-12-27T13:11:00.003+01:00

"If you put aside what you think you know about Jesus and approach the Gospels as though for the first time, something remarkable happens: Jesus emerges as a teacher of the transformation of consciousness."

So says the Amazon book review for The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind--A New Perspective on Christ and His Message, which they automatically recommend me on my 51st birthday. Better late than never!

But really, I don't need to put aside what I thought I knew. I already thought I knew Jesus that way, just not ONLY that way. It is not like it has been a complete secret for the last 1500 years. It is just not widely advertised, because most people don't want their consciousness to be transformed. They want quick, cheap forgiveness, and it is hard to beat Jesus on that.

Be that as it may, it makes me wonder. Many people are ignorant of many things. I was ignorant of many things I recently learned about. Obviously then, there are still many things I don't know, and don't even know that I don't know. Things that are utterly beyond my radar. And judging from the past, some of these are probably hiding in plain sight.

Ignorance - it is not just for other people anymore!

Madmen jump too high

2009-12-09T15:21:00.002+01:00

I have kept half an eye on the latest arc over at One Cosmos, about the defense of theism. At the same time I have been nibbling Huston Smith's book Forgotten Truth. This is interesting, as Smith clearly does not believe that the personal God is the highest level of being. However, echoing Schuon, he believes that a deep knowledge of the personal God is a pathway to go beyond that level. This is all way too advanced for me, it is something I may need to reflect on if I become a major demigod. Probably won't happen this year either.

What I do feel sure of is that between undifferentiated materialism and undifferentiated spiritualism is a chasm of galactic dimensions, which you cannot simply vault over with a book on Neo-Advaita or a couple satsang recordings on YouTube. If you go from atheist to nondualist in such a quick upgrade, chances are that you simply cannot stomach the humiliation of bowing down to anyone other than yourself, or the disgrace of having to restrain your fornication, your greed or your vanity just because some bronze-age tribal religion told you to. As long as there is no other god before you, you are fine. You can continue to do whatever you think is OK, as long as it doesn't get you arrested by the police or worse, mocked by your peers.

There are indeed religious traditions that don't center on a personal God or Savior. But they are few and small, mere sects within larger religions. And they prescribe strict moral codes, intricate regulations and personal sacrifices in the (usually long) time leading up to enlightenment, which is even then far from assured in a lifetime. If you think going it alone without a God is some kind of shortcut, you are badly deluded.

In New Age circles, I have met more people than I can remember who said "I am God" or "we are God". But I am still waiting for someone to say "my husband is God". Then I will know something has truly happened in your life.

More on the nature of the Light

2009-11-07T15:55:00.004+01:00

It occurs to me that those who meditate on the uncreated Tao that cannot be spoken, and those who innocently venerate a saint, are both seeing the same Light. For the Heavenly Light is alive; it is neither reflected nor refracted in compatible souls, but rather lives and dwells in them, and shines forth from them again with the same freshness as when it first shone into creation.

How many of us would have thought of God on our own, and how well would we have known the Holy One without the Holy Ones? It does happen that the Light breaks into a soul directly from beyond, I believe. But more often it jumps from soul to soul, shifting colors with them, yet remaining the same Light. A disciple is not above his master even if the disciple does greater works. If we disregard one of the least in the Kingdom of Heaven, we may deprive ourselves of a great Light that should have lived and grown in us until it reached the brightness of full day. Sometimes it is just a few words from an unassuming soul, and yet those words carry with them a spirit that sets all things right and becomes a wellspring of life, long after they are forgotten by the one who spoke them.

Humility

2009-11-01T16:20:00.002+01:00

This is an important topic, but not one taught in most schools (except the school of life, where there are daily lessons). Christians in particular should be desperately interested in understanding humility, for the Bible says: "God resists the proud, but gives grace unto the humble" (James 4). And nothing worthwhile in a Christian's life is accomplished without grace, not even the basic salvation. If God resists us, it won't be easy to get into the Kingdom of Heaven, whatever that means to each of us.

My current best approximation is that humility is personal realism. Obviously this is different from from the notion that humility is simply low self-esteem. True, for much of our lives this is a good rule of thumb, because we hold ourselves in too high regard (at least in some ways). But gradually the balance shifts. Jesus could say "I am meek and humble in heart" (Matthew 11). It may sound like he is boasting of his humility, a paradox. But he was just telling the truth. We tend to start out proud but not knowing it. Then we are proud but realize it. Eventually we may become humble but are still not humble enough to bear knowing it. To be able to know for sure that we are humble ... Ah, that's something.

Everything is relative except the absolute. So one way to gain humility points is to compare ourselves to people who have accomplished more than we, or those who have accomplished much despite great difficulties. In the middle ages, people studied hagiology, the science of saints. Today we study criminology, even common folks do that just by reading the papers. No wonder people get uppity.

Life is the first draft of our autobiography

2009-10-28T23:55:00.001+01:00

Today I got mail: Amazon.com recommends "Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography" by Huston Smith.

That certainly sounds fascinating. In my life it has been the Divine chasing me, strangely enough.

It must be awesome to be able to, around the age of 90, write an autobiography called "Tales of Wonder". I suspect that if I reach that age and write my autobiography, it will be called "The Eternal Newbie."

Words of wisdom, and not by me!

2009-10-14T00:28:00.004+02:00

"As long as you study the Truth at only an intellectual level, there is a ceiling, but once you reach the stage of applying this knowledge in a practical way, all limits disappear and your learning will take an infinite variety of forms."

-Ryuoho Okawa: Ten Principles of Universal Wisdom.

The benefit of matter

2009-09-29T02:40:00.002+02:00

I don't have much to say about the spirit world. I have no memories of a life before life, nor have I visited the afterlife, and for this I am rather thankful. So I don't know whether people can be conscious without a body, or in just an ethereal body. But the spirit world is certainly present even in this life. That's something I know, as it is plain to see. It is not like we exist in a purely material world now! Rather, we could think of the present world as "spirit world plus inertia". If we imagine being alive in the spirit world alone, then our mind would immediately manifest its contents. Kind of like a dream, really. What we believed would appear before us. But thanks to the dense, slow matter, in this world we move only slowly and with considerable use of energy toward what is in our heart. But move we do.

You could also say that our spirit part is destiny, and our material part is fate. Life in this world is fate and destiny. But if we were only in the spirit world, only our destiny would manifest, for better or for worse. Much better or much worse, depending on our choices. (It is believed that angels are in this situation: Either glory or utter desecration, depending on what they decided once and for all. But we, we are held back, moving only gradually. This viscous quality of earthly life is very handy when we are falling, as we kind of sink downward instead of plummeting to the bottom of Hell at the speed of light. Of course, we are equally held back if ascending.)

Absent spirit, fate would reign supreme, and we would be like animals, blown about by whatever came our way, with no aspiration. Or drifting with the current. Conversely, without fate we would just boundlessly create our own world. There are some "New Age" people who believe they live in such a world, where everyone can get the green light in every crossing at the same time. They believe they are God, creating their world. You should not hurry toward such a world, but rather prepare yourself, so that you don't accidentally create your own hell. That is sure to happen if you mistake desire for aspiration.

On the radius of happiness

2009-08-29T14:28:00.002+02:00

One may disagree with Kofuku-no-Kagaku in various things, but in this at least they hit the bullseye: You can't go off and create Utopia until you have thoroughly marinated in happiness yourself. Even if you are running over with happiness and your family and workplace sparkle with it, you still face an unimaginably harder task to transform society. Even a small town would be a challenge literally orders of magnitude greater.

It is a grotesque arrogance when someone who has no true understanding of happiness in their own everyday circumstances, still think they are qualified to change society in fundamental ways in order to increase the happiness of the populace. Go back to first grade! Find out what actually causes happiness and misery, find it out from hands-on experience, study your own life and those right around you, and learn. Then you can cautiously start talking. When you inspire joy and trust by simply being present, then you can show others the way.

"Knowing" the truth

2009-03-20T20:36:00.002+01:00

The Master famously says: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

If we seek the truth because we want to be free, however, this will not happen. Or at least not at once, although we are heading in the right direction. But the truth is not like a doctor we come to with our symptoms, who then fixes us up and we part amicably. Rather, truth is like someone you fall in love with and marry, and live happily (but not always easily) ever after. We know truth in the Biblical way, so to speak, the way Adam knew Eve. Or, in our case, rather the other way around. Of this is our freedom born, out of our love for truth and its love for us.

Or so the voice in my head says.

We are all atheists...

2009-02-10T21:25:00.004+01:00

...in the sense that there are gods we don't believe in. For instance, we don't belive in the capricious, lustful gods from the ancient pantheons. By our standards, they are barely even human, much less divine. This is probably no accident: For only by becoming more human are we able to grasp more of the divine. (The gods of the ancients were probably majestic to them, just realistic enough to connect to.) It is not by coincidence, I believe, that the world's great religions push so strongly on their believers to live a moral life and discipline the mind. It is not only a good thing in itself, but also a precondition to perceive the divine with more clarity. If we were completely in the thrall of our impulses throughout the day, we would be stuck with inferior gods as well, because we can only see so far ahead of where we are.

Actually, some of us have some experience with that. I not only disbelieve in the capricious gods of the heathens, but also the capricious God of some literalist Christians: The God who hides fake fossils to "test the faith" of his followers. Even the God who tells Adam that the punishment for disobedience is death, only to explain later that actually by "death" he meant an eternity of unbearable pain.

I won't say we all get the God we deserve. That would be bad. But I think there are limits to how far ahead (or up) we can see from where we stand, or if not our life then at least our highest aspiration.

The fake courage of fake materialists

2009-02-09T19:15:00.002+01:00

Occasionally a would-be materialist will mention the courage it takes to live without believing in anything supernatural. This is amusing because it is not even wrong, just impossible. Courage is supernatural.

If you were a true materialist, you would know that courage can not exist anywhere in the universe, and certainly not in yourself. If only because there is no self. There is this moving mass of protoplasm, wandering through the world, driven by its DNA to seek out and digest pieces of dead plant or animal matter, kind of like a slime mold but faster. Further the DNA will occasionally drive this lump of living matter to briefly unite with other lumps to create a new cluster of cells with a combination of their DNA, to repeat the whole process over again.

There can be no courage, no beauty and no hope in a creature propelled merely by the firing of its neurons as dictated by its genes and environment. It does not even have as purpose to survive and procreate - it just so happened that those cell clumps that were programmed to survive and reproduce gave rise to the current fauna, while those whose DNA failed to contain these programs fell by the wayside.

If we zoom in, all we see is atoms combining their electrons to a more stable configuration, then being torn apart by random movements and combining again. If we zoom out, we see a dirty speck of iron circling an average star, dwindling into the background light of a random galaxy on its way through time to inevitable destruction.

So no, if you are still alive, I don't think you have ever been a materialist. But I suppose roleplaying one can help attract shapely lumps of protoplasm of the appropriate gender.

A revisit

2008-12-09T18:19:00.003+01:00

This morning, I felt the urge to fetch from my commode a book I have not read since my early to mid twenties, I believe. The book is by Elias Aslaksen, and called "Sytti veier til Himmelen" ("70 paths to Heaven", I believe would be the best English translation, but I have never seen it in English. The Christian Church at Brunstad is quite diligent about not throwing its pearls before swine, so it is probably distributed by personal contact.)

One thing I realized quickly was that I had understood amazingly little back when I was young. I am not sure how aware I was of it at the time. Another things I realized was that I still understood very little. Yet, some, I believe.

The first of the fairly short chapters is the Path of Humility. And I realize that these years have humbled me a little, though they have also had less positive effects. But simply observing my own life and others could not help but humble me. When I was young, I meant to humble myself. That was my plan, but I suspect that I may have done quite the opposite. But the terrain of life, so to speak, has still showed me the difference between our potential and what we have actually achieved. (With a few exceptions, probably, none of which are me.)

Fantasies

2008-11-30T05:03:00.003+01:00

If perverse fantasies make us more perverse, would holy fantasies make us more holy?

In other words, is it the content of fantasy worlds that change us, or the very act of living in a fantasy world in the first place?

In Japan, they use the word "otaku" about a person who spends his free time reading comics, watching animated movies and playing computer games. This lifestyle has exploded there, and is spreading rapidly in America and Europe as well. In Japan, "otaku" is a very negative word now, but in America it is considered neutral or positive. (They word has been borrowed from Japanese. It is more specific than "geek", which could also be obsessed with this-worldly things like science or languages.)

I personally believe that a process of dissipation will necessarily set in if the imaginary world is lower than the real world. That is to say, if it functions as wish fulfillment, or gives a false temporary sense of being powerful or important. You will notice that higher worlds have the exact opposite effect: They fill you with awe and make you feel small, but they center you and leave a resolve when you return to daily life.

Even though I say these things, I think the content of what you immerse yourself in makes a difference too. I do not know this for sure though.

Small note on the science of blessing

2008-08-13T23:36:00.003+02:00

Without any contradiction, the lower is blessed by the higher.

For us who are on a similar level, it is not quite that simple. Each of us has peaks and valleys, so to speak. By this I mean that we may have come further in some parts of our lives, or perhaps we just have a gift for calling down a special kind of grace. From these peaks in our lives we may be able to bless people who are actually far ahead of us in most respects. If all goes well, we are also blessed by them. Of course, this requires humility. Humility is always realistic, awareness of incompleteness; there is no need to imagine ourselves at a lower level than we actually are. If it seems that way, our aspiration is far too low. Blessings are wasted if there is no room for more. If we know it all, we cannot learn. If we are already perfect, we cannot improve. If we dwell on our peaks, we will not receive the blessings we need.

Container and content

2008-07-04T01:37:00.003+02:00

The half-secret esoteric traditions of the great religions all have certain... techniques, I guess we may call them, to greatly strengthen the human mind, and in a more limited sense the body too. These days, this knowledge is widely available. It is often referred to as "spirituality". By following certain principles, you can grow beyond the limits of ordinary humans not only in that primitive past, but even beyond most of what is considered humanly possible today.

This is a bad thing.

In these traditions, you strengthened the container so as to be able to carry the sacred truths, that could easily destroy an ordinary mind. As we remember, the "stuff" of higher-level worlds is harder, denser, more real than our everyday life. It is no wonder that the wineskins would burst and the wine be spilled. Due to the sheer real-ness of the content, even the greatly fortified container would seem to them a fragile piece of pottery, ugly and weak and temporary compared to the treasure they were to contain.

You want to be strong, not to carry the heavy burden but to achieve great things for yourself? You want to live a long and healthy life, not to fulfill your duty but to enjoy your senses? You want to see what is hidden, not to protect what is precious but to impress the simpleminded? Yes, you may be filled with pride by your achievements. But the treasure is hidden in plain sight. Like a small child you play with the colorful box, unaware that you have missed the gift itself.

Within its own domain

2008-06-05T09:13:00.002+02:00

This is all true, but it is also an analogy about religion and tradition.

When I was young, I was a pretty good programmer. This was back when nobody would laugh if you studied COBOL to secure your future employment. Anyway! I also did take an interest in microprocessors, reading about the new models, and I even wrote a little bit in assembler code as a hobby. I think most of us didn't do that, though. And we certainly had no need to. As long as you knew a specific high-level language and understood it deeply, you could make mighty good code without knowing what a processor was made of. If you thought the computer was powered by magic crystals possessed by demons, you would certainly be a nut, but you could still write excellent programs as long as you stuck to the code.

With computers, the development has gone toward greater abstraction, more distance between hardware and software. The early developers needed to know their processor inside and out to squeeze the most performance out of it. Now, you just wait a year and buy a new processor that is twice as fast.

But in the realm of mind, it is the other way around. We learn more and more about the processors, our brains. This causes some people to think that traditions from before the Decade of the Brain (1990es) are worthless. But this is not necessarily so at all. Within their own domain, sets of knowledge are largely self-contained. You may be convinced that you are thinking with your heart and your brain is there for producing mucus, but as long as you follow the rules, you can still thoroughly rewire your brain, even to the point of causing visible physical change over a large enough number of years, as seen in Tibetan monks.

If something works, then knowing WHY it works is optional. It is probably still a good idea to know, if you can, but it should not unduly distract you from actually doing.

Up, up and... ouch!

2008-04-15T12:01:00.002+02:00

When we went downward into the lands of fantasy and daydreams, the grains of reality became fewer, larger and softer. The opposite happens if we ascend into slightly higher realms, usually by way of religion in some form. Notice that you can join a religion and hang around in the large portal courtrooms without ever setting foot on the pyramid of ascension, in which case you may not notice any of this. But if you move ahead up, the grains of reality become smaller, harder and denser. As below, the forms may seem familiar, but they now contain more than they did before in the same space.

This may impress you: There are words up there that have stood unchanged for thousands of years, while entire civilizations rose and fell in the herebelow. And there seems to be no reason why they should change for another thousand years, if only there are any around to heed them. There is a majesty to this unyielding durability, that provokes awe and confidence.

But there is another side to it. Having come from a softer realm below, you yourself are soft. You will find that things do not accomodate you, do not yield or compromise. If you bash against them, you get bruised or cut easily. There seems to be rough edges everywhere, and the garments of the realm chafe, and your feet blister. Worse yet, those who reside habitually on this plane often seem not to care. "That's just how it is" they will say if you complain about your fate. Worst of all, they may even hurt you themselves. They say things that cut you deeply, and you may think: "This is a hard speech." Of course, there were plenty of people who hurt others where you came from, but you could get back at them. Here, this doesn't work. The people of this realm ignore your needles and laugh at your barbs, as if they themselves were made of living stone, impervious to mundane attacks.

This is where quite a number of people leave in a huff. "There was no love" they say, meaning that they could not do as they pleased and still be accepted.

Others take on a discipline up there, but find it too hard. It seems needlessly rigorous, as if made for someone more than human. You are chafed and blistered. The discipline does not compromise: You may chose to make exceptions for yourself, but then you start to sink in mysterious ways. This sinking is not easily visible to those still in the worldly realm, so you can fool them for the longest time. But for those who still stand in the discipline you compromised, your position is clearly visible, like a hare hiding its head in the bushes. As you hide your head in the lower realms of thought where you feel at home, your ass remains visible for the longest time until you finally disappear from sight entirely.

The only way to endure at a higher level is to absorb and be transformed into the same quality. But who is capable of that?

Down with creation

2008-04-15T09:23:00.002+02:00

When I say that reality is more "fine-grained" higher up, and each "grain" contains the same amount of reality, it is merely an aid for the imagination. We should not try to identify such grains, of course. My point is that these "grains" only determine the amount of reality, not the FORM. If you go down about as far as a human can reach, to the level of daydream, the forms seem virtually identical to those of our own plane of being. But they have extremely low reality: They are malleable, unstable, and transient. A day hence you may have forgotten all of it.

If however several people share one lower "world", or if you spend a lot of time and interest in one of your own making, it will take on more reality. It will be more permanent, less fluffy, things will stay in place etc. Imbuing a lower world with reality is an act of creation, and this is inherently joyful for creative beings. Since humans are "created in the image of the Creator" (in Judeo-Christian terms) this is actually a natural thing for us to do. However, it is not without its risks.

If we neither receive more reality from above nor give any to lower worlds, then we become stagnant and, in a manner of speaking, dead. But if we lose ourselves in the lower worlds without being replenished from above, we could be dangerously weakened. This seems to happen to many geeks, nerds and otaku. They lose themselves in a "fandom" or some such lower plane, and become unable to endure the harsh light of day in the "real world". In Japan, it is estimated that a million or more otaku (fans of comics, movies and games) have become hikikomori and shut themselves in their rooms for months or years, possibly for life. Their relatives provide them with food, while they spend all their days in imaginary worlds.

Vertical gradient of reality

2008-04-14T11:08:00.002+02:00

Merely as an aid for imagination, not as a scientific theory, do I propose the image of a universal ether with a gradient. Let us posit that there is another dimension in addition to our three (or foure, counting time). Let us imagine this as vertical, squashing the usual vertical dimension for the sake of this little model. Most people who would stumble on this blog would be familiar with this model anyway, otherwise I could have chosen other words.

The plane we humans inhabit is itself a bit varied in elevation, and I still speak metaphorically here. Some cultures are down in the swamps and some are up on a hill. This may be unpopular to say in certain circles. This does not bode well for those circles, as these differences are glaringly obvious. It is in fact a good way to get familiar with the concept of elevation, since we can see it with the naked eye, so to speak.

Now the universe extends upward from here and downward as well. And it has a gradient. (Which means it is a scalar field, but that sounds too scientific for an aid to imagination, I think.) We could most easily imagine it as becoming increasingly fine-grained upward. This implies various things, such as it being harder, more durable, more solid, more real. We could also say that it becomes more energetic, vibrates with a higher frequency etc, but I am fond of the "fine grain" image. It is easy to grasp and its implications are obvious, if we see each grain as having the same amount of solitidy or content of the real.

Conversely, further down from us reality becomes loose and porous. Digging and shaping there is ridiculously simple - it is in fact hard to avoid even if you try. But creations in these lower shales are less solid, whatever permanence and reality they may have is gifted on them from above, namely from us. To take an earlier example: A daydream is very easy to fashion but collapses quickly when you leave it, and may fade entirely from memory. Many novels are rather close to this level as well, in that they become hard to tell apart from each other and from common daydreams, and fade quickly; but they are easy to get into and so many of them sell surprisingly well.

In the opposite direction, where the ether or "stuff of reality" is more fine-grained, digging with our bare hands is not a trivial task and does not take us very far! Reality soon becomes harder than rock. We are imprisoned under a glassy ceiling of stern, unyielding reality. And that would have been that, if we lived here by accident.

But there are cracks or faultlines in the stuff, which any of us could find if we remain aware. I believe this is what is commonly referred to as grace. And there have been souls in the past with greater power and greater solidity than most men. Whether they are actually avatars descended from a higher realm, or whether they are sages grown from below, this is beyond what I will explore today. What seems certain is that they have lived here, and found places where they broke through into higher worlds. Normally few were able to follow them, until structures were built, which we commonly call religions. Be aware that the religions partly exist in our own world or plane (which is why they are so accessible) and it is possible to be very religious outwardly and yet never poke your head outside the mundane reality.

We could think of religions as giant stairs (or step-pyramids, a kind of monument found on both sides of the Atlantic at different times). They should allow us to ascend to a higher realm and colonize it. From below the step-pyramid seems to grow smaller and smaller and stop completely. But the metaphorical step pyramid which they symbolize are stairs to a vast realm. Because each of the small grains is as real as each of the larger grains below, there is far more room than it looks like up there. Seen from below, those who go there will also become smaller and smaller. Not to worry.

There is to all religions a temptation to spread ever wider into the present world and build ever more elaborate entrance portals, since these are easily seen and appreciated by everyman. The steps could fall into disuse, though I won't give any examples of that. It could happen though, that the Way could get lost.

Not blind men and an elephant after all? Or..?

2008-04-14T09:26:00.003+02:00

In the book "A Christian Pilgrim in India" the author (not the main character) claims that the different world religions are not different descriptions of the same higher reality, but that the religions have created the universes they inhabit. I partially disagree with this, as you can see from my earlier entries (which, of course, I wrote right before reading that.)

Rather I would say that higher worlds are different and imperfect emanations of an even higher reality. As I said poetically, even the heavens have heavens. These worlds being imperfect follows naturally from us being able to settle them so easily. So we discover something higher and we settle it. Each of the religions has settled a different higher world, which existed only as potential until humans colonized it and "hollowed it out" from the primordial ether of potentiality. Of course the different cultures that settled these worlds made their mark on them.

More on lower & higher worlds

2008-03-31T16:12:00.003+02:00

Lower worlds are the worlds we create. Higher worlds are the worlds that create us.

Create is not influence or change. They all do. Lower worlds drain or dissipate our energy. Higher worlds increase our energy. This does not necessarily feel good. Higher worlds are "larger than life" and tend to make us feel smaller. Lower worlds make us feel "larger than life". Higher worlds are unbearable without humility. Lower worlds do not encourage humility.

Cannot a world be both higher and lower? Worlds weave in and out of our own. This is great because we can descend or ascend on a gradual "ramp" from where we already are. A higher world may be seen as man-created by those who do not recognize it. But these worlds are not made by man, but discovered by or revealed to man. Example: Holy scriptures. A modernist theologian will point out how scriptures were assembled from different sources at certain times. These confuse the map and the terrain. By going there you will know.

Higher or Most High? A world can be higher than the ordinary world and yet not be perfect. Having recognized something as higher tempts us to label it as perfect and put all our trust in it. "Angel worship." Beware that, say angels. Even the heavens have heavens.

Higher worlds unify, simplify. Lower worlds exemplify, diversify. Simplicity in lower worlds caused by selectively omitting parts of the whole. Simplicity in higher worlds caused by including more of the whole.

The ladder of worlds

2008-03-31T01:19:00.003+02:00

When I was young, around three decades ago, I had this recurring vision or fantasy. As far as I know, I had not picked it up from anyone else, or I would eagerly have read it where I found it. The concept was that there were layers of worlds, of which ours was one. There were several below ours, and if you descended to them, you would be more real than the world around you. This would make you more powerful, and the deeper you descended into lower and lower worlds, the more godlike your powers. But staying there, and specifically using power there, would draw on your reality and you would grow weaker, until eventually you could never return to your own world alive.

Conversely, if you spent time in the nearest world above, you would find life there full of suffering because everything was more real than you. The heat of the sun burned you, the cold of the night froze you, and gravity crushed you. Most of all you would feel like a snail, horribly weak and exposed and painfully slow. But returning to your own world, you would find yourself now more real and stronger in all ways than those who had always stayed there.

Much to my surprise, I recently found out that all of this was real. The various computer games are examples of lower worlds. (I suppose daydreams too, but these are poorly documented.) Despite being fundamentally different from reality, they are still patterned on reality and derived from reality. Those who descend into these worlds (ironically the word "avatar" is now commonly used) are more real than the world around them, and more powerful. But as I was forewarned, there is a risk of losing one's reality if the mind descends into the lower world and stays there. Eventually severe dysfunction in the real world may ensue.

As for the world above ours, the rays of that sun do indeed burn us badly, and the gravity there makes us crawl. Just like the lower worlds are of a different nature, and yet following the same laws, so is also the higher world different and not. I am told there are different ways to poke one's head up into higher realms, but for the most part religious traditions seem to provide the most reliable tools. I don't think this is the sole purpose of religion, and there may be congregations or entire branches of faith that have no interest in people actually exploring the upper realms. Nose around if you actively seek the doorway to a higher world, it may be in a surprising place and it is certainly not well advertised. But most importantly, if you expect your visit above to be an easy, blissful trip, prepare to be very, very surprised. Even though you will be treated gently by those who reside there, it may not feel that way because of the natural weakness of one who enter from below.

Attention is milk

2008-03-04T14:28:00.002+01:00

Attention is milk. I mean that almost literally: Babies deprived of attention stop growing and many of them will sicken and die even if they get sufficient food and are kept dry and at comfortable temperature. (Scientifically constructed orphanages in the 20th centuries drove this point home.)

Like the mother processes food on behalf of the baby's body, she also processes nourishment for the soul. Like the baby has a rudimentary digestive tract that is made for milk, so it has a rudimentary soul digestive tract or "bootstrap loader" as we computer people call it, attuned to faces. Starting with the attention it receives, the baby begins to download the other modules of its humanity. It is long before it can process other sources of "soul food".

Unfortunately, some people are never weaned, and depend on human attention all their lives. Even though there are vast amounts of beauty, truth and virtue intruding into the world, they are unable to process it. Since depending on attention as an adult is unnatural, this dependency leads to bizarre and deviant / perverted behaviors, like trying to force attention by threats or by self-damage, or by promising sexual favors.

The black baby dream

2008-01-07T03:48:00.000+01:00

Tonight I dreamed that I was a sim. A male sim, and pregnant. But I could not remember having been abducted by aliens. And when the baby was born, he was black (or very deep brown, like dark chocolate) and not green. He looked like a very ordinary black baby. But I didn't know anyone that black, nor could I remember having woohooed with anyone. Besides, I was male, we only get pregnant with alien babies. Then I got the answer from the DNA analysis. It said the only match for my baby's DNA was the Turin Shroud*. I then woke up.

(*This does not in any way indicate an acceptance of the veracity of the relic by my waking self. I am thoroughly agnostic regarding relics.)

"I have been thinking"

2008-01-03T00:09:00.000+01:00

In fact, I have been thinking way too much. When I was young, I was quite proud of my thinking. I felt that the highest aspiration for a human must be to think as much as possible. But eventually, over a couple more decades, I realized that thinking and feeling both cloud the mind, only in different ways. They are both unavoidable, even necessary, but they get between us and the real world. If we whirl up too many of them at once, they can really make it hard to see clearly.

I call myself a "conscientious observer". This is a wordplay, but a deeply serious one, for it is my current aspiration. But it is hard. When we observe, the mind is eager to whirl up theories based on a few data points, even in those cases where we don't need to act right away. This is the nature of the mind, and rightly so, for there are times when time is essential. If a tiger attacks you, quietly observing for as long as possible is likely to remove you from the gene pool, therefore we descend from the hasty men. But this haste is not productive when observing the national economy, or even a budding human relationship. It is certainly not productive when observing our own inner life.

I have found that when we observe for a long enough time, answers often give themselves with no need for thinking. I suppose it is a form of thinking, it certainly requires a brain, but it is fundamentally different from logic. It is a kind of intuition. Like watching someone else laying a jigsaw puzzle. At some point the picture becomes impossible not to see. But it is possible if I am lost in thought.

Sometimes I see people in the main street who are clearly lost in thought (or possibly feeling). They are so unaware of their surroundings that they collide with other people or (more rarely) even with immobile objects. Actually walking into lightpoles is very rare, but bumping into things happens. The disturbing part is that most of these people probably have a car as well. Driving while thinking is like driving drunk or on drugs, except you can sober up faster. By the time you sober up, however, someone could be dead.

The ability to return to the here and now at will is a great boon, and I intend to keep practicing it. To not think because you are stupid is no great achievement and not very useful. But when the intelligent refrain from thinking too much, they can observe much, and this leads to wisdom.

Happiness is like a tree

2007-12-28T02:09:00.001+01:00

When I think back, my life was confusing. It is pretty strange even now, and there are still some mind parasites impacting my life negatively. But compared to the swirling fog that seems to shroud most people's thoughts, I guess I am seeing fairly clearly. Of course, who really knows the mind of another? It is hard enough to know one's own. But there are things I did not know, or at least not clearly, when I was young. I offer these now, free, in the hope of sparing others from needless suffering, and to increase their happiness.

In my previous post I wrote that pleasure was rationed, as indeed it is. You can have a lot of pleasure in a short time, or you can have a decent amount of pleasure now and then, but you can't have a lot of pleasure a lot of the time. You will burn out if you try, and fall into a depression-like state of listless suffering. So while fun is fun, it is not a source of constant happiness. On the other hand, you CAN grow more happy over time. In fact, the word "grow" is the key. (Another good word is "build".)

Happiness is like a tree, in that it needs time to grow. You can't just sit down one day and decide to be really happy, and then you go out in the world and are really happy. You can summon up some degree of cheer that way, yes, but it tends to evaporate, and it tends not to be waterproof. When even a small unpleasantness comes, the cheer bursts like a bubble and small stinging worms come out and feast on the soul. Anger, resentment, envy, hate and bitter cynicism cause blight on the soul. And because we don't know better, we are convinced that someone else destroyed our precious happiness. But that was just cheer, not happiness. Happiness is a slow-growing thing, but far more durable than mere joy.

Actually, let us look at pleasure, joy, cheer and happiness. They all represent what we could call surplus energy. They manifest in different realms or domains, though, and have different time spans.

Pleasure shows up in the domain of the body or senses. The source of pleasure does not need to be the body, though that is certainly common. But if you look at a dog, you can see the pleasure of being praised is very similar to the pleasure of being fed. There is an influx of energy, one bodily and one social, and they both manifest as pleasure. So even with us, and we can also derive pleasure from art or from spiritual experience. In fact, the highest pleasure seems to be the Samadhi or religious ecstasy, which is highly sought after by some Hindu mystics as the peak religious experience. This pleasure is as intense as that of orgasm (for those old enough to have experienced that) but lasts far longer. In fact, if one prolongs the Samadhi for long enough it will cause the end of life in the body, so-called Mahasamadhi (great ecstasy) which is the preferred way for certain eastern mystics to end their life. (This is not to say that the religious ecstacy is less in other religions, just that they don't have the tradition for reveling in it. Certainly Christianity doesn't.)

Joy is the mental manifestation of surplus energy. If you feel the urge to break into song or dance, it is joy. The joyful person moves more quickly and with more certainty, while the joyless tend to shuffle or drag their feet. But the main thrust of joy is in the mind, a feeling of surging power that is not limited to (or even anchored in) the senses. Joy is often associated with the arts: Song, music, dance can be both sources and expressions of joy, and also the slower arts like painting or sculpture, though the link is not so immediate there. There are many sources of joy, including other people. Sometimes we simply don't know, it just seems to surge or swell from wherever it hides when not in use. Joy tend to be less sharply limited than pleasure, it ebbs rather than being cut off.

Cheer is manifested strongly in the social realm. It takes the form of goodwill, an increased ability to tolerate and sympathize with others, and attempts to spread itself by cheering up those who are less energetic. The source does not need to be social, but it can be, and putting cheerful people together tend to escalate the cheer, much as putting burning pieces of wood next to each other cause them all to burn more brightly.

Happiness is manifested in the human spirit. It is longer lasting than the others, though it also will ebb and flow. We can say that the other forms ride on the back on happiness. If your underlying happiness is high, it takes little for it to flow into the shorter-lived forms. Also if your happiness is high, the opposites make less impact on you. You won't loose your cheer just because the weather is not as nice as you expected, and you don't feel suffering just because you're a little bit hungry or your joints ache just a tad. It takes more to break your stride.

People can be more or less familiar with this interior science, the observation of life qualities by looking inward. Those who are inexperienced or easily distracted tend to not see the difference between the short and long term manifestations of surplus energy. It may be better to say that happiness is an increased CAPACITY for taking in what is good. Its deep waters run stiller, but are not easily drained. Happiness is like a lake: The babbling brook that has not passed a lake will quickly rise from nothing to a boisterous river on a rainy day, and in its sudden energy it dislodges stones and runs brown with soil. But if there is a lake in its course, it will buffer the sudden swell and pass on a more steady stream of water, which does not dry out the next day when the sun returns.

The water in the brook and the water in the lake are identical, but there is great depth in the lake, and so also with happiness. There must be depth, or there is no happiness. If there is no depth, then the slightest disappointment can send one plummeting from heaven to hell, as you will see in a toddler. The toddler squeals and jumps with unrestrained joy, but some small thing happens and the toddler screams in unbearable pain. This changes when we grow up, but not equally in all of us.

There still has to be an influx of happy content, of course, and certain sources are more reliable than others. But there could be books written about that, and in fact already are. I may or may not revisit it, as the weirdness takes me. Have this for today!

Pleasure rations

2007-12-28T02:04:00.000+01:00

I know I've written about this occasionally in the past, but it's been a while now. It is fairly simple, but understanding it could change the world. Your world first, and the shared world if more people "get" it.

There is no known limit to happiness, but pleasure is strictly rationed.

Let us focus on the simple part here. Pleasure is rationed. There is an upper limit to how much pleasure a person can experience over a set amount of time. This is biochemical and follows from the way the brain operates. It is also perfectly reasonable. Another case of intelligent design, whether or not you think intelligent design happens by accident... you simply would want it to be that way if you want your sentient species to survive. It is not a flaw, it is a necessary limitation.

In our more or less natural state, pleasure is used by our instincts to reward us for doing our best to keep the genes alive. If we are hungry, eating brings us pleasure. In fact, it does even if we are not especially hungry, but then only certain foods. Likewise if we are thirsty, drinking brings pleasure; but if we are full, plain water is just icky. And sexual pleasure is a reward for bringing our genes onward to a new generation (although it certainly has many other functions these days). Again, each coitus is more pleasurable if you haven't just had one, and for women there is generally more pleasure around estrus (ovulation), all other things being equal (and sometimes even if not). There are many other pleasures, some of them less obvious, like the joy of dancing or simply listening to music. I am not sure what the evolutionary psychologists explain music with, actually. I think I have already made my point though.

If we were rewarded for everything we did, we would be rewarded for nothing. For this reason, pleasure MUST be rationed. Otherwise we would simply establish pleasure as the baseline, and any lack of pleasure would be considered suffering. In fact, most of the suffering in Europe and America would be considered pleasure by people in the least developed countries, where hunger is the norm and clean water only exists briefly when it occasionally falls down from the sky.

You cannot save up your "pleasure ration" indefinitely; it leaks away over time, but quite a bit of time. This applies both generally and specifically. I once read an otherwise OK novel in which the male protagonist had sexual intercourse for the first times in several years. Let me assure you, it does not build up like that. A couple months is probably the maximum, possibly less for most people. But the misunderstanding is easy to explain: For the opposite is true. If we eat our pleasure ration immediately, it doesn't renew immediately. The more intense our pleasures, and the more of them we have in a row, the less our capacity for new pleasure for a while.

The most extreme case of this is pleasure drugs. These are designed to directly stimulate the brain to enhance pleasure, and they work. (Not saying this from personal experience of course, in case the law enforcement is reading.) But these drugs "burn out" their users, so that life feels like hell when the high wears off. This is not just in comparison with the pleasure. No, everyday life really feels less than blah, it feels like suffering. The brain experiences everyday life as a horrible mixture of pain, fear and boredom. Ordinary pleasures are tame, bland and lifeless. The pleasure account is drained, there is nothing left. The physical pleasures are there, but they do not cause the pleasure reaction. It has been used already.

Other pleasures do not have the same raw power to burn out all your pleasure in on glorious bonfire, but the effect is the same only to a lesser degree. If you chase pleasures, boredom will chase you in turn.

Conversely, if you don't use your pleasure ration, your capacity for pleasure will increase for a while. It seems to follow the same curves as market saturation in economics: The rise is steep at first, then gradually tapers off to reach a plateau. Since each person has their own "thermostat" for pleasure, it makes sense that the timescale may also vary. But this is why someone like me can experience ecstatic pleasure from simple Japanese pop songs, where the dedicated pleasure seeker needs bungee jumping and unprotected sex with strangers for the same intensity.
Actually it is not quite that simple, since each of us also have an optimal stimulation level. Some people need noise while others need quiet, the first need risk while the second need safety. But the thing is, people of the quiet type do not get cheated on their pleasure. They just derive it from less spectacular things. Again, changing your basic mental constitution requires divine intervention or decades of meditation (which may well be a subset of divine intervention). You can temporarily change by taking the right drugs, as people do with depression, but you better know what you do.

If you are depressed for entirely clinical reasons, brain does not work as described in the instruction manual, then by all means take drugs to get it running normally. But if you have simply used up your pleasure ration, then no, that won't work, and will quite possibly make things worse. There is no potion of Restore Magic in real life. You need to go on with your life quietly until your magic bar is restored enough to cast the spell of pleasure again.
Because I am all alone and can't praise or blame others for my feelings, I have observed myself for years and take all this for granted. But most people don't know it yet. They are surrounded by others and naturally think their pleasure or suffering comes from others. They often keep seeking for the one person that can make everything right and ensure that they live pleasurably ever after. This won't work.

Now that you know, you can choose to keep lying to yourself, but this will only make you stupid, not happy. It is also very expensive, both in money, time, and your soul which is rotting from lack of attention. For while pleasure is rationed, happiness is mostly lying fallow. Few are those who look for it, and fewer the guides that can help them find it.

2007-12-09T13:33:00.000+01:00

Kindly note that if you take this test and copy and paste the HTML code provided, it contains a link to a money scam site. Edit this out before posting your results. It is unsure at this time whether Criticsrant.com is the actual spammer or has been hacked, but there is more than one such activity linked to Criticsrant.com, so most likely it is either their scam or they are running a social experiment.

Only one

2007-08-06T11:59:00.001+02:00

I think there is really only one spiritual practice: To take life seriously. The rest is details and will be revealed as necessary.

(By "serious" I don't mean joyless. More like sincere, earnest, honest, real. Living as if it matters.)

I can't think of anyone who has taken life seriously and remained shallow.

I aspire to be a river?

2007-08-05T13:14:00.000+02:00

Sometimes, I have visuals that seem to play inside my eyes, although of course it is in the brain. If I close my eyes, I can focus on the activity that plays there: It is always movement. And this nearly always happens when I have been acquiring a new skill. In my younger years, after I started volleyball training, I would see balls flying back and forth in the typical volleyball trajectories. While learning touch typing, I would see the movements of the typewriter. (This was before the age of personal computers.) And so on... when acquiring a new skill, the signature movements of that activity would play out on the back of my eyes, as it seemed. Even with my eyes open I would be able to watch it, as if by shifting my focus, but more clearly with my eyes closed.

It very much fits the description of "intrusive memories" but was not trauma related. Though the experience itself was kinda disturbing. I am glad I was not driving while these things happened. Evidently this is the brain's way of acquiring a new skill at accelerated speed, by studying it even while it is not happening. So far, so good.

However, I get the same experience after seeing water move sand and pebbles. Since childhood, probably, certainly in my teens, I would go to the large stream on our farm when the weather was right, and disturb the water. I might place a stone in the stream, diverting the force of the water. Then I would just stand and watch the water shape its new course, moving sand and pebbles, undermining stones and moving them out of the way. It fascinated me. It still does, in my 40es. On a rainy day I watched an impromptu stream work its way through a sandy slope, moving the sand in its chaotic and yet strangely purposeful way. Afterwards, the image kept playing on my retina for hours. That's when it struck me that this was the same way my mind reacted when learning a skill. Does this mean that I was learning the skill of moving sand? Perhaps I secretly aspire to being a river?

Primitive peoples sometimes considered rivers to be small gods. I wouldn't go that far, but I can see them being similar to us on a very abstract level. Like us, the river is both a process and an object. It is continually in motion and yet tightly bound to its form. It needs to be replenished continually. It grows as it moves, and no matter the length of its course, it always comes to an end. It is obvious that we humans live on the very borderline between order and chaos. But so does the river. Perhaps my subconscious noticed these similarities before I did?

I invented the RPG

2007-08-01T14:07:00.000+02:00

I believe the year was 1964, when I was 5 years old. This was 10 years before the first commercially available fantasy Role Playing Game, Dungeons and Dragons, was published. Furthermore I lived on a remote and isolated farm, with no TV and only the socialist state-controlled national broadcasting on the FM radio. I had just barely learned to read and write, and not begun perusing our large home library of classic literature; the local newspaper mainly contained local political debate and ads for groceries and agricultural tools, and the ever popular obituaries. In short, I had no other inspiration for this than the Norwegian fairy tales, frequently including huge trolls and creative ways to dispose of them. And of course the voices in my head...

While playing outside one day, I was gripped by a very vivid daydream. In this, I was fighting trolls. But unlike the fairy tales, where this is a once-in-a-lifetime event and quickly rewarded with princesses and such, my troll hunting was an ongoing event. And most curiously, I seemed to absorb the strength of the trolls I slew: Certainly I did grow stronger over time, and took on progressively larger and stronger trolls (with more heads... I think I was up to 9 at the end). The daydream was rather long and ended only when my mother called me to meal. At this point I started crying, because I realized that I had grown so much that I would never again be able to enter my family's house.

All this came to pass, of course, albeit in a different realm than the physical.

Only today did I learn that the role playing game as we know it was not yet invented at the time. Did my revelation radiate outward to the rest of the world, causing D&D and the rest? Or did the planet pass through a telepathic ray between two older, more mature civilizations where this concept was discussed, and psychics around the world just picked it up? Was it a memory from my future? Or could it be that every child knows, deep down, that growing by slaying monsters is what life is about?

Diminishing returns?

2007-07-27T13:33:00.000+02:00

In our material needs, the law of diminishing return is everywhere. If you are starving and have no food at hand, the value of food is almost infinite. But if you are fat and just have eaten a large dinner, the value of more food is zero or negative. Likewise, if you don't have enough clothes to protect your body from the cold or from roving eyes, clothes have a high value. But when you can't close the wardrobe door even when pushing hard, the value of more clothes is low.

And yet, because we (or even our ancestors) have experienced lack, we continue to believe that more is better, even when it defies all logic and decency. But not only instincts and general culture is at work here. Advertising relentlessly fans the flame of desire for material things. And it does so by linking the objects to other needs, not directly material. Social needs, which are often gaping holes, despite all the stuff. So advertisers try to imply (never tell outright) that chewing gum and drinking soda will make you popular; that shampoo will make people love you; that detergents will improve your family relations. And so on and on. There are no commercials telling you that listening before talking will make people respect you, and very few telling you that the best gift you can give a child is time.

Ego & the pre / trans fallacy

2007-07-24T18:48:00.000+02:00

Still using the metaphor of the Human Operating System, we could say that the Ego is an artifact of version 2. It did not exist in version 1, and will not exist in version3 (except perhaps as legacy code). Let me explain that a bit more, because I see a lot of confusion on this.

The lack of ego in HOS v.1 is not selflessness, but simply a lack of self-awareness. A baby is an unabashed parasite, but innocent because it has no ego yet. If an adult woke you up by screaming in the middle of the night, you would not be so tolerant, I wager. Anyway, the ego is an iffy thing well into version 2.1 (the tribal level), where people don't really think for themselves. They follow tradition, they follow the chieftain / gang leader, they follow more or less subtle cues from their fellow tribesmen. There is no sense of personal responsibility, but not really of personal glory either. Even in the civilized west, many people hover around this level for life. It is no wonder that skeptics, when hearing about "ego death", suspect that this will be the result. It is, in cults.

We could say that the first "non-ego" is on the OUTSIDE of the ego. The eyes are turned away from oneself, toward the outer world and the things one can find there, much like an animal. In contrast, the mystic "non-ego" is on the INSIDE of the ego. The eyes are turned inward, toward other treasures. As of today at least, it can not be reached without passing THROUGH the ego from the outside inward. I believe that when v.3 is fully realized, children may be able to pass either directly or very quickly from non-ego to non-ego.

You could say that the ego stands between the world (on the outside) and consciousness (on the inside). The v.1 does not see itself as separate from the world. The v.3 does not see itself as separate from consciousness. (I will not get into whether the world is separate from consciousness. Perhaps it will be important in some other context, but not here.)

In more traditional Christian terms, we could say that on the inside we find spirit. As of version 2, the flesh (outside) battles against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. They are opposed to each other, so we cannot do what we want. (What we want, by nature, is probably to have the flesh in this life and the spirit in the next. This is unlikely to happen, though, because the thing that should have entered into the world of spirit did never grow ready to be born, and may even be dead.)

This is kinda disturbing to read even to me who write it. I wonder which will happen to me in the end. What I know is that there is no return to the innocence of before the ego.

Beta-testing a new soul?

2007-07-24T13:13:00.000+02:00

One Cosmos had another interesting article yesterday again. Using the metaphor of a hole in time, it implies that the future "Kingdom of God" is at the same time influencing backward in time and being created by that influence. This may sound like a time travel paradox out of science fiction. But a more practical comparison may be beta-testing of software, which I am sure some of us have taken part in. I sure have.

During the alpha test, the software is tested internally by the creators. But in beta, it is customary to let volunteers among prospective users download the software and try it for themselves. Their feedback then goes into the finished product, while at the same time the users get accustomed to the software, so there is a certain mass of experience already at launch date.

Obviously this comparison falters if we believe that the next stop is eternity, the complete perfection. I admit that this is a common view and the Bible can certainly be read that way. I will be honest and admit that I don't think perfection is quite that easily attained. Rather I expect the next major step in human evolution, mankind version 3.0. The next perfection will be visible first when we get to verson 3. (Cfr the apostle John: "Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known." If it was not made known to John, I sure won't pretend to know it.)

Mankind v. 1 was the software running on the brains of our ancestors 100 000 years ago. Even though they were indistinguishable from modern humans, they still acted much like the Neanderthals and even earlier hominids. Their life seems to have revolved around the simple flint hand axe: If you could not use a hand axe on it, it was probably not worth attempting. It is unclear whether they had any language beyond the usual grunts and gestures of large apes, but if they had, by all signs they did not have much to talk about.

Mankind v. 2.0 seems to have been in beta from 75 000 years ago, possibly 90 000 years, from scattered artifacts in south and east Africa. But by and large life went on as before until around 60 000 years ago, when almost overnight the new version of man overtook the old. There is some uncertainty about the time - until recently it was assumed to be merely 40 000 years ago, while some now think 75 000, which seems to be when modern humans first left Africa. If it happened later, the wildfire of culture must have overtaken the emigrants, because there is not a soul left of the old. Literally: The human soul, as we know it, came to exist with this major upgrade of the brain's operating system. No longer a mere animal, we had access to a new dimension within. For the first time, we rose above fate.

I propose that a similar leap is about to happen. It must, because we have reached the end of the road. Each decade we stay i v.2 is a risk to our species and the entire world. But it has also been foretold by mystics around the world from the dawn of civilization, probably before. These people, I claim, were beta-testing the new version. This is not a casual thing to do with the very software of your brain. You could go insane, but not least, even if you are completely sane no one would know, as they run the older version and you are not compatible. In days of old, it was not uncommon to simply kill such troublemakers who made people think. They are still not all that popular.

The words of the first mystics are often distorted before they reached us, and besides they had to talk to people far more primitive than us. Their culture lacked the concepts and the detail to express their vision, even more than today. So when they talk about the upcoming big change, it is only natural that they seem to describe the end of the world. I a very real sense it is: Although the planet remains, humans like us (version 2) will be wiped out, like the Neanderthals before us. Their world literally ended, and so will ours. This can not be avoided. And yet, strangely, all the ancient sources seem to agree that a better world awaits after the end. Also that a remnant will be saved, although as if through fire. (The old Norse myths of my ancestors, for instance, foretold the burning of the world, but a couple humans would be sheltered in the branches of the World Tree to see a new, green world rise from the sea.)

A fascinating trait of humankind version 3 is the wireless connectivity - or should we say, wordless connectivity. Scattered across continents and millennia, they have clearly downloaded the same new Operating System from the same Source. There is no way they could know of each other until quite recently, and yet it is as if each had access to those who had gone before - and even, in a sense, those who were yet to come!

Now that we approach the time, this content is more than ever spilling out into our v.2 world. A feeling of fear and foreboding and extinction runs parallel with a feeling of immense opportunity. Global warming will cook us all to death! We will terraform Mars and Venus! We will run out of oil and metals! Economic growth will be explosive for the foreseeable future! Overpopulation! Underpopulation! A world of idiots! A world of geniuses! Global dictatorship! Unprecedented freedom! The robots will replace us! We will become as gods! The singularity is coming! The singularity is coming!

The singularity is indeed coming, and is already at hand. "Behold, I am making all things new." "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation." This is NOT magic. This is NOT accomplished by a fire-and-forget ritual. It is about downloading module after module of the new operating system for our brain, and replacing our old favorite brain software. And no one can achieve this - even though the download is free and support is always waiting for our call - no one can arrive at this without hating the v.2 software of his father and mother and even his own life. And who is capable of this? Don't ask me, I just work here.

About the "wereporcupine" thing...

2007-07-23T14:02:00.001+02:00

Some years ago, I visited my best friends and while sleeping over there, I had several vivid dreams.

In one of them, I was a child in a highly advanced, peaceful culture that faced total annihilation from a disaster of diluvian dimensions. I did not understand much of it, of course, being (in the dream) only a child. We children - dozens of us - were led to a large metal ship. We were told that there was a secret we would only learn after we were inside the ship and the doors were closed. We were sent through time, and during the fairly long trip we learned our secret. Each of us was given the ability to transform into an animal, chosen for us after our personality. This would make it possible for us to scout the land after we arrived, and find out about the new world we would live in, without being known by the locals.
The ship landed and we scattered in what seemed to be the present time. But when I tried to change into my animal form, which was a porcupine, something went wrong. I got stuck in a halfway form, a human shape with long, protruding spines.

I woke up and I felt that this dream was telling me something important about myself.

(More Frequently Unasked Questions as you continue to not ask...)

Genius without filter

2007-07-21T15:39:00.000+02:00

In his blog post yesterday, Robert "Gagdad Bob" Godwin touches on the strange phenomenon of genius. This made me remember something I read in December 2005 about a phenomenon named "Latent Inhibition". I have a hard time remembering that name, because I think of it as "mind filter". Basically, normal people simply don't experience most of what they perceive. Most impulses are stopped at the very doors of perception and never make a memory -- seemingly not even short-term memories. For all intents and purposes, it is as if the perception wasn't even there.

This inattention to detail is not caused by a lack of processing power: Even highly intelligent people suffer from this "detailed blindness". Or rather, they don't suffer at all, except perhaps from boredom. They live their ordinary lives knowing nothing else. And if they are exceptionally intelligent, they excel at the ordinary things. They may have a genius IQ, but they are not geniuses. They are highly intelligent ordinary people. Latent inhibition is a trait that is inherited separately from intelligence.

It is a good thing that most people have this mental filter, because most who lack it go insane. On the other hand, those who don't go insane become geniuses. In other words, the geniuses and the insane have more in common with each other than with ordinary people... even highly intelligent ordinary people. But it seems that an ordinary intelligence is not able to cope with the flurry of information.

One condition that has been specifically linked to this is schizophrenia. This surprises me slightly, because I have also read that patients with schizophrenia have reduced brains, with the fluid-filled hollows (ventricles) in the brain taking up more of the space in their brain case than normal. Perhaps there are many more people walking around with reduced brains, but thanks to the mental filter, nobody notices. By sheer synchronicity, this article (in Norwegian, but with English picture) shows the almost completely fluid-filled brain of a French state employee. I don't think this condition is typical of French state employees, but the French may well disagree. The point is, you don't need all of a human brain if you aren't too perceptive.

I suspect a low latent inhibition makes for a rocky start of your education. I mean, the teacher is talking about Minnesota and a fly briefly lands on your desk. It has six legs in addition to wings. If that's possible, why don't cats and dogs have six legs and wings? What would life be if all animals had six legs and wings? Would people have four arms or four legs? You may end up as a great biologist one day, or more likely just another science fiction writer. But you won't learn much about Minnesota that way.

Playing tag with raccoons

2007-07-19T16:21:00.000+02:00

This is not something porcupines usually do, mainly out of laziness but officially out of consideration. But being tagged by the thoughtful and artistic Robin of Motel Zero, I'll play along for a bit.

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

1) I already told you: Robin Starfish of Motel Zero. Go there, find haiku.

2.1) I have never been in love, never been homesick, never truly missed somebody. There is simply not a human-shaped hole in my soul for anyone to fill. This tends to creep people out. Trust me, it would have been mutual if I had not been used to your ways from an early age. Generally it looks to me like people have been unsuccessfully weaned.

2.2) I can look into people's eyes for any length of time, barring only the need to blink from physical dryness of the eyes. It causes me no pleasure or displeasure.

2.3) I have not been bored since sometime in my teens, except briefly during illness and similar confinement of mind and body both at once. I like to think that I changed on that day when I realized that life does not happen to me - I happen to it. But it could be that my brain simply would have grown out of boredom around that age anyway. I don't know with scientific certainty.

2.4) I am not shy, but I hate to bother people. To the casual observer, these may look the same, since I don't talk to people around me. Because I always have something interesting going on inside my head, I naturally assume that others have too, even when they are not actively doing anything. Yet I don't mind talking to people, alone or in groups, or even speak to crowds, if it is my job to do so.

2.5) My right hand and arm is permanently damaged from typing and mousing too much. It has recovered somewhat over the last few years, but I will likely need to be cautious for the rest of my life. One tool that has helped me is the speech recognition software "Dragon NaturallySpeaking" from Nuance (formerly Scansoft). Ironically, I can only use it for some minutes at a time, because my voice has fallen in disuse after decades of living alone. (At work I only talk briefly, and I can still do this at home too. 5-10 minutes an hour or so.)

2.6) I am not a vegetarian, but I have a natural distaste for eating dead animals. I occasionally do, in small quantities, but most of the time I just find it disgusting. I have been like this since childhood, but it has if anything increased now in my "middle age". I do however consume large quantities of milk. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd think that I was a reincarnated Hindu...

2.7) During my childhood on the farm we had two dogs, one after the other. I do not have pets now, but generally I prefer cats.

2.8) At age 15, I left home to go to high school in another part of Norway. Somewhat on a whim I applied for the language studies rather than maths and science. I never had reason to regret this, because the language study had mostly female students and the other mostly male. My quality of life skyrocketed. As a side effect, I learned English, which I now use more than my mother tongue. And that's how I met you!

3) Already wrote it all.

4) No. See 2.4, "I hate to bother people." Besides, the meme passed this way like 4 days ago. (I am not the fastest snail in the salad, I'm afraid.) So the taggables are already tagged.

That's all folks!

Does spirit exist?

2007-03-17T18:31:00.000+01:00

This may seem the silliest question, because either you know that it exists, or you know that it doesn't. The answer is, of course, that it does not exist in the same way that a stone exists, or electricity. It cannot be measured in any of those ways, even though it can and should be experienced inside each of us.

To the materialist, believing in something that cannot be measured is superstition. But to us mystics, it is superstition to believe that mere matter can write a symphony, a screenplay or even HuffingtonPost. Our bodies consist almost entirely of a few familiar types of atoms. Where in those atoms is the symphony encoded? Is it in the electrons or the protons? No, the atoms are exactly the same whether they make up piece of bog or the brain of a genius. To explain the mystery that these simple atoms can cause all that we see and do, the scientist evokes the phrase "emergent behavior", which means that if you have enough of something in the right form, it changes its nature. A pile of sand behaves differently from a grain of sand, to take the simplest example. Likewise molecules behave differently from atoms, cells behave differently from molecules, and bodies differently from cells. Yes, it is all true. But making up a new word for it does not explain it.

So when life is different from the exact same amount of dead matter, it is not because of the spirit of life, but because of the emergent behavior of life. Yeah. And when humans have culture , it is not because of the human spirit but the human emergent behavior. Yeah. That explains so much more... As one scientist says to the other in the cartoon: "Thank God we're not religious!"

Theory and practice

2007-02-19T14:17:00.000+01:00

I have noticed how different describing a theory is from describing a practice. A theory is true only until proven false. It needs to be proved and defended. But when people write about what they practice, what they live, they can tell it very simply and yet it increases the amount of truth in the world slightly. It need not even be literally true - the sun does not literally rise and set, after all - but a direct observation always has a ring of truth that logical theories can never quite match.

A little knowledge is a good thing

2007-01-26T15:02:00.000+01:00

From what I glean in Scientific American, a favorite of mine, the universe consists of 95% or more Dark Matter and Dark Energy, neither of which we really have any good idea what is. Furthermore the entire universe will at some future time explode to the point where not just the atoms are scattered, but the atoms themselves and their component parts will utterly unravel and matter as we know it will cease to exist, as will presumably energy, time and space.

I'm glad God did not tell the ancient Hebrews this. If He told them that pi was 3, that's fine by me. It is a good start for engaging with the world.

The Buddha actually did tell his followers: "All composite things are subject to unraveling." And then he added: "Strive diligently!" and died. I am not sure they have yet managed to make sense of those two sentences, though they have tried for about 2500 years.

Justice 101

2006-12-21T11:15:00.000+01:00

It amazes me that modern man does not think of paying his bill as a fundamental part of justice. How can a man, or a company, or a nation, be considered righteous or honest or respectable... if they keep borrowing money with no intention of ever paying it back? Such a person (or corporation, or nation) is a pauper by choice, not by need. There is no honor in this, nor even basic decency.

Like booze

2006-12-19T09:06:00.000+01:00

Reading American political debate is a lot like drinking liquor. First you get amused, then you get hot, and then you get sick. I suppose it could be fatal, but I stop reading before it gets that far.

Braintenance

2006-03-28T09:32:00.000+02:00

It has dawned on most people that bad things happen to the body if you just feed it random stuff you find and don't keep it clean and don't exercise it. It is about time we discover this for the mind as well.

I'm a mystic - wanna make something of it?

2006-03-27T11:33:00.000+02:00

For some years now, I have identified myself mainly as a mystic. This is probably less mysterious than you think, so let's get the most common "myth-understandings" out of the way first.

"Mystic" is not a title.
It is not a level.
It is not a degree.
"Mysticims" is not a religion.
It is not limited to certain religions.
It is available to atheists.
It does not require rituals.
It does not require being a saint.
It does not make you a saint.
It is not about asceticism.
Mysticism is a way of thinking and seeing the world.
There are degrees of mysticism.

Perhaps a better expression for those unfamiliar with the concept is "open field of mind". Mysticism is about living without the walls in our soul, and even around our soul. (I use soul in the meaning "psyche" in "psychology", the software that runs on our brain. In no way do I imply that the soul is eternal or magical, in fact I don't even believe that myself.)

The essence of mysticism is simplicity, as opposed to duplicity. To always be yourself, and always the same self. In this regard, it does put ethical constraints on you. If you need to maintain separate "truths" according to who you are with, you cannot engage in mysticism. Mysticism is all about seing everything as a whole, all of reality as connected in a simple and beautiful way.

Mysticism provides a boost to intelligence. Because you can draw on all your experience, even from seemingly unrelated fields, you can solve problems easier with less need to learn things over again. And because the walls around yourself crumble too, over time, you become more understanding of others, have more empathy, and more realism in interpersonal matters.

I am not sure whether you can choose to become a mystic, or whether it always just happens. But I know that you can be "a little" mystic without becoming a saint or otherwise extreme. And once there, it is is largely your own choice how far you go. Mysticism is something you practice, kinda like music or a foreign language. If you don't, it fades but is never completely undone. If you do practice, it will grow seemingly for as long as you live (or until brain damage takes you, I guess... I don't think it confers immunity to Alzheimers, though it may delay the onset since you can use your brain resources better).