Words of wisdom, and not by me!

"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

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

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

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...

...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

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

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.)