These are pieces of ice that have accumulated and frozen together, not churning waters. As I said yesterday, a night ago the river froze over. Barring some unexpected news, it will stay that way till spring.

I have  acquired some more respect for the elderly couple who used to live here before the house was fixed up a bit and rented out to me. It was almost certainly no better insulated then, possibly less. And frankly the electric fuses don’t allow me to heat the whole house even if I wanted to waste that much money. (At least the couple did not have to pay rent, but I am sure they had their expenses on the house as well.) So they probably had to sleep in an ice cold bedroom, and huddle in the living room for the four months of the year which real winter lasts around here.

This is how winter in Norway was until my childhood or thereabout, when people started building windtight, insulated homes. I remember my early childhood living in a house like this, but then my father had it insulated in various ways. And at least we did not get the northern wind ever, because the mountains loomed over us in that direction. Here, the valley runs north-south, so the old folks must have had this howling northern wind every winter. Evidently they still survived well into old age, though.

If I don’t reach the ripe old age of my ancestors, it will probably not be because of the house. What gets at people in this time and age is something else, namely stress.

I am rereading “Tips to Find Happiness – Creating a Harmonious Home for Your Spouse, Your Children and Yourself” by Ryuho Okawa. I feel as ambivalent about this man as ever. It is just disturbing to think that someone of his obvious intelligence and even wisdom would pretend to be God, even in a manner of speaking. Luckily this is one of the many books in which he does not bring up the matter of his divinity at all, though he does recommend reading his books and listening to his lectures to get Heavenly light in your life.  Then again, I wish I could recommend you read the Chaos Node to get Heavenly light into your life. Perhaps one day. Right now it is a bit flickering, I guess.

Anyway, the view of health and illness that he presents in this book is very similar to my own view. It takes (as befits the Buddha) a middle path: Not the chemical materialism of modern medicine, and not the “faith healing” approach of some religious movements where illness is seen as a proof of sin. Some illness cannot be avoided, says Mr Okawa, but often illness is a result of stress, and this can be greatly reduced with the right attitude.

In addition to the modern concept of stress, Mr Okawa also operates with the Mahayana Buddhist concepts of negative spiritual influences, which may come from dead people but also from the living. The mind of a human has the ability to influence other people’s bodies, but only through their own mind. If your mind glows with divine life, negative influences will not be able to attach to you, whether they come from the living or the dead.

This theory of spiritual influences may sound pretty weird to us, but it is really similar to Jung’s theory of complexes: Independent balls of thought or emotion living in the subconscious, which may be formed by our experiences with other people (living or dead) or archetypes, generic ideas of our culture or the human race. So it is not some “hocus pocus”, it is the way the human mind works. These complexes can be counterproductive, sometimes very much so, making us do things we know are bad ideas, but suddenly we do them anyway or even just realize that we have done them, like staying up half the night reading a book, or eating lots of unhealthy foods. These things don’t just happen, there are these dark dust bunnies of the soul pulling our strings.

As you may guess, I am a little out of my best shape myself. Something vaguely sinus related seems to bother my head, and my eyes and nose and throat are all sore. So is the skin on the back of my hands. I should probably do something about this dry air.  That, and shine more brightly with inner light. ^_^