Monthly Archives: December 2010

The missing questions

Posted on by
Reply

Today, some institute called me to ask about my sleep habits. I had gotten a letter in the mail some days ago that I was one of the random people they would interview. I suppose without the official seals you would be reluctant to answer that kind of questions to strangers, about sleep and health.

What amused me was that, judging from my answers, I belong to the happy lucky minority who don’t have sleep problems at all. I am not constantly tired, I don’t lie awake for long after I go to bed and I don’t wake up earlier than I want. I don’t even feel tired after lunch all days, though it happens. (I usually do nap on the bus home though, but I am not sure that is considered a problem, perhaps quite the opposite.)

What they did not ask was what time I slept. I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, so I would have been in serious trouble if I did not have an employer who lets me go to work at 10.  Before I got such an agreement, I was sick about half the time. So basically in today’s society I am severely limited in what jobs I can take, due to the DSLS. But they never asked about that, and there was no time where I could add information that was not in the questionnaire.

This is kind of typical, because I am kind of not typical. For instance, I recently got a consumer survey, which I try to complete. But it assumes that you have a TV, for instance. There is no ticky box for “don’t watch TV”, so I have to just make up answers. I’ve run into the same thing about the car. Nobody dares assume that you’re heterosexual in today’s society, but it is perfectly comme il faut to assume that you must necessarily drive a car and watch TV.  Well, it is no biggie for me, since I’ve chosen my lifestyle, but I suppose if I were blind it would kind of tick me off to meet these assumptions again and again. Then again, if I were blind I would be limited to phone interviews. Not that these are any better.

Sometimes I make up my mind to write about the things that make me different from most people, but I usually forget about it pretty soon. This is mostly because I feel that I am the normal one and the rest are weird. When I play The Sims 2 or 3, my sims don’t have television, not because I want them to be like me but because I tend to forget that television exists or at least that anyone would want to use it. In Sims 3, which is the more realistic of them, I tend to also forget romance. It’s not like their days aren’t full already. And so are mine.

Another pulse watch

Posted on by
Reply

It may be my memory that fails me, but I think this cost about 50% more for the exact same watch, only in a different color and a little smaller. Then again it may be that it cost 50% more than in 2005, which would make a lot more sense, since Norwegians have probably 50% more money to spend than in 2005. The increase in disposable income here in Norway has been crazy for the last decade or so. Wages and salaries have been going up, taxes have been going down (a little), and interests have gone very low because of the international financial crisis (which we don’t have here).

In retrospect, buying non-essentials in December is not the wisdom of Solomon either, generally speaking.  But in one thing I feel justified: Buying mail order would have saved me money, but there would be no way of guessing whether I could actually pick it up, since the post office is 30 minutes of walking from home, and there is no guarantee that this distance will be survivable until spring. It could be mild tomorrow, or it could be howling arctic wind for a couple months like last year.

Ironically, that’s what I want it for, to find out whether the heart lurches when I walk in the cold actually reflect a change in heart rhythm or not. That’s why I asked for the cheapest model they had, because I really don’t need to count calories or stay in my optimal zone or get weekly statistics. As far as I am concerned, it is a medical expense, but I don’t think my health insurer would agree.

Paying bills

Posted on by
Reply

I also have to restrain my greed these days. (BTW, force and enforce are not synonyms. If in doubt, ask yourself: Force whom to enforce what?)

Another month, another stack of bills to pay! Actually only a few, although I am sure there will be a utility bill safely after Christmas, when most people are broke. That way the utility company can generously offer to let you pay it over two months instead, against an interest that just barely resembles usury. I won’t need that option, barring divine retribution, I just think I notice a pattern in bills being scarce before and during the Christmas shopping and plentiful in January.

While I am not being squeezed financially, I still have some loan left, almost a year after I moved. It is not particularly expensive, but a bit embarrassing. Before I moved here, money was plentiful, despite my modest income. If I wanted a new computer or a new mobile phone, I would simply buy it, since I always had money lying around that I did not need. But these days I have to think it over: Do I really want to borrow money for this? And while I do that, I tend to find out that I don’t need this thing at all, or certainly not this year.

One thing that still flies under the radar though is books. Today I bought Voyage of the Dawn Treader, as is good and proper. I have not bought it before, but evidently the unwitting parody… er, movie, is coming out these days. And, more importantly, an online acquaintance has written a book about the mystical aspects of Narnia and of Dawn Treader in particular, hurriedly published to coincide with the movie. I better read the real thing first, eh? Although I kind of have the cliff notes in my head due to unavoidable cultural references.

I’ve also spent a little time studying Japanese on my computer. I have a vague plan to do that a little each day, not counting anime. Anime is nice and all, but as I say, the real life applications of being able to ask a shrine maiden to go out with me is likely to be scarce. So instead I have started on more realistic phrases like “Can you speak English?”, “Where is the bathroom?” and “Whose book is this?”. I am sure if I go over this stuff for half an hour each day, I’ll make steady progress.

You know, it is probably a very enviable position to not be able to fill a whole entry with just talking about my bills. But envy leads straight to hell, so instead please share in my happiness. And I will try to share in yours, if any.

More quiet revolutions (please)

Posted on by
Reply

Preferably as quiet as this. Screenshot from the exceedingly family-friendly anime Kimi ni Todoke (Reaching You), which is not actually sponsored by Happy Science, strangely enough. It is not the happiness that is lacking, at least.

The December issue of Happy Science’s monthly magazine is out. It is mostly about childhood and its enduring influence on your life, and about how you can (and should) look back at your childhood with new eyes and seek to understand your family and yourself as you were at that age. Things that seemed pure bad at the time may make sense now, if you look at it from a much higher perspective than you could then. In this way, you transform your past, and thereby your present and your future.

I have already done some of this before, but I don’t remember all that much about my childhood (except the dirty jokes I read in my brothers’ magazines. It is amazing how well I can remember those after 40 years. I must have a “pornographic memory”.) Anyway, it is said that when you have children of your own, you remember things from your own childhood that you otherwise would have forgotten. Because you have to deal with the same things that your parents had to deal with, and you remember how they did it, and perhaps when you do the same thing to your children you remember how much you hated it and it gives you pause.

I don’t have children so I will probably continue to not remember much other than the books I read. Actually I am not sure I did much at all except reading books (and my brothers’ magazines) and play alone by the streams. Oh, and go to school and taunt the bullies, who would then proceed to beat me up, making me angry so I would taunt them again on the next opportunity. An endless dance or mutual arrogance. But that part of me has already been transformed by self-reflection, which is one reason why there is less hell in me these days than there used to be.

Anyway! More quiet revolutions! The Happy Science Monthly also has an excerpt from a lecture by Ryuho Okawa, the would-be Buddha of our age. “When we first started, we could not even imagine taking responsibility for the happiness of all humanity. However, today, I strongly feel that it is our mission to spread our message across Japan and the world; it is our mission to guide all people to happiness.” Yes, wouldn’t that be nice, if they could guide all people to happiness! There are still almost 7 billion left though, compared to the perhaps 10 million they have supposedly guided to some degree of happiness so far. Keep up the good work!

I am not being entirely flippant there. I may not actually believe that Mr Okawa is a god from Venus, but I do think that if somehow his teachings come to influence the majority of people, we would definitely enter a golden age the like of which has not been seen in recorded history. Love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress is good stuff. Unfortunately, I am all too aware that most people have very different priorities from that, so it won’t be easy. Jesus Christ still has not reached all the world after around 2000 years. And most of us who have heard him haven’t understood much of what he said. So, it is a long canvas to bleach, as we say around here!

Mr Okawa remains optimistic, though. “We are now in the midst of creating a quiet but sure revolution, which will influence neighboring countries, Asian nations, Africa, Europe, and America. By spreading the spiritual Truths, we are gently undoing the mistaken values of today’s society. We are bringing this world back to the world of Truth, where it came from.”

Quiet Revolution? That sounds familiar:

“There’s a quiet Revolution going on,
Like a fire in every corner of the world,
And friends that you have known for many years,
Are talking with a new light inside,
Talking with a brightness in their eyes”
…
“There are quiet celebrations going on,
So many have been waiting for so long,
To see the whole world waking from a dream,
And find a new dimension inside,
See a revelation in our time,
Something is coming now,
Something is coming now.”

-Chris de Burgh, fromQuiet Revolution.

Unfortunately it will probably take some time still for the whole world (or even the reasonably civilized world) to wake from its dream. But quiet revolution is definitely the way to go.

An unsteady heart

Posted on by
Reply

The road I walked. It was a really nice walk apart from this small detail.

First for the physical heart. I have generally had a relaxed relationship to this, compared to the average human, because I hail from a family where heart problems are exceedingly rare before the age of 70 if at all. But occasionally there have been unexplained speed changes, perhaps once a year on average. I know the first summer after I stopped eating fat, when I took long walks it happened at least twice that my heart started running much faster than was normal for such an activity, and kept doing so for a while. It passed when I sat down for a while. I have had a couple more dramatic episodes where the heart just ran as fast as it could for a while, and I’ve seen a doctor for that a couple times.

Today was in the first category. I took a walk to the grocery shop, because unexpectedly the weather had turned mild, several degrees above freezing. It was like spring, for real. Lovely. But unfortunately by the time I had reached the shop, my heart was racing. Not at full speed, I would say, but about as hard and as fast as when mowing grass with the manual lawnmower, is my estimate. And it continued like that while I stayed there, about a quarter of an hour or more. I had picked some groceries but put them back, not wanting to exert myself the least more than necessary. Besides, I considered that if it grew worse and I had to go to the emergency room, it would be inconvenient to have a bag of food with me. And if I died, I would definitely not need the food. So unless I suddenly got better, it was probably better to not buy anything.

I got better, but only when I came home, another half hour’s walk. I felt a bit weak afterwards, but otherwise it seems to have not hurt me at all. That is to be expected, I guess: It was not max pulse, I think, and it lasted less than an hour, and I am still not old. So in itself it is barely worth mentioning. I do so anyway because later one can go back and see that ah, that happened then, and find a pattern in it.

On that note, this morning my heart was actually abnormally slow for a while after I woke up. I don’t know if there is a connection, but perhaps I (or someone else) will know in the future.

***

And that was that! Now to the other heart, so to speak. One thing I considered as I walked home was this: It did not seem to be a panic attack, because I did not panic. In the past, I thought, I would probably have done that more easily. That is because in the past, I was convinced deep down that I was going to hell. Now I am not so sure. I mean, it could happen I guess, but it is not a sure thing. There was a resentment inside me that is not there anymore, and there is just more light in my life now. I know that I can look back on my life and say it was a good life, in the sense that it grew brighter and brighter. I think of life with gratitude now. I realize that my problem all the way was myself, my arrogance and lack of self-reflection. That problem is much diminished, I am happy to say.

That said, the heart is a treacherous thing. Despite all this, I have spent most of the day playing City of Heroes. There are new alignment missions now, that you can do up to 5 a day of, to verify your morality. So I’ve been doing a bunch of these, on a bunch of my characters, instead of anything useful or really edifying. I mean, being an imaginary hero is not the worst you can do, but it is a kind of moral self-satisfaction really. It does not help make the world on Earth a better place to live. I wonder how I shall do that. It will take both of my hearts for a long time, I suspect.

“Hay and straw”

Posted on by
2

Despite the rural placement, there is actually no hay and straw in this house. I include it just to show that I do have somewhere to rest my head, unlike a certain someOne.

This December I have been playing Christmas songs almost from the start of the month. Earlier years I have only done this occasionally, at the spur of the moment. I bought a Christmas CD the first year I had a CD player and has played that sometimes, and another Christmas CD with panflute some years later, but generally I have almost ignored Christmas songs, as I have ignored most other things Christmas related. Well, I did spend Christmas with my best friend for many years and superficially took part in their rituals, but mostly just to be nice.

This year, I have had various good old Christmas songs in my head since around the turn of the month. We’re talking about Christian Christmas songs, not the modern secular “please be nice and let us all be happy” Xmas songs which goes out of their way to not mention God, much less Jesus, although Santa Claus is kosher here since the local name does not have anything to do with saints. These songs are gaining prominence here in Scandinavia at least, but they are not on my mind, of course. I am remembering the songs that were classics when I was born. And probably in most cases when my parents were born too, shortly after World War I.

In fact, today I found one song that was almost forgotten. It is not really a Christmas carol, but there is a line that is vaguely Christmas related, so it is on the Christmas CD Julefred (in Norwegian) by Solveig Leithaug Henderson. There is a parallel English version available, in which the Norwegian songs have been translated into English. I recommend it, as she also has a beautiful voice. She sounds just like she looks. Her voice is not really Enya-level, but is very clean and ideally fit for quiet ballads, and Christmas carols without excessive jazz.

Hay and straw (“Høy og strå” in Norwegian) was a song Solveig’s old parents taught her just as it was about to be forgotten. “It is surely well known among people above 90” they told her. Seems like it was snatched from the jaws of oblivion indeed!

I was listening to Christmas songs on Spotify, the (then) European music streaming site. I was searching for Julefred (Christmas Peace) as this is the name of another Christmas album I know of, and this one showed up as well, and had a couple of my old favorites. It was seeming coincidence that I came to hear this one, and immediately paid attention: The melody was very, very familiar. One of my beloved songs from The Christian Church (“Smith’s Friends”, a Norwegian super pious church) uses the same melody. They “borrowed” it from this song – I assume it is safely out of copyright, since that’s shorter here than in the USA – but I had never heard the original until now. I heard it and was greatly moved.

The song is not really about Christmas, but generally about the poverty in which Jesus Christ lived, having nowhere to call his home.

“The birds of the sky may have their nests, the foxes in the forest their den; the world’s Savior had no place he called his home on Earth.

“Hay and straw was the bedding of his crib, the world’s desert was his resting place. He to whom earth and heaven belongs, wandered here on Earth without a home.

“When in prayer he spoke to his father, he went up to the top of the mountain; he who created myriads of stars, for himself he did not build a house.”

(From the Norwegian song; the official translation is re-imagined in poetry.)

There is some uncertainty as to whether Jesus actually did own a home, as he lived in Capernaum for a while and there is a reference to “his house”, though it is unclear whether he owned or rented it. In any case, he spent much time on the road and at some point famously mentioned that he did not have anything to rest his head at. So I think the song is justified, whatever the literal facts.

I can’t help but notice that Moses is said to have left his position as Pharaoh’s daughter’s son, choosing instead to suffer with God’s people in the desert for the rest of his life. Elsewhere, Siddhartha Gautama turned his back on a kingdom to achieve enlightenment, and as the Buddha spent his life as a beggar to teach others. Even Lao-Tzu eventually left his library and set off with only a lowly water buffalo, at which point he supposedly wrote the Tao te Ching on request.

I can’t help but think that anyone who wants to save the world from the luxury of their palace or even mansion is unlikely to have lasting success, given the necessity for all these great spirits to venture into the desert. (Not that all of these are equal in my eyes, but you should know that already.) And rarely is this summed up better than in this near forgotten Christmas song: He to whom Earth and Heaven rightly belongs, wandered here on Earth without a home. Well, at least part of the time. ^_^

St Teresa vs reptiles! Fight!

Posted on by
11

The strange thing about this castle is that it is our soul. It is so small as to be invisible, and yet large enough for God to live there. And some reptiles too.

I am not sure whether I have used this picture before. It may well be, for I know I have written about this topic before, about the inner castle keep. I think it may have been in this anime (History’s Strongest Disciple Kenichi) that I first saw it, or at least that it first made a lasting impression on me, that we can have a huge castle inside, even as small as we are. It also ties in with the A and B influences of Boris Mouravieff, one of the weirdest thinkers to ever graze the fringe of the Christian religion, from what I hear. I picked up that particular notion of his through the One Cosmos blog a few years ago, though I am not sure if it was before or after I saw this anime.

Basically A influences are all the things in life that fits right in with our life as smart apes, while B influences are the things that fits with our life as eternal spirits. There is by and large very little overlap between these two world views, and yet most of us usually lives in them both to some degree. Or perhaps just around half of us, if Mouravieff is right, as he is quoted as thinking that approximately half the human populace has no spiritual side whatsoever, and cannot understand or relate to such things no matter what is done or said (though they can pretend to for worldly gain if they live in a religious society).

On the other extreme, you have people like St Teresa of Avila, whom I did not know about until a couple days ago. I mean, I knew she was a Catholic saint. That was not much of a recommendation for most of my life: I grew up in Norway, which was almost pure Lutheran Protestant before it became post-Christian as it mostly is with my generation and later. We were led to believe that Catholicism was a kind of “paganism lite”, with the saints playing much the same role as minor deities of the pantheons formerly worshiped in Europe. Kind of like Christmas was dressed onto the existing midwinter holiday, I suppose. Paganism with a Christian face.

Of late, I have come to see this in a different light. I have taken some pretty long detours, admittedly: My understanding of Catholic saints is now similar to how I see Buddhist bodhisattvas. Not identical, but quite similar. But there are also other elements, like the Taoist notion of the Immortals. I think “eternals” is a better concept though, because while I would be happy to achieve immortality through not dying, it is possible to become an Eternal even if you die. As Jesus Christ said about the Patriarchs: They all live before God. And the saints likewise, if not more so, are still alive in the theosphere even if their bodies are long gone.  If you for some reason happen to wander into that realm, you may meet them in a more intimate way than your neighbors or coworkers.

This just recently happened to me. Amazon.com sent me a mail recommending a number of books, most of them old-fashioned spiritual books (and one manga tankubon…) based on my buying history. One of the books was “The Interior Castle” by St Teresa of Avila. Given that I have thought (and written) about this topic several times, and given that the book is freely available (though not from Amazon) – its copyright expired long ago –  I started reading it.

I soon ran into a problem. The problem was that I was so overwhelmed by joy that I could not continue reading. The brightness of her words, the way she verified things that made sense but that I had feared might not be Christian. It was a bit like a court case where the crown witness is led in and suddenly you start thinking that you might win after all.

St Teresa, where have you been all my life?

This is probably going to sound weird even to people who respect me, if there are any left. But I seriously had to restrain myself to not squeal loudly and hug random objects from the pure pleasure of the reading.  It was a pleasure that was in a certain meaning “sensual” in that it filled my body, but it was not sexual. I may not look like it, but I do know sexual pleasure, just take my word for it. This was not it. But it was a certain kind of ecstasy from within. If those who fall in love feel as strongly as I did (and they probably do) then I can understand why they behave the way they do.

Be that as it may, St Teresa is awesome, or I am badly misguided.

The interior castle she describes is made of a single enormous diamond or other clear crystal, at the center of which God dwells in a very bright light. (Yes, that is eerily similar to Happy Science’s notion of the Buddha-nature within, which is customarily described as a diamond and shining with a bright, warm light. I believe this notion comes to them from Buddha, whereas it almost certainly did not come to St Teresa from that quarter. Perhaps it just happens to be a very good description.)

Unfortunately, the castle is easily covered by dark cloth (it is not very big until you enter into it). It is also surrounded by reptiles. She keeps using this expression over and over during her first chapters, which are the only ones I have read after several days. Reptiles, snakes, venomous reptiles. They even follow you into the castle, where they are numerous in the outer mansions, and it is almost impossible not to be bitten by them.

Tell me about it!

Even though, and even after, I have rejoiced in the pure joy of the spiritual teaching, these critters are still biting at my heels. But that is life, I guess. The B influences yearn against the A influences, and the A influences against the B influences. They oppose each other, so that we may not do what we want.

It’s all about me!

Posted on by
Reply

The little guy in the background is the main character and presumed future emperor of the galaxy, but people do whatever they want without considering him at all. With me it is the other way around: I am just some guy, and yet the mighty rivers of the air change their course to accommodate me. I am not sure what is the more disturbing of these two situations.

Well, you could wonder. The weather stayed mild for approximately one day, from Saturday evening to Sunday evening. Then the land went back into the deep freeze, even more than before. It is around -15C now, varying from -13 to -17 (8 to 1 Fahrenheit).

It was enough for my water pipes to thaw though, so I still have water. Even the shower has worked since, though one may wonder how long that can last. It seems unlikely that this whole thing happened over all of southern Norway (and probably some more) just for my sake, though if I had been the main character, it would certainly have made sense.

I think I’ll wait a bit longer before declaring myself the Most Important Person of Scandinavia though. I am reminded of a Christian meeting I was on shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, at which point an elderly man in the congregation got up and told us all that he had prayed for just such an outcome. That was almost certainly true. But I suspect that pray for this also did a large number of the tens of millions who were murdered, directly or indirectly, by the Soviet system, and a goodly number of their relatives as well. And while I cannot say for sure, I would not be surprised if their prayers were at least as fervent.

In fact, being the main character in one’s own eyes is one of the biggest problems of being human. But that said, I do appreciate having running water in my bathroom again, even if I’m not the Main Character except on my blog!

Weather report!

Posted on by
Reply

Winter is such an exciting time here at Riverview! You never know when the water will freeze or thaw. Today, it thawed. But it was a narrow victory!

For about a week now, the long-term weather forecast has said that Saturday afternoon the temperature would rise rapidly to above the freezing point. That seemed almost too good to be true. I did not want to get my hope up. Last winter there were several such false starts. This is no miracle, for Norway has had a couple decades of mild winters. Naturally the models we use now are based on those years, and not on the temperature nosedive leading up to last year and this. It is as if we are in a different zone now, with less hot summers and colder winters.

So I was not surprised to see that the thermometer stayed below zero (Celsius, where zero is conveniently the freezing point of water). But it crept fairly close. By now it is like -1.3 or so, milder than the forecast from earlier today. And mild enough, it turns out, for the water to begin moving again. The water pipes seem to run in the ground under the house, and some heat is leaking down from the house into the ground. It was like that last year too: The pipes did not freeze until around -4, and thawed at around -2.  The same happened now: After a few hours above -2, the water in the bathroom faucet came back: First the cold, and a bit later the hot. And finally the shower too!

I had hoped to get to shower again before Christmas, and that wish has now been fulfilled. A rather chilly shower, but a real shower. Ah, the luxuries of civilization!

I’ll try to keep the faucets dripping. Hopefully it will become second nature eventually. There is nothing I can do about the shower, it does not have a drip mode. It is on/off, really, although I can vary the pressure within certain limits. Not enough to keep the hot water from running out if I leave it on overnight though.  So I enjoy it while it lasts.

I hope you have a wonderful time as well! But if not, tell me about your problems and I will give you unwanted advice instead of sympathy. That’s what men do, or so I have read. ^_^