I already use my serious-brain, but should it have its own journal?
I have been reviewing my journal again. Since times immemorial (OK, 1998), I have written about all kinds of things. About what happens in my life, such as it is; my opinions on various things; review of computers and computer games, anime, books. Analysis of the world economy, reflections on various scientific matters, mainly within psychology, sociology, and information technology. And lately more and more religious and spiritual topics. And it’s all just mixed together.
So if someone comes here through Google to read about City of Heroes, the next day there may be an entry about some Orthodox saint from before the Dark Ages. That will send them packing for sure. Conversely, someone may show up to read about Happy Science (evidently I am the first thing you get if you google for “Happy Science” Norway… imagine that) and instead find me writing about the health benefits of extensive walking or the importance of dried plums for colorectal health. -_-;
So I have made a mental image of a possible new way to organize the website. Instead of one blog with all categories, it might have several levels. It would start with the main site but instead of going on to this blog, you would get a choice between Time and Eternity. Eternity would of course contain the entries on religion, spirituality and perennial philosophy.
The “Time” link would then take you to a choice between Science, Entertainment and Slice of Life. Â Science would be the good old gray entries: Economy, information technology, psychology, sociology, physiology. I might consider spinning off economy since I have particular expertise on that, but probably not – I have more or less given up on humans in that regard.
“Entertainment” would then be reviews of computer games, anime, occasionally music and fiction books. The drawback here is that this part of my life seems to be shrinking slowly over time and may end up more or less deserted, since this is where the spiritual interests are grabbing their spare time from, mostly.
“Slice of life” would be the most personal stuff. I might even have a separate health blog which people would not be interested in reading until after I die, in which case it might be interesting to know. I don’t really think it should interest many other people as long as I can continue to write. So the slice of life would be the rest, if there is any. And perhaps meta entries like this.
The problem with this is that my life and thinking is not really that fragmented. When I think about science or religion it is often because of something I have noticed in my daily life. Also, psychology and religion overlap to some degree, as do sociology with both of them. And the state of your soul can greatly influence your body, and sometimes the other way around.
To take an example I thought of today: Norwegians have grown a lot heavier after they stopped saying grace. On the other hand, the Japanese mostly still say “Itadakimasu” before they eat, and are not gaining weight as fast. From the obesity “epidemic” in America, I would guess they have stopped saying grace as well? But what is cause and what is effect here: Â If I were obese from overindulgence, I would probably have problems communing with the Light at mealtime as well. Kind of like it is hard to pray at bedtime if there are every new people in your bed; but conversely, it is probably hard to get ever new people into your bed if you pray by it regularly. Cause and effect can be really hard to tell apart!
And so it is with the various parts of my life as well, they can be hard to tell apart, and therefore hard to write apart. Â I wonder if I should try anyway, just to make the Chaos Node a bit less chaotic.
Just stumbled on this…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
http://www.ctmu.org/
In conjunction with his ideas, Langan has claimed that “you can prove the existence of God, the soul and an afterlife, using mathematics.”[6]- Wikipedia.
I almost fell out of my chair when reading that on the wiki. I wonder if he’s actually done it.
Well, I am probably still a genius, but not a super-genius like that. I cannot easily, or at all, check his equations. My approach to spirituality is more hands-on, so to speak.
That said, it is rather obvious that “science” as we know it has selected a limited part of reality for its study, and rightly so. There are many things that are not suited for the scientific method, and which therefore give somewhat random results when you try. Like economics, psychology, sociology, meteorology and oceanography. These are essentially chaotic system and performing repeated experiments on them are impossible because you can never restore them to the previous state or find a copy that is equal for the repeated experiment. For this reason they are called “soft sciences”, although “fuzzy sciences” might be more descriptive, or “vague sciences”.
Most matters covered by religion fall squarely in this category. We cannot scientifically approach the creation or the end of the universe, as it is not in our power to create and destroy universes repeatedly. The same goes really for the human soul. It is not in our power to even determine the state of an individual soul, much less change it in exact ways. We can change it in approximate ways, which is what axial religions try to do. But it is more of an art than a science.
Why are some people born smarter than others?
Do we carry intelligence from past lives?
I think basic intelligence, as measured by IQ, is largely a lucky combination of genes and a decent childhood. But the wisdom to direct that intelligence, that may well be a property of the spirit-soul that exists before life and after life in this world. I see from time to time smart people wielding their intelligence like a blind fencer, while others who have less use it to achieve far more.
So there seems to me that there are two different components to intelligence, one of “raw” IQ and one of wisdom. But they also often appear together, it is not entirely random. So perhaps wise spirits usually prefer to incarnate in smart bodies, but sometimes they swap around for some reason?
That’s just a theory though – I have no memories from before this life myself.
But is the mind contained within the brain?
This is hard to answer because they belong to different realms, so obviously the mind is not contained like milk in a bottle. But the mind can at least not manifest in the world without the brain, or in the case of brain damage the mind will perform erroneously or sluggishly or only partially. However, people who suffered acute aphasia (inability to speak) through brain strokes etc and later recovered, say that they were able to think, their thoughts just did not come out. In some cases they would talk gibberish but still be able to write coherently, or the other way around.
As for the consciousness, however, it seems to interact only weakly with the brain. When you go unconscious in sleep, the brain is still quite active. Conversely, when Ken Wilber stops his brainwaves (or at least reduces them to the level of a fish or legally abortable fetus), he remains conscious and can return to normal function at the time of his choosing.
The universe is chaotic? I thought you believed in order?
I suggest you go through this if you have time:
http://www.megafoundation.org/CTMU/Q&A/
The universe is not God – or more exactly, it is not fully God, although it emanates from God. You could say God gives his creation space.^_^ If God was fully present in creation, which equates to the universe being fully ordered, we could not exist in it, since we are not fully ordered – we are not God in God’s totality, far from it.
Therefore, seen from our perspective, there is chaos in the universe, and plenty of it. God’s perspective is certainly different. By God we here mean not some old guy on a cloud, but the Ultimate Consciousness and some such.
“The universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists,[1] including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space.[2][3]” – Wikipedia
It’s simply not possible to have have some BEHIND the universe creating it because the universe by definition is all that exists.
That’s why it is called UNIverse – it is unified. Uno. “One cosmos under God” as they say in America. The idea of the Creator as some guy sitting and crafting the universe some time long ago is disturbingly primitive, but then again there are many primitive people. And in many cases they can’t help it.
“The universe is not God – or more exactly, it is not fully God, although it emanates from God.”
?????
Do you believe in a pantheist God?
More like panentheism – I believe that God is present in everything and necessary for everything to exist, but the sum of all things we can perceive or know does not add up to the total of God.
I believe there is a “core” of God, usually called the “Godhead”, which is perfect beyond our imagining. If nature was not given some space or separation from that divine perfection, individual souls or indeed phenomena such as the material universe could not exist.
In other words, I see nature as a kind of diluted God-stuff. To worship nature, then, is an understandable act if one is ignorant of the greater glory closer to the core. There is to me no dualism where spirit is good, matter bad. It is more a matter of degree, where the Divine glory shades off into first the Heavens, then the material plane, and eventually the Hells.
“I believe there is a “core†of God, usually called the “Godheadâ€, which is perfect beyond our imagining. If nature was not given some space or separation from that divine perfection, individual souls or indeed phenomena such as the material universe could not exist. ”
The unmanifested?
Yes, that sounds right. But such things are not generally something we need to speculate about, I think. Thinking too much about theology before we have the practice will only confuse us when we later try to understand what we have experienced. It is good to leave many symbols open or “hollow” like a container so that we can fill in the meaning later.
Tolle briefly touches on this topic in his books.
Unbound Telesis (UBT) – a primordial realm of infocognitive potential free of informational constraint. In CTMU cosmogony, “nothingness” is informationally defined as zero constraint or pure freedom (unbound telesis or UBT), and the apparent construction of the universe is explained as a self-restriction of this potential. In a realm of unbound ontological potential, defining a constraint is not as simple as merely writing it down; because constraints act restrictively on content, constraint and content must be defined simultaneously in a unified syntax-state relationship.
http://www.teleologic.org/