Category Archives: autobiography

A soul in a sick body

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Living in the world, under the Light.

Thanks to years of journaling, I had at least a theoretical warning. I have noted through the years that I usually get sick the night or at most the day after I return from a trip. Whether it has lasted two days or a week, the symptoms are still the same: Queasiness and loose bowels to border on diarrhea, and a generic feeling of malaise.  I thought for a while that the train ride home had something to do with it, but I had pretty much given up that idea already. So I was not surprised that it happened tonight too, despite traveling with bus and not very far (although further again than to work).

My current theory is that the body is flushing the unusual stuff I have eaten, so it is ready to return to the usual diet now that I have returned home. In this case, two days of cafeteria and hotel food, plus some snacks, but the snacks are actually the most normal part of it.  I doubt either the cafeteria or the hotel would serve anything that would give us food poisoning. Sure, it happens, even in Norway, but it is bad PR so commercial establishments go out of their way to avoid it.

Nor did I eat any meat, although I took a quarter of an egg for lunch today. Over the last few years I have been eating less and less meat, not because my religion specifically forbids it, I just find it distasteful. I feel that dining on the corpses of dead animals is something that should be reserved for dire emergency. If this was a moral standpoint, I wouldn’t be eating milk products either, since modern agriculture does not retire cows in a dignified manner, much less their calves. As I said, I just find meat distasteful, and to a slightly lesser degree fish.

In reality, milk makes up a fairly large part of my diet in various forms. Come to think of it, not eating yogurt at all when I usually eat it at least daily was probably a bad idea. The gut flora would naturally go wild. The strange part is that it did not do it until I came back. Now, this time it was just two days, but I have been away for up to a week in the past (when spending Christmas with my friends) and while I did have some agitation of the bowels, it was very rarely on the scale I experienced once I got home.  Honestly, my best guess is that the deeper parts of my brain recognize that I am home and tell my digestive tract to get rid of the weird stuff so I can go back to a normal diet with a fresh start.

Being mentally prepared, I have felt somewhat less panicky than I usually do during the onset of a sickness.  Still, I am giving some thought to the benefits and malefits of continued life in the body.

***

Of course, in real life God has a lot of other things to think about too, like how my life or death would impact other people or the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and a host of things I cannot even begin to imagine. It is not all about me, except up here in my small deluded head. But that’s where I report from…

And in my head, living for several more decades would be good for my soul even if I continued to play computer games, read blogs and work at a job I am not very good at. Why? Because this life is mostly harmless, and the more harmless decades I can put between me and my childhood and youth of fear, anger and hate, the better.

Much of my time then was filled with a horrifying darkness that is, in essence, a kind of hell. Buddhists seem to call this the “hell of strife”, in which people wander in fear and hate, attacking each other and with each confrontation becoming more certain of the others’ evil, without noticing their own. This was how it was with me.  Even if I had been good, I would probably still have been attacked, but I was not good. Quite the opposite. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my words hurt other people, and I either did not think about it or enjoyed it immensely, depending on whom. I considered myself a lily among thorns or something. A saint among demons.

I may wish that I had been told the Truth at a much earlier age, but realistically, I would probably not have been ready for it. And meeting it before I was ready, I would probably have become immunized to it, in whole or in part, excusing myself and locking it away as something I had already met and rejected. And so I would have been stuck in the dark, for who knows how long.  But as it was, the Light eventually came to me at a time when I was open enough for it, around the age of 15, in my grandfather’s rocking chair, while reading a small tract by Elias Aslaksen.

For years after this, the harvest of those years threw a dark shadow over my life.  Even in my 20es, my dreams were routinely filled with fear and hate and murder. I dreamed about killing innumerable nameless men. And not in any kind of meaningful context, like saving my country or protecting the innocent. It was fear and rage, mostly fear from what I remember. Kill them before they could kill me. With guns, ax, knife, stones, even my bare hands.  Night after night sometimes, certainly it seems very often now that I look back.

Not satisfied with ruling my nights, the darkness sometimes shot into the day, suddenly and unexpectedly. Some small event might trigger it, even just a thought, but sometimes it would just burst into my consciousness for no reason that I can remember: A sudden vision of myself opening fire on bystanders, driving a car into a crowd, stabbing someone over and over, kicking their head against the concrete until it broke.  Thoughts like that, sudden, nightmarish, almost insane.  Then moments later I would catch myself and shudder at the hellish visions.  And I learned to not trust myself, as I had already learned to not trust others.

Things have changed. I still set bullies on fire, in City of Heroes, but I no longer have the same feelings I used to have. Rather, my recent characters of that type are wreathed in a white, purifying soulfire that burns away the darkness in my enemies, or that is how I perceive it. The actual game mechanics have not changed, but my way of seeing it has, and the graphics and play style corresponds to that. I fight not for revenge, but to protect the innocent and purify the guilty.  ^_^

Be that as it may, there may be limits to how long I am going to enjoy even that game, though I know not exactly by now.  But I have noticed that for each passing season, I find it harder to return to Age of Conan, a game that is a masterpiece of lifelike graphics (it was at least for a time the only game with a separate butt size slider, albeit limited in scope). Unfortunately the atmosphere of the game is very dark, and very much like the aforementioned Hell of Strife.

Described in few words, the basic gameplay is the same as in City of Heroes: Defeat enemies, either on your own or preferably together with others. But Age of Conan is, as befits the novels from which it is derived, a dark and treacherous place. One man’s hero is another man’s villain. There is a delight in destruction, blood splattering from severed heads to rain on the inside of your screen, and many of the classes either consorting with demons or gaining strength from acts of destruction, stuff like that.  It is hard to point out each detail, but there is a subtle aura of darkness and treacherous magic that pervades the game world. I find it repellent now. The current me, whose eyes are set on the Realm of Light, find such an atmosphere harder and harder to bear with each passing season.

I read a book last week, after the glowing recommendation of my online friend Alistair Young, a.k.a the Cerebrate. (Unlike me, his official name is not unique in the world. Really, does it cost that much to add a name to become unique? I would happily have done it, but unless one of my relatives does something crazy, there is and will only be one Magnus Itland in the world. And the world is probably quite happy with that.

Be that as it may, the book was a work of fiction, the first in the Dresden Files series of supernatural detective stories. Wizard Private Investigator more exactly.  When Mr Young loves something, I have found that I usually like it, admire it or at the very least respect it. This also came to pass. I did not like the book, but I found it very well written.  The reason why I did not go right ahead and buy the next was this: It was a dark world, with copious amounts of fear and death. Sure, so is real life for some people, especially in countries with war or civil war.  But that is not entertainment. It is not something we immerse ourselves in for our enjoyment.  The book did indeed remind me of Age of Conan, although somewhat less so.

And that is when I realized that I have begun to change further than I did simply by the passing of the years and the fading of the memories. That some kind of anchor for my soul has gone ahead of me, a possible future self perhaps, beckoning to me from the brightness of the Realm of Light, a barely audible song about coming home.

“But I’m not ready yet” to quote Chris de Burgh in his song Living in the World.  (Lyrics and temporary streaming for my friends).  I am pretty sure de Burgh also has his home in the Realm of Light at the least, as can be glimpsed in the sheer wingspan of his soul. But for him, as for me, it is still a question of whether we will return there. And I’m not ready yet. Probably.

I am still shakeable. My light still flickers when my body is darkened by illness. I want it to shine brightly even then, but I know there are still limits to how much I can take.  I want to live in the world with my anchor in the Light. I want to keep reading the saints and sages of the past and present, I want to work, and play, and share, and watch my life grow like a plant until it can bear fruit for those who will survive me. Until my white light can burn more brightly when the lamp that carries it cracks and start breaking up.  But I am fairly sure I am not ready yet.

Years of change

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Well, people change after two years. (I am pretty sure I had very nearly the same text with a different girl a few years ago, perhaps this is a common proverb in Japan? Anyway, I have changed again so it is appropriate.)

I am honestly not sure when or how the latest changes started. It is a little more than a year since I came across the easy-to-read spiritual self-help books by Ryuho Okawa. It is a year and a half since I started experiments with brainwave entrainment. It is probably more than three years since I started reading One Cosmos, a right-wing political blog with a side order of perennial religion, or possibly the other way around.

Of course, the sheer process of growing older – specifically to be 50 and above – may also have made a difference. When you are 50, it should dawn on you that you are not a kid anymore. Less than 70 years left of the appointed human lifespan. Time to wise up!

So there is no helping that my on-line journal also changes. Most likely there will continue to be more religion, philosophy and psychology, and less game reviews, anime reviews, and buttpics. I like my new self, there is an added depth to it. I mean, I was already very wide. (Speaking of interests here, not my body.) I would write about many different topics, from the ancient past to the near future, from farming to computers, from mythology to economy. This is because I was thinking about all those things. I may be a bit less wide-ranging now, but going more deeply into some things.

There are also changes that are less obvious. I write very little about work, for a number of reasons, most of all because my employer really really does not want me to write about it. Ideally I should not even let you know whether I go to work on any particular day. But my attitude to work has changed perhaps more than anything else. I used to consider it a curse, a punishment from God. Now I see it as a mercy, an opportunity to express my love for the human world, to pay back some of the good civilization has done for me over the course of my lifetime. Unfortunately, there are still certain things that make it hard for me to be of as much service as I want, but progress has been made.

I hope the changes will continue and even accelerate. I am curious as to who I will become if I continue to live. In some ways, entering a new life phase is like being a child again, with a thousand new ways opening before me. Which will I take? Who will I become? Will I, as the Japanese song said, surpass multiple destinies while I am alive? This may not fascinate you as much as it fascinates me; but if it does, I hope to keep you updated as long as possible.

Hellish dreaming & writing

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Indeed it is a dream rated 18 and above, that is why I don’t write about it in detail.

This morning again I woke up from a hellish dream. In my dream, I was a woman on another planet, sometime in the age of space travel.  I was a kind of ninja warrior type, and at the time I woke up I was torturing a father to death in front of his daughter whom he had abused.

The emotional intensity of the dream was not as high as the real thing would have been, but it was definitely not a good feeling.  Despite an hour of delta wave entrainment, my mind remained restless this morning.

The thing is, I used to read stories like this until fairly recently. They still sell them over at Fictionwise (now Barnes & Noble e-books) and probably many other places, and they are common enough.  I suppose there are reasons why we are drawn to read stories like that, apart from killing time. A twisted sense of justice comes to mind.  And of course the intensity of emotion.  Though I suppose people who have TV, and especially American TV channels, won’t get much emotional intensity out of a book after seeing literally thousands of people being killed before their eyes in a lifetime. (If you have children and TV in the same room, you are hardly in a position to judge those who sacrificed their children to Moloch.)

I would write stories about war and fighting and killing when I was younger. To be honest, I felt a need to write them, a kind of relief. Writing made from such a motivation has no right to be shared, and I didn’t.  Therapeutic writing I have seen it called, and I suppose it may work that way, if you practice self-reflection afterwards.  Otherwise you may well end up perpetuating the darkness inside.  I think the same thing about the dreams.  They tell me something about myself, but I am no longer a passive observer of myself. Observer yes, but the purpose of my observation is not to continue being the same until I die.  I am in a process of change.   “All that is revealed is Light.”

On that note, I am not happy to see the new expansion to City of Heroes, Going Rogue.  No, it is not inspired by a certain American politician.  Wouldn’t that be cool, perhaps we could have gotten new Defender power sets:  Faith Healing and Hunting Rifle.  But noo, we are offered a whole expansion based on moral ambiguity, betrayal and dark secrets. What the hell, people.  City of Heroes used to be a pretty straight forward game, where the strong defended the weak.  As a bystander would say from time to time: “Forget those postmodern deconstructionists, Itland is a true hero, plain and simple.”

I know real life is not quite as simple as your nearby Southern Baptist may claim, but then again neither are the Southern Baptists.  Lots of them have their own secrets.  But enough about that, the fact is that if you need to keep secrets more sinister than a surprise birthday party, it’s self-reflection time!

Now back to writing. There is a lot of writing in the world, and very little of it is great literature.  Most of it is simply entertainment, and I won’t judge that, especially since my attempts at fiction have mostly been like that.  When you write within certain genres, it is like a contract between you and the reader, that you will sell them cheap entertainment and that’s it.  You don’t go into McDonalds and expect high cuisine, much less a communion wafer and consecrated wine.  Conversely, you don’t expect junk food in a five-star restaurant, much less in a cathedral.  These distinctions also exist in literature, but they are sometimes less clear.

Great works of literature (and other arts) are made by great people, but sometimes also by crazy people. They break apart and the great work of art claws its way out. But most crazy people don’t have such great works within, just more crazy. So that is not a recommended path!  Greatness is always a good idea, regardless of whether you will then go on to create great writing.

Anyway, unless you are doing the equivalent of a literary hot dog stand, there is a certain responsibility in writing.  You can write what you want, but if you influence other people, you should expect to be somewhat accountable. Sure, they are free to do with what they read as they want.  Unless you have pretended to be some kind of spiritual guide, you cannot really take responsibility for everything that happens to people who read you. But it may be wise to reflect on the possibility that your words may outlive you, and affect people for a long time to come.  What would happen in that case?

Gearing up for JulNoWriMo, I am also asking myself this. Will my writing lead others into temptation?  Will someone wake up, many years from now, and feel dirty or unhappy because they relive in their dreams something I wrote? I hope not, but I must admit that my fiction tends to contain elements of a mildly carnal nature.  This is after all the human condition.  And humans can be very entertaining, even fictional ones.  But at least there will be no killing in this year’s book, and almost certainly no actual procreative acts. Although there will likely be many other creative acts, Light willing.

Reflections on wisdom

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I am not sure if I have used this picture before, but I am sure I have considered it dozens of times, because it fits with so much of what I write. And then in the meaning “I have to study more”.

When I was little, I loved to learn random things. I grew up in a home filled with books and papers and magazines, and have three older brothers, so I learned to read long before my first school day. I remember withdrawing to the attic with a book often. The place was just used to store things, it was not really finished, but for me it was a special place.  If I remember correctly, I called it “klokingshulen”, a Norwegian pun meaning either “the sage’s cave” or the “the cave of the process of becoming wise”. I cannot remember if I came up with this name or one of my brothers, we were all a creative little bunch. But I remember spending time there alone with textbooks and such.

Knowledge is not wisdom, but it is a good start.  Before you can cook a meal, you need to have ingredients.  And before you can think deeply, you need to have something to think about! I am glad I loved reading, and looking at things, and using my imagination.  When I had read something new, I would afterwards use my imagination and create stories where these things appeared.

In grade school we learned by heart the multiplication table, but soon I understood that multiplication was just repeated addition. It is still kind of awesome to live in a world where two times three gives the same result as three times two, but it is kind of logical if you can count.  I suppose all healthy kids understand this pretty quickly. In the same way, we find patterns in other things as well. This is what I call understanding.  It goes beyond rote learning and provides a sort of shortcut in thinking.  Without learning, we would not find those patterns in things and be able to go forth and multiply our knowledge, so to speak, taking it to a higher order.

Somewhere, sometime, someone must have pondered the relationship between addition and multiplication. And they must have realized that if you could just repeat addition and get multiplication, then you would get something if you repeated multiplication as well.  I don’t know who first thought of it, but already the ancient Egyptians realized that if 3 and 9 were holy numbers, then 27 must be too, and 81 must be really holy.  So someone there was at least dimly aware of the power of “powers”. Today, computers are based on the powers of 2 – binary – and our common way of writing numbers is based on the powers of 10.

Wisdom is kind of like that. You take understanding one step higher, and then you find some way to make it useful.  Well, that is one way of looking at it at least. Wisdom is not just being able to learn, and being able to generalize from what you learn, but it is finding what is really important in what you have learned and understood, and applying that to your life.  Or at least that is part of it.

Anyway, you can kind of learn wisdom from others, by reading books of wisdom etc.  But you cannot just jump to that. You have to have knowledge and understanding first.  You cannot cook without ingredients or build without materials.  Also, I am not sure, but I think you need some hands-on experience of wisdom in order to “get it” when you see it elsewhere.  Still, you can definitely learn wisdom from others. And you should, because life is short.

If you enjoyed learning facts and loved understanding things, if flashes of insight gave you a thrill, then recognizing words of wisdom is likely to fill you with a bliss so overwhelming that it is hard to describe. Sometimes I can hardly contain my joy when finding another piece of the puzzle, opening up another part of the larger picture.

And it is good that I feel this joy, because the book may taste like honey when I eat it, but it burns in my stomach. Digesting wisdom – getting it embodied in my own flesh, so to speak – is the tough part. It usually comes at the expense of something else. I guess sometimes you have to bring out the butcher’s knife. But sometimes all I do is hold on, and the stupidity dies eventually.  Looking at some of the fantasy books I carried this February on the icy, slippery path in the freezing wind, I remember looking at them afterwards and still thinking I would read them again Someday.  But after months of reading a little wisdom most days of the week, the idea of going through those fantasy books again is like drinking from a puddle.  I would have to be pretty desperate.

There is a saying – I think I picked it up in the Christian Church – that “wisdom is none other than seeing the folly”.  Certainly that is a big part of it.  And first and foremost in our own lives.  But then perhaps eventually we can help others solve their problems too. There certainly are enough problems in the world, and it seems to me that the vast majority of them come from thinking that is counter-productive.  That is to say, people think thoughts that make it harder for them to live good, happy, satisfying lives.  If only there was some way to reach them!

The darker the shadow?

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Myrkemann, my dark/dark tanker in City of Heroes. He is here to represent my dark side, although the Norwegian word Myrkemann (or Mørkemann) actually means someone who tries to discourage levity, entertainment and sensual pleasures in society. I am not sure how well that fits with me…

It seems that my recent commenter has returned, and has a reasonable question regarding my entry two days ago, “STILL evil inside“. He asks: “Why would someone like you get these dreams?” which was what I had already tried to say, namely that I am still evil inside after all these years. However, there is a very similar question that may throw more light on the issue, as it were: Why NOW?

I remember a time in my life where these dreams were particularly common and intense. This was in my twenties, and it was a time when I was trying to become a better person, make progress and become holy. I may have a more realistic view now of just what an immense undertaking that is, even with divine intervention on one’s side. But I’ve still been somewhat active lately, reading books of the Truth and thinking about the Truth and to some extent writing about it as well. I have been concerned about blessing others, doing my work with the purpose of giving back love to the world and so on.

There is a saying: “The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.” In natural life this is a bit of an illusion, as the shadow is only darker in contrast. But psychologically, it is quite real. There are forces that are balanced to keep us in our place. This is perfectly natural: At the very least, it generally keeps us from going insane on a whim. Insanity, like sanctification, takes time and immense dedication and energy that already moves in that particular direction. You cannot just sit down and think, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to believe that I was from another planet and had awesome powers to help people” and the next day you start claiming to be Kal-El from Krypton. No, a lot of work happens underground before the madness breaks out, and we cannot expect it to go any faster upward than downward.

“Indeed, to the General Law someone who ‘moves’ looks like a fugitive from collective work, and nature takes immediate steps – a whole series of appropriate measures – to make the rebel fall back into line” writes Boris Mouravieff. And not much later, he says: “But here again, he must be particularly vigilant not to spend the reserve as fast as he accumulates it.” Recall Ryuho Okawa’s rule about the iceberg? At least 80% under the surface? I suspect I have fallen foul of this to some degree. And so when the shape of things to come start to rise up above the surface, a corresponding shift in the center of gravity moves below water. “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” as a better man than I said.

This is not something new to me. It happens with alarming regularity. Well, when I make any changes in my life at least. Looking at my bookshelf, there has been some very visible changes: Something like my own weight in fantasy books have been replaced with a modest number of spiritual books. If that were to reflect the status of my heart, things would get hairy indeed. It is not quite that dramatic, but I can see how it would trigger a re-balancing.

I have from the start – or so it seems to me – in this journal striven to draw my own picture in both light and dark colors, because this is the nature of a human and I am still one. I am relentlessly reminded of this whenever I begin to wonder a little, since I seem to have so little in common with each of you. A little here, a little there, but it all adds up. But it may be too little for any one to find much reason to linger. If you come to read about my Sims, chances are you shrink back in horror from both my religious psychology and my nightmares (or especially the nightmares I am in my dreams). Conversely, if you come here for your religious edification, you will no doubt take offense before the week is over. And so on it goes. But at least I try to be “fair and balanced”, as they say in America, about myself.

STILL evil inside

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Saturday morning I stabbed three different people in their guts with a large hunting knife, one of them twice.  It was all in self-defense though. And, more importantly, it was all in my dreams.

Seriously, I am not sure I would want to live with someone who repeatedly stabs people with a big knife, even in his dreams.  But I don’t really have much choice, since it is me.

And yes, it is totally like a scene out of the Hell of Strife as portrayed in Buddhism.  The people there supposedly attack each other on sight, not so much because of hate but because of fear, a fear that is of course multiplied by the actual fights they get into.  Kind of like being a gang member in an American city, I guess.  Their iron rule is: “Do unto others as they would do unto you, and do it first.”

I particularly clearly remember the last dream, in which I had a neighbor living in the same house as me who was plain crazy.  There was a religious element in his madness, or perhaps it was my religious element that made him crazy, but he was hell-bent on killing me.  Each morning (the dream lasted for several days in that realm) he would try to break into my home to kill me in my sleep.  I locked the door, I barred it, I even barricaded it at the end.  He always managed to force his way in eventually, but he also always made so much noise that I was awake and ready with my knife when he showed up.  Having been cut by it twice already, he had a healthy respect of the knife, which was why he was always trying to catch me unaware.

A very unpleasant dream, and so was the earlier one in which I stabbed those two other guys.

It bothers me, and I think rightly so, that I still have these kinds of dreams. You may have a religion in which you go to Heaven regardless of your evil character because someone has paid for your sins, but how long can you REMAIN in Heaven if you have a tendency to stab people with hunting knives? Well, presumably you would not be that badly provoked in Heaven – in fact, I have not been that badly provoked in this world since I was a teen – but it is still a rather precarious existence.

I am not blaming City of Heroes for this one, because I had these dreams before IBM even invented their Personal Computer. The feeling in that game is anyway very different.  Well, for me it is.  There seem to be those who take it personally, but for me the game is not about vengeance or even self-defense, but standing up for the innocent.  Besides, the criminals are supposedly arrested rather than killed.  However, a game like Age of Conan is unplayable to me, because it is just too reminiscent of the evil inside.  The whole atmosphere of pervasive villainy, betrayal and random attacks is like a projection of my own Hell of Strife into a virtual realm.

To think that this kind of life was the Heaven of my Viking ancestors is kind of disturbing.  I dare say they did not know true religion, but I still feel their blood in my veins in a manner of speaking.  When I was little more than a child myself, I was not dreaming these things, I was planning them in great detail. As a matter of fact, I even did make a couple stabs at my tormentors, but by some degree of divine intervention I managed to not actually hit them.  I made a hole in a school bag though, as he managed to get it in front of him. Well, those were the days.  It is more than three decades since I left that mindset behind, well in principle at least.  I wonder how long I will still be like this though…

Evil Inside.

Death the shepherd dog

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“In heaven, we look after everyone in this world.” But sometimes a shepherd dog is needed…

I have gotten through two chapters of Bishop Kallistos Ware’s book The Inner Kingdom. It was quite strange to see so many parallels to Ryuho Okawa’s books, and to things I had begin thinking of even before I heard of any of them. It is as if pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are raining down harder and harder, piling up faster than I can put them into place.

I have finished chapter 2 now, which is about death and resurrection. Bishop Ware is quite cautious to leave death as a mystery. Unlike some Orthodox writers, he does not attempt to tell us in any detail what awaits in the time before we are resurrected. His concept of resurrection is also less prosaic than Jehovah’s Witnesses, who seem ready to continue life much as it was before. Ware, based on Jesus, sees the resurrected body as spiritual, able to be either somewhere or everywhere at will, to contract to a physical form or expand to a subtlety where even thoughts cannot touch it. That is pretty much how Okawa describes the ascended Christ too, although of course they have very different opinions on his role in history from now on. And if there is any doubt about that, I have long ago entered into a pact with Christ, which he has kept even when I took it fairly leisurely. Until I meet him face to face in his heavenly kingdom, if I so do, until then our covenant will remain, unless he gets fed up with me first. So far, so good.

But to return to the topic of death: To my shame, the truth is that without the shadow of death, I would quite certainly never have entered into any such covenant in the first place. It may sound very differently now, but I am actually not very religious by nature. A philosopher, yes. That is probably in my blood. My father was a amateur philosopher, and there were several such in his family. Those of his relatives who were of a religious bent were so in a philosophical way, and I guess I have their blood in my veins still. But my passion was always for science, and I had little room for what could not be seen or at least logically inferred in some way.

But if Jesus is the Good Shepherd, then it seems to me that death was his shepherd dog. Let me tell you though that I abhor death as much as the next man, if not more so. For I grew up in its shadow. I knew it from two angles. The one was from growing up on a farm. The goat kids I had petted and played with, I later saw them slain, cut open, their blood being gathered in a bucket, their still warm intestines pulled out and thrown behind the barn, their eyes empty in death. For good measure, I would see them again at the dinner table. Cooked heads is a delicacy on Norway’s west coast, so I got to see even those eyes again. Death was not abstract to me. As far as I was concerned at the time, it was my friends that lay there, and would never play with me again.

The other half was my childhood asthma. From I was a toddler and several years onward, I would get asthma attacks and fight for breath not just if I played too roughly, but often in the night or morning (probably from exciting dreams). I knew, certainly by instinct though I may also have been told, that if I did not manage to keep breathing, I would die. Death was not something that just happened to animals: She was waiting each night in my bed, like the fiancee in an arranged marriage patiently waiting for the day when our union would be consummated. At the time, medicine was not as advanced as now, and especially in the outskirts of a poor nation as ours was back then. My parents were told that it was likely I would never grow up, although if I survived, I would be rid of the asthma. Somehow I also learned this. In retrospect that was probably a good thing.

And so I grew up in the valley of the shadow of death, and I was scared out of my mind.

Without this immediate feeling of mortality, I might never have sought religion in my youth. And if I had not tasted the sweetness of spirit, if I had not at least to some meager degree learned to replace pleasure of the flesh with happiness of the soul, which is so much richer as it is deeper, I would today be as unhappy as any man. This is what I think.

It is not many years since I believed that some people like me were simply made with a naturally higher happiness level. Today I think that is rubbish. Well, I think some people may indeed be so. Generally to have a lower optimum stimulation level is conductive to happiness if you live in times of peace with law and order. But if you are under divine – or demonic – influence for twenty or thirty years, your mind and even your physical brain will begin to change accordingly. You can contest the reality of spirit, but modern science shows that something happens in the brains of monks who meditate regularly. This physical change comes from somewhere. Even if you give it another name to avoid the scary concept of spirit, it is still something and you need to accept this. What you need to accept is the law of karma, or fruit. Good trees give good fruit, and good seeds grow up to good trees. This is the chain of cause and effect, which easterners call Karma. (Look ma, my karma ran over your dogma!)

Thus, as humiliating as this is to confess, in my life death was like a shepherd dog that rounds up the straying sheep and inclines it to go back to the shepherd.

The beauty of Christianity is just this, that the stray sheep is the one that gets all the attention. While the Buddha teaches people to save themselves, and perhaps this is an adequate doctrine for the 99 sheep, Jesus seeks out the stray to such an extent that the last become the first, and hos go before bros into the kingdom of Heaven.

But me, I did not even make it as far as to a successful stray. Before I had strayed very far, the shepherd dog always found me and chased me bleating back again. Now that is humiliating. But at least I have found a large measure of happiness in my life, and I know the direction where there is far more of it. May we all meet there, already in this life and from then onward.

Alone or allone?

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“Wow… I’m part of ‘everyone’…” From the family-friendly and encouraging anime “Kimi ni Todoke”, which probably means “reaching you”. It really is heartwarming, and no, it is not made by Happy Science. It is still good though.

For a number of years, I have spent more and more time alone, to the point where I finally even played alone in the multiplayer game I played. It has been a very slow and gradual change. When I started writing this journal, I still had friends in the 3-dimensional world, although not many, and although I did not meet with them often. But gradually I lost contact with people, and I did not miss them. I enjoyed being alone. I also felt that it was a good thing, morally and spiritually speaking.

I have never disputed the gospel of Jesus Christ, that “it is more blessed to give than to receive”. But the way I interpreted it was more along the observation by Socrates, that a god needs nothing, therefore to need less is to be closer to the divine. I thought that the less I received from others, the better. Which in a certain sense is true, since we tend to start out with an abundance of wants regarding what others should do for us. When Sartre could say that “Hell is other people”, it was in this sense. If people with conflicting wants are placed together, they will naturally create the conditions of hell, each inside himself by resenting the others.

But while I was doing a great job of curbing my wants regarding other people – although in truth it is more like the wants gradually withered – I forgot the positive dimension. I was fairly happy even by my own standards, very happy compared to the overwhelming majority of people. And I thought “this is as good as it gets”. It did not occur to me, not needing others, that they might need me.

In a sense, it is right and necessary to work on oneself, forgetting all others for the time being, to refine certain qualities of oneself. But at some point one should remember the purpose of this work: To be able to add to the total of brightness, happiness, hope and courage in this world. Because we are a part of “everyone”, even our thoughts count. But eventually we must begin to radiate these qualities of brightness, otherwise I must question whether they are there at all. A city on a mountain cannot be hidden, as my hero Jesus Christ pointed out.

I do not know how far this change will take me. After all, I am naturally introverted. Even as a child I had a hermit streak, although I made up for it with incessant talking and grabbing attention when I was with others. And there are so few now who share even one of my interests, that just “hanging out with the guys” is unthinkable. At least I still have my work. And various online activities, with the benefit that people tend to be more open online than in the physical world.

So let us see where this takes us. I will probably always be a hermit, but there are degrees of hermeticism too. More about this sometime, perhaps. Now, sleep, in the sincere hope of doing a decent job tomorrow, Light willing.

Not quite a parrot

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Sometimes I may be biting over more than I can swallow, but I try to only share what I have at least tasted, if not digested.

There is something I want you to know.  It may seem that I have been on a “Happy Science” spree since last summer, more or less, and there are other people also that inspire me but who you probably find distasteful. This cannot be helped.  You have to understand that I don’t believe anything, much less convey it to others, “because Master Okawa said so”, or because Robert Godwin said so, or Huston Smith, or Wilber or Schuon or Kierkegaard or, Light help us all, Mouravieff.  I may possibly bring forward something because Jesus Christ said so, but probably not anymore.  Rather, if I quote them or (more likely) paraphrase them, it is because my heart said so.

Okawa at least is bound to be happy if he finds out that, because he says repeatedly that you have not understood anything he says until you can tell it in your own words, and do so for five minutes or an hour depending on the needs of those who listen to you.  And that is exactly how I see it too.  So, sorry if we agree, but we did so before I had even heard of him, so there is no helping it!

Now, a human heart is not infallible, quite the opposite.  So when I talk about my heart here, I am not referring to the joy one feels when hearing that there is an easier way and you are allowed to do what you want. The world today is full of easy ways in religion.  Eastern faiths in particular are plagued with sects that say you only need to chant a particular text repeatedly to be saved or enlightened. And there are plenty of Christian churches that have followed the times so if you do the same as the majority of people, neither better nor worse, you’ll fit right in.

What I talk about is something else.  It is finding pieces to the puzzle that is life.  I have told repeatedly that my world is not made up of separate rooms:  Rather, it is as if I stand under one enormous dome, on the walls and ceiling of which are all the world’s sciences, seamlessly merging with their neighbors.  Cosmology gradually changes into astronomy on one side and subatomic physics on the other.  Medicine is inseparable from biochemistry and psychiatry, physics and chemistry fit together.  In this world, my whole world is one single entity, though smaller pieces are missing and the picture blurs when I get close enough to one of the walls. It is finding such pieces that fit the picture, it is the joy of finding those that makes my heart resonate, even if they come from a heretic or a madman.

Nor is this unique to me.  Johan Oscar Smith, founder of the Christian Church colloquially known as “Smith’s Friends”, supposedly said that he would learn even from a drunk man in the street. This is probably a good idea, because that is one of the few cases where people will say something that is not already said in mass media.  When sober and watching one’s reputation, it is common to only say what is already accepted by the group one belongs to.

In any case, I do test what I hear and hold it up against the Light.  If it is not shining brightly, I am wary.  I may refer to it in terms that make it clear that “this is what they say, not what I say”.  Or most commonly I just put it aside. If it seems dangerous, I may warn against it.  But my main interest is in that which I can sense is infused with Light.  That which increases love, hope, courage, peace, and depth in me personally or helps me radiate these things to others. If some people repeatedly give me these experiences, I am willing to live with the fact that they seem to balance between heresy and sheer lunacy, with a dash of blasphemy in the extreme cases.

So what I say is what I believe at the moment.  I may be wrong, and I change my mind from time to time.  But it is what resonates in my heart, and I strive to say it in my own words (unless it is already said perfectly).  After all, apart from keeping my friends updated on my trivial human life, the main reason for this journal is to say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.  Whether those words resonate with your heart or not, is entirely up to the Light.  I cannot choose it, and neither can you.  Hopefully someone, somewhere, sometime will get a little help from something I said.  Or if not, at least sometimes I do.

A little each day

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Like watching a turtle race…  I guess my life looks a bit like that.

Easter here in Norway is almost like a small vacation for me and most workers: From Wednesday mid-day till Tuesday morning. For me, this had an effect I did not intend: Because I normally do my daily brainwave entrainment / meditation before work, I skipped it for almost a week. And my day rhythm began sliding again.

I have chronic Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. Basically my day is 25 hours. This is the normal human condition when living in caves, but in normal humans it is reset by daylight. (And yes, I do see daylight each day, unlike unemployed otaku.) So untreated I fall asleep one hour later each night, until I would fall asleep during work hours. For that period, things are pretty rough, but then I sleep in the afternoon for a while, then evening, then night, and morning again. Or that is how it used to be. With brainwave entrainment I can get enough slow-wave sleep even if I go to sleep and wake up at normal time for society.

But I have to do it daily, or nearly so. Even after months, I am not cured, and perhaps will never be. I can skip a weekend and catch up, but clearly not a week. Then again, it really is a computer-assisted meditation, and meditation should be daily anyway.

This made me think about other things that are best done daily. For instance physical exercise. If I make sure to do a certain minimum amount of exercise even when I don’t have time or energy for a workout, my body will know that it is still in use and maintain itself accordingly. (But not today. Today I am tired and my stomach hurts. Tomorrow, tomorrow… perhaps.)

I should do the same thing with my voice, now that my throat has recovered from the mysterious infection. If I speak each day until I am just about to get sore, perhaps my body will adapt to speaking again. (Based on the theory that not speaking really was the reason why I can only speak a few minutes a day now. It is hard to say; almost no human voluntarily shuts up for years just because they have nothing important to say.)

And then there are exercises that are not for the body but the soul. I already mentioned meditation. Prayer is called the breath of the Christian, so naturally that happens throughout the day, but how about setting aside time for quality time with God? In a successful family there is regularly set time aside for being together, so a child of God should also have some such time, I imagine. The problem with this is that my Heavenly Father tends to ask about my homework.

These days I am fairly steady with the daily habit of reading books of the Truth. I have several tomes of timeless wisdom, some acquired in my youth and some quite recently. I also got two new Happy Science book in the mail yesterday:  “Love, Nurture and Forgive” which is pretty much what you’d think.  If only all the world’s cults had that as their main theme, there would be less poison gas in the subways.

The other book is “Tips to Find Happiness”, but its subtitle is “Creating a Harmonious Home for Your Spouse, Your Children, and Yourself.”  I should probably not read that one every day…