Guide me, O Endless Light! To the space elevator! It will glint from Heaven like lightning!

No, I have no idea which commandment is the smallest. I suspect if ten Rabbis gathered to discuss this, there would be at least ten opinions, probably more. However, there is a reason for my strange subject today.

On the commuter bus, I am still reading the Torah for Dummies, by Arthur Kurzweil. He is very supportive of his students, assuring them that taking an interest in the Torah will not be in vain, even if it is on the “for dummies” level. But when asking several Jewish educators where they recommended a newcomer to Jewish life begin, they all answered: Find one mitzvah (one divine commandment from the Torah), and do it forever. Become an expert on that one mitzvah.

This reminded me brightly of a song of encouragement that the Christian Church at Brunstad used to sing when I was young. It is in Norwegian, but the two lines that struck me translate as follows: “Begin now with the smallest commandment, it will glint from Heaven like lightning.”

When people wanted to discuss the teachings of Jesus Christ, he told them: “If anyone wants to do my Father’s will, he will learn whether the teaching is of God or whether I speak from myself.” Somewhat disturbingly, Ryuho Okawa says something similar. Start giving love without expecting reward from people and see if you don’t get happy! Of course, you do so at your own risk. When you actually begin to do something, you get drawn into whatever greater system of teaching you engage with, be it for good or ill.

It is not like people who take no interest in religion do nothing, either. Even they engage with a system of thought that is prevalent in this world at their time. But the the worldly system of thought is rather different from the religious. This is what I call the lower gravity. When you begin with the smallest commandment, you hook up to a divine “space elevator” which is capable of eventually lifting you up to a height where you can start to feel Earth’s gravity growing weaker, and a new more subtle pull from above. Or so it would seem.

“We may be perverted, but we’re not evil!” There are indeed many people who are off from the ideal in a number of ways, but who are not evil. When given help, encouragement and advice, they can live good lives without quite knowing how or why.

Long-time readers may have noticed that I have kind of latched on to the concept of “giving love”, as espoused by the new religious movement “Happy Science” and its founder and leader Ryuho Okawa. Of course, I did not just randomly decide that I would believe this since he said so. Rather, this is also the essence of Christianity, with which I evidently have had happier experiences than most of my readers. But as one goes through life and changes, an immunity can easily arise to teachings one knew when one was younger. Seeing these again in other words, from another angle, can make them new again, even more so than before. This was what happened to me in this matter.

Looking back on my life, I see that giving love rather than taking it has brought me happiness. Wishing to be loved instead has led to unhappiness, as was the case for much of my late childhood and early youth. By love I don’t just mean romance, in my case hardly at all.  But to be shown respect, to be praised, to be given things etc are also a desire for love, in a wider sense.

(Fun fact: In the computer game The Sims 2, when you click on a pet you get a menu of actions, one of which is “Give love”. Choosing this again gives you the choice between “Stroke” and “Feed treat”. It really is that way with people too: You can stroke their ego or give them something material, it has a similar effect. My former coworker used to say: “Praise the fool and he will work himself to death.”)

Anyway, I have been kind of missionary about this, I realize. I think everyone should give love to the best of their ability, because it makes them happier than waiting for others to give them love (or give them anything at all, really). I have generally held the belief that if you are of the opposite type, waiting for others to give to you, you will live an unhappy life, die an unhappy death, and face an unhappy afterlife.

This may indeed be the case when this attitude goes beyond all bounds and one becomes a black hole of self-made misery. But I just got a small correction to my zeal, by reading another reflection by Mr Okawa. In Happy Science Monthly no 205, he takes a more pragmatic approach:

“People who desire to receive love make up the majority in this world, but a great many of them fail to have it satisfied. That is why Happy Science wants to increase the number of people who can bestow love on others – people who can provide love. At the same time, we wish for people to keep their health as they give love.”

In other words, even though it would be better for them if they got up and did something for others, most people are not able to just up and do that. So if people are unhappy and whine about it, if we enthusiastically tell them that the solution is to do something for others, they may not be able to “get it” and just go on griping. In that case, we need to be able to think: “Fine, have it your way then!” and give them love, respect, praise and birthday gifts; but with wisdom so that we are not sucked dry by their bottomless hunger for receiving and receiving.

This is obviously the case with children. Even I knew that. No matter how much you may wish that children were actually grateful and tried to help themselves and others, they are severely restricted in that regard. They seem to be programmed to receive more than they give, which of course in a sense they are. If not, they would not be able to grow up, since they start with nothing.

But adults should know better, is how I have been thinking. After all, they already carry a burden of debt, morally speaking I mean. Whether they know it or not, they have all received a large amount of love – in the wider sense – during their childhood, otherwise they would not have been alive now.

Think about this: If a baby or small child is left in a place where there are no people, like a forest or an abandoned house, it will with certainty die within days. Now, the people who raised you may have been terrible people, they may have been evil, they may have caused you many forms of suffering and may have told you often that they hated you. But if you are alive, the fact remains that they have been better than nothing. Because it is a scientific fact that alone, you would have been dead. Therefore, even if they honestly believed that they hated you, something has compelled them to give you love anyway, no matter how grudgingly.

In short, the fact that you lived to adulthood shows beyond any doubt that you have received goodness from others, probably from many others. Therefore, no matter how much you may wish to hate the world and particularly those who raised you, the fact remains that you have received goodness and are obliged to give goodness to other people in order to maintain your karma balance, or more bluntly to not be a jerk.

But in practice, there will always be a number of people who just don’t get it. They don’t want to be bad, but they don’t really see the Light. For various reasons, they can’t even in their mind restore their karma balance to positive. In fact, I may be one of them. Besides being a very whiny kid until well into high school, I have also have long phases in my life where I wanted little to do with humans. In my job, I did as little as I could get away with, thinking: “God gave me this job to punish me, I cannot really do anything useful here, I am not being paid enough to bother, and I cannot afford to take further education so I could actually do anything useful.” Telling myself things like that, I spent a long time doing good only casually, on a whim, when I felt like it.

There are people who for various reasons are trapped in this mindset or worse for the duration of their adult life. But what I have now begun to think is that not all of these go to hell, in this life or the next. People who lack the ability for self-reflection can be said to live a 4-dimensional life, as they have no access to spirituality and the dimensions beyond. But not all of the purely 4-dimensional realm is a hell. If people live in a good environment where they receive goodness from others, many of them are able to live good lives. They may not be entirely able to pay back their karma balance, but they don’t sink into despair or get twisted into evil and hate either. They kind of stumble through life living reasonably good and pleasant lives as long as the environment is good.

What spiritual people can do, then, is to help provide such environment. By encouraging the more materialist people, wisely, they can provide them with a kind of light or happiness that these again can spread to others until it runs out and they need to be filled up again from someone who has an outside source.

If you think about it, you have probably met such people who have a strange ability to cheer people up, comfort them without encouraging self-pity, and make others feel strangely energetic for a while.  When faced with non-spiritual people, this is a much more useful approach than insisting that they come as they are and become like us. Some people simply are not ready for that, and may not be in this lifetime. But if they can refrain from bitterness and find forgiveness, they can live good and somewhat happy lives and die without holding grudges.

There are those who become so warped that even a good person will despair in their presence, and only a saint can handle them without getting infected by their darkness. These are not the ones I am talking about. Rather, there are many who just don’t see much further than their nose, spiritually speaking, and are in a sense not meant to. They just don’t have the capacity for it. Even some intelligent people may be ridiculously earth-bound. These people are in danger, but as long as they are not actually messing around with darkness, they can still channel goodness that is given to them from other people.

Yeah, that was pretty long and not as concise as I usually write. It is more of a first impression.

Who can bear the Light of Heaven? (Screenshot from the anime “The Laws of Eternity”, fittingly enough.)

I don’t really feel I am the right person to expound on Jesus’ words that “blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God”.  I just briefly want to say that I don’t think it means that people who never have sex will see some guy on a big chair in the sky. Well, I suppose that could happen too, but that is not really the point.

When we step into the spirit world, to stand before the Light, we should be transparent. That is what I think it means.  We are right now like imperfect crystals, which may let the Light through, but distorted by inner fault lines and shadowed by dark spots. These spots, I would say, are our worldly nature:  The strong sense of self, of me me me, of wanting things my way.

For instance when we pray for someone, it could be that we don’t like certain things about that person and so we pray for God to change him.  In that case, we are simply not seeing God. We are not at all pure of heart in such a situation, and our self is not transparent so God / the Light can shine through. When we later meet that person again, we are still the same, and the Light does not shine through us.

We may also pray for someone because they are dear to us, but it may still be an attachment. Someone is ill and we pray to God that God may heal them, because we cannot bear to see them suffer, nor can we bear to part with them. But the reason for our request is still “my will be done, not thine, O God”. Although the Light shines through us, there is a faultline within the crystal of our self, so that the Light is diverted. We may feel exceedingly holy in such a case, and I am not saying we are doing anything wrong as such.  But it is still about me.

When someone is pure of heart, the difference between my will and God’s falls away, at least for a brief moment.  The self becomes transparent, and there is no subject or object. There is no “God, give me this”, “God, do this for me”.  There is simply a taking part in the love that God has for His creatures.

But who is capable of this?  Who has become so pure of heart that the self has become transparent? To even experience this for a brief moment can change a life forever. But who can live a life like that, day by day? Who can bear such brightness?  I sure can’t, at the present time.

Prayer? Prayer is where you step outside your physical body and into a vast, multidimensional realm where spiritual entities, such as angels and even more incomprehensible beings, serenely bear witness from the sidelines as you rise toward the all-powerful, uncreated Light of all universe to tell It what you think It should do on Earth. Or, alternatively, briefly state the purpose of your visit and attentively wait to learn the will of Heaven. It’s your choice, really. Prayer is what you make it, more or less.

I was honestly planning to write a slice of life entry today, and along comes a llama and asks: “What about prayer?” What about it indeed.

The context was a question about to what extent I think thoughts affect the world, to which I had replied, mostly to the extent that we act on them. This may not seem much, but it is indeed pretty important. We are constantly acting out our thoughts in some form or another, so they contribute greatly to our footprint in this world.

What about prayer? Prayer influences our thoughts. Our thoughts influences our actions. Our actions influences the world. And let me add here that the actual physical horsepower put into our actions is not necessarily the important part. To be at the right place at the right time, to say the right words or do that little thing that needs to be done, can have far greater effects than waving our arms and legs with great energy doing things that could have done themselves without our pushing and pulling, or been done better by others. I don’t claim any perfection in this (which sorts under “wisdom”), but it is a fact. If prayer causes you to be at the right place at the right time, it can have great effect without messing with the laws of nature unnecessarily.

I think a lot of people have met a person, or even an object, that was just at the right place at the right time to change the course of a life. It is rare that anyone just marches straight ahead through life.

Back to prayer. What is it? I should not really be the one to teach you that, since there are people who metaphorically speaking hold a doctorate in prayer while I am still in kindergarten. The writings of some of the old saints are still in print, and there is Holy Scripture. I am not worthy to teach such things. But then I think of some of the stuff that goes as religion on the Net these days, and I hope God will forgive me for saying a few words anyway.

Rattling off your wish list is not an ideal prayer. God is not Santa Claus. (With all due respect for Santa Claus, who was known as a holy man back when he lived in Smyrna.)

Jesus made this a point of teaching. Don’t tell God in great detail what you need, God knows already! Also, don’t use prayer to tell other people how religious you are, that makes your prayer worthless. Pray in secret. Don’t use a lot of words when you pray. This is the teaching of Jesus Christ regarding prayer. He also gave an example prayer, which I trust you know if you are a civilized English-speaker.

Thank you, Jesus. Now back to our scheduled rambling. The purpose of prayer is not magic, or “spooky action at a distance” as Einstein famously described quantum physics. It is no wonder that quantum physics is the darling of the New Age movement, where few if any know more than the Science Illustrated version of what works, much less HOW it works. If you simply referred to the entire quantum science as “spooky action at a distance”, and knew no more of it, this would be enough to fully understand why it gets so much love from my New Age friends.

The purpose of prayer is not to make my favorite football team win the next match, or to ensure that I get the next promotion and my rival does not. These things are an abomination in my eyes, although God may be more tolerant. (He better be tolerant, or I’m in deep trouble, not least for writing about things above my pray grade.)

Let’s cut to the cheese: Spirit rules matter. Matter does not rule spirit. This is how we must understand prayer.

We exist in bodies for the purpose of the spirit, which uses our bodies to unfold our destiny. In addition to destiny there is also fate, which is what the world does to us. Destiny is what we do to the world.

If you are a materialist, you believe that spirit does not exist as such, but that what we call spirit is a side effect of our brain. In that case, the above paragraph makes no sense. And in that case, you probably still have a Bronze Age idea of prayer: I pray to the gods, and make sacrifices, and the gods make sure that I live long and prosper. Now, there is nothing exactly wrong with that, and billions of people have probably lived and died in this worldview. But as a highly refined person living today, you probably find it disturbing and kind of icky, and so you reject religion entirely. Actually it is disturbing and kind of icky. As the old advertisement said: I have upped my standards, now up yours!

To be honest, I still resort to Bronze Age prayer when I get seriously ill. It seems to work too, although I think it is safe to say that at some point I am going to die regardless of prayer.

Back to basics. Because spirit is the first mover, the rightful ruler of the body, it makes no sense for the body-consciousness to use the spirit as a tool. The opposite should be the case: The spirit-consciousness should use the body as a tool.

Bronze Age prayer basically is just this: The body-consciousness (which was pretty much the best that what was available at the time) makes request of the spirit to arrange the outer world for the benefit of the body-consciousness, or Ego.

With the coming of Jesus Christ, things were turned upside down, which is to say, right side up finally. (This was a completion of Judaism rather than a contradiction. Many Rabbis will be able to explain this better than I.) In this new light, the purpose of prayer is that God’s will be done. The priorities then go from God, through the human spirit, and meet the ego at its home turf. This is where the ego ideally resigns its claim to rule: Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. Not mine. That is a long canvas to bleach though, or perhaps I am just lazy. A curious passage in the book of Revelation shows the 24 elders throwing down their crowns. I have no idea who the 24 elders are, but throwing down our crowns is the new way of prayer.

Then, if I pray for God to heal me from some illness, the understanding is that this will advance the cause of God or at least my human spirit, which gets time to unfold my destiny. I may technically pray for whatever I honestly believe is in harmony with the Divine will, but I may not pray for what I believe is merely for the benefit of the ego. Past a certain point, such prayers become counterproductive and even dangerous. They are not so at the beginning, but once a certain degree of Light is assimilated, egoic prayer is harmful.

Compare this to someone climbing a mountain, and there is a rope fastened to a spike hammered into the stone. When you are below that point, pulling the rope will haul you upward. When you are above that point, pulling toward it is sheer insanity.

So if someone at my current level of Enlightenment (which admittedly is not very much) were to sincerely pray to God for money, God would quite likely answer: CUT YOUR HAIR AND GET A JOB! or words to that effect. Or as happened when I got a throat infection and prayed to God, he answered my prayer. The answer was GO SEE A DOCTOR. Most of us have the good sense to put the milk in the fridge instead of leaving it out on the table in summer while praying fervently to God to protect it from bacteria. Sometimes a miracle is in order, but the less magic, the better. And the decision is not with the ego.

The early books of Ryuho Okawa are at exactly this level, which is probably why they resonate so strongly with me, even though he thinks he is a God from Venus and I think he is a writer from Japan. In one of them, Okawa writes that “Unlike some religious people, I will not give you money” if you are poor. He does however teach people how to improve their mindset and their work skills. You may have heard the phrase: “Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him to fish and he has food for a lifetime.” Okawa, and I, would probably add that he should also have some fish to give away, if all goes well.

Prayer is a meeting with God, or a representative of God in the spirit world. I think it should be obvious who is in charge of setting the agenda, if all goes well.

In conclusion: Prayer is not a tool for spooky action at a distance. Such a thing may indeed happen, but that is not the purpose of prayer as such. The purpose of prayer is the glory of the Light, and its streaming into the world of matter, so that all things may in the end be sanctified, and Earth be an extension of Heaven, the Realm of Light.

Please bear in mind that there are higher levels of prayer than what I know of, much less practice. Once you are above this, forget it. Step on me and climb higher. That is why I am here. Or so I hope.

***

(And please don’t get the impression that I spend my days entranced in prayer. If I did, when would I get time to play The Sims 2 and City of Heroes?)

In Buddhism, to die a peaceful death you should be free from excessive or misdirected desire. Having no memory of being dead, I can only say that this also seems to hold true for living a peaceful life.

Still looking at the Butterflies book. Now we have come to the problem with attachment.  It is mentioned in various forms in various religions, and the word usually translated as “attachment” is particularly common in Buddhism. The classical Buddhism does not speak about sin, or at least rarely, although it does have precepts. Instead, its problem is with attachments. People get attached to this and that, and so they don’t make it to Nirvana, the freedom from suffering.

The book now goes into some detail in pointing out that desires are not the problem, and the objects of the desires are not the problem. It is the attachment to having your desire fulfilled that is a problem.

I will just have to take his word for him having desires he does not care whether are fulfilled or not. I am not sure I would have used a word as strong as “desire” about something I don’t really care whether happens or not.  A wish, perhaps. A fancy. A dream. Desire I reserve for things that cause emotion.  And emotion, according to this book, is bad.  Well, nothing is bad, but emotions are to be avoided, so I guess they are bad anyway. You know what I mean.

To take a different teacher, Ryuho Okawa says that our attachments are the things that our mind comes back to when we are at rest during the day. When we don’t think about anything else, if we have an attachment, the mind will be drawn back to that particular thing.

The obvious example would be falling in love. From what I have read about this phenomenon and seen on movies, the person who is in love will think about the other person whenever there is nothing very important going on, and sometimes even then. There is definitely emotion there, lots and lots of it. And the person in love is not relaxed about the outcome, to say the least. Or so I have been told.

On the other hand, Okawa says that love that gives without expecting anything in return is not an attachment, even if you spend time thinking about how to help people. I agree with him, but I am not an expert on Buddhism. I don’t think there is anything compulsive about love that does not expect anything, though, so he is probably right in this.

I don’t know how this works with your children, if any. In classic religions, monks and nuns were assumed to have a better chance of salvation, and not having to worry about the kids was probably a big part of that.  I don’t think there was much gain in the “not having to think about sex” department, at least for the monks. It seems that the only guys who forget about sex are those who have been married a while. But I may be wrong, having never been married.

But I think people who have children tend to worry about them a lot, and this seems to be a mixture of love and attachment. They think about how they can help their children, but they also think about many unnecessary things regarding their children, unrealistic worries and selfish thoughts about how the kids may cause trouble for themselves. (Or quite likely already have caused trouble, kids being kids after all. What is wrong with them that they Just Can’t Listen??)  So it is a very intertwined thing and not easy to find out. I cannot with a straight face give advice about kids anyway.

But some attachment are obvious and obviously negative. Like when you go back and think about injustice that others have done against you. I wrote about that recently, how this can turn people into demons while still alive, making a hell for themselves and those who listen to them. It is not the injustice itself that causes this infernal transformation, but the way people repeat it day by day, cutting the soul wound open again and again until it festers and goes gangrenous.

You already know from experience that your body can heal: I don’t think there is a boy who has not cut or scraped himself or broken or twisted something, usually several times. Yet with the exception of broken bones that are set wrong, you heal with just a small scar. You don’t go around and suffer for the rest of your life because you scraped your knee badly when you were 10.  But there are people who don’t realize that the soul can also heal. They keep suffering for decades because of something that is in the past. You can say that these are like bones set wrong, that grow back in a painful and debilitating way. It may be necessary to break them again to heal properly, and this needs professional assistance.

You may say that these attachments are desires to change the past. That is a crazy desire, of course. We can never change the past. But desires are often crazy. In fact, that is a main problem with them. To desire food when you have not eaten for a while is normal and healthy, and we don’t really talk about that. We talk about desires that bind the soul.

When I was much younger than today, obviously, I did not want Jesus to come back until after Christmas. That was pretty childish, although I was probably not an actual child – we never talked about the return of Jesus in my childhood – but obviously I was still very young.  This is a great example of attachment. The Christmas (probably the receiving of gifts) was the attachment, while the coming of Jesus represents the eternal peace or the heavenly world.

So from a theist point of view, you could say that if there is something we want more than Heaven, it is definitely an attachment.  There had better not be any such things when we die, or we won’t die a peaceful death. But correspondingly, there better not be any such extreme wants while we live, or we won’t live a peaceful life! Now that most humans actually live in countries that are not in war or civil war, it would be a terrible waste to inflict the suffering of unrest upon oneself.

But that’s what we do. And, to quote the standard ending for Norwegian fairy tales: “If they aren’t dead, they are still alive.” So it is also with our attachments, and the useless suffering they bring.