Category Archives: religion

Craziness and/or religion

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Is the monster inside you growing bigger and bigger? Religion can help! Probably. At least some religions.

Some time ago said something impolite but true: People are stupid and crazy. By this I mean that throughout history, or even today, most people are not very bright, and not entirely sane either.  Even in our enlightened (?) age, there is hardly a soul that does not harbor some phobia or addiction or obsession or fetish. For some of us, these don’t hamper us much in ordinary life, and tend to diminish over time. (Or we outgrow them.) Not everyone is so blessed, though: Many people live in severe suffering even if they don’t have bodily pain.

I believe we should see the world’s religions in this light. To refer to one of them, there is a story of some people who were entrusted fairly large amounts of money while their boss was abroad. Unfortunately, one of them buried his part of the money, then dug it back up when his master returned.  This did not go over well:  “Why didn’t you at least place your money in the bank so I could get it back with interest!”  One interpretation of this is simply:  If you don’t know what to do, listen to someone who knows better than yourself.

Organized religion is basically some people recognizing that there are others who are saner than themselves, and taking their advice. (And then someone finds a way to make money from it. But let us skip that part today.)

So basically, people don’t become stupid and crazy from religion. Rather, they are already so stupid and crazy that they see their religion as an oasis of insight and peace by comparison. This holds true even if the religion is rather disturbing as seen by a more enlightened soul.  For instance, it is unlikely that anyone goes to listen to Reverend Jeremiah Wright with the thought: “I need to dumb down, I need to become more crazy. This guy should help.”  Rather, if they feel affected that way, they are unlikely to ever come back. His regulars are people to whom this guy is a paragon of sanity.

The same understanding applies to history. Old religions, such as the first books of the Old Testament, contain some pretty bizarre stuff. Like the commandment to kill any couples that have sex during menstruation, to take a well known example. If you think that’s bad, keep in mind that to sentence someone to death Moses required two or three reliable witnesses, that is to say adult men of good repute.  The notion that people at the time lived in a society where unfriendly adult men of good repute witnessed your menstruation and your sex is rather more disturbing than the law itself.  In what kind of bizarre world would this be a problem in the first place?

The world really was bizarre back then. High school history books don’t go into this, which may be for the best concerning the stability of mind among their readers. But civilization back then was a new thing and was basically still experimental. Like a beta version, you know. Not very refined, lacking features, and prone to crashing.

There are several such seemingly absurd passages in old religions. God hates shrimps? Cows are holy? Or oaks? Blood from heifers take away sins? And yet we can have confidence that to people at the time, these doctrines were a great relief from the craziness that was tumbling around inside their heads. “OMG there is a cow, is it evil? What is the purpose of cows in the cosmic order of things? What will happen to me if I don’t find out?”

What is considered crazy varies not only with the times but also somewhat with geography. For instance I noticed this while reading the recently translated book Change Your Life, Change the World by Japanese author Ryuho Okawa.  It contained much general spiritual reflection and modern, sensible ethical advice.  It also included a couple paragraphs about how souls of aliens from the Pleiades had recently begun incarnating in human bodies and would prepare for the upcoming mass immigration from their home planets of aliens in physical form.  Then the usual exhortations toward love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress resumed.  I can only assumed that this must be unremarkable to the Japanese audience, where Mr Okawa has numerous bestsellers and is consulted by leading politicians.  (A recent prime minister there, by the way, was called “the alien” by his friends, and his wife had been abducted by Venusians.  Neither of these were part of his decision to step down recently.)

So, religion has been a steady influx of sanity in a world where complete hysteria was the usual order of the day. It still is, but an increasing part of the populace is getting more sane than their priests. Thank the Light for that! So does that mean we should abandon the concept of organized religion and leave it to the shrinks to clean up the remaining insanity?

Well, as an individual, you should probably not stick with a religion you consider less sane than yourself. But in that comparison, don’t be too quick to overestimate yourself, as people often are. If you are still unable to control your body when influenced by anger or lust, fear or disgust, then you’re still in kindergarten and need to work on your sanity.  The fact that some insane behavior is common in your culture does not make it sane.

For instance, we are aware that phobia – irrational fear – is not quite sane. But pretty much nobody thinks of the opposite, irrational lack of fear.  Here in Norway, for instance, it is quite common to fearlessly have unprotected sexual intercourse with white people. We are also adopting the American way of eating (huge portions), without fear of the unpleasant lfiestyle diseases that follow. Taking some advice from old-fashioned religion could have prevented all of this “quiet insanity”.

That is not to say that religions should not upgrade themselves. They have certainly done that before. Whenever you run into one of those people who get obnoxious about how the Bible is God’s Unchanging Word, just ask if you can assume that he really does greet the brethren with a holy kiss, and literally wash their feet. Chances are he does not, because no matter how much it is God’s Word, we quietly ignore it when it gets icky. Or insane.  This was a natural process until recently, when some people – mostly in America – regressed.  Contrast this with St Augustine, one of the church fathers who lived around the onset of the Dark Ages. He rightly argued that the pagans would think we were fools if we interpreted the Book of Genesis literally. This is still sane advice. Certain other religions could have something to learn too.

I am still not convinced that we’ll increase the sanity factor of religion by including UFOs though. At least not here in Europe. (Your UFO experiences may vary, in which case you may want a religion that has a clear view on how to deal with extraterrestrials.)

Religion and/or insanity

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If you cry because you did not understand other people’s feelings, it may be repentance. If you cry because other people don’t understand your feelings, it is more likely depression.

My only curious reader (I can see on my bandwidth log that the rest of you are out there, but evidently not curious enough to comment or mail me) has another question worthy of a small essay.

How do you tell the difference between a religious/spiritual experience and insanity or a hallucination?

First off, hallucinations are optional. There are certainly people who see lights or shapes or hear voices from beyond, but these are just the form their revelation clothes itself in. You just said it was a spiritual experience, right? Our senses are not our spirit, even in ordinary life. The blind is no less spiritual than the seeing, and old people may gradually lose their hearing but their spirit is unchanged. So the form in which the revelation imparts itself is not important. In fact, having high-resolution visions can scare people or puff them up, neither of which is the purpose of revelation.

What is important is a change of heart. And in that regard, I have to say that there is no objective distinction between the outbreak of religion and insanity, except that they have opposite direction.  In fact, there is every year in every western country (and probably elsewhere too) numerous people who go insane and who personally believe that their insanity is religion.

It is necessary that you see yourself objectively from outside in order to establish whether your experience is spiritual or just insane.

First off, insanity is incoherent. This is more or less its calling card. Religion, on the other hand, should be coherent. It should make the pieces come together and increase the sense of meaning and purpose.

Next, religion causes the will to serve. You may remember the famous line from Milton, where he lets Lucifer say that it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven. So if your spiritual experience causes you to think that others should serve you, then you may have had a meeting with an evil spirit, I suppose. Or you may just be insane.  In either case, it is certainly not a glimpse of Heaven you have had. For if you had, you would know the value of serving, of helping others, that it is its own reward and needs no other.

Generally, someone who knows of Heaven only from hearsay may think that if he is good and humble here on Earth, he will get his reward in Heaven. This reward, whatever it is, should then consist of something else than being good and humble.  But someone who has glimpsed Heaven in some way will know that to serve (which is the combination of goodness and humility) is actually Heaven itself.

But certainly it can look like insanity for people around you. The old way of hoarding stuff, seeking status, and using others for our own pleasure is pretty much the norm, so you will look strange and your old friends may shun you.

And of course, for most of us, the spiritual experience is a pretty brief thing. So we will be left in a kind of in-between state of mind, where the old nature, the small self, tries to reassert itself. In most cases it succeeds, at least to some degree and for some time. Few are those who turn suddenly from sinner to saint, although it has certainly happened.

So in short, the religious or spiritual experience is not measured by its intensity or its display of visions or voices, but by its ability to turn our life toward a much higher purpose. If that does not happen, there is every reason to question it.

Repentance is awesome

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This guy has a lot to repent. Then again, so had I.

Rabbi Steinsaltz writes in his book The Thirteen-petalled Rose that God created repentance before He created the world. That may sound absurd, but in the view of the Rabbis, repentance does not just bring us back to the same state as if we had not transgressed, but to a higher state.

Obviously you cannot take this to mean that we should look for opportunities to sin so we can repent. Nothing good can come from that. We are already human, after all, so there is absolutely no need to go out of our way to make mistakes. To err is human, so any one of us will find something already in our life if we reflect on ourselves. This is certain to be true.

The purpose of self-reflection and repentance is not to depress ourselves. Repentance brings joy and gratitude. Of course it does not feel good right away when we look at ourselves and think “What the hell have I been doing?”.  If we can feel sadness at such a time, it is a grace, a gift from Heaven. But if we can repent even if we feel nothing, that is also a grace. In any case, no matter what we feel, when we realize the error of our ways, the Truth will set us free. Though sometimes we have to pent and repent until it sticks.

So yeah, I’ve been repenting. It is awesome. I am very grateful that the escalator of repentance was created, whether it was before or after the world.

***

If we go to bed and mysteriously cannot sleep, it may be a message from our subconscious that we need a timeout, to “commune with my heart on my bed” as the King James Bible says.  In the past, when there was no electric light and the night was long, it was common to wake up in the middle of the night and lie in silence for a while. This is a good time to look back on the day if we have not already, and ask ourselves :

Was my day worthy of my aspiration for life and eternity? Did my mind point steadily toward my goal like a compass needle?

Humans are beings who make mistakes, so there is a good chance we made some.  Some are small, some seem small until we get a good look at them and go OMG what the Hell was I thinking?? And if we realize that and don’t defend ourselves, then we will definitely be closer to the Light than when we started, even if we experience some sadness along the way.

Paladins, celibates and other abominations

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Moderately abominable paladin: Not so gay, but very very celibate.

One shall read much before the eyes pop out. I recently read an article by Dennis Prager.

This Prager fellow is spoken of with the greatest respect by my conservative friends, one would almost expect him to be some kind of hero of our time. Well, I suppose this may be the case under some circumstances.

In any case, it is strange how pieces of puzzles fall together as one lives one’s life, an effect often called “synchronicity” these days.

***

Does anything ever begin? But we can make a beginning on the day when I was quietly reading Dante’s most famous work, the Divine Comedy.  Now in the (so far slowly) declining years of my body, I am reading up on some timeless classics which every civilized person ought to know, but which I don’t. I mean, I am so busy now that we have all this spare time, so there just hasn’t been time for the pillars of western civilization. This includes Dante who pretty much defined the folk theology of the late Middle Ages. Some of his concepts, like the circles of Hell, have become part of common speech.

While reading my Dante, I found a drive-by reference to “Orlando” and his horn. This sounded vaguely familiar, but something was off. Could Orlando be, apart from a place with an airport, also the Italian name for Roland? Wikipedia sure thinks so. And Roland was someone I vaguely knew from my childhood. Well, not in person, but from the Norwegian folk song “Roland og Magnus Kongjen” (Roland and Magnus the King), also known simply as Rolandskvadet (song of Roland, see also the much longer French “Chanson de Roland”.)

No points for guessing why that particular song lodged in my memory.

Over the next days, I spent some hours reading up on medieval literature. I realized that the peers of Charlemagne’s court were the original paladins, which spawned not only a deluge of romance stories but also some legends that are more comparable to modern superhero stories or the Greek and Norse mythology. These men were seen as larger than life. Though at least some of them were real men from history, they were transformed into archetypes as the centuries passed. Legend became myth.

What does this have to do with Dennis Prager?  Less than he thinks, I would say. He referenced my beloved paladins in his article “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism (and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality”. In this, he argues not only that the paladins in Chanson de Roland were gay, but that celibate men (and women) are less than human.

I can defend myself, but I would encourage Mr Prager to keep his hands off my paladins. It’s bad enough with the yaoi fangirls writing gay paladin fiction without a renowned Conservative adding fuel to the fire.

***

Now, I don’t think people and their works are generally pure good or pure evil. I like to think I am more nuanced than toddlers, people with borderline personality disorder, and American political bloggers. (I will assume, despite frequent anonymity, that these are three distinct groups.)

And Mr Prager’s article certainly has its good points, and is a welcome – maybe even necessary – contribution to the debate. In particular, someone had to point out that the ancient world was not like USA in the 1950es. Young people today may not know, but the world where Judaism first appeared was horrifyingly alien. Civilization was still young and somewhat experimental. Notably, women were literally treated as slaves: Not in the sense that hubby went from the dinner table straight to the couch without doing the dishes, but in the sense of being shipped off to some unknown house around the age of 9, there to be brutally raped and put to hard work, and harshly beaten if the work did not please their husband / owner and his family. Boys were somewhat better off, but were still subject to sexual abuse by older men on a regular basis. You may remember from history class that in ancient Greece, there was an elaborate system in which men of the upper classes would induce barely pubescent boys to love in the physical sense as well as the more romantic adoration or idealization. This was less regulated in other cultures, but the man-boy love association was a staple of coming of age in early civilizations.

From the dawn of civilization, religion has sought to exert a civilizing influence on human sexuality, among other things.  (Food being probably even more prominent.) In Bronze Age religions, this sanctification of sexuality took the form of temple prostitution and also public religious rituals of a sexual nature. In other words, rather than have the men roam freely and rape anything that couldn’t fight back, the Bronze Age religions encouraged them to instead visit the temple and have sex with one of the temple priestesses or cute boys (or sometimes sacred eunuchs) residing there.

Dennis Prager is, understandably, horrified by this practice. So was Yahweh’s prophets, and there are several references to these things in the Bible, some oblique and some pretty explicit. But if you  travel with your mind back through time, you will realize that the Bronze Age religions (usually centered on fertility goddesses) did what little they could to tame the male beast. In the stone age, people had lived in tribes where everyone knew everyone and most people were related. With the break-up of the small tribe, people were cast into a world of strangers, and the male libido, no longer under mom’s wakeful eyes, went wild. We have been working on getting this creature integrated in civilization ever since.

Be that as it may, a new age dawned in the Middle East with Judaism. Marriage already existed, but it was mainly a matter of ensured paternity, not a mutual union. Men were still visiting prostitutes as a matter of course. You will find this mentioned casually in the early books of the Bible. Judah impregnated his son’s wife thinking that she was a prostitute, and thus begat the lineage that would lead to King David and ultimately to Joseph of Nazareth. Samson, the Biblical hero who redeemed himself by killing himself along with a couple thousand infidels and a public building, had a well documented habit of sleeping around, which was fine as long as he stuck with prostitutes and did not get attached to them. When he fell in love with Dalilah, things turned nasty. But sleeping around was OK. Sometimes a man got to do what a man got to do.

The prostitutes are still among us, but they are not employed by the churches.  And the boys are definitely not accepted. (Contrary to some liberal media, the altar boys are generally not there for that purpose.)

Judaism, then, moved the “sacredness” of sex out of the temples and into the home. The sacred union of man and woman was now not a temple ritual, but marriage itself, which had before had a function more akin to slavery.

This is pretty much as far as we have come even today. It has taken its sweet time. Kings and the upper class used to have courtesans and concubines well into the middle ages, if not modernity. (It was usually more discreet in recent years.) The teachings of Jesus Christ about not even ogling other women have few adherents even 2000 years later, but I feel sure its time will come as well. We are talking about changes to basic human behavior, so millennia may be needed to complete the transformation.

***

It is an irony that the focus on homosexuality in the past century has sounded the death knell for the kind of deep affection between men which was idealized not just in the medieval paladin literature, but well into the cowboy age. A bond of love that is not sexual, but intimate in the ways of the soul. When modern liberals read about love between men in ages past, they naturally suppose that they are seeing gay characters, but this is not necessarily the case. Certainly I would have wished that at least conservatives would still be able to recognize this, but even that time may be over.

It is, incidentally, the same with children. Today, a father cannot even bathe his own children for fear that he may be imprisoned as a child molester, should he ever have a fall-out with his wife.  Women can still be affectionate toward each other and children, long may it last.

***

The sanctification of marriage necessarily means that any other lifestyle becomes suspect. Prager is not the first to bring up this. I was still young when I first read the Rabbinical saying that “a man who is unwed after the age of thirty is under God’s curse”. Certainly this was also the prevailing attitude of the Christian Church, and one of the reasons why I slipped out of there. (I still think of myself as a Christian, but not a Churchian, unfortunately.) Even if a man was celibate in word and thought (this was supposed to be possible, albeit only with divine intervention), he was still depriving a woman of a husband. This was a sin, unless one had a really good excuse.

Prager brings up the point that single men commit almost all coarse crime, like violence and drug crime. He seems utterly unaware of the possibility that the causation could be the other way: That most women would hesitate to marry a notorious criminal. (Many of them have girlfriends, though. I guess these are not the marrying type.) Even so, I think he may be onto something. Having a wife waiting for you at home may really make you less likely to do something that could get you imprisoned or dead. Conversely, the need to constantly impress new girls may be a powerful force to push young men into crimes.

That’s still a bit from assuming that being single means you have given your heart and soul to the powers of Death. It may be the Rabbis who think so and not Prager, but this is hard to say for sure from the text of the article.

Is a bachelor actually only half a human until he finds the woman who will make him complete?  I think that is the case for some. One of my friends, a good and admirable young man (though less young than when I first met him) certainly seems very troubled by it. Another is more quiet on the topic, but still hatches plans to get hitched. A third… actually, I cannot remember if there is a third. I think the rest may be either married (or nearly so), or still young, or… non-mainstream in various ways as regards their intimate behavior. And even among those, there are some who feel incomplete.

Not I. Well, perhaps a little. Like 98% complete or some such. I enjoyed hanging out with my female best friend a couple times a year, as I did ten years ago.  But being half a human? Dear complete humans, no offense, but don’t you already have your work cut out for you to keep up with the happiness I have been given, no matter how much sacred sex you have in your marriage? You better amp it up already.

And may Light have mercy on us all if I actually were to level up to my supposed human potential. ^_^

Roland set horn to bloodied mouth, and blew it in his wrath;
rent was wall and marble stones for a distance of nine days’ march.
-Roland & Magnus the King.

So, King Magnus, did the earth move for you too? ^_^

Happy Science on air

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OK, perhaps not quite as literally as the two young happy scientists flying in the anime “The Laws of Eternity”, also by Happy Science.

Actually, “Happy Science on Air” is the new broadcast / webcast from the optimistic little Japanese religion. It is in English and is broadcast each Friday morning in New Zealand. You can listen to it for a week on PlanetAudio.

I want to say a few words about the first ever broadcast, which was this Friday. It was, naturally, a bit of an introduction to Happy Science.  I particularly enjoyed his explanation of love based on his own life. It was spot on and memorable.  There is a lot of suffering in the world because people want to be loved, instead of just loving another.  Obviously when you are a small child, you need to be on the receiving end of love, or you die. As an adult, however, you need to be on the giving side of love. This is the law of life.

The weakness of the program was that, despite the best intentions, it basically preached to the choir. If there were any curious listeners who were not already familiar with Happy Science, I feel pretty sure they turned off quickly when Mr Bellingham asserted that Ryuho Okawa was God and Buddha. It may not be obvious after some months in the sect, but this really is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary proof. It is certainly not something one simply states as a fact and then goes on.

Because of this, it would probably have been better if they had skipped the whole “Ryuho Okawa is God and Buddha” thing at this point.  Especially since it is not something he used to bring up on his own in his early books.

Let me add something of my own here.

I have 17 books by Ryuho Okawa, and ordered another. I would have more if they were publicly available.  There are a number of interesting titles which seem to only be available in temples, presumably for members only. Perhaps those are where Okawa goes on in some detail about his divinity, because it is little more than implied in the books I have read, in many of them not mentioned at all. He does bring it up a few times in some of them though, but never in the form of requiring any kind of service or worship from others. Rather, he brings it up as an explanation of why he has dedicated his life to serve the world.

Of course, you can dedicate your life to the service of mankind without being an incarnation of the highest God.  Well, to some degree you can. Actually if you are filled with love for all people to an extreme degree, you cannot avoid being an extension of God, but let us not get into that level of detail here.

Anyway, if you are curious and have half an hour, follow the link. It is pretty simple, certainly if you understand my writing you understand Happy Science on Air even more easily. Whether you believe it is another matter. I hope at least you take with you the understanding that love is something you give, and this is how you become happy. In that regard at the very least, their science of happiness is spot on!

Time to repent again

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“Pent and repent as necessary”! It is simple, but not easy, which is why we tend to wait until something horrifying happens. Can I budge that trend?

I was leaving the supermarket when my conscience, or some other helpful voice in my heart, brought up my current food shopping habits. Like the small stack of svele (small thick Norwegian pancakes), a meal of which costs the same as a large bread. There is nothing wrong in buying these as such – they are harmless to the body, and a traditional Norwegian food produced locally, something one might want to encourage. However, along with most of my other food, it is unnecessarily expensive. My food costs are not extremely high, since I never dine out these days, and rarely ever buy even weakly alcoholic drinks (alcohol is taxed extremely in Norway). But I buy small portions of ready-made food, like the afore mentioned pancakes, and desserts, and these are quite expensive.

“You still have debt from when you moved a year ago” pointed out the voice in my heart. “Yes, you are paying it down, but slowly. You think you can live with it, but can you die with it? In the spirit world, almost everyone who has lived – and even most who are alive today – have lived in poverty. How will you feel coming there and leaving a debt on Earth because of your gluttony? Does this bring glory to the Name?”

I think that is a valid point. I have a conscious practice of not living as if each day was my last, because I believe our expectations tend to influence us. But I think I have taken this too far. I could spend half as much money on food and still never be hungry, and would probably be healthier as well.

Gluttony is a bit of a moving target, but when I look at the world today, I get the impression that it might be wise to move pretty far, pretty fast.

If anyone actually read this, they should now have one of two questions: EITHER “Why are you so sanctimonious?” OR “Why didn’t you think of this years ago?”

Here we have to understand that my religion or philosophy is not one of rules.  There are those who live by rules: If they stick to the rules, they go to Heaven, otherwise the opposite. (There is usually some provision for forgiveness in case one fails a little, but generally the rules rule.) This makes things simple, at least once you got the rules memorized. As long as you don’t break the rules, you can do what you want.

I, on the other hand, can’t do what I want. I mean, I do what I want, but I can’t do that and know that I have done my best. I can never rest on my laurels, or have a perfectly good conscience. I am, in the manner of speaking, experimenting with my life. Or exploring it. Or perhaps trying to become myself. If that doesn’t make sense to you, then probably nothing I have said today will make sense. But there are many other days! Thousands, in my archives alone.

Grumble or moan?

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“Tied to this world, these people live to the extremes of desire without considering others.” Or, in the words of the Christian apostle Jude, “These people are grumblers and complainers, even though they live to satisfy their desires.”

“The words of higher spirits can nourish the souls of those who live on Earth. In contrast, there are some spirits who are unable to say anything valuable, and only grumble or moan.”  -Ryuho Okawa.

To be honest, I think this is not limited to the afterlife – in fact, I have no memory of the afterlife, so I would not know – but rather I see the same thing here in this world on Earth. Even though we may speak the same language and seemingly talk about the same thing, some are already praising the Light in song, while others are grumbling and moaning. This becomes evident when you manage to get a glimpse through the thick stream of words into the real thoughts that lay beneath or within.

There are people who can use long words and long sentences, yet if you were to sum up their message, it would basically be “moan, moan, grumble grumble”.  Even though they have that much brain to speak or write with, there is little if any gratitude.  Rather they will blame, blame, blame: Bush or Obama, their parents or their boss, their illness or their finances. Everywhere their path is blocked.  It is as if one sees a shade in Hades, stumbling in darkness, not knowing where they are or what happened to them. This is a terrible plight indeed.

I hope to be around to encourage you until I am 120, but whether that happens or not, I implore you: Believe in the Light! Acknowledge the invisible force of Goodness that is everywhere present in this world and any other world. When it seems that you receive less love than you give, that is when you can open your heart to this power. If you are already filled with the goodness that comes from others, there is no empty space inside for the Light to flow into. When you are empty, that is when the Light can fill you, so you can shine brightly from within, like the sun rather than the moon.

Of course, many people really are suffering. It is not something they make up. Truth to tell, this is the human condition, that from time to time we experience things we deeply wish we would never see. Loss is certain: If we do not lose everything in this world gradually, we shall lose it suddenly.  But let that not define us. Let it not shape our souls, so that we live our lives and die our deaths in despair. Let us believe in the Light, and gratefully receive the power to take one small step forward.

Or that’s what the voice inside me says. If I must be honest, there are terrible trials that others have gone through and not I, trials that I even now sincerely hope and pray that I shall never know.

But on the other hand, there are those who would consider my fate unacceptable, and my life not worthy of continuing.  I have been single all my life, for instance, while I have friends who feel sorry about spending a week without their spouse. (Whom they not usually praise as highly as you would think from this.) I earn far less than is common in this country, and am always passed by for promotions ever since I started working 30 years ago.  I care none about this. I do not remember it without actively looking for an example of what I might grumble about.  I did, however, grumble and moan when I was young, and was filled with bitterness because of the bullying I experienced in school as a child. At the time, I thought myself innocent, that I had done nothing at all to provoke the bullying. (It might have happened anyway, actually, since I was chronically ill and children are evil. But we’ll never know, because I was taunting them on a regular basis.) Anyway, I was bitter, and I was in a very real sense in Hell, or at least in the antechambers of Hell. For where your soul is, that is where you truly are.

I do not entirely make this up to sound good and holy, in other words. I know the grumbling and moaning, and I fear ever getting into that pit of darkness again.  May the Light Everlasting preserve us all, and may we let ourselves be so preserved.

What the Hell am I doing?

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“What do you think about this amount?” -I think it is eerily similar to my amount of superhero comics before I left the original Chaos Node.

I stopped by my comic book dealer (who also happens to be the used book store in Kristiansand). I fetched the two issues of Savage Dragon that were lying for me, and asked him to discontinue my subscription. I have quit the other comic book series as they closed down (and usually came back with a different name and different artists, but without me buying them). But this Larsen fellow just keeps ticking like the energizer bunny, it seems. So I gave up and told the shop to just cut it.

“I no longer see the point in reading about people bashing their heads with cars” I explained. “You should have realized that long ago” said the shopkeeper. “Why didn’t you read something more edifying?”

Why the Hell not? thought I, and as always when I use that phrase, I mean it in its religious sense. The shopkeeper continued talking about a local soccer hero who recently died at a fairly old age, and was praised by the local newspaper for soccer being his life until the very last. “Running after a ball is natural when you are a small kid, as long as it is just one of several games you play. But even then, something is wrong if soccer is all you play. And to keep being hung up on this for the rest of your life??”

Indeed. If some other person had been forced to spend his whole life doing nothing but soccer, seeing nothing but soccer, talking about nothing but soccer, wouldn’t he be in Hell? Not because soccer is omg so wrong, but because of the confinement and the stagnation – being essentially trapped in a small corner of a normal childhood for the rest of the life.

Ever since I read Ryuho Okawa’s view of Hell as something humans create rather than something God creates for them, it has seemed obvious to me that people are not actually thrown screaming and protesting into Hell by  hard-faced angels on the command of an angry God. Rather, Hell is something we gravitate toward. There is, so to speak, a mutual attraction between the sinner and his Hell.  Just recently I saw Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz imply something similar in his book The Thirteen Petalled Rose, and a quote from Jennifer Upton’s Dark Way to Paradise about Dante’s Divine Comedy also implying the same thing. Perhaps I am just selectively reading people who tell me what I want to hear, although this is a bit strange when I have not heard about them before. In any case, back to my comic books.

The difference between me and the soccer hero, apart from me not being a hero at all, is that I have only been partially imprisoned in a corner of my childhood.  I have tried to think about this. I have spent thousands on superhero comic books during my adult life, until my late 40es. Why the Hell did it not fall away before? It is after all not a biological urge… one can understand single men who buy porn (although I would think a couple porn mags should be enough for a lifetime, I mean, how many fetishes does one person have? – but what do I know.) Or even women who buy cook books. The body has its urges. But the urge to have cars thrown on you by angry supervillains is probably not one of them.

Looking back, I wonder if this did not start fading away around the time I wrote the series of gray entries about The Next Big Thing. At this point, I saw superhero comics as a symbol, an upwelling from the collective subconscious of the expectation that a new type of human was about to replace ordinary humanity. While the real “human version 3” will probably not be able to fly by willpower or shoot energy beams for their eyes, their thinking will be as far removed from that of current humans as superpowers would be from our physical abilities.

So as long as I remained ignorant, I remained enslaved. Reading superhero comics was in a certain sense a meaningful impulse, diverted into a symbolic form that is not exactly counterproductive, but unproductive.

In a similar way, I believe, the attraction of computer games is that they allow us to quickly do what we feel we want to be doing but cannot. In my case, guiding people to prosperity, peace of mind and lasting happiness (The Sims 2 and 3), or protecting the innocent from evil (City of Heroes). Unless I learn how to actually do these things in real life, I will probably remain attracted to these games until I die… and quite possibly beyond.

That is a chilling thought, right? But now you have to excuse me, the Double XP Weekend has begun in City of Heroes. It is time for Bright Hand of the Sun to protect his fellow heroes from the forces of Darkness!

Esoterism and exoterism

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Of course, if I see the Light and don’t live a great life of love and wisdom, it is worse than nothing. And if you have to rely on books and the words of others, but you use that knowledge to live a great life, then you are much better off.

In all large religions, there are two main groups of followers. One sees religion in much the same way as any other cultural or social event. They go to the church, mosque, temple or synagogue in much the same frame of mind as they would go to a theater, a concert, a movie or a sports event.  They may be fanatic about their religion, but then in much the same way as British soccer hooligan attack supporters of opposing teams with stones and beer bottles.

These camp followers are generally the first to leave when religion loses its influence in society. I will not discuss them in further detail today. Rather let us look at those who remain:  Those who take their religion personally and seriously.  (Although most have other interests too.)

The personally religious again fall into two categories, one large and one small. The large group is what we call exoteric.  In a less precise but more understandable word, we could say “external” religion.  They rely on ritual and dogma as the highest expression of their religion.

Exoteric knowledge is learned the same way as any factual knowledge. To make this easier to understand, imagine that you live in another country and you learn the names of all major cities in Belgium, and where they lie on the map, and their relative sizes.  This knowledge can be learned and taught without ever setting foot in Belgium.  In the same way, exoteric religion can be transmitted without personal experience.

That is not to say that an exoteric religious person never has any religious experience that transcends what you would experience reading a dictionary. Far from it, such experiences are quite common.  But they are vague, haphazard, and play no large role in their life. In fact, exoteric religion usually warns against any altered states of consciousness. And while it does encourage ethical behavior, it is such as can be achieved by training and strength of will. It is not recommended to be transformed into something utterly different from an ordinary human. On the contrary, such a thing is seen as dangerous.  (Which it often is, of course.  Insane people go through this regularly, and are probably rather more common in society than esoterists.)

The exoteric believer gains strength from ritual and dogma.  If he cannot perform his rituals, his religion begins to fade from his mind, and this makes him feel bad. (To his credit!)  Likewise if someone manages to cause doubt in his mind about a dogma, it feels as if his religion is falling apart for him. Some atheists take a perverse pleasure in seeking out believers and dissing their dogma. The predictable reaction of the exoteric believer is to put his fingers in his ears and chant LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA, figuratively if not literally, and this is prime entertainment to some people. Of course there are also atheists who don’t like to cause mental suffering in others, but since you generally don’t hear much from them, it is perfectly reasonable for the believer to think that all atheists thrive on suffering.  It is not actually true however.

But there are also esoteric Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and so on. In each case, these are a minority. It seems to be a personality type, and often asserts itself early in life. The esoteric person often has gone through a brief period as exoteric, but found the need to go beyond this traditional view.

To the esoterist, ritual and dogma point toward something else.  If you point at the moon, a man will look at the moon, but a cat will look at your finger. (And likely swipe at it, at that.) The esoterist does not worship his religion, but rather that which his religion points toward:  The Absolute, the Tao that cannot be spoken, the God who cannot be named, who lives in a Light into which no one can enter, whom no man has seen or can see. And yet, despite being unspeakably alien and remote, the One resides in some way in the depth of our soul, at our deepest core.

This is blasphemy to the exoterist.  As far as he is concerned, the psychic being that resides in his body is himself, the ego, and nothing else (if all goes well – there may be the occasional demonic incursion if you live in a culture that accepts such things.) What he hears the esoterist say is “I am God”, which of course is a pretty good reason to kill the blasphemer on the spot. And of course, if you truly are convinced that you are ego all the way down, then the notion that any of this is divine is utter blasphemy, no doubt about it.

The esoterist has a kind of sense – the eye of the heart, it is often called – that lets him directly perceive truth.  He does not arrive at it by logic, but his love for truth and the One Truth which is the wellspring of all truth is such that he experiences it directly, as a kind of unity, much like your senses perceive your body as being one with you.

There are among esoterists again two sorts.  The most rare, and it is exceedingly rare indeed, is he who can perceive Truth directly with no assistance except the Divine itself. He is the one who has the open eye of the heart. There is no limit to what he may learn, except his lifespan and the direction of his effort.  For Truth is limitless, so even the greatest adept is unlikely to explore it all in a lifetime!

When the esoteric adept tries to share the truth he has acquired this way, he will tend to try to explain it logically. For truth is logical – it is not true because it is logical, but logical because it is true. But this is generally seen as an invitation to debate, for there are many who are masters of logic. But if your first premises are wrong, then no amount of logic will make your conclusions right.  The seeing cannot compromise with the blind in a discussion of what he has seen.

At his point the esoteric adept will normally say something like “This is not open to debate. This is the truth, and it is your loss if you don’t accept it. The presence of the blind will not cause the sun to stop shining.”

The exoterist will predictably be offended. He will see the other as arrogant, blasphemous or crazy.  And reasonably so: At any time, there is no lack of actual insane people claiming to be sent by the Master of Orion to warn us that the Negroes will kill us all, or Dick Cheney is the Antichrist, or Hitler will return with a fleet of flying saucers. And they are absolutely certain of this and need no proof. It is the truth, they have seen it, and are sharing it out of the goodness of their heart.  How exactly is that different?

But I skipped a group here. What about the majority of the minority? What about the esoterists who cannot just stare at Truth and see it as it is? These are those who, when they hear the Truth, recognize it. Their mode of perception is more like hearing than seeing, I guess.  When they hear Truth, it echoes in their heart, like a memory that awakens.  And once it awakens, it returns to life with great strength, which surpasses doubt.  It is as if they somehow knew this all before they were born, and only needed to be reminded of it.

These are what we may call disciples. The Truth they recognize is not something they just learn, like cities in Belgium. It is like a memory of having been there. They can no more doubt it than they can doubt the ground they are walking on or the air they breathe. And the Truth sets them free. They become able to see far-reaching consequences that are not obvious to others. They see deeply into the future or into the human heart. They have gained something that ordinary people are lacking.  There is a conviction and a light in their eyes, and they become able to help others.

After these again come the theologians, years later, transcribing the truth into ritual and dogma.  And so a new branch of religion has been born, and go on its merry way, perhaps one day becoming powerful enough to persecute the others.  Until another visionary appears…

***

Well, that was not as exact and as lucid as I wanted it to be.  But I think it may serve as an introduction, to see whether this might interest you at all. As always, I am more of a spiritual tourist than a teacher, so before risking your soul, be sure to find a more reliable source.  Well, unless you have one in your own heart, I suppose.

Hypocrite? Me?

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“Before I knew it, my aim of bringing happiness to everyone changed into one of satisfying myself.” Well, spiritual self-satisfaction in this case, but even so…

Yesterday when I came home from work, I found a package from Amazon.com. What could it be? I tend to forget such things over the course of the time it takes to ship it all the way from the USA. This time it was indeed The Transcendent Unity of Religions by Frithjof Schuon.

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to advance within your own religion?” asked the voice in my heart. Who needs a spouse when you have voices like that? It is presumably the voice of God, or something in that direction. Or perhaps the voice of reason, I find these hard to tell apart.

Anyway, you have to admit that this hit the bullseye.  Opening the book, it becomes clear (as I had already suspected) that the transcendent unity means that the different religions come from the same source, kind of like a spectrum from a prism. Each color of the spectrum follows its inner nature and takes its own path, but they are all light, and if we could somehow pass through the prism we would find them all to be one. Well, that is not his words, that is just the impression I get. But it is probably a correct impression of what Schuon teaches, in a rough simile.

Now, after this episode, you’d think I’d act accordingly. But no. I put the book in my bag, and today I pulled it out on the bus. Now, there is nothing evil as such about reading religious books on the bus, especially here in Scandinavia where most people are atheists and think you’re crazy (and possibly dangerous) if you take religion somewhat seriously. But even so, would I have done the same if it was something more shameful, like for instance the latest Savage Dragon comic book?

(I used to subscribe to a large number of comic books, now Savage Dragon is the only one left, and that mainly because I am too lazy to discontinue my subscription. Most comic books stop at some point, and restart under a slightly different name, but Larsen just keeps ticking like an energizer bunny. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The point is that if I wanted to give people a realistic impression of me, I have read a hundred times more comics than deep spiritual books in my lifetime. Perhaps a thousand times more, I am not sure.  Probably somewhere between those.)

I’m not exactly a hypocrite, I just don’t mind if people think too highly of me. Why does that not upset me at least as much as if they think too lowly of me?

So I may have these noble motives. I want to radiate light and love and hope and courage to people around me, or who read my journal. That is cute. But it does not count and it does not work unless it is true all the way through. Unless it comes from me actually being that transparent, so the light of the inner sun shines through.

I’m not really that transparent yet. I’m not really that kind of inspiring person I want to be.  Well, I’m quite happy and such, but that’s not really something I have deserved.  And I cannot really prove that it comes from my religion rather than, say, from playing computer games an hour or two each day as I also do.  I may feel pretty sure it is the religion, but if so, wouldn’t I spend more time on it and less on the imaginary little people inside my computer?