Category Archives: religion

A thoughtful silence?

Posted on by
4

I haven’t been writing much lately, but I have been thinking some, and observing myself as usual. I have been observing my dreams each morning. This morning I dreamed that I had moved to (or perhaps built) a house on the road to the farm where I grew up. The road goes through a stretch of wilderness with trees, bushes, shrubs and stones, where the nearest farms are at best distant lights. I remember when I was little, walking to school in the morning, during the dark season here in Norway, and I afraid of the dark. I would talk loudly or sing to hold at bay my fear of the dark and the things that might lurk there – wolves or giant animals, perhaps. This was a more innocent age, where the fear of children was not men. In any case, this was the stretch of road where I now dreamed that I had set up my home. While living there, I was approached by an angry fox, which I eventually befriended, and later a lynx, which I was still trying to befriend when the dream ended.

Not very useful information for future historians, perhaps. Who knows?

Part of the reason for holding my tongue is that I am, as usual, pondering the lessons I have learned from sect leader and acclaimed author Ryuho Okawa. He pretty much ticks of the check list for Antichrist: He tries to transcend and include existing religions, including Christianity. He claims to be the God who resurrected Jesus Christ, and even has temples built where he can claim to be a god. Not the Creator, mind you: He stresses the enormous distance between us and the Primordial God. El Cantare is simply the spiritual leader of this planet – in fact, the name can be translated as “god of the world”. That alone should make the neck hairs rise on a Christian. And yet, for all that, this man is the first I can think of that has so much understanding in common with myself. So what does that say about me?

I don’t know. I try to review my life as it goes on, watching my thoughts and feelings and actions. I am only at the beginning of everything I do. But if I keep the current course, if I live to a ripe old age, will I end up becoming more and more like that man? My conscience really does not allow me not to, with the notable exceptions of claiming to be a god and an extraterrestrial and so on. Let us hope that exception keeps up, at least. But the principles of love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress? Hard to disagree with those. Working toward a happiness that increases the happiness of other people, rather than taking away from it? That should be obvious to anyone. Love is something you give, not something you can claim? That is an eternal truth. Just because a scary person agrees with it and preaches it does not mean it won’t remain true forever.

In the end, I will have to simply continue becoming more and more myself. If that means I become more similar to controversial people, then I can do nothing about it.

But I am thinking that I need to build on the “iceberg that is under the surface” – the 80-90% that should be hidden from sight. I cannot just blurt out every spiritual truth that I discover. But if I don’t, then to some extent I don’t get much new either. Because some of what I write is probably not really meant for me in the first place, but for some poor chap at the other end of Google. It is my dubious task to say the words that must be spoken, before they are lost forever. And “for each useless word that a human speaks, he shall make account on judgement day”, as Jesus says. Between these twin demands live I, and I suppose anyone who thinks seriously about words. There really is no other meaningful way to relate to words. The normal is to just let them flow out, like a dog who pees on every bush along the road. There seems to be no end to the pee and the words that the dog and the human use to mark their territory. But past a certain level of consciousness this becomes no longer tolerable.

Today is St John’s Wake, an important festival in Norway, and one of the few that have survived the transition to a post-Christian society. I was invited to gather with the neighbors this evening. I have not really had the opportunity to meet most of them since I moved here. I wish it could continue that way – not because I have anything against them or even fear them, but because I doubt my ability to be of any benefit to them whatsoever. Even if I go, it will surely be a waste of all our time. But then again, so is befriending foxes in a place that never even existed. So here I go, may God have mercy on my soul.

EDIT TO ADD:

I am home unharmed except for a cough. The whole event was very dignified, and I think I blended in pretty well after a little while. Two policemen showed up at the end, probably because of the bonfire. I am not sure open fire is legal at this point, as it is very dry. The bonfire is an essential part of the tradition though, so we had a small one. Nobody got arrested.

Religious and secular meditation

Posted on by
17

The religiosity of your meditation is not something outsiders can ascertain.

I was already planning to write this entry when I read something eerily related in The Challenge of the Mind by Ryuho Okawa. He says that the purpose of meditation is to contact High Spirits, such as your Guardian Angel. If it was just to sit down and not think, trees and stones would do a much better job of it than us.

That sounds a bit harsh. There are quite a lot of health benefits associated with non-religious meditation: Lower blood pressure, better sleep, better immune functioning, less tendency to smoking and drinking, better memory and a greater or stronger awareness in daily life. I have called it “defragmenting the brain” too, but there is  even more than that. Still, in my experience, there is a clear difference between religious and secular meditation.  I cannot say whether they meet in the end, because I have not come anywhere near the end of any of them, even after many years.

My history with meditation began in my mid teens or so, when I learned it directly from God.(1) I was praying and felt that it was terribly rude to just rattle off my own wish list and then hang up.  God is not a grocer or something. So I respectfully waited after my prayer, in case God had something to say to me as well.  I understand that some people do hear actual voices from Heaven, but I did not.  (Which is good, because I have a more scientific personality and would likely have been scared out of my skin.) Instead, I felt a benevolent Presence.  Kind of, when you pray, you have a distinct impression that there is someone there receiving your prayer.  I suppose some people, perhaps all people sometimes, have to take this on faith.  But I think most of us have had the distinct impression that we have “connection”.  This was like that, only stronger, and it kept growing stronger.  Like there was someone right by me that I could not see, but I could feel the aura of that luminous Presence.

In less religious terms, it was very much like sitting together with a really close friend or family member who you don’t need to engage in conversation. In these cases it is possible to just be together without thinking of what you are going to say next, simply waiting for them to say something or not – it does not really matter.  This was like that, only with awe and majesty thrown in. Kind of like if you could sit silently together with Abraham Lincoln or something. (Requires optional Time Machine.)

From that experience of simply resting silent in the Divine aura, from this grew my religious meditation.  It was an extension of prayer – it was the heart of prayer really.  And it still is to many people, who would regard meditation with deep skepticism.  “Meditation, isn’t that something that heathens do, and those New Age people?  It is probably evil spirits!”  But actually meditation has a long history in Christianity as well, although in the old days it was called contemplation, while meditation was a more active thinking on holy topics. Today these have been transposed, perhaps in the meantime there was a period of confusion where few people thought of such things at all?

It was months later that a more experienced Christian caught me in the act of silent communion and asked me if I was meditating?  So at first opportunity I looked it up.  We did not have the Internet back then, but there was a public library in the town where I went to school.  There I learned about the science of meditation, and I took up that as well. For years I practiced ever deeper meditation, until in my 20es I started having more and more supernatural experiences:  Telepathy, extra-sensory knowledge and the occasional tiny blip of telekinesis.  Scared, I prayed to God to make it stop, and I cut down quite a bit on both the frequency, regularity and depth of my meditation.  The strange experiences pretty much disappeared after that.

I have practiced meditation since then, but irregularly and not so deeply. Religious meditation in particular is something I have done only when drawn to it.

Over the past year and some I have taken up more meditation again, now with the aid of brainwave entrainment.  Using first Centerpointe’s  Holosync and later Project Meditation’s LifeFlow, I have used sound waves to synchronize my brain waves.  LifeFlow in particular has a broad range of different frequencies.  While these tools do not actually cause meditation, they create a state of brain that is well suited for the state of mind that is meditation.  During natural meditation, the brainwaves will smooth out and get slower.  How slow depends on practice and some seemingly random element.  With brainwave entrainment, you can reduce the random element and get there with much less training.  I have not found this useful for the meditation itself, although being able to induce slow-wave instead of REM sleep in the morning has been nifty. Basically, I can’t see that depth (slowness) of brain waves leads to depth of the meditative experience.  Your meditation may vary (and if so, please tell me. Actually, tell me anyway.)

There does not seem to me to be any spiritual benefits to the brainwave entrainment technology at all.  Your spirit may vary.  I find that to me, religious meditation is still a different experience.  Even though LifeFlow 8 induces a “feeling” in the brain that is very similar to deep prayer meditation, it is not it.  It is kind of like visiting the house of a friend and everything is there except your friend.

There are schools of Buddhism that do not relate to a God or spiritual beings, and yet practice meditation religiously. I would think that to them there is no such difference. But I don’t really know.  There is only so much you can experience in one life.  But luckily we have each other to learn from. So perhaps I will know one day, if I find someone who has the relevant experience.

***

“Directly from God”: Well, that was my experience at least.  I have later come to realize that our connection to God may not be quite what it seems:  Each of us seems to have a personal “branch office of God” in our heart, which can differ a bit from that of other people who also believe in God, even those in the same congregation, even those in the same family.  Each of us has a separate “branch office”.  I mean that for instance in each town there used to be a Social Security office, and you could go there for all your ordinary Social Security needs.  It was unlikely that you ever had any other contact with Social Security. To the common man, this office WAS Social Security.  But actually of course Social Security is a much more vast organization, and there are subtle differences in the way you are spoken to in one town and another.  It seems to be the same way with God:  There is much more to God than what any one of us knows, but at the same time God is represented in our hearts with all the Divinity we will ever need.  If our needs for God grows, so does the God within. In this way, we grow toward each other in God, our internal God presence becoming more similar as the Light increases.  If all goes well.

This individual Divine presence is probably what Happy Science calls “High Spirits”, although in Christianity it is customary to only have one, not to chat with a large number of angels, archangels and Saviors.  For us there is only one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus  Christ. It certainly simplifies things.  But of course there are actually many entities in Heaven that are far greater and wiser than we are.  We just don’t play supermarket there, as we already have all the Holy Spirit we need, and then some.  To quote a very old Christian from my home village: “We don’t need more spirit, we need to obey the Spirit we already have!”  Which is of course a pretty good way to get “more”. Or that’s what the Presence in my head tells me…

Death the shepherd dog

Posted on by
Reply

“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.

More lightly esteemed

Posted on by
Reply

This is the field in front of the house I rent, beside the road. You can see a corner of the shed to the left. In the background is our slightly horse-owning neighbors. My “lawn” consists of sand, mud, and a plethora of flowers.  I am not going to mow it anytime soon.

I think I may be conceited again. I have several spare “holy” entries written in whole or in part, which would no doubt reinforce the illusion that I am some kind of spiritual teacher. I love the stuff, but you should not think too highly of me just because the voice in my head shows me shiny stuff.  And I should definitely not think too highly of me either.  If I do, things like this may happen.

The last few days I have had this suffocating feeling.  No, not like being in love, I think, more literally, as if I can’t breathe in enough air.  That is true actually, see my May 10 entry about only having 78% lung capacity.  But it is not that I am short of breath when biking on my exercise bike or walking up stairs or dancing wildly to cute Japanese pop songs.  No, it is when I take a break at work, or walk through the city afterwards, and especially on the bus home. It is there to varying degrees through the day, but those are the worst.  It is pretty obvious from this pattern that it is a thing of the mind.  Neuroses are a sign from the subconscious that I am fooling myself – which is of course the human condition – but more specifically that it is coming to a head, that there is something that wants to be revealed and is poking me to get attention.  I don’t know what though.

The words of King David haunt me from time to time: “I will be more lightly esteemed than this and will be humble in my own eyes, but with the maids of whom you have spoken, with them I will be distinguished.” (2 Samuel 6.)  Norwegian Bibles have “small in my own eyes” here, which makes more sense since if we think we are humble, we probably still have some humility left to learn – at least that is my experience. Look at me, look at me, I’m so humble! What do you think of my shiny new humility?

Socialism & the gospel of Satan

Posted on by
8

It is that time of the year again!

It is the time of the year to mock Socialism again.  Not the socialists, many of them are good people at heart.  They are just misled by a false belief. Of course, you may say that so am I.  The proof of the pudding, however, is in the eating.

As I have said before, there are two gospels in the modern world. The gospel of Jesus Christ is “IT IS MORE BLESSED TO GIVE”.  The gospel of Satan is “YOU DESERVE BETTER”.  I think it is pretty obvious what side socialism is on.

The New Testament says: If anyone has two shirts, he should share with him who has none.  Socialism says: If anyone has no shirt, he should take one from him who has two.  To the casual observer, this looks much the same:  They still end up with one shirt each.  But in one case they also end up as friends, in the other case as enemies.  When they die, the shirt remains on earth but their friendship or enmity follows them to the next world. Therefore, socialism only makes sense if you are also a materialist and an atheist in the strictest sense, who has no belief in anything higher than the world of animals.

Now, without Christianity – or something very similar – socialism could not have arisen in the first place. The shirtless would simply not have had the hope of getting that shirt, much less the conviction that they deserved it. Only if the practice of sharing shirts were common enough that people started to expect it, but not common enough that everyone actually got one, would there be room for the rise of a reverse Christianity based on forced charity.

We Christians can blame ourselves – collectively, I mean, it may not apply to you personally – for not having shared voluntarily.  If we did, back when most of the nation consisted of Christians, there would have been no room for socialism, since we would already have a more egalitarian society without the bureaucracy and bitterness that follows with an intrusive state taking on the role of God.

Even now that we are living in a partially socialist state (and I don’t think there is any nation in the world that does not fit that description anymore), we should not give in to bitterness. Otherwise we will become like those who strayed before us.  It may be that we could have used our money more wisely than bureaucrats – how much does that take, really? – but most of it is still used for reasonably harmless purposes, some even outright good and useful. The nation may have gone astray – and I would claim that it did so before it turned to the Left as it did – but we still need not have the spirit of envy in our heart.

It may not be obvious, but the “capitalist” consumer society is actually powering the Left. Day after day people’s minds and souls are filled with needless desires from the relentless onslaught of advertising.  Using every trick in the book, experts in psychology are making you feel that you need and deserve something you don’t have.  As long as there are rich people, this desire will make you envy them and wish to take what is theirs, unless you consciously choose to immerse yourself in love that gives and fasten your eyes on that which lasts beyond this lifetime.

Of course, we could just “eat the rich”, but history shows that this is not a good way for a nation to feed its populace.  When socialism is taken to the extreme, poverty ensues for the whole people. This should come as no surprise. Socialism is based on blaming the successful for your failures. When the successful are removed and only the failures remain, things are going downhill fast.

Conversely, if everyone was looking to make others happy already in this life, then the whole nation would rapidly become prosperous. Why is that? Because we would be looking out for what other people needed, and fulfilling needs is what creates prosperity. To use a worn old metaphor, baking the cake rather than dividing it.  We can neither be happy nor prosperous by everyone taking from each other, this is obvious.  But when people compete in giving the best service and the highest quality, the wealth of a nation rises rapidly.

Sure, we can compete based on greed, as long as we get to keep enough of the reward (as opposed to have to share it equally with others). But competing to do good from a loving heart makes you happier.  Try it and see for yourself. It actually is pretty blessed to give, especially when you can do it voluntarily.

Dreams of Heaven and Hell

Posted on by
1

SERVICE WITH A SMITE! Not conductive to visiting Heaven at night, unfortunately. Or so I’ve recently discovered.

In the book “The Essence of Buddha”, Ryuho Okawa has a disturbing and thought-provoking idea. Disturbing because it is so plausible, based on the notion that Heaven and Hell are not “elsewhere” but inside us already in this life. (Christian readers may remember Jesus saying this too.) Okawa’s spiritual bomb is that you can get a good idea from your dreams about which realm you belong to.

If you dream about being happy together with other people in peaceful places, this may be a glimpse of Heaven. But if you dream of darkness, fear and violence, chances are this is what you will experience when you leave your body permanently as well. After all, your dreams are fetching their content from the depths of your own soul: It is not like you are dreaming someone else’s dream, after all. Well, unless you are the prophet Daniel, I guess.

This, regular readers will realize, is bad news for me if true. Probably. Because most of the dreams I remember from my adult life are about either a) being scared out of my skin, b) killing people in war or self-defense, or c) humiliating sexual harassment of other people. This reached its peak in my late twenties, though it continued into my journaling years to some degrees. At least there was no overlap between b and c. I would wake from a dream of grabbing someone’s breasts and feel a sense of joy that at least I had not killed anyone this night!

Over the last years I seem to dream less. This may be a sign that the hellishness is receding. You see, if I actually do dream of being happy and peaceful, I am unlikely to remember it. I wake up if I am terrified, or if extremely excited, and then it is hard to go back to sleep immediately. Therefore I will remember whatever I dreamed just before. But otherwise I tend to sleep until my sleep clock gently wakes me, and in that slow transition from sleep to wakefulness the dream fades out of reach. I may remember that I dreamed something, but not what, unless it made a great impression. This is even more so now that I spend 30-90 minutes in slow-wave brainwave entrainment in the morning. For a dream to still be remembered after this, it better be remarkable.

As it happens, I had such a remarkable dream this morning, causing me to wake up an hour before the clock. Unfortunately for your chance of hanging out with me in The Realm of the Good in some years, it was about war. I dreamed that there was a war of some kind, and we were beset by the enemies, but snatched victory from the jaws of defeat through my supernatural leadership abilities. Talk about mixed messages – but then, that is a pretty accurate representation of how I feel.

Again, it bears mention that I don’t believe any of this “because Master Okawa said so”. That would be an insult to his work, as he strives to explain logically why he thinks we can use dreams as spiritual informants. His argument goes basically: Once you accept that there is an afterlife, the law of causality ensures that it depends on this life. This law is known in Buddhism as karma, and in Christianity by the verse “as a man sows, so shall he harvest”. Unless science, Buddhism and Christianity are all wrong on the same point, the current status of your soul is a pretty good hint of where you are heading at the moment.

(Of course, a major point of religion is to be able to change your future destination, but it is unlikely to just change randomly or through applied ritual without personal transformation. What is the point of going to Heaven if you make it a Hell for yourself and all around you? And if you act and think completely differently in Heaven than here, is it really you who went to Heaven at all, or just someone else looking like you? Do souls even “look” at all, are they not defined by how they think and feel, their attitudes and the assumptions on which they habitually act? If you are bitter and suspicious here, and someone happy and grateful show up on the Other Shore, whatever happened to the real you?)

So yeah, I think the man from Venus is onto something here. Dreams can give us a chance to reflect on ourselves, dredging up feelings and memories that need to be held up toward the Light. But they are probably not representative, unless you have some method to rapidly wake you up at random times and then leave you with enough time to jot down your dreams.

Oh, and about that dream… City of Heroes‘ subscriber expansion number 17 came out yesterday, and I had fun roleplaying my new Lightwielding character, Lord Septim Silver, all evening until bedtime. We totally steamrolled the villains and had tons of fun doing it. SERVICE WITH A SMITE! So, I am not completely sure how representative that dream was…

Not quite a parrot

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The immortals will find you

Posted on by
Reply

Mood-setting screenshot from the mostly unrelated anime 07 Ghost, where a song says (approximately): “You must cross over thousands of years worth of time.” Luckily, being immortal does not require you not to die. You just have to live eternally while you are alive, but that is more than hard enough. At least you don’t need to do it alone.

I distinctly remember writing this before, but I cannot find it with the in-journal search function, Google web or Google desktop. So just in case, I will say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

I have earlier said that spiritual practice (such as meditation, deep prayer, chanting, lectio divina, keeping the Sabbath etc) all cause expansion of the Now. Obviously we all live only in the now, since we cannot move our bodies in the past or the future with all our willpower. But at the same time, our mind is constantly visiting the past and the future; and more than that, many alternate pasts and futures. This is useful but also dangerous, as we get spread so thin that the actual, real Now may get too little attention.

The expansion of the Now is of course utterly subjective. We still have only 24 hours a day, no matter what. The difference is how we experience those hours and what we accomplish during those hours. So if you define science as something that can be measured with instruments, then this is not scientific at all. But it is scientific in the sense that it is repeatable and can be peer-reviewed. If you do roughly the same thing, you will get roughly the same results.

One aspect of what I call “spiritual aperture science” is that when the Now is dilated (expanded, made wider, giving more room) it becomes filled with eternity, which flows into time through the opening that is Now. Again, you don’t need to believe this. All you need to do is never set aside any serious time for any kind of spiritual practice, and you are almost guaranteed to never experience any of this. In fact, it will look utterly insane to you, probably. This is as it should be. You have chosen to have no part in eternity in this life. I will not predict what happens when this life is over. I don’t remember anything of the afterlife or the beforelife. What I know about eternity is from this life. And in this life, eternity is only present in the Now. The deeper and wider the Now, the more eternity flows into it.

This, of course, is analogous to the influx of Light in my Lightwielder stories. It depends on practice and the absence of that which is contrary to it. But the real thing has another aspect again. This is the other people who lived in eternity before you. They are still there, because eternity never ends.

The words of ancient saints and sages may seem almost fossilized to those who live the fleeting moment, where the Now is just a pinprick in time. But once you start carrying around a small bubble of Now (which is also a small bubble of eternity), you may meet these words again and something unprecedented may happen. They come to life. Because you and they now live in the same dimension, the timeless Now, they can reach you in a whole new way. As Lao-Tzu said: “When you are ready, the Immortals will find you.”

Did he really say that? I am not sure. I have looked for it on Google, but found no trace of it. I remember it quite clearly, and how similar it was to the famous proverb “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” (Also: “When the disciple is ready, the Master will appear” and any combination of these two.) Perhaps I dreamed it, or perhaps I saw it in the MMORPG which is based on Daoist legend. I know that whether I actually read those words or not, they had a big impact on my life. Not so much as once, more like one of those depth charges that sink down and then go BOOM a while later.

But that is the thing with me and Lao-Tzu. Even if he never said that while alive (and I am still not sure he didn’t), he certainly said it to me. And I have still only a quite small bubble of Now / Eternity, but evidently enough that I can verify by experience that the immortals (eternals) are still there and present in a much more direct way than from the surface of fleeting time.

Also, they will find you. You cannot decide who will speak to you, well at least not in the beginning, I am not sure later. But at first they will find you. The place where I imagine I read that particular quote compared the immortals to angels. (I know that this was before I had heard of Kofuku-no-Kagaku and their tendency to use the words “angel” and “bodhisattva” interchangeably, whereas the obvious translation of “bodhisattva” would be “saint”.) In fact, the veneration of saints in Catholic tradition is clearly related to this effect. It is not a worship (although it will be if you have no idea what is going on and just try to pray to saints as if they were pagan demigods). Rather, at some point one of the saints will come alive to you, to the point where you may well have conversations, or at least certainly know how they felt.

There are no doubt specific rules, or laws of nature in the timeless domain, that decide which nonlocal operators are taking your calls. I don’t know those rules. If I ever find out, I will tell, unless I am ordered not to. Probably I won’t be ordered that way, however. The secret protects itself. Even now, if you read this and you have not dilated your Now, you won’t make heads or tails of it.

Conversely, when I read people who have this experience, even if I don’t agree with them in everything, even if I disagree strongly with them on some things, I can recognize them as soon as I catch a glimpse of this happening to them. They may express it in completely different ways, of course. It will be misunderstood in different ways depending on how you express it. But it will be understood rightly in only one way, because the Now of eternity is one.

To summarize:
-Most people have minds that run all over time, including imaginary time.
-Traditional spiritual practices cause subjective time to change, expanding the timeless Now.
-This causes a subjective experience of eternity that fills this Now. This has a number of effects.
-One effect is a heightened awareness of others who live the same way.
-Many of those people are long dead.
-To the extent that they lived in the eternal Now while alive, they still remain there.

Is that clear? Or should I just write about the weather again?

Superpower: Blessvision

Posted on by
2

One of the useful things I have learned from Japanese TV is that when a toddler makes a sincere effort to start on the path toward becoming an astronaut, they will begin shining with a bright light.

This entry may be offensive to atheists. You should definitely start with something even more general. There are many truths that are expressed in religion but that are actually relevant to all vaguely sane humans, such as “it is more blessed to give than to receive”. Anyone who actually tries this can verify it for themselves. But what I want to write about today will probably not make sense unless you are familiar with religion. So skip it if you can’t understand it.

I started this practice at a time when I was also getting into studying the books of Happy Science, so the two things have become a bit mixed together in my mind. But actually I picked this up from a modern contemplative Christian who mentioned it briefly in his LiveJournal. Basically, when you pass random people, try to silently say “Bless you” inside while focusing on them.

There are of course other expressions that can be used. Basically what it means is “may good things happen to you”. It is best to not be too specific about what you want to happen to them. The idea is not that you, the great and very important person, get to see it happen. The blessing may unwrap in the far future, at a point where they need it the most. Or they may just be spared some misfortune that they did not even know about. There are even events that are blessings in disguise, that don’t seem all that pleasant while they last. It matters not, just bless them, and don’t let them know.

I’ve been practicing this for months. Obviously I don’t compulsively bless every person in sight, at least not when I am in the city where people are swarming all the time. And I take time for other things sometimes, like reading on the bus instead of blessing every car we meet on the interstate. It is not something you do neurotically, it is an opportunity. Although it is in a sense a commandment if you are a Christian, for it is written: “Bless, and curse not!” and again, “but on the contrary bless; for to this you are called, that you may inherit the blessing.”

Now, doing this silently and briefly may seem pretty tame. I guess it is, but it is also very simple and does not take much time. You have nothing but your faith that it has any effect at all – on the other person. When it comes to yourself, it will definitely have an effect if you are serious about it and keep at it for weeks or months. Because when you bless others, it kind of seeps into your own substance. Same for curses, of course, but who would want to try that?

Now you may argue that this is a replacement for actually doing anything good for people. That is not at all true. It is a preparation for actually doing something good for people. It builds a mindset, an attitude where it becomes natural to bless others. And that means, at the very least, that it becomes less natural to try to take from them. You become more aware that other people are as real as you are, and you start thinking of ways in which your life can be useful for others.

OK, to be honest I am not sure how much of that thinking comes from looking at people to bless them, and how much comes from studying the books of Happy Science. But I am pretty sure the blessing is a fairly large part of it. So this is part of why I have turned around completely regarding work: I used to see it as divine punishment, and I looked forward to getting home and being alone, I looked forward to the weekend when I did not need to go to work. Now, I look forward to going to work on Monday morning, knowing that I will have an opportunity to turn my blessings into action, however poorly and incompetently yet. I may not be able to do much, but I can do it with the attitude of love and wishing the best for the people I try to help.

As for today’s title: There is a special state of mind that comes when you focus your attention on someone and think “I bless you on behalf of God who has an ever renewing ocean of blessings and loves you eternally. May good things happen to you from now on and in the future.” It is this state of mind we condense into the simple words “Bless you!”. What I am training at now is to condense this further, so that merely by looking at someone and recreating that state of mind wordlessly, I will be able to convey my blessing just with a glance. This is what I lightheartedly call “bless-vision”. I am certain that should anyone meet my eyes at such a time, they will know to some extent that they are being blessed, much as you notice when someone looks at you angrily or lustfully. But mainly it is a matter of efficiency.

My goal, which I admit is far from certain in this lifetime, is to be able to uphold a steady bless radiance, in which blessings radiate from me to every person and creature and thing nearby that can possibly receive it. That is obviously a pretty extreme goal, and as I said, not necessarily something I can achieve in this lifetime, especially since I have wasted so much of my life already and entered into a habit of wasting it continuously. But it should be possible. There are definitely people who live like these. This is what in Buddhist literature is translated as “compassion”. It is a love that has no object, but is given without conditions and without restrictions. But this is not something I can do, or more exactly be (for it is existence as love) and I am well aware that I am far from this.

Perhaps I am like a toddler who wants to become an astronaut. It is a fact that there are extremely few astronauts in the world, and will be for the foreseeable future. Very few toddlers grow up to become astronauts. But all astronauts have once been toddlers. So I intend to keep toddling. That is my plan, Light willing.

Happy Science’s christology

Posted on by
3

If only he had listened to Ryuho Okawa, this would not have happened.

OK, this is bound to have a VERY narrow reader base. But I just finished my re-read ofThe Laws of Eternity today so it is fresh in my mind.

On that note, I am pleased to find that re-reading the book after several months was a whole new experience. While I won’t exactly say that I had forgotten everything or even most of it, the details had faded into a vague background information, which actually made the book more interesting the second time around.

While the religious organization Happy Science (in Japanese Kofuku-no-Kagaku meaning “Science of Happiness”) has a lot in common with Christianity, it can not with any stretch of words be said to be a Christian sect. It combines Christianity and Buddhism, with some influence from other religions and philosophies, but it is mostly rooted in Buddhism, as can be expected since Shakyamuni Buddha and Ryuho Okawa are each supposed to be 1/5 of the religion’s main deity, El Cantare. Despite this, Jesus Christ is accorded a very high place by non-Christian standards. One gets the distinct impression that Christ and Okawa are best friends since at least when the dinosaurs were young, if not before.

That said, the christology – the teaching about Christ – is what most of all sets the new religion apart from Christianity. When it comes to ethics they are strikingly similar, and the religion’s teaching about the afterlife and much of the spirit world is fairly similar to mainstream Christianity. Admittedly the concept of Hell in Buddhism comes closer to the Catholic concept of Purgatory, not the Final Solution to the Sinner Problem that the Christian Hell is supposed to be. But the various Hells are vaguely similar to those of Dante, and the heavens are quite familiar. Jesus Christ is also fairly familiar – but in the end, there are a few differences that just cannot be reconciled.

Most notably, Jesus is not unique. In Happy Science, a large number of planets are inhabited, and each of them has various spheres of spirit world surrounding them. Jesus lives in the 9th dimension, also called the cosmic dimension, so he is presumably able to communicate with other 9-dimensional spirits around the galaxy. He was already familiar with El Cantare before Earth was settled, after all. But his special role as savior and source of love is for this planet only. Other planets have their own saviors as needed.

Furthermore, even on Earth there are 10 cosmic spirits in the 9th dimension, of which El Cantare is the leader. (No big surprise there, given who is writing the books.) It seems to be a fairly relaxed atmosphere among these saviors, except for some palpable tension between Enlil and El Cantare, but El Cantare is a bit more than “first among equals”. He still shares the same dimension as the rest of them though. It is strongly implied that Jesus is the second in command, so to speak, and actually said to be in charge of the heavens while El Cantare is partially incarnated in the 3-dimensional world. (One should bear in mind that 80% of El Cantare is still up there, though.)

As for Jesus being God’s son, that is not a big deal in a worldview where every living thing (and then some) is a child of God. The primordial God (or primordial Buddha, depending on the audience) is unimaginably far above the created universe, but still every person has a small core of divine nature. There is no need for Jesus to give people this divine nature, it was invested at the moment of creation, according to Happy Science. (They do not refer to the episode where Jesus tells the pharisees that the Kingdom of Heaven is inside them, a very strange claim giving that he spoke to people who violently rejected him. Some later readers have concluded that Jesus could not possibly mean that, and must have meant that the Kingdom was “among” them instead. But in the Buddhist worldview, Jesus’ words are trivially obvious.)

So while Jesus is still the incarnation of Love and still a Savior, he is certainly no longer God’s only begotten Son and he does not have all power in Heaven and on Earth. If you believe Happy Science and its leader Ryuho Okawa. Which means no Christian is ever going to believe him, at least in this regard.

As for the historic Jesus, this part is treated in The Golden Laws and is also a bit different, though not all that much. The virgin birth is written off as a mythunderstanding, while on the other hand Jesus was originally called Immanuel (as per the prophecy) and later changed name to Jesus (perhaps like Ryuho Okawa who originally was named Nakagawa Takashi, according to Wikipedia.) Most of the extra stuff is placed in the “hidden years” from Jesus was 12 till he was 30. Supposedly he spent some time in Egypt, possibly instead of his babyhood detour there. After all, it was prophesied that he would be called from Egypt, which makes somewhat more sense if he was old enough to realize his calling at the time. Supposedly he later went to India and studied spiritual concentration and miracles. He also studied the Persian religion of dualism. By the time he was 30, he had a very thorough education in several of the world religions. (Incidentally, 30 was also the age when Ryuho Okawa began his great mission to save humankind. By then Jesus had already spoken to him many times. But back when Jesus was incarnate, it was the other way around – it was El Cantare who was mentoring him, in his aspect as Hermes.)

Hermes was not too happy about the whole cross thing. He would have preferred that Jesus had been more diplomatic and lived a long life teaching people, like Shakyamuni Buddha did. Having only a few years to get his message across was bound to cause vagueness in the doctrine and a splintering of the religion over time. But Jesus was adamant. No compromise, even in face of Calvary. Never compromise. And it turned out fairly well: Despite some internecine war, Christianity has become a world religion and its vagueness has actually made it easier for it to adapt to changing times and different cultures.

According to the Golden Laws movie, Jesus actually did call for Elijah when he was about to die on the cross, as onlookers reported according to the Gospel. (The Bible gives four different interpretations of his last words, none of which include Elijah, though one sounds similar.) Angels then came and escorted his spirit back to Heaven. The Catholic belief that Jesus went straight to Hell is anyway somewhat poorly founded in Scripture. The verse that says that he went in spirit and preached to the spirits who were incarcerated seems to place his visit there after the resurrection and make it a somewhat less depressing event. I don’t have any revelation either way. In the movie, Hermes is credited with resurrecting Jesus, rather than the Creator acting directly. I am pretty sure this is a view only held by Happy Science.

There is supposedly a whole book which Okawa wrote down that Jesus dictated to him, but it is (probably wisely) not translated into English. I suspect more differences to mainstream Christianity would be found there, but what do I know. In any case, I think I have proven beyond doubt that there is some conflict of interest between Christianity and Happy Science, despite striking similarity in ethics and sanctification.

And while I truly admire Master Okawa and find his books and speeches deeply inspirational, I can’t help but think that the world today is better than it would have been if Jesus had written 500 books and gone into politics. (Your Jesus may vary.)