Category Archives: religion

Self-reflection of La Mu

Posted on by
Reply

If you think thoughts like “This isn’t fair”, it is like dark threads attach themselves to your soul. Thoughts are the threads that bind us to actions; actions are the ropes that bind us to habits; habits are the chains that bind us to destiny. If you want to avoid an evil destiny, remove the evil thoughts.

Around the holiday season, I continued nibbling on the book The Science of Happiness by Ryuho Okawa, founder of the religious movement Kofuku-no-Kagaku, which also means “Science of Happiness”. And I finally came to a lucid explanation of self-reflection. I already understood from other books of his that self-reflection is essential in Buddhism, and I was pretty sure I had done some of it already or I would be less happy than I am.

I attribute my happiness to the thorough education I received in the Christian Church popularly known as “Smith’s Friends”, back when they were less organized, fewer and more mystically oriented than today. (They’re still pretty good, by the way, if you can live with less mysticism and more focus on accumulating money for the Church. Which is hard to avoid, no matter where you go today. If you know of any exceptions, write me.)

Self-reflection in the Christian Church was referred to by the Biblical phrases “afterthought” and “judging ourselves”, the latter being somewhat more positive than it sounds. In context, the Bible says “If we judged ourselves, we would not be judged”, and this is certainly a very positive thing. And even if we are judged by God, the purpose even of this is that we not be condemned. So it is not as depressing as it sounds. But I can see how it would not have broad public appeal.

In contrast, the self-reflection of La Mu should have very near universal appeal, except to those who honestly believe that they are just clumps of protoplasm programmed to replicate and die. In which case they are probably not reading this, but out raping Catholic school girls before committing suicide. To the rest of us it should be pretty obvious that much like the amphibians came up from the water and gradually colonized the dry land, so have we humans come up from the material reality and colonized mindspace. While we still need water (matter) we are living most of our lives in this slightly higher world, and there are many even higher places ahead for us to go. Let us enter the gently sloping beach out of the swamp and toward our destiny!

The self-reflection of La Mu can be summed up as simple and universally as this:

-Have I given love to anyone today?
-Has my mind been unwavering today and in tune with my highest aspiration?
-Have I learned anything new today?

You can find a more detailed explanation in the book, available from Amazon.com (and presumably from your nearest Happy Science temple or office, but there are none anywhere near me.) But I think these three questions should be enough to get any well-meaning human out of the swamps, if practiced regularly, simply and honestly.

If I find that my life was not in accordance with these 3 questions, then I need to acknowledge this, and honestly wish that it was different, and resolve to not miss these opportunities in the future. When I do this, according to Okawa, my past is actually rewritten in the Akashic records (the books in Heaven, to use western words for it). The layers of grime that cover the diamond of the soul are removed, but by bit, so we can begin to emit a bright light from within. This is because the diamond of the soul (our spirit, in western thought) is connected to God and has the ability to receive and amplify the divine Light.

Regardless of the theology, there is the psychology of it. Doing these things causes happiness. Not doing them causes lack of happiness. This can be verified by experiment. Secular psychologists, such as Martin Seligman, have confirmed for decades now that at least adults achieve lasting happiness by practicing classical virtues. Not by receiving money or attention from others. This has of course been known for thousands of years, but modern advertising has enormous wealth staked on encouraging infantile behavior long into adult life. And ironically, this cruel form of capitalism is aided and abetted by institutional socialism, which gains strength from our learned helplessness. If people were healthy, happy and prosperous, the role of the state in their lives would necessarily be less.

Unlike many conservatives, I don’t want to confront the modern overgrown state head on and try to trim it down. This would just cause suffering among those who have learned to rely on the state. Rather, if people become strong by practicing self-reflection, there will be less need for society to intervene in a bureaucratic way, as people will take better care of themselves and each other. I think it is good that we have hospitals that work as well for the poor as for the rich, but I think it is bad that the poor stuff themselves with junk food, smoke, drink and stare at the TV for hours each day. By improving your character, whether you are rich or poor, you will achieve greater happiness and consequently better health and a more productive life. And it has never been easier.

Of course, no matter how happy or healthy you are, you will eventually die in the end. But I think we can agree that this is not when you will regret having spent time on self-reflection…

So, this is my way of giving you love today! It may be a harsh love, but it is certainly well intentioned and will be of great help if for some reason you don’t already practice self-reflection already but start now.

Also, by reading this you will be able to say to yourself tonight: I learned something new today! Yay! And feel a warm glow of happiness inside. ^_^

50th year come and gone

Posted on by
2

Illustration picture from the anime Kimi ni Todoke, which should mean “Reaching You”.  One can only hope.

So by “coincidence”, as some people believe in, I found this small poem by William Butler Yeats on a friend’s blog last night.  He only uses a few words from it, but it struck me straight in the forehead, because it describes in condensed beauty something I have tried repeatedly to write about, but don’t seem to have uploaded anywhere on this site. So, take it away Yeats!

My fiftieth year had come and gone.
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body for a moment blazed,
And twenty minutes, more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed, and could bless.

Does this sound familiar? Apart from the fact that I turned 51 last week, I mean. What he describes is what I in my old journal entries called “pleasure attacks”, but which Ryuho Okawa more precisely calls “moments of bliss”.  Okawa, author of The Science of Happiness where he also writes about this and much more, has a theory that people start having more and more of these moments if they love knowledge for its own sake, not as a tool.  He specifically mentions reading lots of books as a typical activity for this kind of people.  So it is disturbingly spot on when you see the poem and its open book image.

Of course Okawa may well have read Yeats, but I had not when I first started writing about this phenomenon. At the time I also had no idea about its connection to the love of knowledge and reading, but I have had several online friends verify this.

It is interesting that the moment of bliss (or blaze, as Yeats dubs this barely containable surge of energy) is associated with being blessed and able to bless. It is in other words a deeply spiritual experience, and one aimed beyond the individual who receives it.  This fits with Okawa’s theory that the bliss is an early stage of inspiration, caused by being close to High Spirits (angels, saints, saviors, or at a minimum the spirits of great artists or leaders that have gone before us).  These spirits live in the Realm of Light and above, and this Light and life and joy radiates from them to people who come close to them.  (Not geographically, but by alignment of the mind.)

When inspiration breaks through in a clearer form, its purpose is always to create or bring into the world something of lasting value, some contribution to the beauty or knowledge or virtue that goes beyond the individual.  It is indeed like a Light from above breaking through into this world.

The purpose then is not my pleasure as an ego.  It would anyway be meaningless for me to love knowledge for its own sake in order to experience this bliss, because then it would no longer be for its own sake. This paradox vanishes when I realize that I am not just blessed for my own sake, but on behalf of those around me.

As for why most of us don’t really begin to see these things until we are past the midday of our lives… I guess it may be a natural cycle of life, but there are some few who arrive sooner (and many who die from old age having never reached it). So I just notice that this is how it was for Yeats and me, although Okawa seems to have passed this way before he was 30.  Your mileage may vary.  But as long as you live, it is not to late to be blessed and to bless.  And perhaps even after this life, for some?

In any case, my 50th year was one in which I learned a whole lot about the spiritual dimension of life. That won’t help me unless I actually become transformed, of course. But it is still quite interesting.  It really is as if a new quality is opening to life. It reminds me of when I was in high school and for fun put on my cousin’s glasses. And suddenly realized that it was possible to see the world clearly at a distance. Until then I had thought that humans simply did not see individual leaves on a tree until coming quite close, and that things far away were inherently foggy.  Suddenly everything came into focus, and when I got my own glasses shortly after, I spent weeks just staring at things, amazed at the rich details of the world.

It’s happening again.  I truly am blessed, but do I manage to share that blessing? I wonder.  I should try harder.

Icebergs of revelations

Posted on by
Reply

iceberg

Picture shamefully stolen from Sciencebhakta, a blog at Good Shepherd Catholic School. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how a spiritual iceberg should look!

Ryuho Okawa, founder of the religious organization “Happy Science”, occasionally says some strange things. For the most part, however, he says things that seem obvious once I see them, but for some reason were not quite as obvious before. That is good, I think. We need more obviousity. We need to see these truths as self-evident, in an age where people doubt so many things but have faith in their own superiority in spite of all evidence. (Only 6% of Norwegian parents have children who are below average in school. In America, 90% of male drivers are above average while the women are about average. And pretty much everyone who thinks there is a Heaven thinks they are going there, except Jehovah’s Witnesses who modestly intend to colonize the new Earth instead. Compare this to Jesus’ statement that “narrow is the path that leads to life and few are those who find it.” In short, whether it is in this world or the next, almost all of us think we are one of the few. Oh well. If you have found this website, you are definitely one of a few!)

One of the obvious things is to not put all your goods in the shop window. That is to say, if you talk about spiritual things, you should know a lot more than you say. Okawa recommends being like an iceberg, with only a small part of your revelations visible to people, and the rest below the surface. For actual physical icebergs, the proportion that is above water is about 1/8. So for every revelation you share with others, you should have seven more revelations of the same sort.

I wasn’t there, obviously, but according to Okawa he was getting spiritual messages from various high spirits from Heaven for years before he started his organization. But having seen what happened to other religious leaders, he was quite wary of telling everyone until he understood everything clearly.

I have to agree there. I don’t want to mention names, but there are a number of people in the New Age movement at least that strike me as “one trick ponies”. They have one big revelation and they are going all out with it, but not all people are the same. So we get various specialists and people who follow them. You see the same in Protestantism. Perhaps it is something in the culture of northern Europe, but we seem to have a lot of small churches that break out from some other church because they get some revelation that the others don’t have. Each of them is convinced that their revelation is a matter of life and death. Often these revelations are purely theological, that is to say, you cannot actually see that these people become better by believing in this or that particular detail of doctrine. They don’t become happier, more helpful and more merciful. Of course it could still be an important piece of doctrine, but how will you prove it when you don’t have “fruits”?

Okawa is not the first to bring out that idea, of course. Jesus seems to have pretty much shut up about spiritual things from he was 12 till he was 30. He is later quoted as saying that a teacher who is trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is comparable to a host who brings out old and new things from his storage. That is the same thing, is it not? To have a storage of good stuff before you start hosting a large party.

So I’ve been thinking a bit about how I measure up in that regard. But then again I don’t really think of myself as a religious teacher. It is a dangerous job. It is bad enough to destroy your own life, but destroying others surely is worse.

I should write about games, or snow or something, I guess. But this stuff is also interesting.  I wonder if the other people who buy his books have the same experience. That seems unlikely, there is supposedly sold millions of them by now and the world is pretty much the same, isn’t it? So much so that I had never head about Happy Science until I accidentally came across one of their movies. But perhaps most of the readers are just busy storing their revelations beneath the surface.

Vertical religion and Quality

Posted on by
2

di091121

Quantity vs Quality! The eternal battle!

Yesterday I mentioned a book by Huston Smith, who seems to be moderately famous but not to me. He is a scholar of comparative religion or some such, and evidently quite the spiritual offroader himself. Well, judging from the title of his autobiography, which comes quite late in his life as well, around the age of 90, and is titledTales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography. That is quite an adventure, don’t you think?

But I had not heard about that, I bought the book Forgotten Truth because it supposedly claims that a multidimensional, vertical cosmos is the common thread of all the world’s great religions (and some not so great ones too, from what I gather).

As regular readers will know, I have taken an interest in the verticality of the universe for some time now. Obviously I don’t mean vertical in a literal sense, as the physical universe already has this dimension. But rather that there are other dimensions beyond those measured with a measuring tape and a stopwatch. These dimensions are qualitative rather than quantitative.

Take beauty, for instance. It is certainly hierarchical, in the sense that some things are more beautiful than others, but there is no obvious measuring unit for it. There are certainly cultural and even personal variations in the sense of beauty, but the existence of beauty is obvious to all who don’t have a desperate need to forget it. Even so, we cannot perform arithmetics on it. Or happiness. You can surely compare your happiness today with your happiness yesterday, and you can generally say when someone is happy or unhappy, but you cannot compare your happiness to your neighbor’s happiness and announce that you have 1.19 happyliter more happiness than he.

The world is full of such qualities, and they are clearly ordered, so that there is a higher and a lower degree of them, even though we cannot express it directly. This direction is it that we call vertical, in a metaphorical sense. A higher realm, such as a Heaven, would have more beauty and happiness and peace – not as in a greater number of pretty things, happy people etc, but these qualities would be in themselves more intensely present, more subtle, deeper.

I have still only read the beginning of the book, and I am not actually quoting it in the least. This is my view more or less at the time I bought the book, and I don’t expect it to change much from reading it. Although I do expect it to become more intensely present, more subtle and deeper… ^_^

***

Reading one of those early pages yesterday on the bus, I almost laughed out loud. And not in the mocking way of a drunk fratboy, but the unrestrainable glee of a toddler finding something shiny. The shiny in this case was a quick mention of “quality” as one of those non-Euclidian properties of the cosmos.

As I’ve mentioned a couple times, it is November, and for me that traditionally means National Novel Writing Month, a creative stampede in which writers good and bad (and good and evil) each try to write 50 000 words of one single work of a vaguely novel-like nature. And my attempt this year (which seems certain to fail, in part because I take it more seriously than usual) entails a man who crosses over to a different world, one in which Quality is a kind of magic that makes people and things go beyond the call of duty and do things normally not possible. For instance, a craftsman with a very high Quality may make a bed with a very high Quality, such that it not only restores your energy when you sleep in it, but also heals you to some small degree. The Quality of all things in the area influence each other. People in a high-Quality area make high-Quality products, but they also eat high-Quality food made from high-Quality plants etc.

Of course that is just a literary device. It is, as I call it, “like a spiritual journey without the spiritual part”. But of course I hope that some curious soul would set off on their own spiritual journey, whether chasing the wild Divine or merely fleeing the soul death within.

My novel sucks, though. I am not good at writing non-humor novels, and that’s a fact. If I get to live for decades more, I might actually become able to do it. But for now, I think I do a better job with non-fiction. Or perhaps not. Just because I understand what I write (to some degree at least!) does not mean that others do. But surely sooner or later someone vaguely similar to me will come across it. I know that happens to me. I come across someone who I have never heard of, and who is plagiarizing me, sometimes long before I was even born. Like this Huston Smith. Or the Buddha, or Lao-Tzu.

Sixth-dimensional programmer

Posted on by
2

di091023

The Light is a source of absolute power, as I am sure I have told you repeatedly. But this time it is an illustration from the anime “The Laws of Eternity”.

I have thought about this so often the last month or two, I almost believed I had written about it already. So I better do, or I will think I have said all the words that should be spoken, and then they are lost forever.

I’ll use the concepts from Kofuku no Kagaku (Happy Science, formerly IRH) to look at a part of my life from a different angle. I don’t really expect westerners (or indeed most Japanese) to believe that the sect leader is actually from Venus etc. I certainly don’t, but then again I will just let that rest, because I honestly don’t know how literally that is meant. He does say right out that his description of the spirit world is NOT some kind of “other world” that we go to when we die. I already knew this. It makes a lot more sense if, as he says, these dimensions are all in your mind. (That does not make them any less real: Everything is contained by the human mind, even this “real” world. This is why Democrats and Republicans live in different worlds and cannot even agree on measurable facts, such as whether the planet is warming or cooling.) People think they have to go somewhere when they die, but we are actually “there” already. In my case, I think, somewhere in the lower reaches of the sixth dimension, although I am not sure if I can stay there.

Now, what do I really mean by “dimension”? We already agreed it was not a physical thing.

If you really were a materialist – which nobody really is in practice – then you would basically be like an animal. You would have no goals or values above what your instinct told you from moment to moment. But all of us actively remember the past (while most, if not all, animals only recognize it when they see it) and think about the future. This means we all have access to Time, the fourth dimension.

But according to Happy Science (and this is the least happy part of it) many people these days don’t have access to the fifth dimension, which is spirituality. For some reason, this is also called the realm of good (or realm of the good). I guess “spirituality” is not a perfect translation of the Japanese concept? I mean, ouija boards etc should probably not be included. Intriguingly, the voice in my head reminds me that the Bible (Jude, vers 19) supports the view that there are “natural men who don’t have spirit” (or “the Spirit” – obviously one must have some degree of spirit to be human at all, much less religious.) So, since I still have not found any explanation in Okawa’s book for this feature, I rely on the voice in my head (or heart) for the following: The fifth dimension is characterized by the ability to reflect on your life, see your imperfections and repent. Without this there cannot be progress or true spirituality. The “natural men” cannot do this. They will excuse or explain away their mistakes and not grieve over their sins unless they are caught and punished, in which case they grieve over their lost reputation and opportunity, but not their lost purity, otherwise they would have repented alone as soon as they became aware of it.

Well, even though calling me “good” would be a bit of an overstatement, I do keep afterthought, or self-reflection, and I do pent and repent over and over. (Sometimes even without being sick! No, really!) It is just that some things seem to find their way back in. Still working on this, but it does not seem to be unique to me. And as Smith’s Friends say (this is another group of people again, and pure Christian, no Buddhism at least that they know of): The sin you see as most grievous is the one you first get victory over. This seems to be perfectly, accurately true. If you think your sin is not a crime and God is just easily squicked, then it will come back again and again, like muddy footprints in a house where the children never learn to take their shoes off.

The sixth dimension, finally! It is the Realm of Light. All who live here know that there is a higher power, which they may call by different names, but they are all aware of it. And not just in a theoretical sense, like when you learn in geography class that in Japan there is a mountain called Mount Fuji, but more like living in a place where you can view Fuji-san from your window. In the same way, one who lives in the sixth dimension, or should we say, the sixth dimension lives in him, is well aware of the Light. This divine Light is different from the light of the material sun, and it has two unique properties. One, it is able to create. Two, it is able to grow. When the divine Light meets a soul which has affinity with it, that soul will radiate more Light than it received, as if the Light was a living, growing thing. When the Light shines on a group of souls that are drawn to it, it can move from one to the other and back, growing all the while, so that they together radiate a great amount of Light. This is how a true religious organization should work. But this is not restricted to religion. Andrew Cohen talks about “enlightened communication”, and says that there is a greater consciousness beyond ego, which can be reached by groups of people who dedicate their talk to a greater purpose and abstain from making references to themselves. This greater consciousness has abilities beyond what each member of the group has, and even beyond the sum of the members of the group. I will add that exceptional cases of teamwork all over the world may be caused by Light amplification, for the Light has many projects going on.

People from the sixth dimension are active in various areas, doing exceptional things. They tend to be leaders in their fields, or outstanding artists or inventors, people who create something of lasting value. They do this not only by their own inherent connection to the Light, but also by the inspiration of their fellow spirits. Each of us has a guardian angel and many of us has one or more spirit guides, according to Happy Science. These are high spirits from the sixth realm or above who assist us when we seek to achieve something worthy but which we would have a hard time doing on our own. The muse of an artist or writer could be such a being from the sixth dimension, who is currently not in the flesh but is aching to contribute to the world through acting as inspiration (a word clearly related to spirit). I cannot swear that this is true, but long time readers will vaguely remember that I have written about this years ago.

When I was creating the debt reclamation software that later helped numerous companies here in Norway save millions, I would frequently get revelations on how to write a particular piece of code. It was as if someone had figured it out for me and placed it in my brain, and I just had to write it down and test it. This happened many times and I found it remarkable. At the time, I ran rings around a 20-man team of educated programmers with expensive equipment. Alone with a few workers who tested my programs as soon as I had coded them, I made this masterpiece on my free time and mostly for the joy of it, as well as helping an old friend. Because my motivation was pure and my creativity was beyond material rewards, it would seem that the high spirits of programming would quietly pitch in. If you believe in the afterlife world of Happy Science, it may be that spirits like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were looking down from Heaven and decided to give me a hand. Of course, this is figuratively speaking. Remember that everything is in our mind. But the effects are very real.

The sixth dimension is the dimension of truth, or true knowledge. People who love knowledge for its own sake, not as a tool to success in the material realm, will be blessed from time to time by random moments of bliss or ecstatic joy that comes for no reason or is out of proportion to its trigger. I call these “joy attacks” or “pleasure attacks” as a pun on the well known phenomenon of panic attacks. Actually, Okawa is the first other person I know of who has mentioned this! But we are not alone. A few days ago I had a poll on my LiveJournal to find out whether my friends had these experiences too, and whether they really only happened to people know loved knowledge, as Ryuho Okawa says. Not many answered, but all who did had these “joy attacks” and loved knowledge. One even commented to ask whether there were still people who did not love knowledge for its own sake. There certainly are, and I think you can ask any high school or college teacher about that if you are in doubt. Even better, look at advertisement for higher education. We may not know our motivations, but the advertisers know. They study humans with the same professional detachment as scientists study lab rats, because their success depends on knowing what really makes us tick.

Anyway, how do I know that I belong in the sixth dimension and not the seventh? That is easy: The seventh dimension is forgiving love. This is where the bodhisattva belong, and their western equivalents, the saints. (For some reason, Okawa always refers to the Christian version as “angels”.) Let us explain how love reacts at the different levels here. At the fourth dimension, you love your family (natural love). Apart from that, you expect tit for tat. At the fifth dimension, you expect gratitude. If people don’t praise you, you quickly lose your motivation, but if you can see that other people are happy and grateful, you get motivated to keep helping them even if they don’t pay you for it. At the sixth dimension, you don’t need gratitude, just acceptance. I have elsewhere compared this to a young mother whose breasts are full of milk. She does not need the baby’s gratitude, she is aching to let him drink, it is a need of her own. In the same way, we of the sixth dimension have a need to create and to share with the world, and all we ask for is that our gift be accepted. But those in the seventh dimension are not so easily turned away. Their love is unconditional, so that they will keep giving even if they are loved less the more they love. If you look at the official saints of the Catholic church, you will find that a disproportionate number of them were persecuted and many even became martyrs. This makes perfect sense because it is a kind of final proof that they were indeed saints. Normal people would have stopped well before it got that badly out of hand. But there are many other saints, and because they were never tested in such a dramatic outward way, they are not officially known. But those who have met them may realize it in time.

I am not a saint. I pray to God repeatedly that I may never be severely tested in forgiveness. As a Christian I am required to forgive everyone, and I believe this is needed even if you do not belong to this religion. If you cannot forgive someone, there will be a spot of evil on your soul, and this would put a serious dent in any plans you may have for your afterlife. But some of us, like me, are better off the less we are tested, as we could break easily and be overcome with evil. Therefore I pray that I not be tested in this regard, except for the most trivial situations which we all have to face. Like my bosses not respecting my vacation, for instance. To forgive is to forget, so don’t be surprised if I forget to show up for that mandatory training course that is slated inside my vacation… ^_^* But that’s a far cry from being persecuted for the Truth. I just know I could not possibly take that, at least not in the long run. They say that it is easier to die for your faith than to live for it, but I would rather prefer not to test that. Well, perhaps I could die as a martyr at the age of 90… Somehow I don’t think that would impress God or the angels very much though!

As I said, you can (and perhaps should) be a saint without being a martyr. But I also know that I simply am not that kind of person. I don’t have that level of love and dedication. It is a human trait to want to see oneself at the top of the pyramid, or very nearly so, “next to God”. But I cannot honestly believe that I am anything more than a barely sixth-dimensional programmer. Can I even stay at that level constantly? I don’t know, but I sure hope so.

Of course, that’s just one way of looking at it. I have used many other descriptions in the past, my favorite probably being Spiral Dynamics. But they don’t quite say the same thing. Also, one is more dry and scientific, while the other is colorful and filled with the mythos of several cultures. Even I see myself from different angles, and perhaps someone will understand me better one way than another. Is that not a big part of why we are on Earth in the first place, to understand and be understood?

Science of happiness and prettiness

Posted on by
Reply

di091020

There is beauty for the eyes, beauty for the ears, and beauty for the mind. Today I have enjoyed them all.

Got book from Amazon in my mail! Actually it was too big for my mailbox, because they used a huge flat package. In a small box it would have fit right in, but I suppose they have their reasons. For me it was a nice walk to the post office and back, and then I could open yet another Happy Science book. This one is actually called The Science of Happiness: 10 principles for manifesting your divine nature. As usual it is written by the astoundingly prolific Ryuho Okawa, but let it not be said that he is a miser who keeps secrets. He has already explained how he has been able to write more than 500 books since the mid-1980es when he started his happiness movement. The secret? He does not write them, he holds speeches. After making an outline, he then holds a series of speeches (something he does regularly anyway) on those topics. Afterwards, he edits them into a book. This book is no exception, and you can clearly see it when you know it. It has a living, unstilted form that is quite suitable for a public performance.

Yes, I still buy and read books by Okawa. No, I still don’t believe that he was king of Atlantis or ruled Venus when it was a tropical paradise. Apart from his personal biography, however, the voices in his head are disturbingly sane and even wise. Much like mine… ^_^ But of course I’m not some grand savior, just an ordinary guy from the sixth dimension, at most. If I had been incarnated before, I was probably called Ibn something and dabbled in alchemy… Anyway, the voice in my head tells me to pay attention to THIS life so I can get it at least somewhat right. I don’t exactly see a lot of divine nature in my life to date.

Speaking of divine, I have ordered the Saga CD I wrote about yesterday. Even though it is sold by Sony, I have not heard that the original Japanese division engages in the same random attacks on their customers as the American recording companies do. Therefore I don’t feel that I am supporting injustice when buying from them. And I don’t think it would be divine – or even humanly decent – to keep playing their song over and over and not pay for it, even though this is easily possible. Still, I would rather prefer to buy songs in non-physical form. Unfortunately the European iTunes does not have Japanese songs, and I don’t read kanji well enough to even find out whether it is possible for Europeans to use the Japanese iTunes or any similar service.

While waiting for the CD (which will probably arrive after I have left this address) I still enjoy listening to the full song on YouTube with the best conscience. It may not exactly be divine, but it sure is pretty. And beauty is also in its way a reflection of the divine, or so say the perennial traditions. According to Happy Science, great works of art are inspired from the sixth dimension, the Realm of Light. I won’t argue against that. There certainly seems to be an element of Light in it.

Scientists work long and hard days to prove that the consciousness is only a product – some even say byproduct – of the brain, and the same for beauty and religious experience. But by the same token, their own relentless search for “truth” as they see it must also be an unfortunate side effect of a brain that has forgotten its only purpose, to raise as many healthy children as possible to pass on the genes. It is an irony that just like the religious hypocrite is unable to practice what he preaches, so too is the anti-religious crusader unable to live up to his professed non-faith. The Light keeps shining on us all, and even the blind feel the sun on their face at times.

Daemon summoning

Posted on by
Reply

di090909

Demons, unlike animals and plants and stones, don’t exist in this world independently from humans. This is quite a good thing! The bad thing is, people are eager to raise hell, so there is still plenty of deviltry around, even though we have other words for it these days.

Most people these days don’t even believe that demons exist. This is true enough in a physical sense. You can’t put them in a box or take a blood sample of them for your test tube. You can’t take a picture of them, or measure their presence with radiation detection.

And yet, the same things that made our ancestors believe in demons still happen. For instance when someone gets angry or lustful, they may do things they would not normally even think of, and then they say: “I wasn’t myself” or “I don’t know what possessed me”.  In the past, a demon might have been blamed. So in a way it sounds as if we know less these days. But on the other hand, we don’t have the temptation to just blame the demons and pass ourselves off as innocent. This may be uncomfortable, but overall I think it is a good thing. Or would be a good thing, if we actually did take responsibility.

The thing is, we are back to the old metaphor of the rising and setting sun. Today we know full well that it is not the sun that rises and sets, but this knowledge has not caused the sun to stop. The same actual effects are still happening before our eyes, even if we have a different explanation for them. In the same way, blaming complexes instead of demons does not really change the fact that people still suffer.

Despite a very recent origin, Happy Science (Kofuku-no-Kagaku) still believe that stray spirits from Hell can torment people. But they hurry to add that we can avoid this by taking responsibility for our own mind through self-reflection. I would like to say more about this, but I don’t really know as much about it as I want. Anyway, in this religion the stray spirits are attracted to people who have a similar mindset.  So by giving room for dark thoughts, people draw dark spirits to themselves. You may say that they are performing a kind of demon summoning, without wanting to, or even knowing that this is what they do.

The same would probably be the case for someone who harbors perverse sexual lust in secret. In the old days, it was believed that demons of female form would come to men, especially celibate men, and offer them sexual favors. These succubi (succubus in singular form) would arrive in dreams or even when awake if you were celibate and alone. There were also “incubi”, male demons who would intrude on women, though this seems to have been less common and less intense overall.

Today we think of these as figments of our imagination, but the effect is still the same. They may come on their own or we may summon them, and despite their non-corporeal nature, our bodies still react to them. So how much has really changed? We have changed our language but we have not really changed our nature.

So am I saying that people who watch porn are summoning lust demons, or that people who watch racist propaganda are summoning wrath demons? Obviously not in a physical sense. It is a model of reality, not reality itself. It is a way of thinking about things. “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the real Tao.” For a map to be accurate, it must be as large as the terrain.  So the demon paradigm is a way of thinking about things for those who think that way. I can show you another way of thinking about the same thing, just to prove that you can model the same reality in different ways.

A popular way of thinking lately is that the brain is like a computer, and the human psyche is like the software that runs on the computer. This view does away with the most crass and repulsive form of materialism, in which people believe that the mind originates from the brain. That is pretty ignorant, you know. If you know nothing about computers, then you may be excused to believe that Windows is a part of the computer. But then one day you see someone install a new program on their computer, and you realize that it is not as simple as “you start your computer and there are programs”.

Now, you can install programs from a CD or DVD to your computer. Say you install The Sims 2. Before you installed it, it was not there, but your computer always had the capacity to run it, otherwise you could not do it even after installation. Then some time later you install an expansion pack for the game, and now it has some features it did not have before. And then some time later, you go online and download some new things for your game, such as furniture or clothes for the small imaginary people. Each time you are doing this “summoning”, you are changing the content of your hard disk so that it operates a little differently.

Unfortunately, this is not always a good thing. If you follow false leads, you could download a program that harms your computer. For instance, one time I downloaded a program that was supposed to make it possible to play the game without having the CD in the computer; but when I ran my virus checker on the file I had downloaded, it contained a virus that would take control of the computer. Obviously it is a bad idea to just run download anything you find on the Net and run it on your computer! So why do people do this with their brains??

For example, if you have a sexual perversion, and you go online and download pictures or stories that feed this perversion, that will not leave your mind unchanged. It will burrow into your brain and stay there, changing the way you think. If you keep feeding your brain with this kind of stuff, eventually you start thinking that it is normal. Sometimes I discuss anime (Japanese cartoons) with people online, and they are very excited because in this anime there was a picture of a grade school girl in her underwear, and the sight caused their nose to bleed. (This is a way people in Japan say that they become sexually aroused.) If I remind them that it is wrong to think of children that way, they don’t agree with me. I hope these people don’t have children of their own! Their soul has been damaged so that the natural defense mechanism has been disabled.

I hope you can see how this is actually the same thing that I wrote about above. In fact, in the Unix operating system we use the word “daemon” for a small program that runs on its own without user input, such as a clock or the program that fetches mail. So when you download and install a “daemon” in your brain, it changes the way your mind works, even if just a little.

Conversely there are other things that you can install into your brain that works as antivirus. And then you use this “antivirus” to “scan” your brain by reflecting on your life. How are things really, in light of this Truth? Is there a virus here, or is my mind clean in this particular regard? In this way, it is possible to even discover a mind parasite before it has time to explode into disaster.

I hope this was a little food for thought. It is easy to point and laugh at people who believe in demons, but they are still better off than people who believe in NOTHING. Belief in demons can cause unwanted behavior, like trying to buy off the demons or cast them out with magic instead of with truth, so it is certainly not something you should just casually adopt. But the fact still remains: What we summon into our lives will change us. Unfortunately, I know this from experience. Fortunately, not all of my experience is bad. I once allowed a holy spirit from Heaven into my life, who offered wisdom; and he teaches me and reminds me still, many years later.

Let there be Google!

Posted on by
Reply

di090905

Good news: New technology is spreading the good news! In this case, the Internet spreading the good news that an animating movie is spreading the good news that the printing press spread the Good News.  Not confused yet? Read on…

In the animated movie The Laws of Eternity, there is a part where Thomas Edison in Heaven explains his most recent incarnations.  In China, he incarnated as Tsai Lun who invented paper for writing. This made it possible to reproduce the Buddhist Sutras and preserve them for later generations.  In Germany, he incarnated as Gutenberg, and his invention led to the spread of Bibles. Then as Edison he invented the gramophone and motion pictures.  (It is not said in the movie, but this made possible Happy Science’s anime, which has spread their happy news across the world.)

It seems entirely too early for Edison to be back, but then who created Google?

In the world of Happy Science, Google would surely be the work of a Nyorai (Tathagata, archangel) from the eight dimension. A Nyorai when incarnated is a light of his age, and his mere presence changes the way people think and live.  A Nyorai may reform or renew a religion, though he will usually not start a new.  (Lao Tzu got pretty close though.) Other Nyorai may change the political landscape or usher in new inventions that completely change people’s lives. Some of them were later worshiped as gods by the pre-literate civilizations, where the stories of their lives changed and grew with the telling.  Examples of Nyorai are Apollo, Martin Luther and Albert Einstein.

Now,  I am not a member of Kofuku-no-Kagaku, so I may not fully and deeply understand their doctrine. But it is pretty straightforward, I think.  Even in daily life, we realize when two people are working in the same spirit.  Obviously we are not actually reincarnated in the sense that we continue to be the same person, or psyche:  This is always created from scratch in the meeting of spirit and dust, and is subject to its own judgment, whether upon death or in this life.  You cannot say to your conscience:  “Well, I did these good things in my previous life so cut me some slack.”  No, we are all living our first and only life.  But that does not mean we can’t bear within us a spirit that is greater than this earthly life.  Think of J.S. Bach, for instance, did he not have a heavenly spirit that can be felt in his works?

Now, it may be a stretch to compare Bach to Sergey Brin and Larry Page , but look at these excerpts from their letter to the shareholders:

“. . .Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.

. . .Our goal is to develop services that significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible.

. . . Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.”

Is that, or is it not, words you would expect from a Nyorai?  That’s exactly what a Nyorai does, significantly improve the lives of as many people as possible. If at least one of them is not a Nyorai, they are sure faking it well.

Not to mention that without Google, I would not have found the Happy Science books in the first place. ^_^  More broadly speaking, I have found so many new sources of ideas and become able to see my life and the world from so many new angles thanks to Google.  “Googling” has become a way of thinking, that does not replace but expands on ordinary thought by drawing in association from other people almost as if they were present.  With the digitizing of books and newspapers of the past, we are emulating the concept of the “fourth dimension” where not only distance but even time ceases to be a hindrance.

Of course, the “fourth dimension” also includes Hell, in kofuku-no-kagaku’s worldview.  And so does Google.  This is something that cannot be avoided when you give humans freedom. Some of them will use their freedom to raise hell.  But still, giving people freedom is an extremely noble goal, close to the divine, surely.

If you haven’t used Google Books yet, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.  You can read excerpts and reviews and find purchasing information about a huge number of books. Old books that are out of copyright can be read right there on the screen.  It is as if the Great Library has risen from the ashes.  Or been reincarnated or something.

Ideal or attachment

Posted on by
Reply

di0908027

“What are you making efforts for?” This question must be answered before entering the sixth dimension in the animated movie “The Laws of Eternity”.

For some days now I have privately watched a 5-minute inspirational video from Happy Science. (It is actually an excerpt from The Laws of Eternity, the anime.)As the characters pass into the sixth dimension, the realm of extraordinary accomplishments, a question appears in the accompanying song: “Is this my longing ideal, or is it an attachment?”

This is a good question. When we are attracted to something and want to attract it, it may be either of these. It could be an expression of our innermost soul, a part of the reason why we live in this world, and achieving it would bring happiness. Or it could be a distraction, something that would keep us trapped in our illusions so we never get to be who we really are, and thus bring misery.

The placement of that line in the video is probably not an accident. Or if it is, it is a very lucky accident. Ryuho Okawa writes in more detail in his book “The Laws of Happiness”. Here he writes that a politician may be unhappy because he is not president, and an office worker may be unhappy because he is not company president. But if they found themselves in the position they coveted, they would actually soon become very unhappy. This is because most people are not qualified for such a position, and the higher you climb, the more harshly people will judge you. They may not expect too much of some random pawn in the bureaucracy, but they have very high expectations to a leader and will show little mercy if he fails, or even if he succeeds only moderately well.

Okawa believes that there are some people who are born to lead, born to achieve greatness in this world. This may not at all be apparent at the start of their life, but it is apparent in the way they act in their circumstances. These people, according to the somewhat unusual worldview of Happy Science, actually belong in the Sixth Dimension (or above, in extraordinary cases). While this is a notion of the afterlife, the useful part is that people actually live in this world according to their nature in the “real world” as Okawa insists on calling it, the spirit world. So even if you don’t believe literally in the intricate dimensional ladder, it still describes people in this world.

(A few words on that dimensional stuff. It is not quite as sci-fi as it sounds. Yes, the fourth dimension is time, but in this context it mainly means that the spirits after death are unbound by time. They are, in other words, eternal. This is a pretty common belief. In the world of Happy Science, the afterlife is not necessarily Heaven or Hell. People who don’t really have much depth may simply just keep going on as before, barely aware that they have died. The fifth dimension adds spirituality – hardly a physical dimension. The sixth dimension is true knowledge. So you see, these could just as easily describe someone still in this world.)

So a person who belongs to the category of souls that are classified as the “sixth dimension” will have a natural drive to excel. They seek excellence, leadership or dominance not out of a foolish illusion that it will make their lives easier. They know that the opposite is true, but their sense of mission or purpose spurs them on even so. For them it is their longing ideal, and they will sacrifice what is needed and do what it takes to accomplish their life dream. But when someone less spiritually evolved tries the same thing, their motivation is off, and they are seeking an attachment. They want to be admired, respected, looked up to, to have lots of money and things they can buy with money, to be able to boss others around and give orders without having to obey anyone themselves, and men are often motivated by their mating urge as well. It is all about themselves and feeling as much pleasure as possible in this life. But this rarely goes well, because such an attitude does not prepare you for the price paid for excellence.

Alone but not alone

Posted on by
Reply

di0908025

Don’t worry! We are not alone. Well, I guess that depends on how you see it.  This entry owes its existence to me watching another anime where someone says “Don’t fear, you are not alone” as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to be afraid of.

This is a kind of recurring topic, I guess. Or at least I have written about it more than once.  But I think it can take another round, because it is so alien to most people.  I mean, if some blogger writes that he is gay, or that he is afraid of dogs, or that he uses a wheelchair, those are all unusual; but they still fit into categories that already exist in your mind.  But if I say that I prefer a life of  near solitary confinement, there just is no mental category for that.

“Single” doesn’t even begin to approach it. “Celibate” is mostly about sexual abstinence, or at least that is how people think of it.  “Hermit” is someone who lives out in the woods without electricity.   I don’t do that.  I go to work like a good office rat, I just avoid the watercooler.  Whenever possible I just work with the computers, although I have no fear of my coworkers:  I will approach them when needed to get a job done.  They are nice enough people.  But to compete with solitude you need to be truly great. Amazing, really. There have not been many such people in my life. (And I probably wasn’t all that amazing in their lives either.)

The confusing thing is that I am not alone when I am alone.  Well, almost never. I have experienced feeling truly alone and abandoned, and it was hellish beyond any physical pain I can remember. I can easily understand why people will  cut or even burn themselves to try to drive away the pain in the soul, but I doubt it works for long. Luckily, for me those were just brief episodes, albeit episodes that had a lasting effect on my life. Not that I would want to have that kind of lesson taught me again if I can avoid it.

To once again invoke Happy Science and the books by Ruyho Okawa, they assume that each of us have at least one guardian angel.  Usually these days there is also a second angel, a guiding angel.  I am honestly not sure if that is the Presence I experience each day, or whether that is actually God, or even some part of myself – but if so, it is far more than my better half: It is towering above me intellectually and ethically.  It is hard to imagine how I would end up in charge of my body, how I would end up being the ego, the conscious one, if my subconscious held someone like that.  Yet the Presence does not try to depose me and take control of my body – though it may occasionally influence it to halt me in my tracks if I am going dangerously wrong – but generally it is more like a saintly, tolerant older brother.  (I know this because I actually have a saintly, tolerant older brother, although we did not spend that much time together.  It is not a memory of him I experience, but there are certain similarities.)

I may get back to this topic. It is quite fascinating.  But for now, let us just accept the fact that when I am alone, I don’t feel alone.  It is not just that I don’t feel lonely.  Rather, there is a distinct experience or at least assumption of Presence.  Sometimes it is definitely more of an experience, while at other times I just take it for granted.

It seems a bit unfair, I guess, albeit in my favor.  While the voices in some people’s head say “Stab someone with a knife! Stab someone with a knife! Stab someone with a knife!”, mine says “The spaghetti is finished” or “Don’t just lie there and pray, go call a doctor.” (OK, so that was only once, but the spaghetti is pretty common.) Much of the time the Presence is not even close to speaking.  It may illuminate something I read so that I understand it with unexpected clarity, or remind me of something I heard long ago.  Or it may simply be there, quietly keeping an eye on me while I do my own things, or listening while I try to sort out my thoughts.

Women are definitely more sexy, but in pretty much any other regard they draw the short stick over and over.  There is simply no way to compete with someone who is closer to me than my own skin, nearly as much a part of my life as the beating of my heart.  Well, unless you’re the one Chris de Burgh sings about in his ballad Forevermore:

You are my lover,
you are my friend,
you are my life to the very end.
You bring me comfort,
you keep me warm,
you give me hope,
you make me strong.
You take me away to a distant shore,
and it’s with you that I want to stay
forevermore.

Forever is a long time. But I don’t mind, if it is like this. In truth, the main reason I am afraid of death is that I hear from so many that there is some kind of justice in the Hereafter, and I fear that this means I will have to part with my undeserved companion. If it were the other way around – if I were alone now but the Presence was waiting for me on the Other Shore – well, it is hard to say something like this for sure when Death is not breathing down my neck, but I think I would cross over with some semblance of dignity at least. But that is not how it is. Unfortunately for my death, but very fortunately for my life, I already have here something that others hope for in the afterlife.