Category Archives: religion

In other words

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“Dream about Heaven” – individual bliss or Divine Nature?

“The renunciation of the contemplative does not at all have the aim of accumulating merits for the sake of individual bliss; it serves to put the soul, by what one might call radical measures, into the most favorable possible state for realizing its own infinite Essence.” – Frithjof Schuon, Prayer Fashions Man.

This sounds eerily familiar. Didn’t I try (and perhaps fail) to express some of the same in my entry last month, “Ascesis“? I think I said entirely too much, while Schuon may lean in the other direction. He condenses things into crystal clarity, but it also has some of the diamond’s hardness. Not easily chewed and digested.

And no, I haven’t read this book before. But it is not like we are the first two to think of this, I am sure.

“Accumulating merits for the sake of individual bliss” – this is what modern atheists call “pie in the sky when you die”. Rack up bonus points in Heaven so you can get a good seat, by doing good but unpleasant things and not doing pleasant things that you want to do. Then sit and watch the idiots who failed to rack up bonus points, as you look down on them in eternity with a big grin.

But the reality of a Christian (or another practitioner) is something entirely different. Life is hard enough without fulfilling the fantasies of atheist stereotypes. It may be that we start out with a desire for individual bliss, or at least (in my case) a desire to escape Hell. We all have to start somewhere. And it may be that I would renounce far more than I do, if I had some kind of tally of divine favor points (like in the RPG Darklands, which was loosely based on Catholic Germany of the late middle ages, and where you spent Divine Favor by invoking saints for miracles, then rebuilt your divine favor by spending time in prayer or going to Mass.)

But the way I see it, giving up this or that is not a matter of earning points, it is a matter of taking out the trash first, then usable but obsolete stuff to make room for something better. Not just something better for me as this bag of flesh, but for everyone, everywhere, at all times. In the last instance Divine nature, but at least as an intermediate step, the Human Operating System version 3. It seems Schuon had it too, no big surprise there.

“He who knows”

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“I have a strong sense for the supernatural”. This may be a good thing if you run into the right supernaturals, but even then it is far from enough.

“He who ‘knows’ theoretically does indeed enjoy metaphysical certitude, but such certitude does not yet penetrate his whole being; it is as if, instead of believing a description, one saw the object described, but without the sight of it implying either a detailed knowledge or a possession of the object” – Frithjof Schuon, Prayer Fashions Man.

I’ve recently read a bit in this small but dense book by the hero of Perennial Wisdom. It is fascinating to me to see how much of what he writes says the same things that I struggle to express, and says it with crystal clarity. Unfortunately, these crystals are very hard or dense or impenetrable, so for the common man it is not easy to understand Schuon at all. At best one will find a few sentences here and there that stand out. But practice helps, and especially reading more accessible literature on the same topics.

If you knew me, you would see why I think Schuon writes about me and people like me in this particular paragraph. I hope I make no pretense to being a spiritual teacher, for such a person needs to BE what he teaches, whereas I am like a tourist or at best an immigrant in a new country, writing home to tell what I SEE.

For some reason I was given the grace to see various truths. Well, we can specify it a bit more than that: Because of my pure love for truth, I was allowed to see it. You know one of the most famous sayings by Jesus Christ: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” In the same way, despite being more a scientific mind than a religious one, I developed a pure love for Truth or Wisdom; this is already a grace, though from the outside it looks like virtue. But there was in this “virtue” no effort, but a pull toward the pure beauty of Wisdom, which is more radiant than the full moon rising on a dark night.

At the time, my love was pure, for I was attracted to Truth itself, not knowing that it would also bring me great joys. This is analogous to an innocent young person’s first love, who is unaware of the pleasures of lovemaking, but is still filled with a longing for the other person and a wish to see and be with the beloved. Once you know by experience what awaits you should you be received by the one you love, it is almost impossible to be that selfless ever again. At some layer of your mind you will always calculate with a reward, even if you would have loved the person without it.

In this way, I can no longer lay claim to the pure love for Truth, Knowledge and Wisdom that was my greatest grace. But I did see enough to enjoy certitude, as Schuon puts it. You must understand that when Schuon says “theoretically” here, he does not refer to someone who simply learn things by rote from a book. I did indeed learn from books to some extent, but by resonance rather than memorization. For the Knowledge we talk about here is of a higher order, it is Knowledge of the heart.

Even this Knowledge, however, is flat until lived. It remains just an image. To gain that extra dimension that makes it fully real, it must become flesh. Another famous phrase in Christianity – perhaps the core message of the religion – is that “the Word became flesh”. This is also in a certain sense an example for us. Until the Truth becomes flesh, becomes embodied, becomes lived life, it is incomplete, shallow, flat.

And that’s where we are now, isn’t it? Postcards home from Heaven.

THIS is a summary??

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You probably have many questions, but I am terrible at explanations. And here I prove it once again.

I will try to summarize the thing I have been babbling about most of the month: The Human Operating System version 3.

The operating system on a computer decides what kind of programs it can run, and some are better than others in certain situations. In the same way, humans have a set of basic abilities that are necessary for us to use our brain in the normal way. This “operating system” is not something we are born with, but we acquire it very early in life. The most obvious part of it is language.

Humans like us existed for a long time – a hundred thousand years, perhaps much longer – using an earlier operating system, basically the same as the Neanderthals used. Their culture was focuses squarely on survival, and the tools were fire and the hand axe, which they made exactly the same way for tens of thousands of years. Invention was practically unknown. Any form of art or decoration was absent. And we believe language as we know it was not part of their abilities, although they had the physical ability to make any sounds we can make.

I call the stone axe survival culture “Human Operating System version 1”. It worked: These humans slowly spread all over Africa, and races with the same mindset (Neanderthals and Denisovans) roamed Eurasia in the depths of the last Ice Age.

As you may have noticed, humans are different now. This is because we have a new operating system, which we download when we are infants. We are able to talk, we are creative and imaginative, we cooperate on a larger scale and usually without the use of hand axes.

Outbreaks of the current mindset (Human Operating System version 2) appeared in the most densely populated areas of Africa, first briefly showing some limited aspect of culture, and finally with a broad range of features that seems to have spread like wildfire to all human populations.Those that did not change, went extinct quickly. While we have improved on this steadily, the basic abilities today are still the same.

***

I believe that a great transition is going to happen again, and humanity will once again get a new operating system that is suited to the large number and the power we now wield on Earth. The new operating system will allow us to cooperate much more seamlessly, to use our resources much more efficiently, and to understand our world much more deeply.

And like there were outbreaks of version 2 before it spread everywhere, so I also believe there have been “beta tests” or early deployments of version 3. I believe ancient legends, and the world’s great religions and philosophies, are the memories of individuals and small groups who had this new operating system, this new way of thinking and feeling and relating to everything.

We need to bear in mind that in the form we know these legends, they have been transmitted to us by people like us, who have the version 2 mindset. As such, we tend to “translate” the thoughts of the higher minds into the familiar patterns of our own mind. This is similar to how you translate a globe into a map, and when the globe is lost, you think the map is the real thing, and that the world has four corners and edges from which you will fall off. But when you start to explore the world, you will realize that the map was a projection of a globe all along.

I believe that those with the Human Operating System version 3 also had access to one more dimension of the mind, the fifth dimension. We humans cannot directly sense time: We can only experience moment by moment with our senses. But in our minds, we reconstruct the dimension of time. We are not born like that, it is an ability that gradually becomes solid during our early childhood, and is improved on for a long time. In a similar way, the New Mind has the ability to mentally intuit the fifth dimension, a second time dimension at right angles to the first.

Just as the current Human Operating System version 2 brought amazing, almost miraculous abilities that were not present in version 1, so also version 3. This does not necessarily mean that every miracle reported in every religious tradition of the world is literally true, of course. But something about these people made it perfectly natural for others to expect them to be able to do pretty much anything. So it seems likely that they did show abilities not known before. It may even be that some of our modern technologies are inspired by those stores, and are in effect a kind of “copy”, similar to how the Neanderthals made imperfect but still usable copies of some Cro-Magnon tools just before they died out.

***

I believe the most important trait of the Human Operating System version 3 is openness, or unity as it is more commonly called. Under version 2 we have a lot of walls inside, that divide us into rooms, where different aspects of ourselves hide out and work each toward different goals, sometimes sabotaging each other outright. This can seem useful in the short run, as we can get material benefits by being different people in different situations. In particular, it helps boost reproductive success, especially in men, so it is natural that this trait has persisted so long. But getting rid of those walls frees up a lot of energy, and ending the internal squabbling gives a great strength to accomplish what a divided self could not.

Next is overcoming the walls between ourselves and others. This is rather hard to achieve when we have walls internally in ourselves, and this is why this should be a priority: Before all else, to avoid self-deception.

From time to time there are people who – randomly or after seeking it for years – experience a wordless unity with everyone and everything. They perceive the whole world, the known cosmos and beyond, as a single connected unity of which they are a small part. This changes everything… or so they think. But despite their experience of no-self, or no-distinction, after a passing of time the outside observer will notice that they again manifest egoic traits. The New Mind is not “fire and forget” – it is something that must be worked on, expanded, lived and cultivated. You may think you now have a Buddha mind, but you don’t really have any Buddha accomplishments. People don’t feel a Buddha compassion radiating from you, or sense a Buddha purity of mind. The experience of Enlightenment or Liberation is actually just a break-through into a new and larger open field, into which you will grow for the duration of your lifetime at the very least.

***

I have rambled about this for weeks, and it could be that some of it is just science fiction. The part about the fifth dimension will certainly seem like that. Science cannot even say for sure whether the fourth dimension, time, exists objectively or only in our minds. But the concept is certainly useful. For instance, when I bake a cake, the logical observer will be right to point out that the cake only exists in my head. I imagine a future in which there will be cake, somewhere ahead of me in the mental dimension of time. But the cake does not exist, so the skeptic is right. And imagining it will not make it magically appear. But this imagination allows me to work toward the goal of bringing a cake from the unseen and private “future” of the fourth dimension, into the 3-dimensional now where the cake is edible and delicious.

If you talk to a toddler, skepticism toward the fourth dimension is rampant: “Chocolate later” is almost indistinguishable from “chocolate never”. This is strikingly similar to how adults perceive eternity. “In eternity” means “pie in the sky when you die”, to them. They are not yet aware of eternity as a dimension that exists here and now, a dimension they will be able to intuit as clearly as if they actually perceived it, just like they have come to do with time.

The benefit of having more dimensions in your mind is that your model of the world becomes more realistic. To the toddler, the cake appears in mysterious ways. There was no cake, there may have been mention of cake, the Parent does something and cake appears! And it was good. The toddler may then implore the Parent for more cake, over and over and over again, and eventually more cake appears, so it seems that words do have power to cause cake, when directed at the proper target, often enough and with enough emotional intensity. But sometimes the cake does not appear as expected. Life is full of disappointments! But during this process, the child gradually begins to get an idea of TIME and how it works, and eventually the mental model snaps into place. The child has become One Of Us.

***

Since the wisdom of the current age is to show “newest first”, I shall finally post links to each entry in turn, so as to make it easier to read the ramblings in the almost random order in which they were rambled. Just press Back in your browser to get back here if you actually read any of them.

Human Operating System 3.0

The end of this world

Beta-testing eternity

Caution: Religion!

Surpassing fate while alive

Downloading eternity

Ascesis

The Harbingers

The Open Field

Here to help you – sort of

That said, I still suspect I said it better the first time, during the week-long series starting June 18, 2005:

The Next Big Thing

Ascesis

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“I have no interest in most things in this world.” There is a particular detachment that is necessary to install a new operating system to the brain.

Wikipedia is helpful again. Here’s some words from its article on Asceticism: “The founders and earliest practitioners of these religions lived extremely austere lifestyles, refraining from sensual pleasures and the accumulation of material wealth. They practiced asceticism not as a rejection of the enjoyment of life, or because the practices themselves are virtuous, but as an aid in the pursuit of physical and metaphysical health.”

Mostly metaphysical, I think. Let us go back to the metaphor of downloading a new operating system for our computer. We are talking about something really massive here, and there is a limited bandwidth. Now while you are downloading this, you also want to stream a movie, then play an online game, then download a folder full of music. All on the same trickle of a bandwidth that you use for downloading the new operating system. It’s going to take its sweet time, isn’t it? And unless you constantly set that big download on pause or at least low priority, it is going to make a hassle of the other things you want to do, so you don’t get the satisfaction you expected from them either.

It is like this with the new Human Operating System. Life is disturbingly short (despite what you may have thought as a teenager) and our capacity is limited. To first download and then implement the New Mind, replacing part by part of the Old Mind, we always have two alternatives from which to choose: Prioritize the Old, or prioritize the New.

There are two aspects in particular: Time and attention. These are always limited and they give strength to whatever you invest time and attention in. As the saying goes: “Which one will win? The one you feed.”

It is in this perspective we must also see the puzzling practice of celibacy. There are men who are born to sleep alone, there are men who are made to sleep alone, and there are men who have chosen to sleep alone for the sake of the New Mind. It is exceedingly difficult to download and install the New Mind, even in part, while you maintain a mutually interdependent intimate relationship. Of course, it is also difficult to be celibate. If your spouse is as interested in personal transformation as you are, they may even be a help. But then there are your children, if any. Children are an amazing and wonderful project to undertake. But they drain your time and attention like whoosh. Children are not pets. (And even pets are not toys.)

Food is a lot like sex (at least for men) except you actually can actually die from lack of food. So you can’t simply quit. You have to maintain a balance for the rest of your life. If you are too attached to food, you will think about it a lot, spend a lot of time on it, and possibly eat a lot of it and so ruin your health. (Somewhat depending on how physically active you are.) If you eat too little, hunger will keep hammering on the doors of the psyche, disturbing you at all times of the day. So to free up bandwidth, it is best to eat simple food and in moderation.

The ancient practice of fasting is still recommended from time to time. Think of it as a test on how attached we are to our personal body. We may think we have free will, but fasting will tell us something about the matter. Instead of waiting for unexpected tests to jump us, we may take the fight to the enemy, so to speak, testing ourselves under controlled conditions. Or not – unless this is a required part of a Tradition you have chosen to follow, it is voluntary, and it should not be done to excess.

In days of yore, food was scarce. (At the time of writing, the Earth produces enough food for the average person to get just a little chubby, but this has not always been so.) So there was also the element that if you ate less, someone else could eat more. And if you subsisted on gifts (as many monks did) it was just common decency to not fatten yourself.

Entertainment is a bit different from this again. On one hand, it is not really an urgent need. On the other hand, it is not something you bind yourself to with iron chains. Even if you watch a movie tonight, you don’t need to watch one tomorrow, or ever again really. Each case stands alone. Or that is how it looks like. But this also means that you can always, as game reviewers say, “just play five minutes more and then suddenly it is morning”.

There are a lot of things of which we can say: “But it is not a bad thing!” Asceticisms – from the Greek word askesis, meaning training or exercise – basically refers to abstaining from good things for the benefit of something better. It does not refer to abstaining from vices, much less outright evil. To abstain from evil is a necessity even in the current version of the Human Operating System, because evil is corrosive. Evil destroys our harmony with others and within ourselves and comes back to bite us for sure. It is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die, or like picking up burning coals with your bare hands to throw at others. It is utterly insane, but even this is hard to accept when we are excited by our emotions, on the verge of falling back into Human Operating System version 1 (“all problems can be solved with a hand axe.”)

Next to destroying the soul by hate and envy and such straight out poisonous thoughts, there are the lesser vices that erode our health and our relationships, typically greed in its many, many forms. Lust as a vice can be called “sexual greed”, for instance. Gluttony is “food greed”. Greed is a wish to have something that does not belong to us, or to control something (or someone) that is not ours to control. Evils and vices are bad for us in and of themselves, so it is not ascesis to drop those. (And even then it is hard for most of us.)

But the things that are good and praiseworthy in normal life for normal people, but have to be cut out to make room for an even greater good – making that sacrifice is ascesis.  It is not a coincidence that an expression from sports has been chosen, for even humans with no goal beyond the life of their own body still can make such sacrifices to win a sports competition or become a professional.

It is not that the practices themselves are virtuous, as Wikipedia points out. In fact, overdoing them can cause a surge of pride in the old Ego: I am holier than thou, better show me respect or all hell is loose! The Buddha recommended the middle way, and he was not the only one. Modern Judaism frowns on ascetic practices of any sort, encouraging instead the pious to remember the Creator whenever they enjoy anything created.

But if there is no ascesis at all, the Old Mind will happily expand to fill all available time, and all available attention, and the New Mind will never be downloaded, much less installed.

I am obviously not a god or an angel, I am pretty sure I am not even a saint. So if your religion tells you that there is a Higher Being that enjoys to see you suffer, I will not tell you otherwise. I am not a teacher of religion, I think. I just want to share a new branch of psychology, which has been hidden inside of religious and philosophical traditions for thousands of years and has only recently taken on a life of its own, now that many different cultures meet and people can compare their similarities (and their differences).

But if you want to download and install the Human Operating System version 3 beta, it will be necessary to make space for it by reducing the time and attention that goes into the Old Mind, the way of living according to this age which is about to end.

It will be necessary, but not enough. Even a very ascetic life will take you nowhere (in this context) unless you have a reliable source of the New Mind, and it resonates with you inside, and you meditate (or do some other corresponding practice).  “Meditation brings wisdom, lack of meditation leaves ignorance” to quote the Buddha.

You have to download the New Mind (from fellow disciples, Scriptures, or a living Master if you live in an age that has one). Then you have to install it, which requires slowing down the old mind through meditative practice. Then you have to test it in practice and see if the installation has worked, or if the Old Mind still runs the show. This is a process that is repeated over and over, leading to growth over time. If we stop, our progress stops as well. I know this too from experience.

Surpassing fate while alive

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“You can’t move others’ hearts unless you can move your own heart.” Today let us look at the story of three wise men in the East, who each sought to move his own heart and ended up changing the fate of civilization for thousands of years.

(This is a continuation of a series about the Human Operating System version 3, or the New Mind which must replace the mind that is common today. Today we look at the Far East.)

New Age people here in the West find the Eastern concept of reincarnation comforting: Even if we have to leave this world, we’ll be back after a while. But for the original owners of these religions, the concept of reincarnation was a very disturbing thought. It was like a prison in which they were trapped. Even if they did good deeds and were rewarded with a good rebirth, it was not a final solution. They had to keep running just to stay in place. There was no escape from the endless cycle, millions of years of temptation, separation and loss, the pain of birth and the pain of death, over and over for all time. Unless they could somehow reach Liberation. Salvation for them was not to live forever, but to cease living forever.

The Buddha became popular because people believed he had found the answer to ending this eternal cycle of life and death. In East Asia, many revere him or even worship him as a god. But if we look at it from a safe distance, his teachings are not a promise of Salvation after you die. No. This Liberation, the Nirvana (or Nibbana, in Pali) is supposed to happen in this life. If you do not reach Nirvana while alive, you’ll have to enter the ring again. In this sense, Buddhism is not a “faith”: It is experiential, and more of a science. There are methods, and peer review, and you are supposed to make observations. You can’t close your eyes and wish that you’ll get to Nirvana someday. You have to listen to the teachings, temper your desires, restrain your anger, overcome your fear, practice meditation and eventually reach the state of mind that is Nirvana.

(In later times, many of the Buddha’s followers have taken up beliefs and practices that – at least from a  distance – look a lot like closing your eyes and wishing to go to Nirvana someday. I can certainly understand this, but that was hardly how it began.)

If we go even further East to the homeland of Confucius and Lao-Tzu, they seem to have very little interest in the afterlife at all. Confucius certainly recommends venerating your dead ancestors, but I get the impression that this is necessary for your own sake rather than for theirs. To accumulate virtue and improve your soul while alive, this is itself the greatest goal. It is not something you do in order to get bonus points from gods. Indeed, I get the impression that the Sages would reject anyone who came to them with such an underhanded plan. To become a Noble Person, or in the most extreme case a Sage, this is the uttermost goal of earthly life.

The goal of your life must be reached while alive, and the earlier in life, the better. Nor is it a dreamy ecstasy – although ecstasy may happen earlier – but a state of mental clarity, of harmony and of being useful. The Sage is someone who can lead people in a natural way, by means of his example as much as his advice. There is no search for good feelings; if there is happiness, it is in the harmony with our purpose and in the good of many. It is not a life that would appeal much to an egotist, even had such a person been able to reach it.

(This hasn’t stopped later Daoists from fervently chasing after physical immortality, or at least extreme longevity. Belief in Immortals is rampant in folk Daoism, and a number of rituals are in circulation that are supposed to help you towards achieving this honor. I can certainly sympathize with that, but that was hardly what was intended.)

Confucius sums up his own life, early in part 2 of the Analects: “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.” It was this latter stage which was the culmination of his progress, and which is very hard to objectively achieve. You may think what you do is right, of course, but you could simply be morally stunted. But Confucius was not simply some guy who thought highly of himself. He says himself that he did not consider it a loss if no one had heard of him. He was to live only a couple more years after he was seventy, but he changed the fate of the world’s largest empire and is revered even today.

I believe that all these three men – the Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Confucius – were examples of the Human Operating System version 3, where the center of the personality is no longer in the ego or the body-mind. There have been others since, and quite likely before as well, but these are well known and their words are clear and luminous. If you want to hear from the Sage’s own mouth, this is a good place to start.

Caution: Religion!

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“Burn in Hell!” To a lot of westerners, this is a big part of how we consider religion. Hell is not a good place to start looking for Higher Consciousness, I think.

Wikipedia has an unusually good explanation of what Higher Consciousness is, but personally I like the term “meditative consciousness”, as it is more descriptive and objective. I am sure everyone who actually has this consciousness will agree that it is indeed higher – somewhat similar to how being alert is higher than being half asleep, or that adult consciousness is higher than toddler consciousness – but I feel that for newcomers it is better to use a more objective term. Once you know it better, you can know what is higher and what is lower.

Meditation is a practice that can be undertaken in religious or secular context. The world’s great religions all have spiritual practices that include some form of meditation, but you don’t have to be religious to practice meditation in some form. Anyway, meditation or a similar practice is necessary to actually experience this new form of mind rather than just read about it. Hopefully we’ll get back to that. But because meditation is so closely aligned with the New Mind, I like the term “meditative consciousness”.

For the past 2500 years or so, the New Mind – the Human Operating System version 3 – has been mostly found in the esoteric branches of the great world religions. It is important to understand that the esoteric traditions are very different from the first impression you normally get of a religion. When you as an outsider think of religion, perhaps you think of the phrase “pie in the sky when you die”. We have to understand that the comic book version of religion is something far removed from the teaching of the founders, and that even inside each religion the esoteric tradition has often been in danger of persecution.

In the past, each person usually only had access to one religion. Messing around with other religions was not just seen as spiritually dangerous, it could also result in severe burn damage to your body, or the sudden separation of your head from your neck. For this reason, it was hard to notice that the inner traditions of very different religions had one trait in common. That trait is the higher consciousness of which I write.

This is not to say that I reject the other functions and qualities of religion. But I believe that in order to understand what religion is all about, you have to have the same mindset as its founders and first practitioners. Since they had the Human Operating System version 3, any attempt to fully implement the religion in H.O.S v 2 is likely to be like the Neanderthals copying the implements of modern man: Imperfect even as a copy, and without true understanding. A Neanderthal wielding a tool copied from a Homo Sapiens Sapiens would still be a Neanderthal. Not that there is anything wrong with that. But their time was gone, and soon so is ours.

Most of my potential readers will probably be atheists or agnostics, so you may find the smell of religion disgusting. Conversely, if you are a Christian, you will be offended by the thought that Christ had a form of mind also found in some other historical figures. This is misguided. The H.O.S v 3 is just a beginning. To us at our current level it is The End, but if having this was the only noteworthy thing about Christ, he would not have been remembered the way he is. The other founders of the great world religions were likewise not copies of Christ, but had their own qualities that set them apart. Each person who had the New Mind also was responsible for how he used it further, and it is this that separate the sun from the stars and the stars from each other.

What I am saying is simply that the founders and the early followers had a more advanced mind than almost everyone at their time, and almost everyone today. To us that mind is so alien that we might mistake it for their only important quality, but that is not the case. They are also distinct.

But because of our prejudices, I believe that it may not be good to seek H.O.S. v.3 in the religion we are most familiar with, regardless of whether we hate it or love it. We will then too easily fall back to what we think we already know. To realize that we don’t know is the beginning of true knowledge. For this reason, since I write in English, I will recommend that people study the teachings of the Eastern traditions, especially the Far East which is the most different from our own. The teachings of the Buddha, of Confucius and of Lao-Tzu are all lucid and amazing when well translated. And nobody here in the West is likely to feel compelled to worship them, neither by society nor by their own heart. So they are well suited to “download” the H.O.S. v.3 from.

Be crazy so we can be sane

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“Love is simply an electrical bug in the human neural circuit.” Now if only we had a forum where we could get together and assure each other that it is the rest of the people in the world who are crazy…

The trigger for this entry came from another absurd question on Quora. This time: Should religious belief be classified as a mental illness?

It is kind of disturbing that people even ask this, but there are in fact a disproportionate number of the mentally ill who manifest their illness in terms of religion. That is perhaps not so strange, since religion is already the domain in which we have the most unusual experiences and traditions, and insanity is pretty unusual for most of us. It is hard to manifest insanity in the form of accounting, for instance.

Science comes somewhere in between, I guess – I see some pseudoscience that looks nothing like sanity to me, but still has some few but vocal supporters. Like “Venus was a comet which passed Earth during historical times before entering its current orbit.” But enough about that. But then again, ten years ago we weren’t a result of interbreeding with Neanderthals, now we are. (That would explain me, to some degree…) So science is pretty crazy even when it is true.

Given that almost everyone is religious, the notion that “religion is insanity” sounds more like a projection if anything. Like people worry in the dark corners of their mind that something may be wrong with them when they are so different from other people; therefore all the other people must be crazy, that would explain it!

The truth is, as I have said before, that almost all modern atheists are really half-a-theist: They tend toward Socialism, which gives them the option to serve a powerful, invisible, mostly benevolent invisible being that already has an established caste of servants dedicated to bettering the world on behalf of the otherwise invisible Greater Power, which in this case is called the State. True, the State does not offer an afterlife, but neither did Moses. Read the Pentateuch – the original Torah – and you will see that the question of the afterlife was left open. God promised them that their cows would have calves and their enemies would flee. Socialism is on that level now.

But atheists don’t know how similar they are to other believers, so they need to fabricate this vast gulf between them, with the believers being crazy. Luckily this is still a minority position among atheists, it seems. But the fact that some seem to really think so, made me think back to another small group of people who were Different.

For many years, I was part of a church (or sect, as pretty much everyone else called us) which was very pious. We took the Bible very seriously, although not always literally. If you think Jesus was literally a door and Christians are literally sheep, I guess some suspicion is in order regarding your mental health. This was not a congregation where you just went to church on Sunday and otherwise went on with your life as if nothing had happened. The founders and early adopters, in particular, were men and women of heroic virtue. They set aside even the usual “harmless” cravings of human nature: Entertainment, tasty food, pretty clothes, sightseeing … stuff that no one else would consider sinful, but they set it aside so they could use their time and money and thoughts to serve God and help their fellow man.

But by generation three and four, most of their descendants were not like that. They were still good people who stayed away from crime, drugs, drunkenness and fornication, by all means. But they had hobbies (much like me), they had tastes and interests and wants and wishes that were their own and not those of God. They were by and large human, although very good humans, loved by employers for their loyalty, honesty and hard work.

The problem was that they were really good people with a doctrine saying that they were far more than that. The chosen ones, the bride of Christ, the saints, the overcomers. They should be exceptional, rather than just good. And so, subtly and softly like the slow falling of night, rumors spread. Not rumors about anyone in particular, friend or foe. But rumors about The World and those who lived there, those who had not been saved. This is indeed a motley crew, as life will show us, but the attention became steadily more selective, until The World was a cesspool of depravity, an ongoing parade of drug abuse, divorce and drunken gay sex. All of which certainly happen in The World and not in the Church, but … you see the point, I hope. Because they could not get better, others had to become worse to keep the distance.

And that, I think, is where the more sectarian atheists are today. Because they aren’t all that different from believers, the believers need to become worse. Crazy, evil, or at the very least amazingly stupid. Because the need to feel superior is very strong, particularly in those who are average.

The mystery of the Resurrection

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Screenshot anime The Golden Laws

In the Japanese animated movie “The Golden Laws”, two teenagers in a time machine witness among other things the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. (They conclude that the resurrection must be the work of the God of Love, Hermes, the husband of Aphrodite…) Since we don’t have time machines, all we have are the words of people who lived reasonably nearby in time and space.

Today is Easter Sunday, arguably the holiest day in the Christian calendar. While I don’t celebrate days and seasons, I think it may be a good idea for most people to do so, and especially where there are children, to help them notice something different from the usual chase after stuff that fills the world every day.

It is a highly unusual day indeed, for it is said that on such a spring day many centuries ago, a man who had been dead returned to life – and more than life. “The first Adam became a living soul, but the second Adam became a lifegiving spirit.”

There are various stories about people returning from the grave. One imagination that is particularly popular in our days is that of the zombie, a dead person who returns from the grave to a state of half-life, as it were, something in between death and life, a body animated but without a human soul. Variants of these stories tell of ghouls who eat human flesh, and vampires who drink human blood, as their unlife is not enough in itself to sustain their continued existence without draining the lifeforce of others.

While such stories are common in folklore, the resurrections in the Bible are rather different. They generally show people being restored to full health, able to resume their life on Earth for the remainder of their natural lifespan. There are several such stories both in the Old Testament and the New.

The resurrection of Christ is portrayed as different from all of these. Then again he was different well before that. Even so, after his resurrection he seems inordinately powerful even by his earlier standards. He disappears before the eyes of people and appear in a closed and locked room. He changes his appearance, or perhaps other people’s perception of him, effortlessly. Despite still bearing the wounds of his execution, he seems unhindered and unbothered. He is seen by his friends as someone who has not just escaped death, but overcome death. Someone who is restored not merely to life, but to an abundant overflowing life, enough to share with others. To them it seems unthinkable that he can possibly ever die again, and very thinkable that he can not only resurrect others but even make them immortal as well.

You may say about the people of the first century CE that they were an ill-educated and superstitious lot, but one thing is for sure: They knew death, and better than most of us. They lived in an age where life was still fairly nasty, brutish and short. It was not that there were no old people, but they were fairly rare. Infants died with disturbing regularity, children passed away, young people died in various ways. Weakened by hunger when crops failed, killed in battle when wars raged, struck down by plagues – death was a common sight, and was not hidden in secluded and sterile buildings. People knew death, and they bloody well knew that death was highly unlikely to have a positive outcome. Think about it, these were not kids. They did not see death on TV, they buried their family members and friends. They knew what was going on.

These were the people who were convinced that Jesus Christ had become some sort of spiritual superhero, scattering the shadow of death like the rising sun scatters the darkness of night. So convinced were they of this that they did not hesitate to die rather than stop telling everyone what they had seen and, in a few cases, touched.

Whatever happened that day, we can never prove it or disprove it without a time machine. But what we can say for sure is that this man, Jesus Christ, was such a person that a rather large number of people found it believable that he had returned from death in abundant glory and overflowing life, even though they had seen him die a gruesome and humiliating death only a couple days earlier, in plain sight right outside the capital city.

According to the letters of St Paul, it was commonly accepted among Christians that the risen Christ had been seen by more than 500 people, some of them still alive about 20 years later when this was written. The explosive start of the new religion certainly points in the same direction. It may seem contrary to all laws of physics that this actually happened; but as I said, death was something these people knew at least as well as we do. And whatever really happened, whatever the Resurrection really was, this was how they perceived it: The man who had died horribly in plain sight, had returned with the power to scatter the chains of death and grave. That’s what they experienced.

I don’t know the physics of it any more than the rest of you, but I know that this man who died naked or nearly so on a timber pole, he changed the course of history so thoroughly that we cannot even imagine how the world would look today without him. And by all accounts, he did so AFTER he had died and his followers had fled like scared sheep, hiding behind locked doors.

Perhaps we’ll never really understand. I’m fine with that. To think that I can understand everything that has happened in human history, that’s a bit over the top even for me. And this mystery is quite possibly the biggest of them all. (Your mysteries may vary.)

Not an angel

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke Tadaima. Don't worship Chiaki!

“Stop wishing and praying to me!” If you’re paying even a little attention, you can see that I am not an angel. If I am suspended between Heaven and Earth, it is certainly not by the power of flight.

Wherever the rays of the sun reach, we say that we are “in the sun”, and in a way that is true. Inside the globe that is also called the sun, nothing can live. If the sun itself extended to this planet, we would be vaporized. In the heart of the sun itself is utter darkness and deadly energy that rips apart even the atoms themselves; yet here, at a safe distance, we are basking “in the sun” on a bright spring day. The sun that maintains all life here on Earth is alien and dangerous, yet it is still here, in a form that can support us.

They say you are what you eat. In that case I am stardust charged with sunshine. Everything on your plate and everything in your body is made of this, but chances are you also haven’t thought of it very often?

The True Light is also alien beyond imagination, and yet it is from this that we are made and from this that we are maintained.

So make your wishes and prayers to the Light, the Eternal, the Uncreated. If it sees fit to choose me to use, even if I don’t deserve it, then I am going to do so whether I plan to or not. And if it chooses otherwise, there is nothing in my power to do about it. I can choose what to do, to some extent, but I cannot really choose the outcome of it, for there is always more than this one pawn in the play.

If I forget this, there is a good chance I will be reminded of it, quite forcefully. That is a special love and I am grateful for it … afterwards. Sometimes long afterwards.

Well, that was certainly pretentious enough. I will make myself even smaller than this.

Why should God get all the glory?

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Screenshot anime Rebirth of Buddha

Feel how deeply precious it is that you have been given life…

Why should God get all the glory? That’s what some guy (I did not check the name, but it is always guys) wondered about on Quora. Why do people thank God when something good is achieved, but not blame him when things go wrong? It ain’t fair, yadda yadda. (What, they don’t blame God? Go read the Book of Job and say that again with a straight face.)

Well, here’s a few thoughts on why.

Basically, to a believer, the relationship to God is like the relationship to parents, only more so. Without them you would not been here, and without God they would not been here, nor the world in general. If you think it is a good thing that the world exists, and if you think it is a good thing that you are in it, it behooves you to pay some respect to the Creator, if any.

Of course, if you start from the position that there is no Creator, it makes no sense to pay any respect in that direction. We know that.

Now if you think making the world was a big mistake, you have a legitimate quarrel with God. This is a very rare point of view, though. Most people who stay in the world think it has some good qualities.

From the point of view of the believer, lack of gratitude to God is like being a whiny child.
“Waah! My dad gave me a gift but it wasn’t as big as I wanted or as much fun as I wanted! Waah!”
“Waah! My God gave me a life but it wasn’t as long as I wanted or as comfortable as I wanted! Waah!”

Being given life is seen as a priceless opportunity by the believer. (Of course, most of us still want the biggest and most shiny version, given the chance. Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes that doesn’t happen, and we tell each other that it was perhaps not what we needed, and Dad knows best. This makes us feel better – “us” in this case being those who say it, not necessarily those on the receiving end, see Book of Job again.)

But of course, if you are not a believer in the first place, none of this makes sense. Humans, trees, rocks … all are just assemblages of molecules, shifting forms that arise and disappear into ultimate oblivion. There is no life, only organic chemistry. There is no hope, only electrochemical fluctuations in the brain. Nothing lasts, except entropy. We are random shapes born to be forgotten, drifting without volition through a brief existence on a temporary speck of dust in a vast, cold cosmos relentlessly winding down. A logical worldview – but not one that resonates with most people, at least not yet.