Category Archives: religion

The gospel according to Twinings

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Learning to fly in the School of Hard Knocks.

I wrote somewhat glowingly about the Twinings video a few days ago. At the time I wanted to write a novel inspired by it. Perhaps I will. But I think I may skip that because it is a topic worthy of a masterwork I cannot write (at least yet). You see, I have realized that the Twinings ad is actually a summary of the spiritual journey. It is the essence of religion, in a manner of speaking. No, I have not converted to Tea Worship. Rather, it is the essence of my own religion. Not the tea, but the boat journey.

Please do yourself the favor and watch it, preferably full screen. It may save your soul. OK, probably not. But it’s worth a try.

See, the movie actually starts a little after the actual spiritual voyage has begun. Fairly early after you have decided to set your course for Heaven (your name for this may vary), you have to row. Sorry about that. This is where a lot of people give up. They have been told by their pastor and reliable books that We Can Do Nothing To Our Salvation, that those who try to save themselves are outside grace, are under the Law and will be judged to the full penalty of the Law etc. Well, at least that is what Christians say around here. Your Christians may vary. Other religions are less bothered by this, it seems.

But the truth is that most of us come upon a stretch where we have to row. It just doesn’t feel good to abide by the basic tenets of religion. We want to snap back, we want to hurt or at least threaten those who mock us, we want to take a break from being good, we want to have some fun with our favorite sins from the good old days. Not that this isn’t going to happen anyway unless you’re some super saint, but the thing is, no progress is going to happen if we only do good when we feel good. We just have to sometimes do the right thing even if no one sees it and we don’t feel like we want to at all. We have to set aside time to pray or meditate, to read holy books or whatever our religion dictates which seems meaningless to us when we are tempted to skip it. In other words, we have to row.

The risk here is probably that we might succeed. I do not know why this happens to some people, why they manage to live good lives on their own, in their own strength. I guess that is commendable in its own way, but it is not the spiritual journey. That one happens pretty much like in the YouTube movie. Things get rougher than you had anticipated, and then you make a mistake or something happens and you lose your oar. The inner storm is too wild, your boat is too small, you are too weak. You lose your oar and no matter how much you try, you cannot get it back. You fail at life. Hopefully not in a spectacular manner that lands you in prison or pregnant or worse (although those may also happen here); but inside you this thing happens and things go out of control.

Don’t kill yourself at this point, the fun has barely even started.

The waves get bigger and the storm gets stronger and you seem destined to drown now that there is nothing you can do to save yourself. And then at some point you recognize that you are still alive, and that somehow the storm and the waves are conspiring to send you in the direction you were planning to go, albeit in a scary and uncomfortable manner. And then you start making these great leaps that feel like you are flying, except when you land again, and it feels like THIS time you are going to crash and drown for sure. And it just goes on and on, year after year. But at some point you begin to believe. You have seen the foam of the waves transform into seagulls so many times, you have had so many hard knocks and every time you get thrown forward again. You begin to believe that no, you are probably not going to Dissolution after all, even though you deserve it. And a strange exhilaration fills you as you see the storm throwing you forward, again and again, toward your distant goal.

In real life, this part goes on and on. Years go by for sure.

The end is what you thought your voyage would be, except so much more beautiful. The calm is absolute. Nothing, no pain or even death itself, can make the calm waters even quiver. There is absolute stillness. Or so I have heard – I am still being thrown around by the waves. ^_^ But I have this from pretty reliable sources. Not just Twinings…

The absolute calm, which started inside you as just a tiny mustard seed, has spread to completely engulf you. And in that calm, as Unknown Friend just said the other day, is Heaven itself. Its energies are moving your boat now. At some point, your boat will reach the Other Shore, and you will meet your True Self, the You that called to you from the future with absolute love that you could not deny. Finally you are home. Finally you are complete. Finally you are you.

There is much beyond that, but it is not for me to write about the things in Heaven. I’ll be so happy just to make it to the shore. And if I do, it is because the waves and the storm were directed to help me, even though I thought they were going to destroy me.

So that is the spiritual journey according to Twinings. But I may be wrong. You see, you hear these funny voices, in the Tower of Song…

Now may be a good time to watch it once more, preferably full screen. Does your heart agree with mine?

“What you deserve”

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I probably still underestimate my happiness, compared to what I deserve. But less than I once did.

How would you like to get what you really deserve? I know there are few things that worry me more than the supposed law of Karma, or Divine Justice, or any such thing that would ensure that at some future time there is a reckoning for my life and I get exactly what I deserve. That would be a definite downer.

And it’s not like I’m some kind of criminal, or even given to grotesque and blatant transgressions against the specifically religious codes of behavior, not by human standards. Well, I have eaten some swine and cows, especially in my younger years, so I may not be welcome in those communities. But I stopped eating blood as soon as I was my own master in the food tray. And I don’t actually sleep around with other people’s wives (or husbands, God forbid) or get drunk and pick fights and blaspheme with impunity. Stuff like that.

That’s pretty much as far as it goes, though. The compass needle of my heart still goes crazy at the sight (or even thought) of certain types of women, although I can control my hands and generally my feet. I am still an unstoppable wellspring of excuses for laziness and gluttony, at least by the traditional standards of these things. (Not American standards, but that is faint praise indeed, may the Light have mercy on the unlucky souls born there.) Despite my supposedly pure intentions of doing my job to the best of my abilities and with love, I somehow end up doing very little and being very slow to acquire new skills. And my own wants generally take precedence over other people’s needs, almost every time and without a second thought. There are lots and lots of such things. Enough to fill books for sure.

In short, I am horribly lacking in divine love for my fellow travelers, and correspondingly full of love for my little earthly self. Despite all I have seen, all I have experienced, and the constant support of the holy Presence in my life, I remain a venial man pretty much across the board. I certainly don’t deserve the happiness that has been chasing me virtually all the time for years and years now.  That is not to say I don’t eagerly accept it. ^_^  But I definitely hope there won’t be a complete and fair reckoning anytime ever.

It baffles me that people who are utterly beholden to sin, think they never get what they deserve. Isn’t that a reason for jubilation? And I’m floored by advertisements that says things like “You deserve the best” when obviously only the best people deserve the best.  If I found a cure for cancer, or a safe and pollution-free energy source, or a way to regrow lost limbs or safely raise a low IQ, I would perhaps deserve the best. But just for being an ordinary citizen mostly looking out for myself? What the Hell do I deserve?

But of course, most people who irrationally think so highly of themselves, can’t help it. They have been raised that way, or the voices in their head don’t instruct them properly, but rather lead them astray. Jesus Christ says that the servant who knows what he should do and fails to do it will receive many lashes, while he who did not know will receive fewer. Likewise that he to whom much is entrusted, of him will the more be required. That’s basically what they say these days, “with great power comes great responsibility”. Although it is not just about power, it is about knowledge too. So a blind-hearted atheist may get away more easily in his life review than a religious person who received many revelations from Heaven but failed to use them responsibly. Yes, I am looking at me here.

For all these and many more reasons, I have no wish to ever get what I deserve. May the Light eternal avert from me its full Justice, that I may abide in Mercy forevermore!

***

PS: No, I am not feeling particularly depressed or anything. This is how I generally feel. I am not fibbing when I say that I feel happy in general, but I am very much aware that this is an undeserved and unwarranted happiness, a gift that I keep being given like a small child who keeps receiving and receiving from its loving parents even though it does nothing to earn its keep in any way.

Speaking or being spoken

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“The road to refinement is difficult.” But you’ve made a great start just by shutting your mouths! Congrats!

In the first chapter of Meditations on the Tarot, our Unknown Friend mentions speech almost in passing (when talking about concentration or yoga as stilling the oscillations of the mental substance, or willed silence of the automatism of the intellect and imagination). His point is that to most people, speaking is automatic. Not in the positive sense that you don’t need to think of how to move your tongue or your vocal cords, but in the negative sense that words just jump out of your mouth without a conscious decision to speak, much less exactly what to speak.

He says that the Pythagorean school prescribed five years of silence for beginners, or “hearers”. Only once they had learned fully how to be silent, could they be allowed to speak. At this time, it was judged that they were no longer just speaking automatically.

By default, there is an inner pressure to speak. The restless activity of the mind seeks an outlet. It is not so much that one has something to share with others, or even that one asks others for a favor.  Rather, there is speaking inside the head and it comes out. In the really bad cases, this is similar to how a baby excretes bodily wastes – it just happens, and the best one can do is clean up the mess afterwards. This is generally how children speak for many years after they have learned continence on the other end. Some people remain in this sad position throughout their lives.

Others – probably most, now that service is such a main source of employment – learn to “potty train” their mouth, so that they can hold back the words that bubble up inside. It may require them to ball their fists in their pockets or behind their back where the customer cannot see it, but then as soon as the source of their agitation is out of earshot, it all comes out.

This kind of verbal excretion is mentioned by Jesus Christ, who says that it is not what goes in through the mouth that makes a human unclean, but what comes out through the mouth: Evil thoughts that come from the heart and pass through the mouth; these make a human unclean. We Christians call this Jesus Christ “our Lord”, but it actually does not come easy to us to obey him in this. Of course it does not, for as long as the evil thoughts (or at least “thoughtless words, which cut like swords”) bubble up inside, the pressure will just keep rising if we close our mouth. Silence of the mouth is a terrible fate if one has no way to achieve at least a modest degree of stillness of the heart.

Stillness of the heart, then, is required in order to truly speak, rather than being spoken by the pressure of words that bubble up from inside. Stillness of the heart is hard to achieve without some degree of solitude. In fact, it takes a lot of solitude for a long time, for most of us. It is not impossible to arrive at this stillness in a noisy, busy, crowded life; but it takes an inordinate amount of dedication and grace put together. To expect that God’s grace (or some other karmic benefit) will make up for the lack of outward quiet – when one has a choice of such quiet – is rather similar to jumping from the top of the temple spire, relying on God’s grace to not get hurt.

Of course, not everyone can live alone or should live alone, or in a monastery of silent monks or nuns. Sometimes you just have half an hour now and then, or perhaps Divine providence makes it so that you cannot sleep for a period at night, so that you then get a chance to still the waves of your mind and commune with the Light in the depths of your heart.

But first and foremost we need to become aware of the words we speak (or type, for those of us so inclined!) We need to choose self-reflection: What did I just say? Where came these words from, did I really mean to say this? We need to reflect on our spoken words for sure if we shall ever hope to reflect on our thoughts.

To the religious, self-reflection saves from Hell; for it is written: “Pay attention to yourself and the teaching,  keep doing this; for when you do so, you shall save yourself and those who hear you.” (The phrasing in your particular religion will vary, but not the fact, surely.) But even if you are not religious in the traditional sense, surely you have a higher aspiration, or you would not be here reading this. You are not like cats or dogs, who make sounds merely to scare enemies, attract mates, evoke sympathy and obtain food.

I have had the opportunity for transformation in this regard that only a tiny, tiny fraction of humanity has ever had in all of history. If I have achieved some degree of awareness and choice of speech, it is no more than is required under such circumstances. In truth, almost certainly less. So I am not here as a teacher to instruct you, but as a fellow aspirant to encourage you in our shared hope and aspiration. May my words have been acceptable.

 

A community of living and dead

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In this old anime, a Japanese housewife places the picture of her deceased son so that he can watch baseball on TV. This is a somewhat crude and literal way to include the dead in the community of the living, but I think most of us can at least somewhat understand how she feels. There are more subtle ways to transcend time and mortality, though.

Already in the short foreword to Meditations on the Tarot, the author tries to take us into a world that may be unfamiliar to most. He greats us as an unknown friend “from beyond the grave”. That is not to say that he wrote this book after his death, but he arranged for it to be published years after his passing, and anonymously. I understand this decision: On this path, you continue to grow and change throughout your life. If you knew some of his earlier works, it would color your impression of this one, which was specifically designed to stand on its own.

When I say the book stands on its own, this does not mean he makes no reference to those who have inspired him. He does, but for a very specific purpose: The quotes are “evocations”, to bring these great spirits of the past to be present in the room with the reader, so to speak. This requires some explanation.

We must not understand this in a crude spiritism sense, where the ghosts of the dead masters are floating around like transparent shapes looking for a medium who can see them and convey their thoughts. Far from it. We are not talking about the astral bodies, but a far deeper layer of the person. But also, I would say that these great spirits are not moving forward in time to speak to us. Rather, they speak to us from where they lived. They speak to us across time, because they were greater than time, they extended beyond time, and so does a tiny part of us. That part is how we can feel connected to them despite them having long passed from this world. There is a part in us that is not limited to this world and to this time. And it is this part we seek to develop by means of such tools as Meditation.

Unknown Friend explains that what we call Tradition is not a doctrine or theory, but a community of people – some still alive but most having lived in the past – who each is a link in the chain of Tradition.

This is not unique to this book. In Eastern Orthodoxy, it is generally understood that those who lived in the past and even those who shall live in the future are part of the Church. They are included in the communal prayers, and are also assumed to include us in their prayers when they lived or are going to live. We are the Church members of the future for those who lived in the past, and the Church members of the past for those who have yet to live.

Nor is this unique to Christianity. In China, there has for thousands of years been a quest for immortality. In its crude, exterior form this is simply an attempt to prolong the life of the body, but there is a deeper, esoteric understanding of the Immortals as spirits who transcend time. The “teacher” in the proverb “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is understood to mean the immortals.

And this is exactly what happens here in the west with a book such as Meditations on the Tarot. If you are not ready, even if you should somehow happen to find the book, the evocations will not work. The timeless high spirits of the past will not inspire you, and quite likely the whole thing will seem either absurd, boring or outright creepy.

This is how it is with esoteric knowledge: The secret hides itself in plain sight. It is not necessary to speak in riddles to not be understood: That is automatic. It is necessary to speak in riddles to be understood, because we are speaking of that which cannot be seen, cannot be heard, and most importantly, cannot be put in the wallet. The people who will even be interested are few.  But perhaps there are enough that I have not written all this completely in vain.  Even if one historian in the future stumbles upon it and feels a twinge of familiarity, I shall be content.

After all, letters to an Unknown Friend is what I have done since 1998, long before I had heard of this book. ^_^

 

Hermetic tradition, huh?

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4300 years ago is the oldest estimate I have seen, and the oldest known sources are more like 2100 years old; but even then they claim to be part of a much older tradition, so who knows when and where it started.

It would seem that I am become part of the Hermetic tradition, and presumably so is the Pope. I am sure Hermes would enjoy that; perhaps I should write him a letter…

Back when I started reading the blog “One Cosmos”, one of the recommended books (and oft quoted) was Meditations on the Tarot, by a now deceased Catholic philosopher who prefers to be known only as “your unknown friend”. Although his real name is known (and a little famous), it is customary to not mention it. Despite the mention of Tarot, the book is unabashedly Christian, with a vaguely Catholic slant (at least if you know it). It does however draw on a multitude of sources also outside of Christianity.

I bought the book, a hefty tome, unfortunately not available in Kindle form yet.  Truth to tell, I did not get far into it. At the time, it was a rather heavy read. This was at the early years (if not months) of my interest in books of timeless wisdom, and I had little training in reading such things and little understanding of this way of thinking. Some five years have passed since then, I think.

The book was pulled out again on the same blog recently, and I also brought out my own copy.  That’s when I actually noticed the subtitle: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. 

I was about to write something like “I have written at great length about Hermes Trismegistus”, then decided to link to it, then my search function only showed a couple drive-by mentions. Have I really not gone into detail about this mysterious person, who supposedly lived in ancient Greece or perhaps Egypt? He is known mainly from Egypt after it was conquered by Alexander the Great, and evidently the Egyptian god Thoth was identified with the Greek Hermes. This combined god was called Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the three times greatest. Perhaps that was their way to say “awesome”?

In any case, Hermes supposedly wrote a large number of books containing the wisdom of the universe, but only a tiny portion of these writings are still extant. And this has been the case for a long time. From these somewhat cryptic sources we have people drawing very different conclusions. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, for instance, is more similar to witchcraft than to Christianity. But this book is not.

If you are in doubt, it may be worth noticing that the current Pope is photographed with Meditations on the Tarot on his table. Of course that is not proof, he may have been surveying it for heresies. But he spent his adult life in the same intellectual circle as Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote a foreword (now afterword) to the book, and who was nominated as Cardinal by the earlier Pope but died before he could take office.

So Hermeticism seems to have, in fact, once again entered mainstream Christianity. (It made several appearances in the early church, in apologetic writings – that doesn’t mean the church fathers apologized, rather they wrote books to defend the faith. The word has changed meaning since, I guess. But back then, Hermes was considered more respectable than Jesus in some parts of the civilized world.)

Anyway, it seems their paths are meeting again, as it were. I am sure this would amuse members of the Japanese new religion Happy Science, who believe that Hermes and Jesus were friends since before the age of the dinosaurs. But Jesus hasn’t said anything about that to me, so don’t quote me on it. Anyway, I doubt the happy sect members have time to read my blog, given they now have over 700 books to read by the reincarnation of Hermes. And I still haven’t read through Meditations on the Tarot.

 

 

River of Light

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This is not how it looks at first, when there may be just a single faint star in a dark night. This is how it may look eventually, when the Light is breaking through in earnest. “The path of the righteous is like a radiant light that grows brighter and brighter until it is high noon”, as someone said around 2500 years ago.

Over at the One Cosmos blog, I am learning that Fridtjof Schuon plagiarized me years before myself, only better: “Thus meditation may be compared not so much to a light kindled in a dark room, as to an opening made in the wall of that room to allow the light to enter — a light which preexists outside and is in no way produced by the action of piercing the wall….”

See, I tried to tell y’all! It is all about spiritual aperture science. We start with perhaps a pinhole crack in the cosmic egg, and then we latch on to it and as the light flows in, it grows stronger and stronger, until it becomes irresistible or nearly so.

I remember when I was a boy, in the small river or big stream that passed through our farm, there was a tongue of land that stuck out in the river. There stood a tree, clinging to a stone, and had stood since long before my time. One day, driven by my curiosity, I found the narrowest part of the miniature peninsula. There I pulled a line with a stick, making a tiny furrow that just a little water could run through. A few days later, the rock and its tree were an island in the river. (The tree, unfortunately, lost its life not long after due to this experiment.)

In our spiritual life (if any) it doesn’t go quite that fast. And the channel may need to be kept open “manually”, at least for a while. But this manual labor, as it were, is not what produces the Light.

Nor does prayer create holiness. Rather, there is a “pressure” of holiness so that it flows into our emptiness, if any.  Or you could say that when you pull the heavy curtains away from your window, this act does not create the sun outside.

This is what I believe, and I think I have good reason to. I am not a saint or guru, but neither is this just something I have read in some book and can parrot.

That’s why, to paraphrase Bob, you don’t need to make a god in your image in your head. Simply turning in the direction of Perfection, or Completion, or preferably both of the above, and looking in the dark for the tiniest crack. You don’t need to know what is on the other side until you see it. It is not like Moses, for instance, had the Torah when he started. The Light breaks through wherever there is a soft spot in some human heart, a crack in the shell of self centeredness. For most of us, of course, this happens through the words (and life) of those who have already been there and been done that to.

Or that’s how I see it tonight.

Moron exposure

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Immediate reaction to being exposed to morons, screenshot from City of Heroes. We are obviously not talking about latter-day (or any other) saints here.

In the game City of Heroes there is a science enhancement called “boron exposure”. The logic behind this will be explained below, so I’ll just mention that I created a brute-type character named Moron Exposure.

In real life, it is easy to see oneself as being exposed to morons, an old word for people with severe cognitive challenges. Or in other words, really stupid people. The somewhat less flattering truth is that we all risk functioning on a moronic level when we go beyond the limits of our competence. In some cases there is a sudden cutoff, in other cases it is more of a slope: The further we get from what we know, the more stupid our thinking becomes.

Be that as it may, even the competent may make mistakes. A slip of attention, an unfamiliar task, and you end up sending off a job badly done. This happened just yesterday with Form Regnskap here in Mandal, an accounting company that among its clients count my landlord’s company. They sent me, on behalf of said company, an invoice for two different costs related to the house.

According to the contract, I am to pay the costs of water, sewage, garbaged disposal etc. This is somewhat unusual around here, usually these are included in the rent. Anyway, all of these were on the invoice. Unfortunately, some of them shouldn’t have been. I already paid the garbage disposal fee directly, in fact it was one of the first thing I did after moving in. As for the other fees, it is not possible to see whether they are for the whole house or only half. Looks like the first, unless the house has been sectioned off into two independently owned parts. This is possible but not something you’d do if you plan to sell the whole building again at some future time. I’ll have to check this with the municipality. It is pretty clear that I can’t rely on the accounting firm.

I intend to counter-invoice them for the time I have to spend clearing this up. Not as any sort of punishment, but I already work full time. I am not obliged to work for free on behalf of other people’s accounting firms.

***

While my first reaction was one of annoyance, I took a long walk and talked it over with the voice in my heart. We came to agree that this was actually a positive event: It is a chance for me to fix my own broken karma. It is not like I haven’t made mistakes, at least one of them really serious, in my own work. By being on the receiving end of such a work mistake, I get to see this from the other side. I get to, at least to some degree, reap what I have sown. So that is good, to have the opportunity to do so while alive.

Earlier this year I read Dante’s poetic description of Purgatory, in his Divine Comedy. The literal existence of Purgatory is a matter of theological dispute, but I notice that Jewish tradition (within Kabbalah at least) support the notion that the “demons” we have created in this life will come back to haunt us in the next, until they have fully expended the power we gave them here. Since we are rather less substantial in that state, it takes a lot more time and / or intensity to pay this back.  The Buddhist notion of Hell, which is actually more like Purgatory in that it is temporary and useful, is similar to this. Although it has attracted even more grotesque imagination than Dante’s Hell, much less his rather bearable Purgatory.

I have no experience to speak with authority about the afterlife, or even the before-life. What I know is that in this life, as you move closer to God / Tao / the Light / the Source, the distance between action and reaction grows less. You get the chance to pay off your karmic debt within reasonable time, whereas if you speed away in the opposite direction, there is so long a time from crime to punishment that you may have forgotten the first when you are caught up by the latter.

Now you may argue that Jesus (or Amida Buddha) has paid your karma debt, so there should be no such reaction. But that is only partially correct. We still need to turn around and see our acts from the other side, otherwise we lack in being complete persons. If we keep slapping people and never get slapped, we live and die unaware of what we have done to others. In that example, we are usually educated hands-on in kindergarten, so we don’t need to end our days in ignorance. But when things become more subtle, it is easy to live a life of ignorance, and our soul becomes unbalanced. This is its own punishment. The (partial) perfection of the soul is its own reward, and a very great one.

If getting an inaccurate invoice can help improve my soul, it is something to give thanks for, rather than a cause for clenched fists.

***

In Silver Age superhero comics, it was not uncommon that exposure to dangerous chemicals or energies could alter a person to become a superhero, like for instance Flash who got his powers from a lightning strike in his chemicals while he was working in his lab, or the Fantastic Four who were exposed to cosmic radiation in a space shuttle. The Science enhancements in City of Heroes are based on this idea.

My imaginary character Moron Exposure is derived from this notion, except instead of being exposed to a toxic chemical, he was exposed to a toxic social environment, and gained his amazing strength and resilience from this.

I created this character a couple days ago. Nice to see someone up there is watching me even when I dive into the 2-dimensional worlds. ^_^ Or is this what they call “synchronicity”? Synchronicity of Heroes?

St Symeon and seeing the Light

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The heavenly light form of Jesus Christ as imagined by a Japanese artist. (From the animated movie “The Laws of Eternity”.)

I just recently became aware that St Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022 AD) claimed to be able to literally “see the Light” – the heavenly form of Jesus Christ. This is actually not something most Christians claim to be able to do in any literal or near-literal sense. I shall assume that he was seeing this with spiritual sight, not actual photons striking the retina, although what do I know about Jesus and photons.

I haven’t studied the details of this yet. As I said, I only became aware of it a day or two ago, and only today did I realize the scope of this. It was not just some single event, although it evidently started out this way. But after years of asceticism he seems to have seen the Light on a regular basis, and even claimed that this was the purpose of human life. Or so I have read others say about him. I have yet to read any amount of his own writings.

I think regular readers can see why this would interest me. It would probably also interest our visiting Llama. But I doubt any of us would spend the rest of our days in extreme monastic life to find out. Probably not.

Further brief reading reveals that St Symeon had a very informal approach to religion, and while he would celebrate a yearly feast day for his spiritual teacher, he was not generally big on rules and ritual, and reproached those who thought Christianity was about such formal things. He held up personal experience as the original Christianity, and denounced as heresy the teaching that contemporary Christians (as of the year 1000) could not expect to have these same direct experiences as the first Christians.

Needless to say, Symeon was not entirely popular with the church authorities of the area, although the people seems to have loved him. It is a bit hard to find objective facts about this, since his biographer was also his disciple. But for that same reason we can be quite sure about his views on ritual and rules, because this was about a millennium before it became trendy to denounce these kind of things.

Extremely regular readers may believe that I knew all about St Symeon beforehand, or even that I shared his experiences to some degree. Certainly the description of The Light in my “Servants of the Light” fiction is disturbingly Symeonitic. But such things don’t really surprise me anymore. The undeserved Presence in my heart is pretty clear on this topic, although it rarely ever reaches the level of actual vision, like a hallucination.

I guess technically it would qualify as a hallucination as long as other people don’t see it too. It is my belief that voluntary hallucination is not necessarily a sign of mental illness. Indeed, Symeon and several others who had really strange visions (or heard voices, or felt intense heat etc) were capable of more coherent thought than their contemporaries, elaborating on their teachings in a systematic way, as well as writing poetry, organizing large numbers of people, and predicting future events with some degree of accuracy. So while these people certainly had a different function of the mind, it can hardly be called dysfunctional. Rather, one could argue that they were MORE sane than the common person.

In fact, if we accept the childish definition that a hallucination is seeing something that isn’t there, then it could be argued that Symeon was the one who had it right, and we who see a world without the Light are hallucinating. The Light is certainly present in the world, of this I have no doubt, nor do any of the great world religions.

Whether this higher level of sanity also applies to me is more doubtful. But if I live long enough, it would seem that my life is stumbling in this direction. And I suppose I may still literally see the Light, although that is not guaranteed unless I become pure of heart. That is still a bit off, to say it delicately.

and the one who died upon the cross, well he is the One for me.
And he says: Come with me and you will see
the Light that shines for eternity...

 

Perfectly imperfect world

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I still suck at kanji, so I have no idea whether the painted words are in any way related to the romaji and the corresponding English text. I hope they are decent, at least they are pretty. Anyway, my destination lies beyond, and for good reason.

The llama touched on this recently, so perhaps I should describe it in more detail.

I know I have written in great detail about this before, after listening to the voice in my heart. But I have probably not uploaded it, because I am not really a person fit to teach. I am a guy who gets up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats, plays computer games or reads or writes or watches a cartoon, and goes to bed. Oh, and walks an hour usually. But the sacrifices I have made for the Truth are so few and so small as to be negligible. That is why one should not take on faith anything I say about more important things.  Try it against your own conscience, and/or learn from the great guiding lights of the past.

But I think this is self-evident, that Earth is not Heaven, and world is not God. Or rather, Earth is not fully Heaven, at best a pale reflection. And our world is not God in the fullness of perfection and completeness, the Sum of All Good etc.

I am not simply talking about a specific religion here, although I have one. Rather, I think all of us have some idea of perfection, some idea of completeness, some idea of the Highest Good. Since some things are more worth than others, there must be something of the highest worth. Since some things are more real than others, there must be a supreme reality. The ancient form of the pyramid represents the great chain of being, with the One at the top, from which all flows and to which all leads. The Great Pyramid was supposedly in its heyday covered in white stone, but its peak plated in gold.

Now, we must understand that this world is not a direct manifestation of the Supreme Being, of the Perfect and Unlimited. Rather, there is a distance between the two. This world follows laws of nature, but there also seems to be much randomness. And so also with the hearts of men. Though we have principles, it is hard to hold onto them in the face of temptation. Others also have this struggle, so we should meet them with understanding when they try to do their best but sometimes fail.

The natural world itself seems to contain this measure of randomness. Things happen for a reason, but only in light of the transcendent (that which goes beyond). If seen with the eyes of plain matter, there is a lot of randomness. Why do bad things happen to good people? More importantly, why do good people happen to do bad things? Why these fluctuation, in matter and in human will? Why the imperfections, the failures?

I say it is because the world is not God or even Heaven, and is not meant to be so. God – or the Uncreated Light, or the Tao – has granted us space so that we could exercise our free will. If it were not so, we would not be here to talk about it.

Think of a brightly shining light bulb. In the night, it shines brightly. But if we could somehow place this glowing bulb inside the sun, it would actually there be a darker, colder place than its surroundings. It would also very quickly cease to exist.

In the same way, even the most luminous among us – the wisest, the purest, the most worthy – would become an impurity if God were to manifest fully in this world, if God were to take direct control in an obvious way. And because “God is light and there is no darkness in him” (to use a phrase from the New Testament) we would not even be able to exist in such a situation.

We live in this imperfect world because it is the only place fit for imperfect people like us. “God alone is great and perfect.”

However, unlike the rest of nature, man (and this includes woman, of course) can change. It is not easy. You cannot simply sit up one day and decide: “From now on I will not give in to temptation. From now on I will do the right thing every time as far as I can see.” Well, actually you can, perhaps even should. But you cannot carry it through. As a man you simply don’t have that kind of backbone. You are subject to imperfection, to fluctuations, you become tired in your morality much as you become tired in your mind and tired in your body. Certainly I do not wish to hold you back if you want to live a perfect life. Go for it! But don’t kill yourself when you crash.

Gradually – at a snail’s pace for most of us, and that is being generous – we can change. There is what religious people call “grace”, a kind of invisible flow of opportunity (or more poetically “helping hand”) from above. It is not always equally palpable, equally possible to sense and identify. But at some point there should be a small crack in the cosmic eggshell that surrounds us, and that’s how the light gets in. At some point we should be able to find a small stream of grace and follow it, sensing somehow when we begin to get too far away from it, or when it is closer at hand.

Various religions have techniques for finding and making use of such opportunities of grace. If you mistrust them all, I suppose you can try to make it on your own, but I recommend you learn the basics at least from those who have trod this path before you.

The idea is that we can get closer to Heaven while here on Earth. That we can become less random, less an object tossed around by fate and more a living being with its own destiny.  Our destiny lies beyond this world and its randomness. When the world is random toward us, we need not respond to it randomly, but the compass needle of our mind can come to point more and more in the direction of Heaven.

But won’t that lead us to becoming engulfed by God and cease to exist? Not in this yuga (lifetime of the universe) it won’t. Such complete unification is the point at the tip of the pyramid. It is certainly not something we need to worry about. If the time comes for all to become One, we will be fully prepared for it and even eager for it. Not until then. Divine Love does not force itself upon the unwilling soul. You can get to know this by experience.

 

 

Viruses and ghosts

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In the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, hospitals are plagued by the ghosts of people who died there and refused to accept their fate.

Today, after eating a small piece of chocolate, my throat began to get irritated. I had to constantly cough and swallow just to keep breathing, or so it felt. I tried to wash it away with water and then eat something, but it just didn’t go away. I started to get really worried. At this point, other symptoms had already joined in: I was getting weak, my heart was beating fast, I was shaking and my face was flushed, my eyes were dry, I was queasy and my bowels were upset, I even developed a headache. It was like my body was breaking down all over, all of a sudden. I started to think: No! I don’t want to die! And then I remembered something.

The place I was when the symptoms began used to be a hospital, many years ago.

In the movie The Rebirth of Buddha, there is a memorable scene at the hospital, where Sayako (the main character, well, except for the Buddha) can see the ghosts of patients who walk around, bothering doctors and nurses and fellow patients in their attempt to get painkillers and other forms of comfort. They all don’t want to die, and being materialists in life could not accept the fact that they were dead. So even now they are haunting the hospital, thinking that they are patients there and it’s all about them.

Could it be? That some long dead patient had returned to its hospital and found some kind of resonance with me? Stray spirits are attracted to people who resonate at the same wavelength, so to speak: People with the same habits, viewpoints, attitudes, feelings and interests. Well, that’s what Happy Science says. That doesn’t sound very happy, but the happiness is that you can save yourself and sometimes even the stray spirits by reflecting on yourself and seek to live a life of selfless love. When the stray spirits notice this, they will either flee from the growing Light in you, or begin to reflect on themselves as well and be saved.

Christianity generally seems to assume that possessive spirits are all demons, not ghosts. This corresponds to the notion that the dead are sleeping, unaware of what goes on under the sun, as the Bible says. Of course, just because they are sleeping does not mean their dreams may not resonate with ours… if only in the form of a morphic field. Be that as it may, the New Testament certainly implies that not only mental illnesses but sometimes also physical may be created or made worse by the influence of spirits.

This may sound like pure superstition unless you consider that the mental equivalent to these stray spirits are complexes, or mind parasites: Essentially tiny split-off parts of the same stuff that personalities are made of. In some cases, people literally have multiple personalities, usually one more dominant than the rest but not always. In “healthy” people the other personalities never grow to more than a rudimentary level, but they can still mess up things pretty badly. This “complex” theory is a pretty respectable branch of psychology, first championed by C.G. Jung.

Consider the placebo effect, in which supposedly ineffective pills or injections cause substantial health benefits. And equally nocebo, where harmless treatments cause illness and in some cases death when people believe in them. A wrong diagnosis can sometimes become self-fulfilling, and the patient dies before the error is found and corrected. Likewise, someone may recover from a serious illness due to misdiagnosis, although this may be less common.

Even though I did not think about it at the time, I was aware that I was in an old hospital building. Judging from the symptoms, it seems likely that I have contracted the illness my coworker had last week (he has now returned). He is still not able to speak normally due to his vocal cords being  affected, and had various other symptoms including fever. So it could simply be that I have the same virus.

But in either case, body and soul are tightly integrated. In this life, they cannot be separated. In the next life, they probably can. But I am in no hurry to find out. Still, if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take: It certainly beats it wandering around bothering the living!

Actually, I should probably not bother the living even while I live. But at least reading my journal is voluntary!

***

(Incidentally, my throat is still irritated, but the other symptoms are gone for now.)