Category Archives: human mind

Human husbandry

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Let us talk about snacks. You know you want some. Well, you know some part of you want some. But we need to practice human husbandry here.

No, I am not talking about being a husband, despite the picture. I don’t have the experience to teach you that! I am making a twist on the phrase “animal husbandry”, the care and feeding of animals.

I am talking about the human animal that is our body and at least some of our mind. Now, I am aware that this is wrong and misleading. The idea that we are this pure spirit riding the animal body, an unrelated creature with a different and perhaps opposing agenda. This is a dangerous thought to hold onto as a worldview. The body and the mind are more than intertwined, they are more like the metal of a coin and its imprint. This is true. We are not separate beings, the mind and body.

And yet, let us take this metaphor further. It is a metaphor, kind of like a very simple parable, something used to describe something else. Not the thing itself. But let us take it a little further. In days of yore, say in the Viking age, it was the metal value of the coin that determined its value. You might cut a coin in two if you got something for half price, and it would work just as well. These days, of course, it is the imprint that makes a coin valuable. The metal itself is cheap and generally not very useful for anything else, or it would not have been wasted on coins. It is all about the pattern. Or in our metaphor, the mind.

In ages long gone by, it was also the “metal value” of the human that carried it through. Food was scarce, and especially food that was rich in energy, like sugar and fat. So if you came across something like that, it made sense to let the body eat as much as it could get away with, and come back for more if there was. After all, there would soon be less food again. Being well fed would give you the upper hand in survival and reproduction. Survival of the fattest, baby!

And reproduction… what a topic. In the wild, humans did not have all that many opportunities to find a valid mating partner. Also, life was short, and death came suddenly. You had to have a bunch of babies just to be reasonably sure some of them lived to give you grandchildren. Luckily one of the few threats that did not exist yet was sexually transmitted diseases, with the possible exception of herpes. So, you see what way this goes. It made purrfect sense to hit on what few targets you came across during your fertile years, unless something was horribly wrong with them.

Apart from that activity, however, running around too much would waste precious energy. If there was food nearby, a good idea was to eat it, and relax so your body had a chance to store up fat for the dry season. (Children would be the exception to this, as they urgently needed to explore the territory and their own limits and develop the survival skills to do this thing called life all over again.)

Today, things have changed a bit. Pretty girls are everywhere, and so are chocolate cakes, hamburgers, and couches. TV satisfies our curiosity without us needing to lift our plush backside until we drag ourselves to bed. The human animal is in hog heaven, as I think you call it in English. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, there are some problems with this.

***

This is why, for instance, if you put the snacks in the same room as the magic mirrors, the enemy has already won.  If it is the TV, the human animal will quietly feed while you are concentrating on the story unfolding on the screen. If it is the computer, you will get distracted while working on your spreadsheet or letter, and snacking will make you able to concentrate again, mysteriously, although it needs to be repeated from time to time.

Unlike your friendly barnyard animal, your human animal has as much brain as you have. In fact, it has your brain, exactly. Sometimes you will fool it, sometimes it will fool you. Which is not a big surprise, since it is you.

This is why we need to keep the food in the kitchen, and if possible have the home office at least one room away from the kitchen, preferably two or three.  (Due to the rational layout in my current apartment, I only have to go through the two doors instead of three, but it still helps.) Buying an inexpensive mirror or two or three to place in the kitchen may also help. Then you will know that you will be watching you. Remember, you usually do stuff when you think you do not watch!

Now for that other thing – TV is a window, as far as the human animal is concerned. There is plenty of evidence that people who don’t have TV, and specifically people who don’t watch soap opera, are more satisfied with their current spouse, if any. This is because even though you, the rational you, know that the pretty women and rich and powerful men on TV are not your actual neighbors, your subconscious is still absolutely convinced that they are and you have drawn the short straw in the spouse lottery. (You have also drawn the short straw in the self lottery, but evidently we are a bit more forgiving about that.)

You don’t really need me to go on to tell you about porn, glamour magazines etc, do you? We know how this works by now. None of this stuff was around in the stone age. Seeing is believing. Seeing constantly is believing that it is available, achievable. Oh, that goes for the chocolate cakes and stuff in women’s magazines too. The more you look at them to desire them, the more ready you will be to engage in fateful behavior in real life. Just saying.

Really, you know this just as well as I do, once you start thinking about it. Go on, think, if you will.  I am not the master of you. The question is, who is? Are you?

Games made me do it!

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Screenshot from City of Heroes, starring my character In Hoc Signo Vince (a modern paladin type with a Roman-inspired helm and Valkyrie cape), leader of the supergroup Masshiro (“Pure white” in English) on the main European server. In the background two other supergroup members. Evidence to use against me if someone here in Mandal blows up something.

According to an article in Norwegian news site DN.no, the star profiler of criminals, Pat Brown, has found a connection between Norwegian terrorist Breivik and computer games. (Breivik famously mentions playing computer games in his 1500 page book. Of course, I mention playing computer games over and over in my far larger autobiography right here in front of you, and I have yet to kill any socialists in real life. So I think that may not be the crucial point.)

“Violent psychopaths often have a superhero complex” the expert is quoted as saying. (Well, it is translated into Norwegian, so some nuances may be lost.) “They are obsessed by the thought of playing the role as Superman, Spiderman or ninja and fight in a superhero way.”

Evidently it must be divine intervention that I have not already murdered several times over as many people as Mr Breivik. Well, I won’t deny that. Divine intervention is a good thing. (Somewhat depending on the deity, says a voice in my head.) But if so, I think we should not rule out demonic intervention in his case. Or “mind parasites” as we say in the Transdimensional Church of the Cosmic Raccoon.

Evidently computers must be a lot more widespread in Afghanistan than their $1 a day average income made me believe. Also, those games must be older than I thought to have influenced not only Hitler but also Genghis Khan (probably Civilization II in the case of Genghis, the Mongol Horde strategy was a pretty sure winner back then). Not to mention the Vandals, the Aztecs, and the Assyrians with their habit of stacking up skulls. Incredible how the amount of computer games has dropped over the last few decades to give us the fairly peaceful and harmonic world we have today, compared with every single age of recorded history (and the bone record of prehistory, implying that something like a quarter of the stone age dead were killed in some way).

Oh well. I should probably go set some pixel people on (spiritual) fire again. After all, I am not like you ordinary people who don’t do such dubious things as playing games!

Incidentally, the word “masshiro” is Japanese, as is the costume of one of the girls. It refers to all of us using light-based powers, as a symbol of spiritual purity, and has nothing to do with race.  Yeah, right, tell that to the judge!

Familiarigravity

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I have never seen this bush before, because I had never walked that far from my new home. This probably happens every time I move, but usually I forget to write about it.

I was taking a one-hour walk today, finally, now that my foot is fully recovered. Well, it was meant to be a one-hour walk, but due to familiarigravity, it ended up more like 50-55 minutes.

What is familiarigravity? I can hear you ask. Actually, that is what I would like to know as well! I discovered it for the first time more than 30 years ago, toward the end of my high school years. (Yes, amazingly I have lived a long time already, longer may it last.) What I discovered was that when I leave the places I usually go, and walk into the unfamiliar, even if it is just along a road, I slow down and yet I tire more easily.  Conversely, once I turn around and start walking back home, walking becomes easier and I walk faster without getting more tired. It is as if there is a center of gravity somewhere in the familiar.

No, the road is not actually sloping upward. This is when I walk in flat terrain. If there is actual uphill or downhill, these add or subtract as usual. It is as if there is a second force in addition to gravity, similar to it but weaker and with a different center. This is what I today decided to call “familiarigravity”.

Obviously the law of familiarigravity is a law of the mind, not of matter. But the two are certainly intertwined in us humans. And I sincerely hope they will continue to be so for quite a while yet!

 

Reflections on quiet

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“The only person who truly knows your innermost thoughts is yourself.” And even that is a very optimistic view.

Back when I first started to experiment with the Holosync Solution, I briefly mentioned something important: If this could make people sit down and shut up for an hour each day, it would lead to rapid personal growth regardless of whether the brainwave entertainment actually worked.

This is not to say that I don’t believe the brainwave entrainment works. It probably does, at least part of it. And it probably does have health benefits beyond what you could get by just staring at the wall for an hour each day. But the fact remains that staring at the wall for an hour would indeed be an improvement for most people. Or at least half an hour, but if you really want far-reaching changes in your life, why not go the whole hog and just sit there for an hour.

This may seem like an absurd thing to do. And for all I know, it may be better to play Bach for an hour each day. I keep hearing good thing about Bach, although he is a mite too subtle and refined for a barbarian like me. ^_^ But the thing is, each of us has a profound need to sit down and shut up, if at all possible. And it is a need we usually repress at all costs until our health and even life itself is in danger.

There are different levels of quiet. What we today call meditation (and which the monks of old called contemplation) is a much deeper quiet than just sitting there and shutting up. There are also different levels of meditation. But we have to start somewhere, right? And the first thing we need to do is shut up.

Even if we shut our mouth, even if we go sit down in a room by ourselves and don’t turn on the TV, or the radio, or the stereo, or the computer… even if we just sit there and say nothing, that does not mean we really shut up. Our mouth shuts down, but the brain keeps making talk as if we were not alone.

Actually not all people have that particular brain that talks incessantly. Some think in images or even in music by default. But it is extremely common that our thoughts take the form of a flow of words.  This inner monologue (or in some cases dialogue or more!) tends to go on and on when we are alone.

In meditation we make a distraction of sorts, by binding our mind to a mantra or some other symbol. This serves as an anchor for the mind, so that we can quickly jump back to that point of stillness when we realize we have been carried away on the stream of consciousness. It is like a teleport spell that takes you back to the anchor in a moment. No need to flail and get upset or disappointed or even surprised that an important person like me got carried away by random thoughts. Just jump back to the point of quiet and start again.

But – at least at the outset – the truth is that this inner silence is not really what we are aiming for. I mean, each of us is aiming for it consciously, I suppose. But not having it is an important lesson in itself. By seeking the stillness inside, we become aware of the mind-chatter, the inner talk show, the often inane babble that it all comes down to when there is nothing more to say and the mind just can’t shut up.

If you never sit down and try to shut down your thoughts, if you just distract yourself until you cannot stay awake any longer, you can delude yourself. You can think that you are this particular person, “I”, who has some clearly defined personality traits and is pretty much the same person at all times, and simply creates thoughts by the amazing power of your brain. You don’t need to wonder what to think, say or do: By virtue of simply being you, it all pops into your head when you need it.

Once you become quiet enough to listen to your own thoughts, you will realize that no, you are not that unified thing, like a pearl that is whole and looking the same from all angles. Rather, your mind is like a flock of sheep, or a kindergarten with overly excited children squabbling and laughing and crying and doing random things, talking incessantly and mostly about useless stuff. But you have to be still enough to observe yourself to find out these things.

Is that really useful to know? Yes, it really is. If you don’t know at least roughly what you are, you are deluding yourself. You will make a history, a narrative, that is actually, factually wrong. And you will be surprised over and over by things inside yourself:  Feelings, irrational impulses, sudden urges, subtle tendencies. Among all these, you are blown off course again and again and cannot understand why.

But even if not, you really need that quiet. For your body to relax, for your mind to defragment itself and settle down. For your thoughts to stop flapping their wings quite so vigorously. And to become able to fall asleep without chemicals and without being so exhausted that you cannot wake up in the morning without (more) chemicals.

So if you haven’t already, please take some time to sit down and just shut up for some minutes. Your future self will thank you.

Noisy brainwaves at night

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Ah, from now on there won’t be anything like this anymore. Or will there? While the picture has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I think it conveys a bit of the nostalgia of leaving a dreamy place and time. (The text is from the song S.S.S! (Sun Shiny Day), which is quite like that.)

One of the things I am likely to miss after moving to the apartment, is playing my stereo in the wee hours of the night. No, I am not rocking it out, quite the opposite: The sound is LifeFlow 2, a delta brainwave entrainment track. By passively listening to this, more and more of the brain is synchronized with waves of 2 Hz, which is close to the frequency of deep, dreamless sleep.

I don’t think such induced brainwaves are a complete replacement for sleep, but on the other hand this deep sleep is something we tend to get less and less of as we grow older. It seems to me, as purely subjective experience, that I am actually less tired at work when I have woken up 3-4 times in a night and turned on the delta track. This could be coincidence, of course. I won’t say it happens every single time.

But what happens almost every single time is that I fall asleep pretty quickly, since I don’t have to worry about whether I fall asleep or not. I’m good anyway, which is the ideal condition for falling asleep in the first place.

Obviously a stereo by the bed will be less popular if you share bedroom with someone. Well, unless they go to sleep at the same time, I guess, in which case it should be just as useful for each.

Earphones can also be used, but are kind of unwieldy, depending on your favorite sleeping position. Ear plugs are supposedly less effective, unless you can make sure they are inserted exactly to the same length in each ear. That won’t work for me, since my ears are quite different in construction. Standard ear plugs will fall off my left ear almost at once, but stick just fine in my right.

Supposedly the entrainment effect has very little to do with the volume, as long as it still reaches your subconscious, so I suppose I may try to keep playing, just more softly. Or perhaps by now I may be able to induce that frequency just by deciding to. I doubt that, though. It is one thing to do it with alpha waves and upper theta, but delta is not something you normally synchronize while awake.

Meditation in The Sims 3

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In the Sims 3, meditation requires visiting China and learning Martial Arts. In real life, you can easily learn it from the Internet (link with sound). On the other hand, the floating and trippy colors are subjective at best.

I guess there are not many people who meditate and play the Sims 3.  The two don’t quite exclude each other, but they largely appeal to different types of people. Meditation calms and quiets the mind, while computer games tend to excite.  (With the Sims 3, that depends a bit on your play style, I guess.) Games tend to be an escape from the real world, while meditation is a grounding in something even more real than the manifest world. So they are quite a bit apart. In light of that, I find it a bit amusing that meditation in this game has become quite a bit more realistic than before.

In the Sims 2, meditation was unlocked by the Logic skill (usually at level 4), and basically froze your sim’s motives – you did not get more hungry or tired etc, as if time had stopped for you. For your sim, I mean. After a long time spent in continuous meditation, you would start floating in the air and be able to teleport.  Not exactly a fast way to travel, since it took the day to get that far.

In the Sims 3 meditation is much more realistic, although there is still the floating and teleportation at the end, which is (in my experience at least) not realistic at all. (I hear some people feel like they are floating, but that is pretty much it.) For the rest, though, the skill has become more realistic. I am not sure tying it to the Martial Arts skill was a good idea, it could have been a separate skill. But I guess it beats logic as a starting point. Anyway, you now grow hungry and your bladder fills up etc much like you were just sitting there. The only thing that happens right from the start is that you start building up “meditative focus”.

This focus lasts for a while after you end your session, and improves the quality of your work and the speed of your learning. Fittingly, it evaporates if you use the “magical” ability to teleport.  Magic is not the best use of meditation, after all.

Once you have spent a long time in meditation – not hours, but a noticeable part of a normal lifespan – you become a master of meditation. I am not 100% sure this is a feature rather than a bug, but it seems the meditative focus now becomes permanent. It says 15 minutes left, but it has said so for half a generation now.

If that is intentional, it is actually a pretty good approximation of real life. If you do keep it up for many years, meditation will really change you and make you better able to live your life, learning things and doing things better.  Quite apart from any mysterious or seemingly magical experiences you may or may not encounter along the way.

“Austerity measures”

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My own austerity measures: The first sacks of things to throw away before moving to the smaller place. More sacks to follow.

I have written a few times about the near future, after peak oil and peak metal and so on. What I have sketched is not a disaster scenario. Disaster scenarios are good for selling books, and I agree that if we act like complete morons, we can make a disaster out of it. Then again we can make a disaster in paradise itself, as the Jewish creation mythos so beautifully explains. This tendency lies in us all and must be watched.

Seeing pictures of Greeks rioting in the streets not only brings home this human tendency to make a mess of things, but also an even more ingrained human tendency: To never give up something you already know from experience that you can live without. This is not a pure evil: It is kind of helpful for a marriage, for instance, that you won’t give up on your spouse at the first bump in the road, even if you survived for several years before even meeting them. But for the most part, it is people torturing themselves.

I am going through my own austerity measures these days. Getting less for the same money is the trend of the future, and I have started (somewhat unexpectedly, in my case) since I have to move from a house to half a house for the same rent. In the process, I am once again going through the things I’d like to bring along, and sorting out things that I won’t realistically have room for. The thing is, I started my adult life with much less than this. It took many years before I even had my first bookshelf. It is like my material riches have increased by 1000% and now I have to go back to 800%. Not really something to riot over, I think.

I can see how people who planned to retire at 50 will be upset that they can’t. The whole thing I am going through now is an exercise in how to (not) react when you find out that people break their promises if they have the power to do so. That is unfortunate, but when the promises were a bit too good to be true, when we were living our dream, simply going back to reality should not be the end of the world.

Retiring at 50 or even 55 is certainly dreamlike, at least if you have a job you hate. But the best response to that is to either get a job you like, or like the job you have. Almost all jobs consists of helping other people (because that is the only thing people are likely to pay for, if they have a choice). So by rising your love to a very high degree, you can usually find satisfaction in any work that is not contrary to law or decency.

I have every intention of working till 75 if my health holds up. That is not a certain thing, of course. But as far as I see it, retirement is not natural. It should not really exist. Rather, people may get disability pensions when they are no longer able to work, whether it happens at 20 or 90. If you want, you can of course quit your job at any time, but I don’t see why one should be rewarded for that. The way Europe at least has organized this, people have paid for other people’s retirement for decades, so it stands to reason that they want to get their money’s worth. But that money is not saved anywhere. It is already spent, on other people’s retirement. So it is not like you can give them back the cash. Given that we all face a period of austerity, I think it is more important to support those who are actually ill, over those who are actually lazy.

When the money is gone, it is gone. The tooth fairy won’t bring it back even if you break somebody’s teeth. It is like that with all things. The only certain thing about anything on earth is that it will end. As the Buddha said: “All things that have form are subject to decay.” I hear even the protons will decay some hundred billion years from now. We should salvage the happiness we can find during our journey through time, collect the good memories and learn from the unpleasant. For each of us there will come a time when we won’t get any more memories from Earth. There is more joy to be had from austerity than from rage. Believe me, I have tried both.

Tomatoes vs cancer: Fight!

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Actually we don’t know whether I even have cancer, but we do know that I have tomatoes!

Today I walked briskly for about an hour (burning 650 calories, according to my pulse watch.) This is supposed to be a good thing (see my earlier entry on this topic). Then again, I usually do that on Saturday anyway.

Unfortunately, it turns out that today it is vegetables that cure cancer, more exactly tomatoes and broccoli. And there are limits.  They go somewhere before broccoli. I find it impossible to believe that a merciful God would intend broccoli as human food, at least for regular use. It may not be as poisonous as it looks and tastes, but that’s the most credit I will give it.

“The only treatment that approached the tomato/broccoli diet’s level of effectiveness was castration” according to the article. That makes sense – it is also the only treatment that surpasses the tomato & broccoli diet on a scale of pure horror and revulsion…

Actually, the connection may be closer than that. “Another recent Erdman study shows that rats fed the tomato carotenoids phytofluene, lycopene, or a diet containing 10 percent tomato powder for four days had significantly reduced testosterone levels.” Yeah. Significantly reduced testosterone levels may help in consuming broccoli too, I guess. It is the archetypal spinster food, after all. Eat broccoli, avoid men, live till you are 90 and donate your fortune to a pet cemetery.

Even tomatoes and I don’t have the most cordial relationship. I have (repeatedly) been told that when I was little, I enthusiastically grabbed my first tomato and bit into it. Then I declared: “Tomatoes taste best in fresh air” and went outdoors and threw the tomato as far as I could. Which was at the time not very far, and it was found not much later. My brothers will probably not let that story go until we are old. If we grow old at all. Old age may be the source of many complaints, but most still prefer it to the alternative.

During my long walk I thought a bit, although not much. Here is an overview of what I thought:

So, in order to outpace cancer and various other common but grisly deaths, you have to walk briskly. The study drew a line at 3 hours a week, but this was probably more for practical reasons (there are probably not enough Americans who walk 7 hours a week to be statistically significant). So probably the more the better.

Now in addition to this, you are to eat lots of tomato and broccoli. But you can not eat sugar, sugar is poison (again).  Some fats are healthy (this year) but that does not much help me, since I get violently ill if I eat more than a few grams a meal of any fat. Actually I may be able to eat slightly more milk fat than other fats, but it is hard to say. My main source of fat is cheese, and it is not like I eat pounds of the stuff. Anyway, for now suffice it to say that I can’t eat fat and am not supposed to eat sugar (unless I am willing to die a grisly death).

Well, if all I can eat is veggies, and I am traipsing around the countryside every day, at least I won’t get aggressive prostate cancer from overweight. On the contrary, I will probably end up as something closer to a walking skeleton. Perhaps I could get a part time job showing medical students the various bones of the human body?

We already found out that sitting might kill me, but on the other hand Meditation can Boost the Immune System. So, meditation without sitting? Perhaps I should meditate while walking. Actually, that is something I occasionally do, but it tends to be less deep than classic meditation, for the obvious reason that one does not want to fall into a ditch or get run over by a car or stumble over roots.

There sure are a lot of things to do and not do if one wants to avoid an untimely death! And not least, Do Not Worry! For on the day you do that, you shall surely die. Or at least raze your immune system to the ground or something.

***

At this point, we are pretty close to what the ancient called “reductio ad absurdum”. Trying to live a healthy life can be so stressful that it kills you.  Later in the day, I listened to the latest weekly broadcast from Happy Science NZ. To my amusement, this week’s short lecture by Master Okawa was how to achieve definite health.

It is really a miracle that you can create illness in your body by the power of your thoughts, says Okawa. Even an ordinary person has this amazing power, to create illness. About 70% of illness is created this way, with the power of the mind. Despite this, people seem unable to create health. Isn’t that strange? Perhaps you really want to be sick, so you have an excuse for your failures. But if you want to be healthy (or only 30% sick, I guess), you should focus on thinking bright, positive thoughts. Reflect on yourself to get rid of hate and accusation. Practice gratitude to bring happiness into your life. Hold on to healthy habits. Make a life plan that is in accordance with the will of Heaven.

Mind you, I am not a big fan of the “if you had faith, you would not be sick” theology. But Okawa’s estimate that about 70% of illness is self-inflicted in one way or another seems reasonable. In our civilization, “lifestyle diseases” and stress-related illnesses are dominating the charts, massively so. So until further notice, I will continue to take my walks when feasible, eat tomatoes when feasible, and live with brightness and gratitude in my heart, hopefully for the remainder of my life, whether it is 6 months or 60 years. So far I’m planning for the latter though.

 

Growing up

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I disagree a bit – kids do need to be looked after. But it is true that you have limited influence on who they become in the end: That will increasingly depend on their own decisions. Each child is an individual, whether you want it to or not.

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Over the last years, I have noticed that I am beginning to grow up. It has kind of accelerated after I hit 50, it seems…

“Growing up” is really a very vague concept. When are you a grown-up? For much of history, childhood was very short, in so far as it existed at all. There were infants, and then there were small, stupid workers. But you generally were not considered grown-up until you were able to reproduce. That did not stop girls in particular from being married off as young as 5, although more commonly around 9 years old. The notion that pedophilia was wrong, rather than just impractical, is fairly new. The word itself was unknown a hundred years ago, but we have had some idea about this for longer than that. The ancient Greeks and Romans, however, did not. Judaism stood out in this area by not actually shipping the girls off for marriage until their first menstruation (which was generally later than today, due to less nourishing foods and vitamins).

Today, we have almost certainly gone too far in the opposite direction. People are now “kids” until they graduate from college, and are not expected to take responsibility for their own lives until then. (Kind of hard to do in a capitalist society without money, really.) Needless to say, most people won’t be celibate that long, but are discouraged from forming a family. By the time they take their place in adult society, they have a decade’s practice of fooling around. To everyone’s great surprise, some of them continue to do this after they marry and/or have kids, and acrimony ensues.

***

But there is another meaning of growing up, and that is internally. Some people don’t really much care about what happens inside their own mind, much less others, but in that case you would probably not be hanging out here. So…

Ryuho Okawa (of Happy Science fame) says that you are fully responsible for your own life from around the age of 30.  He bases this on both his own experience and Jesus Christ, neither of which started their religious work until the age of 30. Even then, one may notice, Jesus’ mother managed to get him to perform his first miracle by putting him in a situation where she would be regarded as a weirdo if he didn’t. Or that is one way of seeing it at least. He warned her at the time that she could not expect to have any say in his life anymore, and from what it seems, she didn’t after that one time.

It is a gradual thing though. We start shaping our own lives much earlier. Jesus asserted himself when he was 12 and stayed behind in the temple, although we don’t hear of any further such episodes. But for the rest of us too, it is common that some sense of identity awakens late in childhood or at the onset of puberty. In my case, I discovered my free will the summer when I was 15, I believe, shortly before leaving home for high school. So that was convenient. I read a small tract by Elias Aslaksen, a Norwegian preacher of Truth, where he convinced me that nobody can lift our hand to strike or open our mouth to speak. We are not responsible for what others do to us, but we are responsible for how we react. What we do depends on what we think, how we see that which happens to us. The way we see things can be completely opposite, depending on ourselves.

In a matter of minutes, my life turned around. Of course, in the heat of emotion this insight was often forgotten, but not permanently. Gradually, my power over my own body increased. It still does – it is still not complete, even at this age. I’d like to be able to say with Confusius (Analects chapter 2):
The Master said, “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.”

Intriguingly, reception of Truth is what I am “specializing in” now, I guess. There is still so much Truth to absorb. But I really wish to arrive at having no desires that transgress what is right. At that point, I suppose I may call myself a grown-up, even spiritually.


The end of the world

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10

Even if the world ends today, we still want to protect you.

Rumors of the death of the world have so far been exaggerated. Although these days, for the first time in history, we may actually have the power to make the planet go Krypton in the manner depicted above. If Stephen Hawking is wrong about some small detail in his theory of black holes – which very few humans alive understand except Hawking – then the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could actually cause just such an event, where a microscopic black hole sinks to the center of the planet and eats it from the inside. It would be a spectacular sight, but we wouldn’t be around to see it.

So far, however, there is no sign of the end. I consider this a good thing. Some angsty teens may disagree. And also, evidently, a few of my fellow Christians. Or at least one old preacher who doesn’t want to die, which I can certainly understand. I’m afraid he is mistaken, though, if he thinks the experience of the Rapture as depicted in Christian tradition will be significantly different from death. There would still be a transition. It is not like you get taken in a spaceship to another terrestrial planet. Probably. There are some who think this is what happened to Enoch and Elijah, especially since Enoch wrote a book with numerous astronomical references. Or so I have been told. But that does not seem to be what is happening here. Nor is the elderly preacher putting his baby son in a rocket and sending him to a planet circling a white sun.  If you’re going to the phantom zone, you may as well die and become a phantom that way, you know.

And that, my dear reader, is what I have been thinking on today, while taking a walk and listening to Angela’s beautiful song, The End of the World. This was the song that inspired me to write my groundbreaking series of gray entries in June 2005, starting with “The Next Big Thing”, in which I proposed that the end of human history was near: Not in the form of a physical disaster, but by a total conversion of the human mind to a new and higher level, resulting in the extinction of the current way of thinking in the same way as the Neanderthals and others like them just fell by the wayside after our minds achieved symbolic thinking that we have today.

Back then, those who could not keep up – not only the Neanderthals but most branches of humanity at the time – suddenly disappeared, and we descend from those few who invented symbolic thinking and those who were able to learn it.  (For instance, almost all humans descend from the “genetic Adam” who lived 60 000 – 90 000 years ago, but the Khoisan people do not. They parted way with our ancestors at least 110 000 years ago. Of all human groups that lived up to 65 000 years ago, only they and we survive, it seems.)

The Neanderthals had larger brains than we have. The various human tribes that existed around the time of the Dawn of the Mind were for all purposes identical, as far as we can guess from the fossil record and from the traces of crude stone axes made everywhere. And yet, with the sudden outbreak of the human mind as we know it, some were endowed with it and others were… left behind.

When I wrote all that stuff on 18-23 June 2005, it was pretty vague to me still. I am not sure if I had yet found One Cosmos, it certainly had not impressed me if so. I had read a little Ken Wilber, but I think that is pretty much it. I was not sure whether it was just me and a couple others in the world who were “getting it” even at a mostly theoretical level. It seemed impossible that the Transition would happen for generations yet. And indeed, most of the New Age seems to be spiritual fog and magic in modern clothes. But there really are some people here and there, often hidden among the ordinary religious masses, who are “downloading” the higher consciousness. We are on our way. Though we are not there today, and almost certainly not in 2012.

But when the Transition comes, I hope “we” (though I may no longer be there bodily) will be able to protect as many as possible in the chaos and turmoil that follows among those “left behind”. It is not like those who ascend sit up there and laugh at the maggots who fry down below. Those who look forward to such an ascent are likely to get a very unpleasant surprise, I suspect.