Category Archives: human mind

Reading for understanding

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Madness is not the only danger in books. There is also the danger that something may be understood that can never be forgotten.

Having finished The Torah for Dummies, I’ve started on How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (who wrote the original) and Charles van Doren.

One of the very first concepts introduced – before I even got one Kindle dot into the book – is the difference between reading for information and reading for understanding. This is something I have written about before, as I have been introduced to the subject by the Catholic scholar A. G. Sertillanges, and before that more briefly by Ryuho Okawa, founder of Happy Science. Apart from them, and a reference to Sertillanges statement on the blog One Cosmos, I don’t think I have seen or heard this anywhere. Or if I did, it was well before I was ready for it, for no trace remains.

When I wrote about this myself a while ago, I compared the first to someone filling a container with a liquid, for instance pouring juice into a glass. The second sort however expands the container, for instance making the glass taller so it can hold more juice. The first is ordinary, the second is miraculous. But then, we are humans so miracles are not uncommon. At least not for those who wake up to the divine heritage, so to speak.

What Mortimer Adler writes about here seems actually to be an intermediate level of mind change, perhaps. The first change is just in the content of the mind, and the third change in its size. But to introduce another metaphor, you could say that reading for understanding puts more tools in your toolbox. I would say that expanding the capacity of the toolbox itself is yet another level, but let that rest for now. I think his brief introduction simply combines these advanced forms of reading (or listening, on some occasions).

His point is that if you understand perfectly what the author says, your mind and the author’s mind are of the same mold. You don’t understand more afterwards, you just know more. This is not the same thing! You need some knowledge to understand, but you don’t understand better infinitely as you pour on more knowledge. Past a certain point there is no noticeable gain in understanding by adding more and more examples.

When you don’t understand a book (but it presumably is understandable, which can not be taken for given in these days with self-publishing), you need to put more work into it. You can ask someone else to explain it, or read a book that explains it, but if they do so too well you still have not understood the original. When you by your own effort understands a book you did not, you have acquired new understanding. Your mind has leveled up, so to speak: You have a new way of thinking or seeing things that you did not have before. This is a pretty awesome thing to have happen to you.

(Also, this is mostly why I write these days. You have Google right there, you can know anything on Earth. What I want is to give you a glimpse of a different and hopefully higher perspective, another angle, a new dimension. The wonder and the glory and the stars in the sky. Still very much a work in progress, obviously.)

Mortimer Adler stresses that the author needs to have superior understanding compared to you. That is certainly true in a limited sense, namely within the context of the book. However, for the “mid-level” (one more tool in the toolbox) reading, you may well be the superior in a broader sense. Let me show this by an example:

If I were to write a book about the Norwegian language, I would be superior to most of my readers. I am, at the very least, a master of my mother tongue New Norwegian, the western and rural version of Norwegian, to the point that I feel confident mainly poets and highly trained academics can wield it better than I. However, the reader of my hypothetical book may be a world renowned linguist, fluent in more than a dozen languages from different language families and written in different scripts. By any sensible third party this reader would be my superior and have a vastly deeper understanding than I. Just not in the topic at hand.

This is just an example. What I really mean is that a person does not need to be a higher spirit, so to speak – a greater genius – simply in order to have an understanding you don’t. This is what I mean by saying that such learning adds to your toolbox.

In contrast to this, there is a third level. This is the one Sertillanges and Okawa writes about, the High Spirit, the Genius. What they do is open up our very capacity for new understanding. They add new dimensions to the container. You may have been fascinated by teachings that you found could make your glass taller, but you had no idea that it could also increase in radius. Then suddenly you see this, and everything changes. Nothing can quite become the same again.

So what M. Adler writes about is indeed reading for understanding, as opposed to just reading for information. But what I speak of in the last few lines is to read for revelation. And usually this does not even happen, but rather one just reads and the revelation presents itself. When the student is ready, and not before. Still, some places you are more likely to meet it than others.

Climate change of mind

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Now that I have your attention – it HAS got a little bit warmer, hasn’t it? Just not in the USA, according to a recent study.

Today I read an article in The Economist, about some scientists who had calculated that food prices were currently around 5% higher than they would have been without the global warming of the latest two decades.

This is a difficult thing to calculate, of course, and was probably wrong. There is a lot of marginal land that becomes worth farming if food prices stay high for a while, whereas if prices remain low, land may be laid fallow more easily. If prices should continue to rise, it may become economically viable to use new forms of agriculture, such as vertical farming. The world could easily feed 20 billion people if these were people who produced valuable goods and services, so that anyone would be bothered to grow the food to sell them. Facing a beggar bowl however does not motivate farmers to invest.

In fact, there is not a lack of food on Earth even today. There is a lack of money to buy food among some people, but less so than ten years ago, not to mention twenty or fifty. Today, obesity is a health risk to more humans than is starvation.

What we most need then, is not to reverse the physical climate change. I would not mind if we did something about that too, but it is not the most urgent. Rather, we should do something about the cultural climate. The climate of the mind, for each of us and for society as a whole.

For instance, we know that producing meat is in most cases far less efficient than growing plants. There are in fact some areas which are best used for pastures, but a large number of the meat animals in the world eat grain, soy and other food that is edible for humans.  While strict vegetarianism does pose some health challenges, most Americans and Europeans could halve their meat intake and halve it again without experiencing any discomfort. In fact, they would probably feel more energetic and enjoy better health and a longer life. And it would lower the food prices in the world, faster than reversing climate change would.

To permanently end starvation, however, there needs to be a culture change in the countries where starvation is widespread. There has to be an end to war and oppression in these places, so people again dare work without fear that their work will be stolen or destroyed by enemies. This is the fundamental requirement. There are various things that can be done after that, but this is what must be done first. You cannot grow food on a battlefield.

When I say that these countries need to change, you may hear it as “blame the victim”.  It is certainly true that the rich world could have dealt better with other parts in the past, and should do so in the future. But there will be no food to the starving by paying reparations to a dictator or by fanning the flames of war. There is only so much outsiders can do until the people themselves can agree on a philosophy of live and let live, at the very least. This is the task of religion, philosophy and art, to teach humans to live in this world without losing control of their own aggression. You cannot simply substitute money for any or all of these factors. There needs to be a widespread change of mind.

***

As you can see, I do not wish to teach something that is entirely remote and out of our hands. There are things that people in poor nations have to do for themselves, and there are things we can do as a society, but there are also things we can do as individuals, even at our dinner table. These things are not different and separate. Whether it is in Norway or the USA or Congo, we all have to cultivate a mind that accepts other people as real and precious.

I think I mentioned when it happened, a few years ago. As I prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and came to the point “give us today our daily bread”, the Lord reminded me that I was not praying “give ME today MY daily bread”. This is the kind of awareness we need to have at the dinner table. What we choose to eat or not eat has effects on us, our families, our society, and the entire world.

Likewise when we come home from work and decide whether to sit down in front of the flat-screen or do some exercise, these decisions made by each of us has a profound effect on the national health care expense.

And of course, our energy use and transportation has some effect on the atmosphere. (Although not necessarily the way you think! For instance, if you are a meat-eater, biking actually causes more greenhouse gas emission than driving a small car, because of the large amount of greenhouse gas that goes into your food. Or to take another example, transport by ship and rail gives off very little CO2 compared to the mass and distance of transportation, so that buying something from halfway around the globe could cause less emissions than something made locally, if it was made more efficiently in the other place.)

There are a lot of things to learn, and there will be disagreement about details. This cannot be avoided. But we need a climate change of the heart, with much more warmth than before. Then we will surely find a way forward for everyone, starting at home and spreading around the world.

Are we happy now?

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“My emotions were almost unbearable.”  I have been in such a place, and I don’t want others to stay there longer than necessary.

When I warn against emotional advertising, or casual sex, or socialist envy, it is not because I crave that you agree with me or acclaim my opinions as being right. My purpose is simply to increase the happiness of those who read me.

I mean, I have other interests too. I am not a Buddha or some such, living only for the benefit of the world. Mostly I am minding my own small things. But if I bother to write about more general things, this is why. I try to pick something that is not so far out that ordinary people cannot “get” it. On the other hand, it should be non-obvious enough that not everyone has “got” it already.

People generally crave attention, acceptance and acclaim. Their map of reality needs to be verified by others. “Since others agree with me, I must be right!” For the same reason, people tend to only read books and newspapers that agree with them, listen to radio programs that agree with them, and so on. The need to belong to a group of like-minded people is so strong it might well be an instinct. And the best part of it is when you can get others to accept your way of seeing it, rather than the other way around.

But that is not what drives me. I am not part of a group. And I rarely hear from those who read me, well except for my old friend, who anyway seems to do quite well on her own. In terms of getting attention, it would be far more efficient to spend time on a dating site: Even if I never even got to second base, I would get a lot more excitement than here.

The other day, I read this in a newsletter: “A baby is born with a need to be loved – and never outgrows it.” This was evidently considered words of wisdom or truth, and I agree that it is probably a fact for most people. But as I have told in the past, we are not supposed to be children all our life. At some point we have to give more love to others than we receive from others, otherwise the amount of love on Earth will dwindle and go dry.  Sometimes it seems this has already happened. In the striking mental image by Ryuho Okawa, a society without love is like a hospital filled with patients crying in pain. Where are the doctors and nurses, who can give care and prescribe treatment that actually leads to healing?

But it is not just old age or a sense of obligation that drives me, I would say. I am still receiving love, and lots of it, but from the Light, from God or Heaven. This is my experience. I am receiving constant love and attention and advice from Above. You may be convinced that all such things are fantasies and only exist in my head. Then ask yourself: If you were hungry and you decided to fix this by fantasizing about food, how long would you survive? A number of weeks, perhaps months if you were a fat American tourist. But I dare say that your imagination would wear pretty thin after a couple of days already.  But I have lived this way for many years. So either the Heavenly Light exists, or the need for love and attention does not. In either case, you probably have to adjust your worldview dramatically, if you are an ordinary person.

Please do. And you don’t need to report back to me when you find a wellspring of happiness that never seems to go dry. You don’t need to remember my name or tell others about me. Just pay it forward. I have plenty.

Just say no to advertising

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There is nothing quite like a light from Heaven saying “Think on your own!” But at least don’t let cruel enemies dictate your thoughts and feelings. The Servants of the Light have come to set you free; the rulers in the dark are seeking to enslave you.

This is a quick reminder that emotional advertising is evil, even demonic in a literal sense. Such advertising, most notably TV and movie ads but also the simpler form seen in many colored magazines, is callously designed to create insecurity, inflame desires for things you don’t need, and to make you identify with external status symbols.  It seeks to pull you apart from yourself and fuse you with highly temporary objects.

Modern advertisers know more about the human psyche than most of their victims, so it is no wonder they are successful. And make no mistake: To them you are valuable in the same way that cattle is valuable to the rancher. Your wellbeing is of no concern to them at all, as long as you can be used to create more profit.

There is no point in being angry at these people, though. They are captives of a deeper darkness than most of their victims, a hollowing that is the antechamber of Hell. The human subconscious operates in symmetry: What you do to others is done unto you. By making others into lifeless objects, your own life is gradually lost. Theirs is a fate worse than death. In any case, they are not your concern. You are.

There are two main defenses against manipulation. The most obvious is to run for your life.  Don’t watch TV or movies unless you have a good reason to. This is generally a good idea, but particularly so if there is advertising involved. The adverts are designed to manipulate you, and unless you are highly aware, they will.

There, I mentioned the other defense: Awareness. This again falls into two parts. One is to be aware of the purpose and form of the advertising. Typically it will depict a situation in which people receive acclaim, praise, respect or understanding from others, or experience emotional closeness. These are things people often feel they lack, and this feeling is aggravated by seeing others in these artificial situations over and over. In order to obtain these immaterial values, you are told (subtly, of course) that you need to purchase something you otherwise would not need.

The other part of understanding is your understanding of yourself. If you don’t know what makes you tick, if you don’t spend time watching yourself and looking over your actions and reactions, it will be hard for you to see when people are turning your knobs and pressing your buttons to make you work for them. Another benefit of such self-insight is that you are not easily manipulated by people in the flesh either.  Relatives, coworkers, bosses, many such people have techniques for manipulating you. If you know yourself and what is really important to you, they cannot pull your strings and make you dance to your tune.

If you are not yourself, who is going to be?

Be free!

An anti-dromedary??

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An antidromedary? (Negative of picture from Wikipedia.)

Not quite. Enantiodromia is the tendency of the psyche to counteract change. Rather than passive resistance, enantiodromia implies an actual movement in the opposite direction of the recent changes.

A common phrase describing this is “two steps forward, one step back” (and sometimes, by the more exasperated, “one step forward, two steps back”.) Whenever a constant effort of change is put upon the psyche, there is a resistance. When one presses forward, it is a bit as if walking in a bubble of some invisible elastic material, which pulls one back as soon as one stops moving forward, or even if not. To make progress, one must drag this whole two-ton bubble forward with oneself.  This is because the conscious self is only a small part of the psyche, most of which is subconscious.

The lecher who gives his life over to sexual pleasures will after a while find that he no longer takes pleasure from them, even in quantities that he formerly found enjoyable. But at the same time, the monk who tries to devote himself to celibacy finds himself burning with unrequited lust.  (I am not talking here about the normal feeling of satisfaction or hunger in the short run, but over a longer span of time. As a tide compared to a wave, perhaps.)  Likewise the fervent believer will inevitably experience doubt, and a doubt that shakes his convictions to the core; but the ardent skeptic will suddenly be given to irrational superstition.

The greater the force by which one tries to move the psyche, the greater the force by which it strikes back. In many cases this has caused a whole new personality to emerge, one that is opposite to the personality one displayed before.  A revolution of the mind, as it were.

But reading about it, it seems to be another case of what Boris Mouravieff calls the “General Law”. Or in everyday speech: “Don’t rock the boat.” Don’t move too fast, don’t move too far, or the automatic mechanisms to stop insanity will kick in and drag you back. Or you could overcome, I suppose, with sufficient force.

Besides reducing the incidence of madness, the General Law also helps avoid cultural flutter. You would not like to go on a vacation to Malaysia and come back a Muslim.  So we have a defense against changing far and fast.  Although it seems to me that people who fall in love can punch through this barrier. Then again they are, in my eyes at least, already insane. ^_^

It is extremely rare that a voice in my head says a word I don’t know, for the obvious reason that the voice is not actually a voice but more like a current of thought in my greater flood of thought (or perhaps it is the other way around). In fact, I would still not have known how to spell it if not for Google’s helpful “Did you mean to search for…” feature.

Your soulmate may vary

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Not a soul you’d want to mate with, to say the least.

I am not known for my unreflected obedience, so it should surprise no one that I disobeyed Bill Harris, director of Centerpointe Research Institute. When he sent me an email titled “Attract your true spiritual soulmate (single women only)”, I knew I was not supposed to peek. I mean, that is kind of like peeking in a woman’s purse, or something. But on the other hand, I thought to myself, I don’t want risking to be  attracted by a true spiritual soulmate without the knowledge to defend myself. So read it I did.

Since it turned out not to be particularly useful for me, I may as well pass on the moderately good news: Evidently there is a website named “Calling in the One“, teaching spiritual women how to become magnetic to their soul mate. I don’t particularly mind, as long as said soul mate is not me. The compass needle of my heart is already wobbly enough without spiritual women co-creating trouble along with the Universe. I would rather it point straight toward Heaven, into the Light, rather than spinning around a woman. No offense.

I have a few words to add, though, with a little help from an ever helpful voice in my heart.

Your soul mate is similar to you. Not a mirror image, but on a similar spiritual level. That means, dear single person, that if you suck, so does your soul mate. You better look extremely objectively at yourself, because we can assume that so does the universe.  (Unless your universe exists only in your head, in which case you are pretty much on the losing end of romance anyway.)

***

The American concept of “soul mate” seems to be derived largely from Judaism, where it is believed that singles are only half humans, needing another half to complete them, and that this half has already been decided in Heaven. I am not sure how Judaism usually arranges marriages these days, I assume the fathers don’t make a contract about it when the kids are small as was the rule pretty much everywhere in the past. But whoever makes the decision, it is a frightful responsibility.

In contrast, the Japanese new religion Happy Science (and possibly other sects of Buddhism, I am not sure) use the phrase “soul mate” in a quite different way, more similar to “class mate”.  There are supposedly 20-30 soul mates of you incarnate during your lifetime. They make up most of your family (usually, but it is possible to have other parents for some special purpose). They are your best friends, and your rival that seems to block your path at every turn.  When you meet a stranger and they feel as close as family, it is one of your soul mates, with whom you have spent many past lives and many centuries in Heaven, agreeing to meet again when you both did duty in the flesh again.

In this worldview it is not a huge disaster if you marry the wrong soul mate. Perhaps your spouse and you agreed beforehand to get together for the purpose of bringing into the world a child or two who needed just these two parents.  Or perhaps your spouse had certain qualities that were important to you at that time of your life, but over time you forgot those qualities and why you thought it was a good idea to marry just that person.

To be honest, I think Happy Science is more in tune with contemporary Americans than Judaism or traditional Christianity.  Happy Science basically says “People make mistakes, learn from them and make progress.”  Traditional religion says something like “People make mistakes, you’ll be free from them when you go to Heaven.” People today aren’t usually that patient.

In any case, the sad truth is that there are very few Ones. But if you are a Half and your soul mate is also a Half, then you may just end up being One together. You should not hope for much more than that.

***

Me, I am not a half, so I don’t fit into that equation. But I may be one of the other type of soul mate, your soul’s class mate during this lifelong education. (And quite possibly beyond.) Perhaps we can help each other with the difficult lessons.

And you said to me: “Who will open up my eyes,
To the wonder and the glory, and the stars in the sky?”
And you said to me: “For this road I’m travelling on
I need someone beside me forever. Who?”
And I said, “It’s me, and I’m ready to go,
ready to show
That I’ll never let you down.
And I want you to know, that this power will grow,
Every day, every beat of my heart,
Forever, forever…”

Yes, I quoted that song back in 2002 when I first bought it. And again in 2004, although that was more playfully. I still remember how I felt back in 2002. And you know what I feel now? That this power has grown, far beyond what I could imagine back then.

Whether I am still here when you read this or not, it matters not.  Even if no one praises me or notices me, I will strive to grow in brightness.  I don’t need to be loved (except by the Light), I don’t even need to be needed anymore. I only need for this Brightness to keep flowing into me, until my soul burns like a portal to a world of light. And then we can go into that light, home.

I wonder if that will really happen. I wonder if I will reach my aspiration. Probably not, given how limited I actually am. I would probably need to live till I am 120 or something, and I don’t even know whether I’ll be here next year. But I am glad I even got to see into this Promised Land.

Your soul mate may vary. As may you.

Meditation, observation & bzzness

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“Because my role is observation.” (Yuki Nagato, from an anime about Haruhi Suzumiya.)

I am still in the middle of reading Butterflies are free to fly (parental, grandparental, angelic and divine guidance recommended, as this book may well cause insanity, suicide or lifelong unhappiness in the fragile or not exceptionally sturdy and well-prepared reader.)

The book quotes Jed McKenna, a probably fictional teacher of extreme truth-seeking. This is actually kind of true: “Ultimately, the only spiritual practice is observation; seeing things the way they really are.” Whether it is the only, I don’t know, but I have found it to be essential. That is why I used to call myself a “conscientious observer” for a long time. (It is a pun on “conscientious objector”, obviously, but I did not pick it only for its fun value.)

In light of this, it is puzzling that Mr Butterfly … Stephen Davis, I mean, is pretty much rejecting meditation as a kind of distraction that seeks to induce an altered state of consciousness. I am not sure what kind of meditation he has done, but he presumably has done some, being the new-age person he was. But something must have gone wrong. You see, meditation should make you MORE aware, not less. If you’re tuning out, if you’re entering the land of fuzzy, you’re doing it wrong. Sure, meditation should cause you to relax. Your body, that is. Your awareness however should increase.

There are actually two aspects of this. One is the very slow increase in your capacity to be aware or conscious, a process that takes years. A more immediate effect is the surge of available awareness when you sit down and detach from the self-generated busyness of daily life.

Usually we spend our time either doing something that requires attention, or thinking of something that has happened or will happen or ought to happen or should have happened or may happen if, but perhaps not if, and it was their fault and not mine. This is the standard human condition. When we sit down and shut up, the awareness is withdrawn from these habits, and there is a surge of free awareness. When we are new and lack technique and discipline, it is common for this free awareness to latch onto random things nearby: Either sights or sounds, feelings in our body, emotions in our mind, memories or internal images. More likely than not, the surge of awareness will magnify these so they become awe-inspiring, or deliriously pleasant, or terrifying, or otherwise larger than life. Thus we have an Experience.

The Meditation Experience is pretty much unavoidable, and sellers of related materials (such as brainwave entrainment programs) do their best to create positive expectations, which will (if all goes reasonably well) assure that you get a Good Trip instead of a Bad Trip during your first sessions.

In reality, the Experience is a side effect, and actually a distraction. What we want to become able to do is observe ourselves. We want to be able to watch our thoughts as we think them, our feelings as we feel them, without having to stop what we are doing and ponder. Usually we are almost completely absorbed in whatever we are doing, and are seeing completely through our eyes. We are not at the same time seeing ourselves from outside.

The purpose of the observation is not to evaluate, to judge. I mean, sure we can do that, but it is highly likely that this will distract us and we end up with a courtroom case with ourselves trying to defend ourselves against ourselves, and I cannot imagine how much awareness one must have to keep track of that AND the actual life we are performing the living of, at the same time.

Sure, we should judge ourselves. But before we do that, we must observe ourselves. The purpose of meditation is not to feel good, although stressed people usually feel good when their bodies relax. (Then fall asleep, which is pretty much the opposite of meditation. But if you lack sleep, and almost all modern people do, it will soon become a habit to fall asleep when you try to meditate. This is the reason for the unnatural and even painful positions of many meditation schools. A better alternative, I think, is to actually set aside more time for sleep.)

People who have been meditating deeply, frequently and regularly for a couple decades or more, may begin to become aware at all times, including during dream and finally dreamless sleep. They achieve a state of constant witnessing.

I am not saying you cannot achieve that by writing down truth, as the more or less fictional Jed McKenna proposes. Perhaps meditation is a relic from before paper became commonly available. But it works, if you do it right, or even reasonably right. You become more and more aware of yourself, without losing the ability to actually live your life while you observe it. At first you have to take time out from your life to observe yourself, but eventually you can be said to “meditate” all the time, to some degree.

I don’t actually do that, not all the time. Occasionally I am swallowed up by something I do. And I am still unconscious while sleeping, after all these years, with a few seemingly random exceptions.

But the idea of meditation is not to increase fuzziness, but to reduce the bzzness of thoughts and plans and daydreams that repeat endlessly in the head, absorbing all available awareness. Bzz! Bzz! Busy bee thoughts fly round and round in the head. Withdraw from these. Because your role is to observe, first and foremost. Well, unless you’re an ordinary human or something, I guess.

Mistaking Hell for Heaven

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Does this look like Heaven to you? Actually it looks like the game Oblivion (which is the Elder Scrolls word for Hell), and is replete with demons, undead, monsters and criminals. Despite this, I bought a brand new computer in 2006 just to play it, and still occasionally enjoy it. This does not speak well for my soul, I suspect. Well, it may still improve. The soul, I mean.

“The path to Heaven passes through Hell. The sinner thinks this is Heaven, and stops.” That’s what the free thought in my head said this morning. I suspect it is only true in a poetic sense, but then again this is probably the case with nearly all references to Hell.

Depictions of Hell, from the time of Dante onward (and even earlier in the Far East) have had an amazing appeal to human curiosity, perhaps because so many of us have at some point suspected that we might end up there eventually.  In any case, I think these depictions are symbolic at best, even when made by the religious. And religious people are not the only ones who go into detail about this: A couple of my favorite fantasy writers in years past dedicated many chapters to the location. It is also a staple of cartoon drawings.

In fantasy, Hell is a terrible place and it seems highly unlikely that anyone would sign up for it voluntarily. But in real life, many people love hellish things.

To take an example that does not embarrass me personally, think of the people who comment on political blogs and online newspaper.  There can be little doubt that they really immerse themselves in anger, grudges, hate, suspicion and paranoia. And sometimes you can see the same people returning over and over to bathe in the lake of fire and lie down with the poisonous worms.  They can’t help themselves abstain from this suffering any more than a drunkard can abstain from strong drink.

These are examples of people who suffer voluntarily, perhaps foolishly thinking that they suffer for some greater good, although they end up simply tormenting each other and inflaming their own sense of victimhood.

These noble excuses rarely applies to those who are drawn into the Hell of Lust. To the saintly observer (not me, unfortunately) they appear similar to earthworms wriggling in mud. Their relentless fornication is simply gross. (And indeed there are many fetishes in this part of life that are just plain disgusting even to the average person. Just not to those who share them.)

A different case is excess and its consequence. Most of us learned during childhood that eating too much sweets caused a tummy ache, and during our youth we learned that staying up too late caused a very unpleasant tiredness the next day. Many adults have found that drinking to excess causes a headache, and that’s before you face the consequences of the things you actually did while drunk, which can vary from embarrassment to prison and diseases.  Despite knowing this in our brain, the temptation remains. Most debt problems also fall in this category. As such it may be said that entire nations go to Hell, financially. Widespread suffering follows.

To move on to the least obvious, there is the relationship of the perpetrator and the victim. In this world, the rapist may feel that he is in heaven while his victim is in hell. The thief may be similarly elated to abscond with your valuables, not thinking about your loss and the feeling of your home being violated, your security compromised. There are many such “pairs” where one feels a surge of satisfaction while another experiences a much deeper pain.

But in the spirit world, there is no such distinction.  Just as the pleasure and pain of carnal excess was separated by time, so the pleasure and pain of crime were separated by space: I am in my body and you in yours. But time and space collapse in the spirit world, and the murderer stabs himself. This is not actually something that only happens after death (in fact, I have no memory of ever being dead) but happens subconsciously in this life already.  Empathy is hardwired in humans (search for “mirror neurons” for more information on this). To resist it you need to amputate yourself psychologically, and your subconscious will not be fooled. It will give you hell already in this life. Crime is not a well documented source of happiness, to put it mildly.

In Buddhism it is taught that there are three Poisons of the Mind that lead people to Hell: Anger, Greed and Folly.  Here is my personal interpretation of this: Anger represents the animal mind that is overcome with passion. Greed represents the human longing for the eternal and infinite, gone terribly wrong by being redirected to material things. Folly is the insane notion that we are separate from others and that only I am real, the others are “non-player characters”, props that are placed on the scene where I alone act out my life. The three Poisons, then, permeate body and soul and intellect, causing them to malfunction. While this condition lasts, the more we strive for pleasure, the deeper we sink into suffering.  What we think to be Heaven turns out to be Hell.

But in this life at least, it is possible to wake up and realize that my suffering is trying to tell me something, that I have gone astray. Whether this awakening is possibly in the afterlife, is still hotly debated. Why wait? (Well,  except because I want to play just 5 minutes more…)

Craziness and/or religion

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Is the monster inside you growing bigger and bigger? Religion can help! Probably. At least some religions.

Some time ago said something impolite but true: People are stupid and crazy. By this I mean that throughout history, or even today, most people are not very bright, and not entirely sane either.  Even in our enlightened (?) age, there is hardly a soul that does not harbor some phobia or addiction or obsession or fetish. For some of us, these don’t hamper us much in ordinary life, and tend to diminish over time. (Or we outgrow them.) Not everyone is so blessed, though: Many people live in severe suffering even if they don’t have bodily pain.

I believe we should see the world’s religions in this light. To refer to one of them, there is a story of some people who were entrusted fairly large amounts of money while their boss was abroad. Unfortunately, one of them buried his part of the money, then dug it back up when his master returned.  This did not go over well:  “Why didn’t you at least place your money in the bank so I could get it back with interest!”  One interpretation of this is simply:  If you don’t know what to do, listen to someone who knows better than yourself.

Organized religion is basically some people recognizing that there are others who are saner than themselves, and taking their advice. (And then someone finds a way to make money from it. But let us skip that part today.)

So basically, people don’t become stupid and crazy from religion. Rather, they are already so stupid and crazy that they see their religion as an oasis of insight and peace by comparison. This holds true even if the religion is rather disturbing as seen by a more enlightened soul.  For instance, it is unlikely that anyone goes to listen to Reverend Jeremiah Wright with the thought: “I need to dumb down, I need to become more crazy. This guy should help.”  Rather, if they feel affected that way, they are unlikely to ever come back. His regulars are people to whom this guy is a paragon of sanity.

The same understanding applies to history. Old religions, such as the first books of the Old Testament, contain some pretty bizarre stuff. Like the commandment to kill any couples that have sex during menstruation, to take a well known example. If you think that’s bad, keep in mind that to sentence someone to death Moses required two or three reliable witnesses, that is to say adult men of good repute.  The notion that people at the time lived in a society where unfriendly adult men of good repute witnessed your menstruation and your sex is rather more disturbing than the law itself.  In what kind of bizarre world would this be a problem in the first place?

The world really was bizarre back then. High school history books don’t go into this, which may be for the best concerning the stability of mind among their readers. But civilization back then was a new thing and was basically still experimental. Like a beta version, you know. Not very refined, lacking features, and prone to crashing.

There are several such seemingly absurd passages in old religions. God hates shrimps? Cows are holy? Or oaks? Blood from heifers take away sins? And yet we can have confidence that to people at the time, these doctrines were a great relief from the craziness that was tumbling around inside their heads. “OMG there is a cow, is it evil? What is the purpose of cows in the cosmic order of things? What will happen to me if I don’t find out?”

What is considered crazy varies not only with the times but also somewhat with geography. For instance I noticed this while reading the recently translated book Change Your Life, Change the World by Japanese author Ryuho Okawa.  It contained much general spiritual reflection and modern, sensible ethical advice.  It also included a couple paragraphs about how souls of aliens from the Pleiades had recently begun incarnating in human bodies and would prepare for the upcoming mass immigration from their home planets of aliens in physical form.  Then the usual exhortations toward love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress resumed.  I can only assumed that this must be unremarkable to the Japanese audience, where Mr Okawa has numerous bestsellers and is consulted by leading politicians.  (A recent prime minister there, by the way, was called “the alien” by his friends, and his wife had been abducted by Venusians.  Neither of these were part of his decision to step down recently.)

So, religion has been a steady influx of sanity in a world where complete hysteria was the usual order of the day. It still is, but an increasing part of the populace is getting more sane than their priests. Thank the Light for that! So does that mean we should abandon the concept of organized religion and leave it to the shrinks to clean up the remaining insanity?

Well, as an individual, you should probably not stick with a religion you consider less sane than yourself. But in that comparison, don’t be too quick to overestimate yourself, as people often are. If you are still unable to control your body when influenced by anger or lust, fear or disgust, then you’re still in kindergarten and need to work on your sanity.  The fact that some insane behavior is common in your culture does not make it sane.

For instance, we are aware that phobia – irrational fear – is not quite sane. But pretty much nobody thinks of the opposite, irrational lack of fear.  Here in Norway, for instance, it is quite common to fearlessly have unprotected sexual intercourse with white people. We are also adopting the American way of eating (huge portions), without fear of the unpleasant lfiestyle diseases that follow. Taking some advice from old-fashioned religion could have prevented all of this “quiet insanity”.

That is not to say that religions should not upgrade themselves. They have certainly done that before. Whenever you run into one of those people who get obnoxious about how the Bible is God’s Unchanging Word, just ask if you can assume that he really does greet the brethren with a holy kiss, and literally wash their feet. Chances are he does not, because no matter how much it is God’s Word, we quietly ignore it when it gets icky. Or insane.  This was a natural process until recently, when some people – mostly in America – regressed.  Contrast this with St Augustine, one of the church fathers who lived around the onset of the Dark Ages. He rightly argued that the pagans would think we were fools if we interpreted the Book of Genesis literally. This is still sane advice. Certain other religions could have something to learn too.

I am still not convinced that we’ll increase the sanity factor of religion by including UFOs though. At least not here in Europe. (Your UFO experiences may vary, in which case you may want a religion that has a clear view on how to deal with extraterrestrials.)

Religion and/or insanity

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If you cry because you did not understand other people’s feelings, it may be repentance. If you cry because other people don’t understand your feelings, it is more likely depression.

My only curious reader (I can see on my bandwidth log that the rest of you are out there, but evidently not curious enough to comment or mail me) has another question worthy of a small essay.

How do you tell the difference between a religious/spiritual experience and insanity or a hallucination?

First off, hallucinations are optional. There are certainly people who see lights or shapes or hear voices from beyond, but these are just the form their revelation clothes itself in. You just said it was a spiritual experience, right? Our senses are not our spirit, even in ordinary life. The blind is no less spiritual than the seeing, and old people may gradually lose their hearing but their spirit is unchanged. So the form in which the revelation imparts itself is not important. In fact, having high-resolution visions can scare people or puff them up, neither of which is the purpose of revelation.

What is important is a change of heart. And in that regard, I have to say that there is no objective distinction between the outbreak of religion and insanity, except that they have opposite direction.  In fact, there is every year in every western country (and probably elsewhere too) numerous people who go insane and who personally believe that their insanity is religion.

It is necessary that you see yourself objectively from outside in order to establish whether your experience is spiritual or just insane.

First off, insanity is incoherent. This is more or less its calling card. Religion, on the other hand, should be coherent. It should make the pieces come together and increase the sense of meaning and purpose.

Next, religion causes the will to serve. You may remember the famous line from Milton, where he lets Lucifer say that it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven. So if your spiritual experience causes you to think that others should serve you, then you may have had a meeting with an evil spirit, I suppose. Or you may just be insane.  In either case, it is certainly not a glimpse of Heaven you have had. For if you had, you would know the value of serving, of helping others, that it is its own reward and needs no other.

Generally, someone who knows of Heaven only from hearsay may think that if he is good and humble here on Earth, he will get his reward in Heaven. This reward, whatever it is, should then consist of something else than being good and humble.  But someone who has glimpsed Heaven in some way will know that to serve (which is the combination of goodness and humility) is actually Heaven itself.

But certainly it can look like insanity for people around you. The old way of hoarding stuff, seeking status, and using others for our own pleasure is pretty much the norm, so you will look strange and your old friends may shun you.

And of course, for most of us, the spiritual experience is a pretty brief thing. So we will be left in a kind of in-between state of mind, where the old nature, the small self, tries to reassert itself. In most cases it succeeds, at least to some degree and for some time. Few are those who turn suddenly from sinner to saint, although it has certainly happened.

So in short, the religious or spiritual experience is not measured by its intensity or its display of visions or voices, but by its ability to turn our life toward a much higher purpose. If that does not happen, there is every reason to question it.