In the West, Buddhism is known as an agnostic philosophy. But in Asia, millions worship the Buddha as a savior or something similar to a god – seemingly in spite of his best attempts to dissuade them.

In software development, and important phase is the one we call “beta-testing”. After we have tried to code the software correctly, and tested it in-house, outsiders are allowed to test it in a real-life environment. It is not yet ready for final release, but it is very similar to the final version, if all goes as expected.

We saw that something similar seemed to happen with the modern human mind, version 2. There were scattered outbreaks of it here and there over a period of a few tens of thousands of years, where you could see some of the features of the modern mind. But then one day the finished version was rolled out, and in the blink of an eye (at least geologically speaking) everyone adapted the new operating system of the brain, or died out.

If, as I think, we are approaching the final release of Human Operating System version 3, it stands to reason that it has been tested in the field for quite a while already. But what is it? What could it be that makes all things new?

To get an idea of the scale of the change, I want us to think about the difference that the previous major upgrade made. By all accounts, our ancestors 100 000 years ago looked like us (probably dark-skinned since they lived in Africa) and had the same basic instincts as us. But their behavior and thinking (if we can call it that) lacked many of the elements that we now consider essentially human. They seem to have had no learned language, no art, no imagination. Their ability to plan ahead seems to have been quite limited, although there was some. They created stone handaxes ahead of time, after all. But problems that could not be solved with a handaxe were generally just avoided.

The new mind must have seemed like a miracle to those of the old mind, except they had no concept of miracle or the supernatural. But suddenly there appeared people who could communicate with a language of thousands of words, even in the dark and through walls. Their mind was also able to travel in time, making detailed accounts of the past and plans for the future. They were able to create a wide and ever growing range of new and better tools. The amount of change that could take a hundred thousand or even a million years, could now happen in one generation. The magnitude of the change is enormous.

I expect this to happen again. The New Mind is going to be miraculous, able to do things that seem utterly impossible to the old mind. Not just impossible, but unthinkable. Things that are beyond the concepts of the old mind. It is not just that you won’t believe them if told, but there is no way of telling you. You don’t have the holes in which to put this knowledge. In order to have the New Mind explained to you in any way that makes sense in the least, you first need to have the New Mind itself, at least in part.

Human Operating System version 2 added a new dimension, the dimension of Time. Our ancestors, despite their big brains, seem to have had very little understanding of time, since there was no language in which to think about it. Certainly they could remember something from the past when they saw it, and repeat successful actions from the past, and make simple tools before they needed them. But they seem not to have had an understanding of what time was, or the ability to use it to the fullest. We do this from childhood onward as a matter of course. We travel almost too much in time, dwelling on the past or the future or even alternate versions of these. We live in the fourth dimension like fish in water, so to speak.

The New Mind then might have another dimension added, a fifth dimension that we are vaguely aware of now, at least some of us, but are unable to use at will. As it happens, such a fifth dimension is mentioned in esoteric texts. It can be called vertical time, as it is in a sense at right angles with the usual time dimension. Another word for it is eternity, but this word does not mean what you think it means. Because the untrained human mind cannot imagine a second time dimension, they have instead redefined the word to mean “an endless stretch of time”. Perhaps that is the original meaning in some languages even, but the way it is used in esoteric teaching is to refer to the Fifth Dimension.

Now, where can we find people who have beta-tested a dramatically new mind, a completely new approach to life, the universe and everything … people who as a result of this got the ability to perform miracles because they had a second time dimension added to their mind? I think the answer is pretty obvious. The founders of several of the world’s great religions and philosophies match exactly these criteria, and sometimes their students for a limited time. In the cases where enough of the original teachings were preserved in some form, mystics in the same tradition much later would sometimes develop some of the same abilities.

Specifically, if a second time dimension was involved, one of the miraculous abilities would probably relate to time in some way, for instance by having impossible knowledge about the past or the future. Let me give you one example.

At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was very thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it.

The Big Bang for dummies, complete with the rather important notions that the universe itself was expanding and that matter only appeared later in time, things that are still hard to grasp for high school students. It was definitely harder to grasp in the year 1270 when the Ramban died, the Jewish Rabbi who wrote that passage. How in the world could he write an up-to-date description of the Big Bang as we understand it in the 21st century, when he lived in an age where it was generally assumed that the world was less than 6000 years old and there were no more continents west of Spain?

I believe that, apart from any supernatural explanations, mystics are connected across time. This is actually the stance of the Orthodox Church (not affiliated) except they apply it only to the church. But they believe that the church when assembled for service is accompanied not only by the deceased saints, but also by those yet unborn. Obviously most churchgoers even in the Orthodox churches are mainly bench fillers. But to those few who have attained higher consciousness, the experience of co-existing with the past and future is surely more than just theory.

I happen to believe this also applies to mystics of other schools. I also happen to believe that these various schools and branches and mutually suspicious religions and philosophies will vanish with the coming Change. It is the primitive, ego-centered H.O.S. v.2 mind that wants to hoard the truth, like it wants to hoard everything else. An amusing example is found in Christianity, where Jesus’ disciples comes and tells him: “We saw some other guys doing miracles in your name! Tell them to stop it!” Never mind that people who have been suffering for a long time are being helped; it is more important that we maintain our monopoly on Jesus. Ours! Only ours! Not wanna share!

But sharing is at the heart of the New Mind. In fact, the heart is itself shared, its doors thrown recklessly open. But to serve all, you must first be free from all, and who is capable of this? Who can love without attachment, give without keeping a balance, achieve without pride? You can certainly try to copy the effects of the New Mind, and if you are smart and have a strong will, you can get a ways, like the Neanderthals copying the new tools of the Cro-Magnon before dying out.

Or you could download the New Mind now. But not exactly from the Internet.

“It’s the end of the world!” Well, it is almost certainly the end of anime, tragic as that may seem to some of us.

It is a widespread belief that the world that we know will come to a sticky end. Today it is “global warming”, when I was a child it was “nuclear winter”. We simply don’t know what will do us in, but we feel that the current civilization is living on the edge of the abyss.

Since I write in English, my readers are probably vaguely aware of the Christian “apocalypse” (the Revelation of St John) which predicts a horrifying end to the current world, and the establishment of a new and vastly better. They may even remember that Judaism makes a similar claim (book of Daniel). They may have heard that the ancient Mayans likewise predicted a sudden end to the world, although recent research has found a calendar continuing after 2012, so that date may be off.

But you may not know that the old Norse religion of the Vikings also predicted a future destruction of this world (in Voluspa) and the birth of a new and innocent one. Even the Hindu religion predicts that the world will go to the dogs and start over fresh, although they believe this happens cyclically over immense eons of time; still, the end of the current age should not be that far away.

Perhaps this global agreement simply stems from the observation that young people are not living up to the standards of their parents and grandparents, as already the ancient Egyptians noticed. But in the cases I know the best (Christianity, Judaism and the Norse Asatru) the disaster was foretold by prophets.

Now there are always people going around claiming THE END IS NIGH! so that doesn’t say much.But these prophets were deemed credible by those who listened to them. They seemed otherwise sane or even more than sane: They would predict things that actually came to pass in the near future as well, or reveal secrets, or speak with such clarity and coherence and wide sweep of knowledge that people sensed that not just were these people sane, they had a supernatural wisdom. They were each someone their people looked up to. These were the men and women who foretold a dramatic end to the world.

I believe that mystics through the ages have told of the same event, but it is not actually a physical destruction. Rather, it is the destruction of the human mind as we know it, in the sudden emergence of the New Mind, the Human Operating System version 3, on a global scale.

***

In my previous entry, I pointed out that humans like us once had no culture, no language, no art and seemingly no imagination. Then, at a speed many times faster than biological evolution – so fast that it seems to have spread like a rapid contagion – they either converted to the current way of being human, or died out. Every single one of them. It was the end of their world. I believe it is going to happen again. Not just because the prophets of three continents (at least) have foretold it, but because it is our only hope.

When population density reached a critical level for the hand-axe people, a change happened in their way of thinking that made it possible for them to exist together. Through the new practice of talking, they were able to organize larger groups and more complex societies, with specialization. Their newfound creativity allowed them to use resources that were not available before. We have continued down that path, but no matter what branch of human endeavor you look at, change is happening faster and faster. We are headed for a singularity, as if the river of time has gone from a leisurely flood to foaming rapids and is heading for a waterfall. Or as if the water that was slowly warming is starting to bubble and will soon boil the frog that has adapted to the heat until now.

We no longer need prophets to tell us that the world we know will change beyond recognition. But most of us still don’t know what is going to end and what is going to begin. Like the ancient mystics, I believe that what must necessarily change is our mind, because the old mind cannot handle the world we are beginning to live in. We need to level up.

Why is this a disaster? Isn’t it a good thing if we rise to a higher level of consciousness? Yes, if you ask those who have actually experienced this as an individual, they will tell you that it was the best thing that ever happened to them, without a doubt. But they can also tell you of the fear and confusion they faced, of the total sacrificed they were called to make before entering into the new life. It is hard for almost everyone to give up everything they own. But to give up everything you ARE, this seems like death itself.

The old world will not be happy to just lie down and die. Despite our best preparations, I don’t think we can awaken the New Mind in everyone at the same time. And while at least the early users of Human Operating System version 3 will be able to understand those with H.O.S. v.2, this is not mutual. Watching every institution crumble, every tradition, every nation and power of the old order, they will not feel they have much to lose. They will find themselves in the spot of the Neanderthals, and not everyone will yield their world peacefully.

Add to this the destruction of the natural world which will have been wrought by mankind in the last stages of the current world order. We have already eradicated many species, with new ones following on a more or less daily basis. The climate is getting erratic. Rapid communications means terrifying diseases like Ebola or SARS can spread around the world in weeks, each of them capable of killing a majority of us. It seems that we have to either change or die. And the change, as I said, will seem only marginally less like the end of the world than would death.

The afore mentioned prophet Daniel has a description (based on a dream by someone else, strangely) which describes it better than I could:
“While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold were all broken to pieces and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace. But the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain and filled the whole earth.“

Daniel then explains that the huge statue was the civilization that descended from Babylon. At some point, an outside force of a completely different nature will hit and utterly demolish it, taking its place and growing even much larger.

There can certainly be different interpretations to what this means – the Jews thought it was the nation of Israel which would conquer and destroy the other nations, while various Christian churches have thought it referred to them or to the Return of Christ. Not saying anything against it – a good text should have several layers of meaning – but one understanding that actually makes a lot of sense is that it is the next version of the Human Operating System. For make no mistake: Just as the world of handaxes and simple instinctive language has passed utterly from Earth, so the world of cultures and nations will be forgotten once the next version of humanity becomes the norm.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

***

(Indeed, the reason why I wrote about this in the first place in 2005 was that my world seemed to be nearing its end. I had a temporary cancer diagnosis (was later rescinded) and the relevant hospital staff had summer vacation for a couple months, which would have been plenty of time for a fast-growing cancer to establish itself. So I listened to this Japanese song, The End of the World by Angela, where she says (in Japanese): People are bewildered that life must end, and time strikes them harshly. But even if this world ends today, I will still protect you. And I thought, if my world ends, how can I protect my friends through the time that will come? So I decided to write it down, even though it was still not quite clear to me.)

Here’s the song The End of The World on YouTube, as long as it lasts.

“It felt like I was watching people from a different planet.” Our ancestors 100 000 years ago were so similar to us, if you managed to restrain them long enough to cut their hair and put clothes on them, they would blend in with the crowd. Yet they were utterly alien to us, and we to them, even though we were their children. It is about to happen again.

I wrote about this in summer 2005, and it may still be the most important thing I have written. But various things have happened since then, and I have decided to write about this again from the start.

There is a lot to be said about this topic. It changes everything. Things that seemed absurd will make sense if one “gets” this, and things that seems to make sense to ordinary people will seem absurd.

Although this topic has probably not been expressed this way by anyone else, the topic itself has been introduced into human history again and again in various forms, and is an important part of all the world’s high cultures.

***

I am talking about the upgrade of the human psyche, the software that runs on our brain. And not just the business applications, like learning a new language or another skill. Rather, I talk about the “human operating system”, the fundamental way in which we relate to the world, the way we think and feel about life, the universe and everything.

In the past, we did not have computers. Therefore we could not make this analogy. It is just an analogy, perhaps even a metaphor. The human brain is not a computer in the sense that we know them today, the blocks on our desks. But it has certain elements in common with them. There is a physical structure that serves as a basis for an information structure. The physical structure is the hardware, which corresponds to the brain. The information structure is the software, which corresponds to the psyche, or the mind and the subconscious. The most basic part of the software is the operating system. When you turn on a computer and use it, the operating system is active in the background and interprets every input, conveys every output. It decides the format in which information is stored and retrieved at the most basic level. We also have this in our psyche, but we do not have a name for it.

***

The “human operating system” has come in two main versions that we know of. The human brain has been largely unchanged in size and shape for something like 200 000 years. (It has shrunk just a little the past 10 000 years, or so I read.) But for most of the time, humans were Not Like Us. They had no culture, probably because they had no language. They made hand axes of stone, which they probably learned to make by watching. There was nearly no variation or improvement on these for several thousand generations. The Neanderthals, which parted ways with us about 600 000 years ago, made roughly similar axes.

Somewhere around 90 000 years ago, we start seeing some weird stuff happening here and there in Africa. Egg shells are collected on a string. Stone with a strong pigment has been scraped. Thousands of years later, elsewhere in Africa, fishing nets show up for a while, and elaborate bone tools. Elsewhere again, rare stone is freighted across long distances, implying some kind of long-distance barter. Somewhere between 65 000 and 40 000 years ago, it all suddenly seems to come together in an explosion of creativity. Cave art, sculptures, new tools and weapons that were both more efficient and elaborately decorated. Intricate ritual burial that speak of a spiritual tradition. While not as refined as later civilization, these tribes were fundamentally similar to us, compared to their ancestors who were utterly alien.

The change happened so suddenly and totally, it seems from our remote distance as if every human on Earth suddenly one day changed from the old version to the new, or else died. It probably did not literally happen that fast, but it happened faster than anyone has been able to track, and none of the old humans have survived even in the most remote parts of the world.

I refer to the stone hand-axe time as Human Operating System version 1, and the later use of speech, art and imagination as H.O.S. version 2. This is not controversial, although the naming is original. The controversial part is version 3, which I claim has been in beta for several thousand years, and is slated to replace the current mind as completely and irreversibly as the Ice Age revolution replaced the world of hand-axes and grunting.

The Human Operating System version 3 is basically what we now call Higher Consciousness. I believe certain people in our past have had this to a high degree. Those who saw them and listened to them realized that they were deeply different, but could not understand them. So they tried to emulate them and explain them using the tools of H.O.S. v 2, somewhat similar to how the last Neanderthals copied imperfectly some of the new inventions brought by their African cousins before they disappeared.

They may have been “beta testers” of a new mind that one day will utterly replace the old, like it happened once before, consigning to oblivion the old way of being human.

And there’s a mighty judgment coming … but I may be wrong.
You see, you hear these funny voices, in the Tower of Song.
-Leonard Cohen.