Category Archives: science

Like a light that grows

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Screenshot anime The Golden Laws

I made a trip back to 1986, aided by the mysterious powers of my diary (which at that time was printed on paper). It was kind of embarrassing, partly because back then it was less of a day-ary and more of a night-ary, kind of dark and angsty even compared to how I felt at the time. I remember that much. But also, I turned 28 at the end of that year, and I was still painfully stupid.  Probably still am, but I mean compared to now.

I was already recognizable myself, and I was rather more pious than now, it seems, at least emotionally. But somehow I continued to rack up consumer debt. Credit cards, shop loans, that kind of stuff. It may be argued that at the time, I earned rather less than I do now. We’ve had a phenomenal economic growth here in Norway over the last 20 years, not just the rich but common people, unlike in America and parts of Europe. But it was not dire need that mired me in debt. Although I didn’t write much details about how I got the debt (only about how bad it was), I remember buying various stuff that was not survival-related, to put it mildly. A big electronic organ (which admittedly brought me quite a bit of joy for some years, but which cost me several months’ pay). And then later (or was it first? I think later) an electronic accordion. Because I could, seeing how I got shop credit and all. Various computer related stuff (computers were invented back then, actually, just not the Internet as we know it). I bought the cutting edge stuff, of course. Buy now, pay later!

Taking that trip back to the past, I realize that I wasn’t really that different from ordinary humans. Lots of them still do this. I think most outgrow it, but I am not sure. As I said, here in Norway people have a lot more money now so any debt they have acquired is steadily erased by their rising affluence. But in America, debt still seems to be a big problem.

There were other typical human behaviors too, like in interpersonal relationships. (Not intimate relationships, I had my last kiss in 1984 after all, and even that was pretty accidental as such things go.) But what strikes me is how poorly I understood not just others, but also my own emotions. It probably seemed perfectly normal at the time, though. I don’t recall going around constantly thinking to myself: “You’re an idiot, you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t understand other people and you don’t understand yourself.” Well, I did think that, but mostly late at night when writing my diary, reflecting on myself. But I did not think it in advance, preventing or at least mitigating the dumbness.

Observing myself at half my current age, I am more convinced than ever that the current me is not simply a result of my half-Aspie heritage or Neanderthal genes or some such. I mean, yes, I was never entirely neurotypical, but that didn’t really make me who I am today. Rather it is the light of timeless wisdom that has kept shining relentlessly on me, showing me a little more now and a little more then. I may close my eyes and pretend that I did not see, but in the long run it cannot be unseen as long as the light remains on. Whenever I open my eyes, there it is again.

For me, this light is a religious thing. After all, this experience is foretold in Proverbs 4, verse 18: “But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day.” The Norwegian translation, which was often quoted in the Church when I was young, translates it slightly differently (as is often the case with poetic elements of the ancient language): “The path of the righteous is like a radiant light, that becomes clearer and clearer until the full light of day.”

Now, “righteous” may not quite be the best description of me, if I must say so myself. And that is one reason why I think I am probably still an idiot, just less so than I used to be. But I’ve learned some lessons. Like “consumer credit really is a gift – from you, to them”. Or “don’t mix girls and money unless you are ready to lose both”. ^_^ Both of these are prefigured in Ecclesiastes and  the Proverbs of Solomon, by the way, although I should probably leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Although I am a Christian of sorts, I’ll readily admit that I have found timeless wisdom in the Scriptures of other religions and a few works that are not generally considered religious as well. That is great, I think, and perhaps Frithjof Schuon and friends are right about the transcendental unity of religions. But also over time I have found that although I have found wisdom in other religions, I had not really needed to. There is in the religion of my youth a spirit that keeps unpacking the deeper meanings of the Scriptures, so that they would be more than adequate for whatever one were to run into. I won’t deny that the same may well be true for the other great world religions. Those who have dedicated themselves to them would know, I guess. I can only speak for myself. And even then I haven’t earned this. It was given to me, for some reason.

But this is at the core of things, that this Light is alive. It grows, given the chance, becoming brighter and brighter as we admit it is right. Perhaps it is in that sense that “righteousness” is meant in the text I cited. When we admit that the judgment of the Light is right and we were wrong, the judgment turns to brightness. As long as we stand against it, it is like walking along a dark road where the headlights of the meeting cars shining in our face is more blinding than the darkness. But when we turn around and accepts its judgment, the same light brightly lights up the road. Well, that’s just an illustration, but one I know from experience.

So there it is. Looking back across half my life so far, that is the image that comes to mind: A radiant light, starting as the faint light heralding dawn, shining more and more brightly into wonderful daylight, where an entire world opens up around me. Well, it is not full daylight yet,  but so much brighter than in 1986! I wish I could show even one of you this brilliant road to tomorrow.  But judging from my results so far, it may be safer for y’all if I keep writing about The Sims…

Afterlife before death

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Screenshot anime Yahari Ore no Seishun Love Com

Heaven, Hell or Limbo? Where do we spend our free time, if any?

There are various ideas about what the afterlife of the soul is like. Some people don’t believe in an afterlife at all. That sounds very convenient, actually. “What you see is what you get.” Except that materialism is kind of insane once you try to spell it out. “My opinions are simply electrical impulses in my brain; if there is a truth, I can never know it, and if I did, I don’t have free will so there would be no connection between the truth and whatever came out of my mouth.” So, most of us like to think that we have some kind of soul or something like that, so that we are not just lumps of protoplasm ambling pointlessly through the world.

With the idea of the soul comes the idea that it may survive death somehow, although that is not really obvious. I could write at length about this, but today I’ll just assume that the soul has an afterlife, probably, and talk about how we can estimate what that might be.

My proposition is that the soul actually gravitates toward one of the realms that make up a possible afterlife. Lately, I have begun to notice how this happens in daily life, when I don’t make an effort in some direction. If I just relax and watch my thoughts as if I were observing something outside myself, eventually the thoughts will gravitate toward something. I would not be surprised if this happens in full after death, when we are no longer recalled to (or by) the body with its interrupts from the outside world. Perchance to daydream, if you will.

Sometimes I will just sit there and wait for my psyche to drift toward something, so I can observe what it is. But often it will start moving on its own simply because it is not strongly tied to something else. Even at work if there is not something going on that grabs and holds attention, the mind may start to drift. Definitely on the bus or other places where boredom might otherwise have been an option. When this happens, it happens while my heart looks another way, so I won’t notice until I have already arrived and my mind is starting to interact with the other world.

So what are these other worlds? For simplicity, we could divide them into Hell, Limbo and Heaven.

***

Hellish thoughts and feelings become obvious as soon as we return to self-awareness. “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed the evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness.…” (Jesus Christ, in Mark 7.) “He abused me, he ill-treated me, he got the better of me, he stole my belongings;”… the enmity of those harbouring such thoughts cannot be appeased. (The Buddha, Dhammapada part 1).

You don’t even need to be religious to be aware of this. I read this year about a modern man, a left-thinking man and a would-be feminist, who was deeply disturbed by the fact that he could not see an attractive woman without being assailed by vivid visions of sexual interactions with her. He went in search of various cures, and eventually made progress by making a habit of not allowing such thoughts to linger. This was possible because he became aware of himself quickly. This ability of self-reflection is given to people to various degrees, but can be trained. We can become more aware of our thoughts and feelings by paying attention to them during the moments when we are aware, then there will gradually be more such moments.

***

What I called Limbo is more like the Ghost Realm, in which the world of the mind is much like this world on Earth. It frequently involves traveling in time, either to a past that was or a future that may be, or even to a past that could have been or a future that might have been. “If I had said this instead of that, this could have happened, and then that, and then one thing and then another” is the kind of thought that belong here. This kind of thought is actually very common. A beautiful example of this is found in the ending song for the anime Yahari Ore no Seishun… “Before the plane’s contrail were dissolved in the wind, if I could have said ‘I wanted to see you’ … maybe I could have avoided this endless sadness; maybe I could’ve been here alone with you…” (This is arguably a borderline case as the endless sadness is itself an aspect of Hell, but then Hell is said to be bordering on Limbo or the Ghost Realm.)

***

Above this earth-like limbo lies the first genuine Heaven, the Realm of the Good. In this life we can enter this when we spontaneously think warm, happy thoughts about others, thoughts of friendship or gratitude, thoughts about the joy of seeing others smile, things like that. Probably also thoughts of beauty and pure nature, playing children and animals. If you relax and let your mind wander and find yourself smiling innocently, this Realm of the Good is probably where your soul naturally gravitates. That bodes well for your afterlife, probably. And at the very least for this life!

There is also a second Heaven, different in some ways from the first. This is the Realm of Light, the home of the nurturing love, of those who are born to be teachers or leaders, a world of inspiration. If you relax and your thoughts by themselves go to how you can help others, or how you can improve yourself, or how things can be improved or something new invented … this may be your eternal home, for where your heart is, there also will your afterlife be. Probably.

Where else? Would you spend your eternity as a guest in a place where you could never relax, on the risk of drifting away to somewhere else? After all, without the body to anchor you, are you not yourself the soul that gravitates toward this or that spiritual “location” or state of mind?

***

I am not sure exactly why or how I began to become acutely aware of this recently. I am sure it has been a sobering experience for me. I like to tell myself that my home is in the six-dimensional Realm of Light, but the truth is that this is more like my highest aspiration, a place where a rope is fastened which I might have tried to climb up, or to which I might be pulled up. But it is not really my home in the sense that it is now my center of gravity and the place where my soul naturally finds its rest. I am probably not daydreaming in the sense that neurotypical humans do – I am half Aspie after all – so for the most part I will talk to myself inside, tell myself stories. And this summer they are almost all about time travel. More about that next time, perhaps.

What dreams may come

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Screenshot anime Rebirth of Buddha

In the anime “The Rebirth of Buddha” by Happy Science, hospitals are places where the astral bodies of the deceased roam the corridors, desperately seeking help for their ailments because they don’t want to die, unaware that they have already passed away. But this is not the first movie where the dead are unaware of their death. Then again, in our dreams we are unaware of our sleep… Coincidence, or…?

In June this year, prolific writer Richard Matheson passed away at the age of 87. This is generally not something to celebrate, but in his case at least it means he got the chance to test his theories about the afterlife, in which he had taken a keen interest. While most known for his horror and science fiction novels, one of his best loved books was “What Dreams May Come”, in which the main character experienced three main realms of the afterlife: The Ghost Realm, Heaven, and Hell. Well, I guess two of these qualify as horror!

Matheson used realistic settings for his stories, and he researched the afterlife thoroughly before writing this novel. While the story is fictional, the setting mostly represents what the author believed about the afterlife, based on reading and thinking about the matter, mostly from oriental sources.

I am not really writing about Matheson or his book or the movie based on it, but I need to give a spoiler here because it illustrates a point that is otherwise difficult to make. Having seen the movie or read the book – preferably not right before bedtime – may help make this distinction that I briefly mentioned in my recent entry, between the “bodysoul” and the “spiritsoul”.

In Matheson’s story, the main character dies in a traffic accident. However, he does not realize that he is dead and that it is perfectly normal to hang around for a while after your passing. He suppresses the memories of his own death and burial and keeps trying to contact his family, especially his wife, with whom he was very close. Occasionally a vaguely seen person tries to contact him, but he ignores this and keeps haunting his home.

At some point, however, a new split occurs, and his soul parts with this astral body which he wore when he haunted his family. Suddenly he can think much more clearly and feel fully himself. He can now see the spirit that tried to contact him and recognizes it as someone important to him. Together they go to a Heaven, of sorts.

So if you remember that scene, you understand the concept of a person having several bodies (three in this case).

Ryuho Okawa, founder of the Japanese New Religion Happy Science, describes a similar situation, probably based on the same sources. According to Okawa, people in the 4th dimension wear astral bodies, but when they ascend to the 5th dimension, they discard these bodies and live as souls. Later, they may discard these as well and live as spirits in the even higher Heavens.

***

Let us talk a little about dreams. Not only Shakespeare but also Ryuho Okawa compares the afterlife to a sleep with dreams. Other sources claim that our dreams at night actually take place in the astral realm, and Okawa teaches that the Spirit World (or to use his favorite name for it, the Real World) is a world of the mind. So in that sense we certainly spend time in the world of the mind every night, but it is very rare indeed that two people share a dream and remember it. Often you dream about someone else but they have no memory of the dream at all. This may be just as well, but this leaves open the question of whether, if we meet others in the afterlife, do they also meet us? If not, it is kind of pointless, is it not?

Well, no one is saying that our dreams actually are our afterlife, just that they have certain things in common. Most notably, our dreams are made out of the content of our psyche at the time we dream, which is also the content that we are going to drag with us into the afterlife in the unfortunate case that we die before we wake. So if we carry a lot of fear or anger with us in our subconscious, then we may have a problem when we pass over and still carry this stuff with us.

***

Now let me talk about my dreams. I am the Viewpoint Character, after all! And my dreams are pretty unusual. I think I may have met two people who dream the way I do with any regularity, or even at all; but it may be just Drew, I am not sure now who the other person was.

You see, when you dream, you feel as if you wear a body (or even are a body, if that is how you usually think of yourself), and it is typically the body you have in your daily life. Associated with this body is your body-soul, the personality you have acquired in this life: Your name, your most common memories, your habits, your relationships to family, friends, job and home. Basically, you are you, even in your dream. Sometimes I am, too. But often I am not.

In my dreams, I can have a completely different body and the personality that goes with it. For the duration of the dream, I have other memories (although I later only remember those that I recalled during the dream), another home, a family, friends, another job or school. It is a completely different life. And it is indeed complete, for the duration of the dream. I don’t find these circumstances strange or unfamiliar; they are part of the web of life for that person I am there. Only when I wake up do I realize that I don’t know any of these people, including the person that was me in the dream.

In some dreams, not often but it has happened several times, I actually move from one person to another in the dream. It is usually only two or three people, but I once moved in rapid succession through half a dozen different people of both sexes, experiencing their different view of the same situation. Like I was some kind of spirit possessing people. Yeah, that sounds creepy to me as well. They did not seem to mind or notice though. Now that I think about it, I believe this tends to happen only when people are agitated. This may deserve further study (although I am not sure how I would do that).

So in my dreams, I seem to possess many different “astral bodies”, but I have not laid off these bodies and their personalities and become my real self, if there is such a person. It seems to me that the person inside or underneath my body-soul is simply an observer. When I meditate, I can observe my mind. My mind is not me. There is another me inside “me”, the Witness which watches the outer world and the inner world both, watches silently and without really engaging. When I engage, I fall back into the mind, and become part of the personality, the surface consciousness, the bodysoul. I cannot really imagine existing as a spiritsoul, without even an astral body. This may be a good thing, because it is not obvious that I would ever return if that happened, even if it happened in a dream.

And I think I still have a lot to learn from the “dream” that is my life in this world, in this body, in this time.

 

Not exactly religion

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Screenshot anime Yuyushiki

“OK, God. Give me money.” The Bronze Age religions were unabashedly Version 2: You gave your gods stuff, like burning the fat of a sheep, and they gave you stuff, like more sheep. The deal made sense since they were more powerful than you, I guess. But if you try this today, within one of the great world religions, you’ll sense a disturbance in the Force. Something has changed, but what?

I want to make it even clearer that what I have written about this past month is not a new religion, or an old religion, or a syncretism of several old religions. Rather, I write about an element that shows up in several great religions, but which is itself (I believe) not exactly religious.

The New Mind, the next major version of the “operating system” for the human brain, changes the way one sees things. It certainly changes the way one sees religion. Religion as seen by the old mindset is a very different thing from what the founders intended, as they had (at the very least) version 3 rather than our version 2. So a person thinking in the old way is actually unable to understand his own religion, even if he is a good person doing good things and very eager in his practice and strong in his faith. These qualities are all worthy of praise, but there are still many things that you can’t understand.

There are things that are simple and obvious once one has glimpsed them through the lens of the New Mind, but which needs elaborate interpretation to seem to make sense under the old mindset. If one tries to simply put the statements from the New Mind into the worldview of the old mindset, the old mind will be unable to contain them and may be destroyed in madness, or else reject the new thoughts entirely. In either case, the content is lost.

Through centuries of relentless theology, the world’s great religions have become completely understandable to the old mindset. Unfortunately, this means that they have become deeply misunderstood.

It bears repeating that the Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tzu by all accounts had no plans of making a religion at all, and yet each of them has become worshiped as a god by a goodly number of their adherents throughout history and even today. Socrates is still known only as a philosopher, but at his time he was sentenced to death on religious grounds.

The “human operating system” or complete mindset is not exactly supernatural, or at least it is not clear that the next version is more supernatural than the one we have today. There is a reason why version 3 has not become a runaway success yet. Version 2 is very well suited for the time we have lived through for the past few ten thousand years. With the center on the individual person, his body and his bloodline, it encourages people to survive and breed even at the cost of others, within reason. In this way, humans have become gradually more plentiful and gradually exerted greater control over their environment. Only now has population density reached a level where the old system is creating problems that threaten our very survival.

And that is why, religion or no religion, we have to prepare for the change. It is change or die. If we after that still has something that can be called religion – and I think so – it will be very different from what most people think of as religion today. That’s probably a good thing, to be honest. Because there is a lot of weird stuff that is accepted as part of religion today, and a lot of people who quite reasonably reject all religion because of the weird mishmash and painfully stretched explanations that come from trying to express Version 3 truths in Version 2 thinking.

I am certainly not an atheist, but I agree with some of the saner atheists on a lot of things. The god they disbelieve in is not the God I believe in, to put it mildly. Someone called it “a faith worse than death”, and that is really apt, because living forever as a minion of a capricious, cruel and spiteful god is more like being a zombie than being saved. But before you make a final decision about what to think about God or Spirit, it is more important to think about yourself and upgrade your own mind. THEN you can look at all things, whether it be religion, politics, food or sex, with new eyes. But if you are happy with how you are now, you will say: “The old is good” and you will want nothing of this.

But I believe you will be happier if you tear down the walls of your mind and let the Light in.

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Screenshot City of Heroes, approx. 2004

Randomly diving in the enormous archives of my Chaos Node, I think I found the first entry that outlined my belief in the Coming Change and the parallel to the arrival of the current mind. It was more than a year before the longer series in 2005. And it was in part based on an even older entry, but one that only contains the seeds of the idea, not yet sprouted. (There is a link to that entry too.)

A super future, if any (Idus Martiæ, 2004).

THIS is a summary??

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Screenshot anime Date A Live

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

Human Operating System 3.0

The end of this world

Beta-testing eternity

Caution: Religion!

Surpassing fate while alive

Downloading eternity

Ascesis

The Harbingers

The Open Field

Here to help you – sort of

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

The Next Big Thing

Here to help you – sort of

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Screenshot anime Oregairu (Yahari Ore no Seishun...)

Why do I have to help you grow as a person? Well, first of all because there is no greater joy than to see you walk on the Way. The faster and the further, the better. We do not compete.

In my previous post, I claimed that people who have expanded far into the Open Field, are able to maintain a presence in the mind of people who resonate with them. This is presumably the reason behind the practice of venerating saints (in Christianity), bodhisattvas and tathagatas (in Buddhism) and “immortals” (in Daoism), as well as similar practices in Hinduism and Shinto. It may even be behind the Chinese practice of ancestor worship, although it hopefully goes without saying that the vast majority of ancestors never expanded into the Open Field in the sense we are using it here.

The way I have understood it, there is actually a sliding scale of this expansion, so there are some whose presence will only extend to a few and perhaps for a limited historical time, while others may extend to a great number of people over the course of thousands of years. Some of the greatest of them may have been worshiped as gods in the past, but today we are kind of wary of assigning that label to anyone other than the Primordial Source of Creation. The Shakyamuni Buddha, for instance, seems to never have considered himself anyone’s god, but a great number of people in the Orient worship him in a way that is not very different from the western worship of God. The Hindu avatar Krishna is worshiped in a way eerily similar to the Christan worship of Jesus Christ. But let us not here go into a debate of which God or Savior is the real one, if any.

What I want to make clear is that non-local operators are always waiting for your call. But if they originate within the paradigm that I have described – if they are have the Human Operating System version 3 – there are certain things they do not do. Most notably, they do not rape your mind. Even though their presence in your mindspace may be stronger than your own in some ways or even in general, they will not force you. They do not try to take over your mind or your body. They also never threaten you in an accusing manner. They may reveal to you consequences of your thoughts and actions, and this can be scary, but only because it is true. They do not try to demean you or belittle you (although you may notice in their presence that you are, in fact, rather small). They seek to help you, and they seek to help others. They will not assist you in causing suffering to yourself or others.

The resonance with the Harbingers is certainly not the only processing that takes place in your brain apart from your own ego. Each of us generates naturally a number of shadow personalities with their own agendas, so it is not like every stray thought that sounds “not like me” is from the fifth dimension or above. That is why I try to make it clear that the agenda of the Harbingers, the Immortals, the Teachers, is to help you and others. Don’t respect every stray thought. If you also have the life aspiration of helping others, every time you center yourself in that aspiration, there is a great chance of resonance with a Helper. If you only want to take and get and receive, the resonance fades.

You may then reasonably ask: “Why would I want helpers who only want me to help others? What’s in it for me?” Well, it helps you flatten those walls that keep you trapped in the current system of thought. A system of thought that is nearing its expiration date. As our power and our numbers increase, the possible outcomes no longer include “business as usual”. Either we transition to a higher level of consciousness, or we die out, or we somehow survive losing our power and our numbers, for instance through a nuclear war or some other massive catastrophe that sets us back hundreds or thousands of years.

It is imperative for the whole world that we prepare for the transition, regardless of whether we come to personally take part in it. But it is also important for ourselves to break down as many of the walls as possible, because it is a happier, light-filled life.

It may hurt for a while, and perhaps in the end we won’t be able to change. There are many who have become enthusiastic, but once there was a challenge, they did not have the strength to continue. There are many who had the best intentions, but the attachments of the current lifestyle gained the upper hand and the upgrade to Version 3 slowly faded to a standstill or less.

This is why it is necessary to remind ourselves that non-local operators are waiting for our call. In so far as history has preserved some of their words and deeds, this can serve as a seed to get our resonance started. And if there is a community of like-minded people (who have not been hijacked by personal ambition, as usually happens after a  while) these local operators are a great help. But be warned that if you aim for transformation, you won’t have a lot of companions locally in time and space. Not yet.

But for each of us who gets a tiny little hole in the cosmic egg, the brightness inside our shared world will increase a little, and it becomes easier for the rest. And the only place to make that little crack in the walls of our mind is in the Now.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the Light gets in.

-Leonard Cohen, Anthem

The Open Field

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke Tadaima

Hopefully your children will live in a future with even more freedom – a freedom that begins within each of us.

If I were to describe the most striking feature of the New Mind, it would be openness. Some call it unity. I would say it is the same thing, a lack of walls that usually divide us both from others and internally in our own mind.

The current mindset, which has dominated since the depth of the last Ice Age, is based on the “technology” of language. We believe this did not exist in its current form during the previous version of the human mind, back when all problems could be solved with a hand axe. Language is an amazing tool, but it also subtly encourages a particular way of thinking, which we may call analysis. It divides the world into things, and each thing has its name. We act and think as if this division is real, whereas it is only a tool for the mind. The head cannot live without the body, even though it has a word that describes it. Likewise a human cannot prevail in the long run without others, and without the entire ecosystem that supports us. But this is easily forgotten when we live in a mental world defined by analytical thinking, a world where each thing has its name and its labels.

In contrast to being locked up in one’s own name, the New Mind sets you free in an open field. At first it is just a crack in the egg where you are the chicken. You begin to realize that other people may be as real as you are. But this does not usually last. They do something stupid and you slam the door shut to protect yourself. This makes perfect sense. But the truth is that they really are real too. The world extends beyond us. I think most of us have had moments where we glimpse that.

There is so much more. Time and eternity. But first things first. Inside ourselves, we also set up barriers and walls. We divide life into different rooms, and may even act and feel and think differently depending on which “room” we are in. We can be a completely different person at work, in church, at home, even in the living room and the bedroom.

It seems reasonable, if we want to become one with the universe and beyond, that we first become one as a person. This does not necessarily mean that we should act the same in all situations. It is possible to do this on a primitive level, like when people plead with their boss like they would with a parent, or with a public servant. This just causes pain for all involved. Likewise when a customer of the opposite sex (or worse) tries to flirt with an employee. These kinds of “unity of self” are not what I talk about, for they come simply from lack of self-awareness.

We must go in the opposite direction, observing the mind relentlessly and objectively until we see the many different parts or aspects for what they are. There is a lot to say about that, but “what I say to you, I say to all: Watch!” Constant awareness of the mind and of the Watcher that watches the mind will definitely begin to pull things together, if we can endure. That’s a big if, admittedly. There are so many times we want to shout: “That’s not me! I am not like that!” Which is true, in a sense, because there is a part of us that is pure and innocent of these things that go through our brain and sometimes our body as well. But we have to take responsibility or we will remain hopelessly fragmented till the end.

If we fail to learn from our mistakes, there will over and over be new opportunities to repeat the same lessons. Until in the end we whisper: “It was me all along. I really am like that.” And the truth will set us free, given half a chance.

The walls within us, then, are usually meant to be the first to fall. But it does not end there. The walls between us and others also begin to break down. You know the saying about loving your neighbor as yourself? That’s because your neighbor is yourself.

Even in the current version of the Human Operating System, no man is an island. We are distributed, parts of us being stored in the brains of other bodies with other names: Parents, siblings, friends, lovers, spouses, children, grandchildren. As we pass through this life, larger and smaller fragments of us reside in the minds of others. The representation of us that resides in any one other individual is usually not balanced. The other person may see only a few of our sides, and these may even include some that we don’t see. (And some that don’t really exist, although this is probably less common than we think.) Taken together, there is quite a bit of processing taking place in other brains on our behalf, and in our brain there is a lot of processing taking place on behalf of others.

In the current Human Operating System, this distributed processing is haphazard. That is not so in the next version, which comes network-ready with a rich range of features. It is a common feature of the Great Teachers that they know what others are thinking, when this is needed. It is not like they go around peeping at people’s thoughts at will, but when the need arises, they are able to glean the content of other people’s minds far more easily than others. Often they show more insight into your mind than you have yourself.

Conversely, the “image” in your psyche of a Great Teacher may be conscious to some degree even in the absence of the physical person, and may even be more conscious than you are. You may find yourself sharing your mental space with a being that physically is no longer in the world (or, at least possibly, one that is not yet in the world) but is still more real to you than people you walk among day by day. This also is an example of the phrase: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” The teacher will appear “in your head”, first perhaps as a mere resonance, but as you download more of him, your invisible friend will be able to help you out in countless ways.

When a person has upgraded to Human Operating System version 3, the attachment to a particular body becomes rather weak. Sure, you are still responsible for that particular body, but you also have many other responsibilities, which may be spread across thousands of bodies and across thousands of years. With the appearance of Version 2, man became a soul or psyche. With the appearance of Version 3, the new man becomes something more, able to give mental abundance to many, outside of his “own” body and his “own” time.

Or that’s what the voices in my head tell me. Do I look like that kind of super-person to you?

The Harbingers

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Screenshot anime Narue no Sekai

Luminous beings of healing, compassion and wisdom will herald the end of the human era as we know it. And they may be your children.

I would assume that there are few enough people who would be interested in reading this strange tale about a new Human Operating System. But you may be passingly familiar with a strand of modern entertainment that is called “superheroes”. Most people in the English-speaking world knows of at least some of these, such as Superman. But why are there more and more of them?

In the early days of superhero comics, the superheroes were few and far between. Superman was the only superpowered being in his world for a while, and rather more realistic than in the later comics. No flying to the stars, just jumping over tall buildings. But anyway, gradually there popped up more of them, and they began to interact. This is mildly interesting, but could be explained from outside sources: Where there is a demand, after all, there will be a supply. People liked to read about superheroes (and now watch them in movies), so the industry supplies more of them. Still, there is more to it than that, and this is relevant to our bizarre little series.

For when the writers of the various comic book universes turn to the future, that future is full of superpowered creatures. They envision a world in which a new breed of man is either taking over the world or coexisting uneasily with the ordinary Homo Sapiens. In the Marvel Universe they are called mutants (though some call themselves Homo Superior); in the DC universe, metahumans, in the Wildstorm universe, gen-actives. But perhaps the most revealing name is that given by Valiant Comics: Here, the new people with miraculous powers are called Harbingers, from the belief that they herald a new step in human evolution.

Western comics (and later movies) have not been alone in envisioning such a future. Japanese manga and anime, while different in many aspects, also often portray a future (or parallel present) in which the number of people with “abilities” or “aura powers” is rising rapidly, as more and more children are born with abilities their parents did not have.

This is perhaps not so surprising, for in real life we have had the Flynn Effect since at least 1914, when the first systematic, large-scale IQ tests were deployed. The Flynn Effect is a steadily rising intelligence in new generations, much faster than biological evolution can provide. The growth has been about 10 points per generation, or 3 points per decade. This means that if your grandparents had an IQ of 100, which is the average, then your parents probably had an IQ of 110, and you one of 120. However, because the average IQ must remain close to 100, new IQ tests are devised and the scale is reset. So chances are that you kids are just 110, your parents 100, and grandparents 90. (On average – this obviously varies from person to person.)

The multitude of low-IQ elders was so common that for a while it was assumed that human intelligence naturally decayed with age. And eventually it does, but as Flynn discovered, the more common problem was that today’s elders have been stupid all their life. There was just not much talk about it because their level of stupid was the normal back then. It is only now that they are being revealed as stupid, because smarter generations have arrived.

So far, the mysterious powers of the gifted children seems to be mostly things like using electronic devices without reading the instruction booklet, not flying and controlling the weather with their mind. Good thing too! But if my theory is right, and humanity is gearing up for the next phase change, the actual “superheroes” of the future will be humans physically like us, but with a new and vastly improved Human Operating System, namely Version 3. And they will quite possibly be as far ahead of us as modern man was ahead of the Neanderthals and his own ancestors who solved all problems with the same hand axe.

I have mentioned that the invention of speech as we know it must have been miraculous by the standards of its time. The new type of human was able to communicate extremely detailed information and make elaborate plans, and they could do so even in darkness or through walls! They were also able to invent new tools and weapons that had never been seen before, and they enjoyed activities that seemed meaningless to their ancestors, like painting images or making instruments sing.

Just like the Version 1 human with his hand axe could not have predicted what his children would be like, so we are also unable to say for sure what will happen after the Singularity, the Armageddon, Ragnarok or whatever we call the birthquake of the new era. We suspect that there will be war and rumors of war, and upheavals in nature that exceed what we have seen before. But we do not know quite what the new world will be like, if it even succeeds in establishing itself.

Still, we have some idea. Because there have been Harbingers already. Few and far between, misunderstood even at their own time, made into legend and then myth with the passing of time. But we know a few things about them, and it seems reasonable to think that the same traits will be found in the future.

They will understand those with the old mindset, but will not be understood by them. Their understanding will be deeper even than our own, not just deeper than our understanding of each other but of ourselves. They will know us better than we know ourselves. This will apply at least to the first generation, those who grew up like us, but it may well last as long as our current mindset still exists on Earth.

They will cooperate far better, almost as if they shared a common mind or at least a telepathic connection. They will seem in some ways like individual limbs on a greater organism, even though they each have their own personality.

They will not be slaves to physical desires or the hunger for status, acceptance or recognition. This is not asceticism like those still aspiring to the New Mind. It is a full clarity of their role as beings of information, centered on a specific body but using it rather than being used by it, and extending far into a virtual space beyond the particular body. Perpetuating their bodily life or their genes will be undertaken in so far as it serves the greater purpose in which they cooperate, not at the cost of it.

They will have a different relationship to time. And more specifically to eternity. Their thoughts will stretch far into the past and the future, but even the current time will flow differently for them. They will seem to know things they could not possibly know.

They will have Abilities that seem supernatural but are not, and these will not be technological in origin (although the future superhumans will almost certainly have technology beyond our imagination). They will specifically be able to influence the bodies and minds of normals, primarily to heal and sometimes to teach, but not to enslave. Still, the normals will fear them until they know them, and some even then.

They will appear to shine at times. It seems likely that this is a perception only and that they are not literally emitting photons, but I don’t know this for sure. I know that radiance is firmly associated with past Harbingers from different continents, cultures and eras.

Luminous beings of knowledge and compassion, the Harbingers will gently herald the end of the world as we know it, the end of Humanity version 2. The gold and the silver, the bronze and the iron and the clay: Everything we knew will become like dust on the wind, and the book of history will be closed.

Ascesis

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Screenshot anime Sakurasou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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