Category Archives: slice of life

More sofa

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By popular request (OK, 1 request), a more detailed picture of the sofa. We turned the pillows upside down, and then they had a different pattern. I actually preferred the green pillows, but I care only infinitesimally. I am just using it to sit on, if that.

So far I’ve been sitting near the fire though. This night I think I fired a bit too hard, for there was a vaguely chemical smell, probably from the paint getting hotter than it has been before. Nothing caught fire though and the smell faded eventually.

I was sick all last night (thanks to the soup, no doubt) and slept most of the day, so not much to write about here.  Working on some philosophical stuff again, but no idea whether I will publish it or just keep it for my own use. Iceberg, remember?

Green winter in October

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Today I was reading something interesting on the bus and drove past my stop. But on my way home I saw this, which was to become my new desktop picture.

For the past two decades, the normal weather in winter here on Norway’s south coast has been what we call “green winter”:  Temperature hovering around zero, colder when it is clear but warmer when water comes down, so that it comes as rain (or at most slush) rather than snow.  There is snow occasionally, and once in a while lots of it. But after a few weeks or sometimes just days, it rains away again.

Last winter was not like that at all.  Snowdrifts as tall as me, about 6 feet, near the house. Slightly lower snow drifts blocking the road, and filling up overnight if I shoveled them away.  Icy cold week after week, freezing whatever water pipes were not running.  (The shower in particular seem to have only off and on mode, no trickle.) The winter before was also fairly cold, although not quite that intense.  I suspect this one will be even colder.  Certainly the fall has been the coldest I can remember since I moved to the South Coast more than 30 years ago.

The temperature now in October has been typical of “green winter”, but without snow yet.  Still, clear nights of frost and rainy days the temperature of a fridge. Actually it is not raining much here even now.  Tonight it is cold and clear again.  But it is probably the rainiest part of the year after all.

September was already in full autumn mode.  Normally some of the summer would linger on, or we would get an “Indian summer” a little into the month. Not so this time.  It was chilly from the start, and ended at the border of winter, where we have been ever since.  I’d “blame” the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland, but that would probably be mostly wrong. There was no ash cloud last year, and it was still colder than usual. There is probably some longer weather pattern involved.

I have enough free wood in the shed for a long winter if that is how it is going to be. I doubt I’ll be able to heat my home office with just my computers much longer…

Dreams

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Dreaming about pregnancies again. It’s been a while.

Yesterday morning, while sleeping at the hotel, I had a memorable dream. I dreamed that somehow the rumor had spread that I was going steady with a nurse. The story grew over time, so that after a suitable time we were supposedly not only living together but also had a baby. This amused me, and I did nothing to kill the rumors, if that is even possible. But evidently even this was not enough…

One day I saw a young woman outside a house, painting or something while wearing pajamas. She was quite young, probably less than 20. At least she looked that way, being too skinny to be attractive to me. But another guy was pestering her, a local of that world whom I vaguely knew, who was drunk again. She was standing on something so that her middle was nearly even with his eyes and I saw that he was unable to resist. As he reached out to touch her, I snapped a picture with my mobile phone. She barked at him and shooed him away, and he also became aware of me taking the picture (which was the point) so he was shamed and left her. Instead he followed me, arguing that I was hardly in a position to criticize other people when I myself had made a younger woman pregnant while I had a fiancee and a baby at home. I was like WTF, and he went into some detail so I understood who he was talking about. It would have been amusing except probably not for her. Rumors had it the younger girl would be having an abortion, so of course her lack of a baby or even a visible pregnancy would actually just verify the story for them.

There was some more, about the pictures on my phone, which were several of friends and family, but the dream began to wind down from here.

I don’t see any deeper meaning, except for this: The girl was wearing blue-striped pajamas very similar to my (in)famous old PJs, which extremely regular readers saw repeatedly when the journal was young. A subtle reminder that with our dreams, not only are we the director, but we also play all the roles.

A soul in a sick body

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Living in the world, under the Light.

Thanks to years of journaling, I had at least a theoretical warning. I have noted through the years that I usually get sick the night or at most the day after I return from a trip. Whether it has lasted two days or a week, the symptoms are still the same: Queasiness and loose bowels to border on diarrhea, and a generic feeling of malaise.  I thought for a while that the train ride home had something to do with it, but I had pretty much given up that idea already. So I was not surprised that it happened tonight too, despite traveling with bus and not very far (although further again than to work).

My current theory is that the body is flushing the unusual stuff I have eaten, so it is ready to return to the usual diet now that I have returned home. In this case, two days of cafeteria and hotel food, plus some snacks, but the snacks are actually the most normal part of it.  I doubt either the cafeteria or the hotel would serve anything that would give us food poisoning. Sure, it happens, even in Norway, but it is bad PR so commercial establishments go out of their way to avoid it.

Nor did I eat any meat, although I took a quarter of an egg for lunch today. Over the last few years I have been eating less and less meat, not because my religion specifically forbids it, I just find it distasteful. I feel that dining on the corpses of dead animals is something that should be reserved for dire emergency. If this was a moral standpoint, I wouldn’t be eating milk products either, since modern agriculture does not retire cows in a dignified manner, much less their calves. As I said, I just find meat distasteful, and to a slightly lesser degree fish.

In reality, milk makes up a fairly large part of my diet in various forms. Come to think of it, not eating yogurt at all when I usually eat it at least daily was probably a bad idea. The gut flora would naturally go wild. The strange part is that it did not do it until I came back. Now, this time it was just two days, but I have been away for up to a week in the past (when spending Christmas with my friends) and while I did have some agitation of the bowels, it was very rarely on the scale I experienced once I got home.  Honestly, my best guess is that the deeper parts of my brain recognize that I am home and tell my digestive tract to get rid of the weird stuff so I can go back to a normal diet with a fresh start.

Being mentally prepared, I have felt somewhat less panicky than I usually do during the onset of a sickness.  Still, I am giving some thought to the benefits and malefits of continued life in the body.

***

Of course, in real life God has a lot of other things to think about too, like how my life or death would impact other people or the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere and a host of things I cannot even begin to imagine. It is not all about me, except up here in my small deluded head. But that’s where I report from…

And in my head, living for several more decades would be good for my soul even if I continued to play computer games, read blogs and work at a job I am not very good at. Why? Because this life is mostly harmless, and the more harmless decades I can put between me and my childhood and youth of fear, anger and hate, the better.

Much of my time then was filled with a horrifying darkness that is, in essence, a kind of hell. Buddhists seem to call this the “hell of strife”, in which people wander in fear and hate, attacking each other and with each confrontation becoming more certain of the others’ evil, without noticing their own. This was how it was with me.  Even if I had been good, I would probably still have been attacked, but I was not good. Quite the opposite. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but my words hurt other people, and I either did not think about it or enjoyed it immensely, depending on whom. I considered myself a lily among thorns or something. A saint among demons.

I may wish that I had been told the Truth at a much earlier age, but realistically, I would probably not have been ready for it. And meeting it before I was ready, I would probably have become immunized to it, in whole or in part, excusing myself and locking it away as something I had already met and rejected. And so I would have been stuck in the dark, for who knows how long.  But as it was, the Light eventually came to me at a time when I was open enough for it, around the age of 15, in my grandfather’s rocking chair, while reading a small tract by Elias Aslaksen.

For years after this, the harvest of those years threw a dark shadow over my life.  Even in my 20es, my dreams were routinely filled with fear and hate and murder. I dreamed about killing innumerable nameless men. And not in any kind of meaningful context, like saving my country or protecting the innocent. It was fear and rage, mostly fear from what I remember. Kill them before they could kill me. With guns, ax, knife, stones, even my bare hands.  Night after night sometimes, certainly it seems very often now that I look back.

Not satisfied with ruling my nights, the darkness sometimes shot into the day, suddenly and unexpectedly. Some small event might trigger it, even just a thought, but sometimes it would just burst into my consciousness for no reason that I can remember: A sudden vision of myself opening fire on bystanders, driving a car into a crowd, stabbing someone over and over, kicking their head against the concrete until it broke.  Thoughts like that, sudden, nightmarish, almost insane.  Then moments later I would catch myself and shudder at the hellish visions.  And I learned to not trust myself, as I had already learned to not trust others.

Things have changed. I still set bullies on fire, in City of Heroes, but I no longer have the same feelings I used to have. Rather, my recent characters of that type are wreathed in a white, purifying soulfire that burns away the darkness in my enemies, or that is how I perceive it. The actual game mechanics have not changed, but my way of seeing it has, and the graphics and play style corresponds to that. I fight not for revenge, but to protect the innocent and purify the guilty.  ^_^

Be that as it may, there may be limits to how long I am going to enjoy even that game, though I know not exactly by now.  But I have noticed that for each passing season, I find it harder to return to Age of Conan, a game that is a masterpiece of lifelike graphics (it was at least for a time the only game with a separate butt size slider, albeit limited in scope). Unfortunately the atmosphere of the game is very dark, and very much like the aforementioned Hell of Strife.

Described in few words, the basic gameplay is the same as in City of Heroes: Defeat enemies, either on your own or preferably together with others. But Age of Conan is, as befits the novels from which it is derived, a dark and treacherous place. One man’s hero is another man’s villain. There is a delight in destruction, blood splattering from severed heads to rain on the inside of your screen, and many of the classes either consorting with demons or gaining strength from acts of destruction, stuff like that.  It is hard to point out each detail, but there is a subtle aura of darkness and treacherous magic that pervades the game world. I find it repellent now. The current me, whose eyes are set on the Realm of Light, find such an atmosphere harder and harder to bear with each passing season.

I read a book last week, after the glowing recommendation of my online friend Alistair Young, a.k.a the Cerebrate. (Unlike me, his official name is not unique in the world. Really, does it cost that much to add a name to become unique? I would happily have done it, but unless one of my relatives does something crazy, there is and will only be one Magnus Itland in the world. And the world is probably quite happy with that.

Be that as it may, the book was a work of fiction, the first in the Dresden Files series of supernatural detective stories. Wizard Private Investigator more exactly.  When Mr Young loves something, I have found that I usually like it, admire it or at the very least respect it. This also came to pass. I did not like the book, but I found it very well written.  The reason why I did not go right ahead and buy the next was this: It was a dark world, with copious amounts of fear and death. Sure, so is real life for some people, especially in countries with war or civil war.  But that is not entertainment. It is not something we immerse ourselves in for our enjoyment.  The book did indeed remind me of Age of Conan, although somewhat less so.

And that is when I realized that I have begun to change further than I did simply by the passing of the years and the fading of the memories. That some kind of anchor for my soul has gone ahead of me, a possible future self perhaps, beckoning to me from the brightness of the Realm of Light, a barely audible song about coming home.

“But I’m not ready yet” to quote Chris de Burgh in his song Living in the World.  (Lyrics and temporary streaming for my friends).  I am pretty sure de Burgh also has his home in the Realm of Light at the least, as can be glimpsed in the sheer wingspan of his soul. But for him, as for me, it is still a question of whether we will return there. And I’m not ready yet. Probably.

I am still shakeable. My light still flickers when my body is darkened by illness. I want it to shine brightly even then, but I know there are still limits to how much I can take.  I want to live in the world with my anchor in the Light. I want to keep reading the saints and sages of the past and present, I want to work, and play, and share, and watch my life grow like a plant until it can bear fruit for those who will survive me. Until my white light can burn more brightly when the lamp that carries it cracks and start breaking up.  But I am fairly sure I am not ready yet.

Blowing on embers

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The raging fire inside translates into a pleasant warmth when you pass by it.

The summer was cooler (in temperature, I mean) than I am used to. Some people blame the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland. Certainly the autumn has also come faster than usual, although we have had no snow yet and only a couple nights of frost. The thermometer in my living room soon went down to 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) and has pretty much stayed there for about a month. It has not gone much below that, even after cold nights. It is as if the house cannot really believe it can get colder in the living room while there are people living in it.

But I don’t live in the living room, I live in the home office. And in the bedroom at night. The home office is still heated enough by the computers, when I keep the door closed. Although today is is just barely.

And today, the living room thermometer went below 14 degrees C (57F). So I fired up the wood stove again.

It is more like a test run, really. I am not going to heat the whole house pleasantly warm throughout winter, but I intend to burn wood every day to help keep the pipes from freezing. That is not really a problem yet, probably not for several weeks.

I first put some balled-up newspaper pages in the stove, then put in an empty yogurt carton filled with other, flattened cartons to a compact mass. This burns like a very porous wood and is a great way to get a fire started. After a while I returned and put wood on.  By then, there was only embers, and they seemed to like it that way. So I found a drinking straw and used it to blow on the embers. Soon they flared into an intense flame, easily igniting the wood. It has been burning since, with the occasional new piece of wood thrown in.

***

And this, dear congregation, is my text today. Because something similar happened to me. I have gotten my hand on the book The Intellectual Life by A G Sertillanges. It is an old book, the last foreword by the author from 1934, and the book had already been in print for a good while by then. It may be around a century old, or nearly so.  It is certainly from a time when there was no contradiction between the words “intellectual” and “Christian”, rather the author seems to assume that any serious intellectual would also be a Catholic or at least a Christian.

How did we get from there to here?  I don’t know. It happened before my time, I believe, or at least before I started thinking about such things.

Be that as it may, the book bears a striking resemblance to parts of the writing of Ryuho Okawa, more exactly his writing about Wisdom, one of the four pillars of the “modern four-fold path”: Love that gives, Wisdom, Self-reflection and Progress.  Okawa’s view of wisdom is so strikingly similar to the older book that I am certain he must have read it, and it must have resonated within his heart as it does in mine.  Then again Mr Okawa supposedly reads about 1000 books a year, so it is no wonder if he has read this. And if he has, it is no wonder it made a deep impression on him. It probably would on anyone able to work through its somewhat dense language.

Yes, Sertillanges writes for the intellectual, and he does not bother to make it easy to read. Why would he? Intellectuals should be accustomed to heavy reading. His writing is quite a bit harder to read than mine, whereas Okawa can probably be read even by 12 year olds if they are interested in the subject matter.

I have not read far yet. I hope to write more about the book once I have finished it, or at least read a goodly part of it.  But the effect was very much like blowing on embers.  My desire for a life of the spirit flared up, and with it a willingness to spend more of my time and my thought on higher matters. That means, among other things, that I won’t be punishing those treacherous Greeks in Civilization V tonight. ^_^ Or anytime soon, I suppose.

Not that there is anything wrong with playing Civ5. To quote Okawa, whose latest book I reread a bit of later today: “For example, if you wish to graduate from university with good grades, find a good job, and be successful in society, you cannot spend all your time gambling. This might be fine if you intend to live the life of a professional gambler or if you want to gamble moderately, work moderately, and live a moderate life. If you have high aspirations and need to concentrate on achieving them, however, you must give up your gambling activities, even if you enjoy them.” If you replace gambling with gaming, you’ll see what I mean. Do I wish to live a moderate life, or do I have higher aspirations? That’s where the fire of the heart comes in.

Work angels and Gaming Jesus

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Various occupations indeed. I actually thought of this picture, as it pretty much shows how I felt. I am not the kind of person who actually does SEE luminous beings though. I would probably have run screaming!

I am not alone in my head. Neither is anyone else, or at least not any normal person, but most are not aware of it, or only very dimly.  I sometimes jokingly write about “the voices in my head”, but they are not actually voices, more like independent thoughts. Today, they helped me at work.

After noon, I ran into two different cases which I could not solve. In one case, others had already tried to solve it too but given up. But while I was talking with the client, I received what I can only call a revelation. In fact, I said so out loud the first time, it was so out of the blue.  I cannot give any details about it, of course, my work being mostly non-disclosure. But it was computer software related.

I trust I have mentioned that for a while I developed software on my spare time for a friend, creating a big database system that let a number of workers register and access information regarding debt collection, and the system would follow up and print various documents and so on. It was really far too complex for a single person to keep in his head, but what happened was that I frequently received sudden insights, as if someone from outside projected into my mind how to do a task, complete and ready to just key it into the computer, or very nearly so.

Today was somewhat similar, only less extreme. I did not follow any logical train of thought. It was more like intuition, or even more than intuition. Jumping to conclusions, but in a good way. And it worked. Of course, perhaps. I mean, either of course because these things do that every time, or of course because I would not have written about it otherwise, given my good relationship with the “silent voices”.

***

The other part of today’s subject header is a bit different. I have mentioned a couple times in the past where I have bought a computer game acting on impulse, and how I had been warned in advanced by the “voice in my head” to not buy it. Each time it turned out to be wasted money. I may have referred to this warning as coming from “Gaming Jesus”, an expression I picked up from the now long gone web comic “Shawn Island”. In this comic there was a vaguely Jesus-like amnesiac who spent much of his time playing computer games and believed he was Jesus, thus he got the nickname “Gaming Jesus”. The phrase must have stuck with me, because I thought of this after I had been warned (in vain) a couple times about bad games.  I defended this idea by saying that perhaps people were saying “Good Lord what a terrible game” or “Jesus, this game sucks!” so obviously the Lord would have heard a lot of these comments already before I came to the shop. ^_^

No actual blasphemy is intended. There could be any number of reason why an independent thought process in my subconscious would know that a game was bad even though it had not heard it or read it until later.  Reasons like, uhm, reasons, I guess. Wait! Like, if it had been that good, I would have heard of it elsewhere?

Anyway, I heard about Civilization V yesterday, though not in a positive way. An online friend said he was not going to buy it.  But the non-voice in my head did not warn me against it. I checked it out a bit online and realized that it would probably be fun.  I don’t really have time to play much, but I used to love the Civilization series from the very start and have spent many happy hours on it. I certainly wish Sid Meier to become (or stay) rich and famous. So I bought it today in my late lunch break.

There was no protest by independent thought processes this time.

I actually forgot about it until a ways into the evening, at which point I installed it and played until it suddenly was close to midnight. It is like the original, and at least most of the sequels: Just a little more!  I remember when I had just got the original game – it may have been the first evening actually – I suddenly noticed that there was a strange light on the curtains. Cautiously I checked out what it was… it was the dawn. I had thought it was still evening. Not quite as bad this time, but I should probably be careful. Life is short enough. While I have gained a kind of perspective and time dilation from playing various games, I have other things to do now that are competing for the time.

Since I did not get any warning against the game, I assume it is not the reason why I got a sunburn.  What? It is October, in Norway, and it has been overcast for about a week, almost year record in this part of the country. But I really have a red triangle in the area where my topmost shirt button has been open. It looks like a redneck sunburn alright. Huh.

I also began freezing and shivering even though it was not particularly cold. It reminded me of a fat poisoning, though I don’t remember eating enough fat for that. It seems to be fading now, after spending time in outdoors winter clothes in a warm room, and before that some physical activity in front of a space heater.  It’s too late to go to bed early in any case, and I will wait a bit longer to see what happens next.

I have no idea whether there is a connection between the shivering and the fake sunburn, much less a connection to Civ5.  But I assume that if it was something bad that was happening to me, the silent voice in my head would have warned me.  OK, so I more or less stole that one from Socrates, but why not. If the independent actors in (or through) my subconscious can help me solve problems at work and be a better judge of computer games than I am, who knows what else they might do.

But if they tell me to kill random people, I’m opting out.

(Seriously, why do some people have voices that tell them to kill their neighbors, while I have the ones who tell me to stop playing games and take the pasta off the stove before it gets burned? It certainly does not go by merit, I can tell you that much.)

My Gmail was hacked!

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Just thought you might want to know. Sometime during the day, someone took over my gmail account. It had a password made of 8 random letters and numbers. Admittedly this is a bit few, but normally brute hacking won’t work against someone like gmail since they won’t allow a re-attempt speed that can only be achieved by a robot.

I installed a Google News applet for my android phone today. I wonder if that may have been a malicious program – android does not control their free applet all that strictly, so that is a possibility. I may have given it my google account password indeed, which would be an insane thing for me to do given that it only delivers public news. I will have to reinstall it (once I get control of my android account) to see whether it really does ask for the password. Since it has a pretty Google logo, I may have fed it by habit. Worth checking.

I have filed a request for getting back control of gmail, which is luckily frozen. It has probably only been used to send a few thousand spam mail, in which case all my address book contacts will have gotten one.  I am not sure how much difference that makes: Since my gmail name is in hundreds of places anyway, a lot of forged mail with me seemingly as sender is already being belched out on the Net. I know this because I get several of these daily in my own spam box. Hopefully people will realize at a glance, as usual, that no that’s not him.

If a more creative organization had gotten hold of it, they could probably use it more efficiently. But it is already frozen, which means they probably jumped to the spam pump immediately. So there should be relatively little damage. I’ve changed a few other passwords, including to my old account at chaosnode.net.  The handle is the same, after all, and if you have known me for a long time, you probably have it on file already.

I provided Google with some pretty unique information (the complete url of the invitation mail I got when I first got gmail), so I expect to get it back within 24 hours.

A huge disappointment is that despite some 10 attempts, I never got the text message with a verification code, which could have unlocked the account automatically without fuss. Why?  Perhaps my text messaging in Android does not work when my google account is locked? That would be pretty idiotic, but you never know.

Well, that was fast! Control of Gmail is back in my grubby hands, with a new password that makes more sense to me and still no sense even to my best friends. I have also set different passwords on Facebook and Chaosnode.

The spam sent from my account was pitiful, with only random letters in the subject header. I can only assume that they are paid per mail, and their contract with the Mafia never said anything about the mail actually being read by anyone.

Special thanks to Fujitsu-Siemens, who made a PC so durable (despite numerous problems) that I could recover my correspondence from many years ago by simply firing up Opera and scrolling through the mail. Whew.

Also four thumbs up to Google for handling this quickly and professionally. It seems most of the mails were rejected before even getting to my contacts, as gmail detected a sudden change in behavior when the robot took over. Now the only thing that did not work as expected was the text message with the recovery code. It has still not arrived, so I think we can tentatively say that it does not work … either generally, or in Norway, or with Telenor Mobil, or with Android phones, or some combination.

It is quite disturbing how much e-mail really matters these days. I get my bills to that address, even.  I’d like to check out that applet and see if it really does ask for my Google password. But not today, just in case it has found some other way to steal it.  I have deleted it for now.  Your curiosity may vary.

Sugar love

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Tiny Snow Fairy Sugar, since this was written under the (heavy (syrup)) influence of “Sugar Baby Love” in Japanese on YouTube. ^_^

If I were to eat a pastry all at once (or over the course of six hours or less) I would get horribly sick the next day. I would probably survive, but I am not entirely sure. I have not tried that much fat since the purgatory weeks in 2005 when I found out I no longer tolerated fat. So I eat one pastry over three days for breakfast, when I have had no other fat for a long time.

Sugar, though… sugar is my friend. I love sugar, and sugar loves me! Candy, sweets, desserts (without cream), sugar-filled chocolates, sugar-laden beverages… I can snack on these all through the workday. I automatically stop when I feel sweet enough, usually, but a while later I start again. Evidently my body mops up sugar from the bloodstream at a ferocious rate when there is too much of it: I used a blood sugar tester for diabetics for a while to observe my own blood sugar, since both my parents had diabetes and at least one grandparent as well. However, after a while I stopped. My body does not seem to care how much carbs I throw at it. After a while it is back to the baseline it has in the morning. Conversely, I can go all day without falling below that level, if I for some reason cannot eat. It is like a mutant power, even my doctor was baffled that it did not seem to matter much whether I had eaten or fasted before a test. So, I seem to be the Chosen One of the Sugar, or something. Or perhaps it is paying reparations for my parents?

And of course, you don’t actually get fat from sugar. Not a typo, I mean you and not only me. Humans suck monumentally at converting table sugar to fat, though we can slowly transform fructose into fat in the liver. What we do is burn the sugar instead of fat, and store the fat in more or less sexy places depending on our hormones. Evidently there is some destruction of fat though, even for me, because despite my partial pastries and nightly noodles, my weight remains constant (after shrinking for some months after I moved).

I must admit, fat really satisfies in a way sugar can not. Sugar is temporary, but fat is until death do you part. Well, that is often the case at least. I have read that most people put on a pound each Christmas season and never takes it back off until their final illness, if any. But I don’t celebrate Christmas anymore. And if I did, it would be with my sugar. ^_^

Life Divine… or not

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Unfortunately, it is not something we can get to by just dreaming about it.

I bought a book again. Despite my earlier criticism of the Kindle, I did buy the Kindle edition. At least it was 55% off, but truly they ought to be 75% off. After all, you can get half the price of a used book back from a used-book store, if it is treated reasonably well. And before that, you can lend it to your friends, if they treat it reasonably well. (And they should, if they want to be your friends!)

Anyway, it was a heavy tome, so if we add the cost of shipping it to Norway, I came pretty close to saving my 75%. Keep moving in this direction, Amazon!

The book this time was The Life Divine, by none less than Sri Aurobindo himself. He is like the Teilhard de Chardin of Hinduism, except with a name I can spell. OK, Teilhard probably did not have a history as a freedom fighter before turning to metaphysics, but they are both famous for integrating evolution into religion. Or perhaps the other way around.

(On a lighter note, I seem to have named my first spacefaring race in Spore “Bindo” in honor of him, last year (?) when I played that. Spore is a game of guided evolution, based on the assumption that nature has an innate drive toward sentience and that a cosmos filled with intelligent and creative life is unavoidable. I am sure Sri Aurobindo would have agreed, though he would surely not have had time to play it himself. Neither have I, these days, although my reasons are less admirable.)

The book is said to be 1100 pages, although it is obviously many more on my mobile phone. The prose is heavy, even to me. (I am not sure if it is heavier than mine, or just heavy in a different way.) Then again he was not a native English speaker, but came from India. Perhaps we foreigners tend to go wild in the language’s immense vocabulary? Luckily I have been assured that the book contains many repetitions, though I have not come to them yet. Repetitions as in saying the same things over in a slightly different way. Apart from that, I suppose we don’t have that much in common, Sri Aurobindo and I.

The thought has struck me that this is a book that would have been nice to have in my bookshelf. Â If nothing else, there is a good chance that my heirs would find it on my bookshelf after my passing (may it yet be far off) and think to themselves: “A thick book about The Life Divine? Surely Uncle Magnus must have passed on to a better place, then, having had such interests in his later years!” And they would feel comforted.

Unfortunately, their comfort would be somewhat exaggerated. Even reading The Life Divine is none too easy, but living one is still much further off. And it is still too early to say for sure whether this book will help me toward that goal. But even should it do so, that alone will not be enough.

I am obviously not talking about good vs evil here. And certainly not spirit vs matter. I am happy to see already in the second chapter of the book, Aurobindo establishes that matter and spirit are different in degree rather than being opposites. This is also the Biblical doctrine: All creation comes from the same One, who also in the end will be All in All. Â For this reason, we pray: “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” rather than “Please let us escape this goddamn material world and flee to your spiritual Heaven”.

I was about to apply the usual disclaimers, but I don’t think even I should add disclaimers to the Lord’s Prayer…

It is when it comes to the details that it becomes hard to pray “Thy will be done”. But then again that has never been easy. It was, by all accounts, not easy for Jesus either. But then Jesus presumably did not have a Jesus, while we have.

In any case, the idea for which Aurobindo is famous is not so much theological as just logical. Seeing how matter gave rise to life, and life to mind, we must assume that mind will give rise to supermind, a higher consciousness. Since there have already been some people with a higher consciousness, they can be seen as harbingers or forerunners for the rest of us.

(I wrote vaguely about this in my “Next Big Thing” series of essays, probably my most important writing in this blog. Or it would have been important if others had not said it better before me, but at the time I did not know of that. And this is its value. It is the notes of an explorer, not of a parrot.)

(Ironically, the more I learn about esoteric matters, the harder it becomes to come up with an original thought that I have not already seen elsewhere. But then again, re-inventing the wheel is overrated, especially if you can get a rounder wheel from someone else for free!)

***

My own life is certainly not divine these days. I wake up morning after morning filled with lust, so that it is difficult to not look twice at the women I see on the bus or in the city, and I had to suspend my fiction project as I kept imagining embarrassing things about the main character.

I am not convinced that this is coincidence. It seems to me that in the world of the mind, much like in physics, any action leads to an opposite reaction. So by taking an interest in the higher mind, perhaps I indirectly vitalize the lower mind. The totality of the psyche has a great inertia, I believe.

Then again, your psyche may vary.

Another doctor visit

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Fetched from my LiveJournal, because I am that lazy!

The last two nights, whenever I laid down on my left side, I had a crushing pain in the center of my chest, with some of the pain protruding toward my back. I normally sleep on my left side, although I move to other positions briefly during the night. When I slept on my back, propped up with a couple pillows, I had no pain.

Yesterday after I came home I did not eat for the rest of the day, to make sure it was not that. (But usually problems with a full stomach only show up when I sleep on my right side. Acid reflux, and not in the good way.)

At work today, I was plagued with bouts of shivering and extreme tiredness. I called my regular physician center (local clinic) and when I mentioned the nightly chest pain, they asked me to come in at once for a check. I only had time to throw on my jacket and tie my shoelaces before hurrying to the bus.

Of course, when I laid down on the observation bench, trying my best to emulate the position I sleep at night, there was no pain at all. I noticed that the bench was a lot harder. If the pain returns, I may try to find a harder surface and see. Though I am not sure that will fix the sleepiness during daytime, at least for the first couple weeks…

There was as usual nothing wrong with my heart. I told the doctor as much. My familiy is basically immune to heart problems, except for a certain slowness of the heart as we grow older. (Then again, my family is prone to age-related diabetes, and I have so far not the faintest hint of it, so perhaps I should not rely entirely on genotype…)

The doctor thought it must be something muscular that bothered me. That’s pretty vague. It is certainly unlike any of the back pains I have had from lifting badly or sleeping weirdly or playing roughly. Then again my legs and arms and back have been stiff ever since I bought the latest book, just before this problem set on, so who knows.

She ordered a bunch of blood tests that would, she said, reveal whether my internal organs worked as they should. I expressed amazement that I lived in an age where you could find out such things just from a blood test. I did not voice my suspicion that doctors use blood tests much like their predecessors used leeches, to make people feel better by having blood drawn from them. It worked for generations, so why not? Seriously though, I thought that was still 10 years in the future, to check up on liver and pancreas and the gang just with a couple vials of blood. I must have missed a couple issues of Science Illustrated.

The doctor was an intern, I think you call them in English. (American?) They have taken their exams but have to work with some supervision for a while at various locations. She looked underage. Am I really old enough to think that about my doctors? Oh well, at least she should be updated with the newest science (and without some of the old mistakes).

It is kind of embarrassing if it turns out to have been nothing dramatic this time either, but it beats the alternative. I want to work till I am 75 or 80 after all, like my ancestors!