No sex please, we’re writing

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(Today’s title is a pun on the (British) comedy “No Sex Please, We’re British”. Which, incidentally, I have not seen, but it is probably not too bad, being British.)

The story I am writing for this year’s JulNoWriMo is extremely chaste. There is nothing in it that I can imagine would activate the gonads of any remotely sane human, and I think the chance is very low with the insane as well.

Therefore, I can only assume that some completely unrelated influence (like the Norwegian summer?) is whipping up my sex drive. Not that it can do much good or harm to the world, since I have settled into a comfortably celibate lifestyle. It would surely take weeks if not months of preparation to change that.

For my poor characters, however, the world is in a great deal more flux. They and their universe live inside my mind, and when my mind is shaken (or even stirred), they are the ones likely to pay the price. So, my writing is more or less on hold until the compass needle of my mind stabilizes again, or at least stops spinning wildly. It should only take a couple days. Usually a couple extra hours of sleep will help with the problem. Details not really available, beyond the fact that dream sleep (REM) increases over the course of the night.

Many years of writing experience has taught me to NOT get my poor characters mixed up in my hormones. Besides, I have bought and paid for books where the author seems to have failed this rule, and it was not a pretty sight.

The unexamined life

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Yes, the years just fly by when you’re watching anime, playing games, or doing other things that are mutually exclusive with self-reflection. (Well, actually Lucky*Star is an anime that may give some pause for thought, although not on a Socratic level, I dare say.)

“The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates, but not until today have I reflected on the context of those words: Socrates was threatened by the government to give up his public teaching of philosophy or else be sentenced to death. But he chose rather to die than to go against his “daimon” (or daimonion), the spiritual voice he had obeyed since his childhood and which he considered a gift from Heaven.

Most of us hold the opposite view: The examined life is not worth living. It seems to us so unbearable that we will go to great length, even a high risk of untimely death, to avoid it.

***

What is this examination of which Socrates speaks? We call Socrates a philosopher, which he certainly was. But speculating on whether the Earth originated in water or fire, or any such remote topic, hardly changes the “examination level” of our life. You cannot say that after having discussed how many angels can dance on the tip of a needle, you have examined your life.

In contrast, self-reflection is all about examining our life. When a child in Japan misbehaves, its parent may tell it to sit alone and reflect on what it did. (Well, it happens in non-religious anime, so it is probably widespread.) This awareness of one’s own behavior, as if seen by an outside observer, is also one element in the Jewish and Christian concept of repentance, although this one focuses more on the act of turning away from mistakes rather than on the pure observation.

Boris Mouravieff, claiming to write from an esoteric Orthodox Christian tradition, puts the pure observation of oneself as the primary spiritual practice, the tool of transformation. The act of paying attention to oneself (in particular to the fragmented nature of the personality, which changes like a kaleidoscope with time and opportunity) is in itself the driving force of transcending the fragmented false self, causing a “heat” to develop in the bucket of iron filings with which he likens the natural personality. If this is raised to a high degree, the fire melts the pieces together. Be that as it may, the relentless observation of the personality is in itself the recommended spiritual practice.

There are hints that this may be original Christian teachings. Jesus Christ exhorts his disciples to “watch at all times”. The statement appears repeatedly in the formula “watch and pray”, always in that order, blended with other words but with these being the direct instructions. For some reasons the “pray” has completely overtaken the “watch” in modern Christianity, so that it has fused with the “pray without ceasing” mentioned by St Paul the apostle. However, in the repeated sayings of Jesus – and this is in fact one statement he clearly and intentionally repeats, as if it was a key point of his teaching – there is always a “watch” first.

It is possible that Paul also thinks in this direction when he tells a younger preacher to “pay attention to yourself and the teaching”, which may refer to comparing himself to the measuring rod of the Christian teachings, or it could mean paying attention to the teachings he preached. Perhaps both. But clearly it was necessary to pay attention to himself – that is to say, examine his life. Reflect on himself. Watch.

In some languages (including my native Norwegian) the “watch” of the gospel is translates as “stay awake”. One relative of mine ran into mental disturbances trying to stay awake all night every night to pray. Intriguingly, a few people in this world have the ability to remain conscious even in their sleep, in a purely observing, non-acting mode. This usually appears after a couple decades of daily meditation of the more advanced sorts. It occurs to me today that Jesus may have lived like that, conscious and watching his own mental plane or “innerscape” even in his sleep.

If we translate ye olde phrase of Jesus into the language of the 21st century, we might say “be conscious at all times and stay connected to the Divine”. This sounds a lot less offensive to people with Jesus willies, although I am not sure whether this is a good thing. It also happens to pretty accurately portray good old Socrates, who not only examined his life even in the face of death, but also publicly spoke about the divine presence which had accompanied him since childhood and never let him down. Such faith did he have in his daimonion that when it did not warn him as he was sentenced to drink a deadly poison, he concluded that it was probably no bad thing.

***

Far from consciously observing ourselves even in our sleep, however, most of us do the exact opposite: We look away even when awake. Hold on a minute, my sims need to harvest their watermelons. OK, back. As I was saying, we tend to distract ourselves from the “life examination” by disappearing into engrossing hobbies like computer games or puzzles, or (for the more simpleminded perhaps) basic instincts like FOOD! and SEX! – not sure if socializing with other people also count as basic instinct with humans, quite possibly it does. It certainly is effective at distracting us from observing our own thoughts, words and deeds. So our lives remain unexamined, and that’s the way we like it, uh huh.

Some people cannot stop the relentless intrusion of reality simply by sex and petty crime. They have to drink booze or take hard drugs to try to forget. This is the last step before suicide itself – for in their eyes, the examined life is not worth living. Or at least living through the process of examination is not worth it. But as I pointed out just above, I feel that there is only a difference of degree between them and us.

That is not to say that God hates games as such, or even sex. OK, at least not all sex. But the use of anything as an escape route to avoid self-reflection, to shirk the burden of self-consciousness (much less God-consciousness), to flee from the examined life and stay in the dark – like someone who turns on the light, sees a big spider on the pillow and decides to turn off the light – that is probably not the best idea.

Whatever happens when you examine your life, it made Socrates so happy that he could not stop talking about it, even if it should cost him his life. The same happened to Jesus’ disciples some centuries later. It doesn’t seem to have made the Dalai Lama particularly depressed either. It seems that all true religion, in the sense of spiritual religion rather than just social or ritual religion, must contain this element. But getting there… that is the hard part.

I have watched enough to watch myself flee from my own watchful eye. Because I find the unexamined life quite worth living. And the terrible truth is that the unexamined and the examined life cannot both exist at the same time. For the new, examined life to live, the old unexamined life must die. It may well do so whether we want it to or not, if we keep observing it. This may be one of the cases where looks really can kill. At least they can be quite painful.

But first, my sims need help with their potatoes.

 

The Sims Freeplay Android

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Here’s how it looks on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, except it looks sharper. Apologies for the lack of professional photo equipment.

For those who cannot get enough of The Sims, there is now a new and better Sims game for Android. And it is completely free, well if you don’t have connection charges (it connects to a server occasionally). Oh, and if you are patient and not too impulsive. But it can be free. It is for me. Then again, I don’t drink.

There are certain minimum requirements, and the game will not install without them. I would recommend a tablet or a really big screen, honestly, because there is a lot of detail and you would have to zoom in quite a bit on a small screen. Luckily, you can zoom in and out and rotate with the usual controls – the tutorial should also show you this.

The Sims Freeplay can be downloaded for free from Google Play (formerly known as Android Market). It gets you started right away with a tutorial which continues far into the game, giving you ever new goals. Goals again give you some kind of reward when fulfilled. However, some of the goals also require some expense (in-game, not on your credit card) to fulfill.

Already in the tutorial you will learn about the “Lifestyle Points”, which you get from time to time by fulfilling goals or leveling up. (Yes, the game has experience points and levels like a role playing game.) These Lifestyle Points can be used to hurry a project. For instance, each time you add a building to your town, it will not only be more expensive than last time, but also take more time. By throwing in LPs, you can finish immediately. If you run out of them, you can buy them for real dollars through the game interface. The developers probably hope that people will either lend the tablet to their kids without warning them, or else playing when drunk. Warning: these things are expensive.

What you will NOT be harassed to do is recruit your friends. There is no friend requirement whatsoever to play the game, although you can in the most recent versions of the game log into Facebook (of all places – why not Google+? Android is a Google product, you guys). Once there, you can supposedly do social things on a houseboat in the game. The YouTube trailer seems to imply that the social activity largely consists in your sims wiggling their butt. Or perhaps that’s just what I remember. I don’t have any Facebook friends who play the game, to the best of my knowledge, so apart from a small daily gift the social boat does nothing for me. If you are my Facebook friend and want to wiggle your simulated butt to tinny electronic music in this game, I’ll try to help; but I’m not really a social person.

What you can do without friends however is built small homes for your sims, create more or less random sims (small computer people) and dress them up, and direct them around their homes doing various things. Like using the toilet or gardening. Pretty much every interaction will give XP, which helps you level up. The game as a whole levels up, not the individual sim. Also, all of the households share the same money, unlike in the normal Sims game. So you can earn money in one house and spend it in another.

The easy way to earn money is buying a garden plot and grow vegetables. At least in the early levels of the game, the income depends on how much you are willing to click. The vegetables that take a half hour to grow give more money than the ones that take five minutes to grow, but they don’t give six times more. If you can be bothered to click six times as often, you can get noticeably more profit. I assume that after a few dozen clicks you will have second thoughts, though, unless you have an extremely boring life otherwise. (There is even a 30-second vegetable, if you are extremely trigger-happy. It is also free to plant, which is nice if you have somehow wasted all your virtual money. Not that I would know, would I?)

Once you have built a workplace in town, you can send your sims off to work and earn money and XP that way. This also has the benefit that they will rise in their career over time, earning more and more money and XP per hour. Be warned however that everything in this game takes real time. For instance, I built the science building, which gives a pretty nice pay. It so happens that I can send my sims off right before I clock in at my own workplace, and they will finish around the time I arrive on my own bus home! Most people start earlier in real life than I do, however, and unless they think playing this game at work is OK, there is no point in having a science building: You cannot program your sims to do some action in the future, and they have no free will worth talking of. So you need to access the game in the hour before their virtual workplace opens, to send them there. They will go home on their own though.

Don’t despair if you don’t find any workplace with suitable working hours (although there probably is one – each workplace has different hours). After a few levels you will unlock vegetables with a roughly work-like time span, like 10 hours, which should keep them occupied all through your workday if you are European. Americans may want the 12 hour option, from what I hear. Poor folks. I wonder if we should boycott products made with unpaid overtime. It is kind of like slavery, isn’t it?

The sims, to get back on track, certainly don’t require much attention for their own needs. For those of us used to the original Sims games, it is amazing that the small computer people can go a whole day without needing to visit the toilet. They can also go a long time without eating. But over time their need bars do fall, and you should check them from time to time. The sims will get XP from filling their needs too, after all.

One element from the original games is that more expensive objects take less time to fulfill needs. So if you sleep in a more expensive bed, you can sleep an hour less and be just as rested. In addition, you get more XP for using expensive objects. So that is an encouragement to earn more simoleons (the sims currency). Simoleons are also needed to buy houses for new sims. The new sims can help earn money, but at some point the cost of getting a new sim house is more than the new sim can earn in quite some time.

Your first household comes with a free dog. You can buy dogs for your other households if you want to. They will once a minute or so find a place where something is buried on the lot. Click on them and they will dig up money, or occasionally some other treasure. Supposedly they can even find Lifestyle Points. I generally have enough other hobbies to not watch over an imaginary dog every minute. Your hobbies may vary, as may your attitude to dogs.

In the end, I don’t see myself sticking with this game. The reason is that time cannot be frozen. If you leave the sims alone for a day, their status bars (hunger, bladder, energy etc) will have declined quite a bit. At this speed, they should starve to death over the course of a long weekend or so. I don’t really want to play a game that I can’t put away for a week or a month to concentrate on other interests. I haven’t yet let it alone long enough to say whether the sims die a slow and agonizing death or just get really grumpy, but I dislike this situation on principle.

Apart from that, it seems a pretty harmless game. If you want to hide from reality in an imaginary world, this seems a good place to do so.

 

JulNoWriMo has started

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Regular readers will know that I each year take the month of November off, more or less, to participate in NaNoWriMo, the (inter)National Novel Writing Month. Tens of thousands of people do this now, after the movement has grown year by year. But some are not satisfied with just one novel writing month, or they may have all or some of July off and are not spending it traveling. So some years ago JulNoWriMo was born. It has never really taken off the way NaNoWriMo did, and may well be headed for extinction: NaNoWriMo has now expanded with “Camp NaNoWriMo” in June and August. It is NaNoWriMo with fewer participants and a different atmosphere, people join into small virtual groups (if they so desire) rather than a “zerg” (stampede).

On the first day, I have written 8343 words, so that is a pretty good start. (Except it was Sunday so I didn’t need to work.) It’s a new story, but yes, it has lots of amazing books. ^_^

“2012” by Ryuho Okawa

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The end of the world? Not if Ryuho Okawa has anything to say about it! And he has quite a bit to say, as usual. Although this time most of the talking is done by the spirits of Montezuma and Quetzalcoatl. That’s how they appear in this book, at least.

The book 2012 is one of two I recently discovered on Smashwords. I tend to buy any books from Happy Science, although I have had a couple disappointments, even they have been interesting at least.  Happy Science is a Japanese new religion. Technically it is a cult, in the same way as Christianity, a religion centered on one man who is believed to be divine. Unlike Jesus Christ, Japanese author Ryuho Okawa is neither dead nor resurrected, but he obviously has some other qualities to inspire his followers. Like having written over 800 books in less than 30 years. This is one of them.

The book is a bit overpriced compared to its length. This seems to be a trend now that IRH press has taken over publishing the English versions themselves rather than licensing them to overseas spiritual publishers. Perhaps they feel that people should be expected to pay this much for books by a god? Or perhaps they just are unfamiliar with the price level in the English-speaking market. This is quite possible. I know from my own homeland, Norway, that book prices here are several times higher than in America, so much so that I prefer buying Norwegian books in English translations. Perhaps the same is true for Japan? Japanese anime certainly is expensive compared to American cartoons, so that may explain it. Anyway, prepare your wallets, I paid around 15 bucks for some 25000 words. Of course, being Norwegian, I don’t have a problem paying 15 dollars for a book, but your economy may vary.

Now for the book itself. It is sold as non-fiction, but I think some will disagree.

***

There is a prophecy that the world will end in 2012, more exactly on December 22. This is because the end of the Mayan calendar happens at this time. That seems a pretty flimsy excuse for ending the world. The world of the Mayans has already ended, so to speak, when their kingdom dissolved shortly after the year 900, even though their descendants still live in the area. The Aztec empire was to some extent inspired by the Mayans who preceded them. The Aztecs lived further north, in today’s Mexico.

Earlier this year, a calendar was found that included the next cycle, showing that Mayans did not actually expect the world to end this year after all. But the book I review was written in 2011, so this information is lacking.

Ryuho Okawa may be considered the greatest god on Earth, but even gods can’t know everything when they are incarnate. So he used his powers as the world’s greatest spiritual medium to place a general call to the spirit world, asking for whichever spirit was most involved with the 2012 prophecy. He then acted as host for the spirit, while his assistants interviewed it. They got quite a surprise. The spirit was that of the last Aztec king, Montezuma. But more worrying, he claimed to now be the guardian spirit of Barack Obama, and planned to use him to fulfill the Mayan curse in December 2012.

The book includes the full interview with the spirit of Montezuma. He does not seem all that impressive to me, and probably not to the Japanese either. He insisted that he did not want revenge on the Caucasians or the Christians, he just wanted to get the karma back to the middle by ending their dominance. He spent a good deal of his time talking about aliens and an expected alien invasion, but the connection between this and what he said before about ending the Christian calendar was pretty vague. All in all, for a great statesman he did not seem all that enlightened.

The more the contrast to the second interview in the book, where Okawa summons Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god, whom Montezuma had mentioned a couple times. Montezuma believed that Quetzalcoatl was actually Jesus Christ. Now, a while after the previous interview, Quetzalcoatl had contacted Okawa saying that he wanted to give a message. This happens from time to time. So Okawa let the spirit of Quetzalcoatl enter his body and let his assistants interview him.

This was a very different and somewhat hair-raising read. The spirit of Quetzalcoatl appears far more intelligent, coherent and spiritual. First, he confirmed that he was Jesus, but did not make an issue of it. In fact, he seemed surprised that he had lived a long life without being killed this time.

(In the lore of Happy Science, there are ten 9-dimensional spirits or Saviors, of which Amor (Jesus Christ) is one and El Cantare (Ryuho Okawa) another, but due to the vast spiritual power of these beings they can only pack up to 1/5 of their consciousness into one mortal body at a time. They can however send less, and there is also a difference of how “core” the personality is that they incarnate. Okawa is the very core of El Cantare, the most exact representation of his being and the most powerful. Jesus Christ was supposedly something similar for Amor. Still, it seems to have baffled everyone that Jesus would send even a fringe incarnation to Meso-America without telling his good friend Ryuho Okawa. There is no mention of this in The Golden Laws, which details the appearance of the Great Spirits in human history. Then again, Japanese generally don’t consider Latin America and Africa “human history”, more like pre-history I guess. Actually Quetzalcoatl took them to task for that.)

Quetzalcoatl does not consider the aliens much of a problem. His worry is something else entirely: Japan is about to get destroyed by a human army, and Okawa’s life is in danger. It is of the utmost importance that Okawa completes his message to the world before he dies and gets it to Latin America, where it will survive after the fall of Japan. Quetzalcoatl scolds Okawa’s disciples for their lack of devotion, saying that they treat Happy Science as a business and don’t see the importance of saving souls. He also takes the religion to task for its focus on material progress. God does not particularly care about material progress, says Quetzalcoatl: People are often more likely to seek salvation in hard times. Civilizations rise and fall because that is the way they were designed to work. To the gods, this is comparable to a washing machine, that shakes things up and down to get rid of the dirt. So there are good times and hard times, you cannot escape that. You need to save the souls, that is the purpose of religion, not to run a successful business.

Quetzalcoatl also states that the failure of the Happiness Realization Party to win political influence in Japan was due to the poor quality of Okawa’s disciples, they are 20 years behind the curve and it may be too late to save the country now. Thus his invitation to bring Happy Science to Latin America, where he will watch over it after Okawa is gone. You are only thinking about Japan, he scolds the Happy Science staff: We are trying to save souls in countries you don’t even know the name of!

Okawa seems taken aback after the end of the interview. Still, the afterword of the book states once again that the future will be bright if you believe in him and improve your mind. As humans, we have the divine ability to create, and together we can create a better future.

But it does not escape my notice that he has just this summer released a movie in Japan detailing the invasion by a superior Asian military power, and how in that case the nation can only be saved by spiritual means. I look forward to seeing it. Is this the legacy of Quetzalcoatl?

Happy time-twisting

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The universe is full of life!

“The infinite space is full of various forms of life.” So there is nothing strange about me writing about a reincarnated Pleiadean. It is a work of fiction, after all. At least I hope so!

The independent thought streams in my head, even the guest writers, can be pretty impressive. Take the muse I wrote about two entries ago, which was telling his story as a TSI (fictive name for Happy Science) member who discovered that he actually came from the Pleiades.

So I just bought a new book that has quietly become available from Happy Science, Secrets of the Everlasting Truths. The book goes in some detail about how Ryuho Okawa has found a way to explore outer space through interviewing humans who are reincarnated aliens. Most of them, he notes, are from the Pleiades and Vega.

Given that I just bought this book, it is not particularly surprising that I write a fanfic in which the main character is a reincarnated Pleiadean. Well, except for the small detail that I wrote that first and discovered the book afterwards.

***

In all fairness, this is not the first time Okawa mentions Pleiadeans and soul migration between planets. I (or my muse) did not simply make this up, there have been mentions in passing in two of his earlier books, although I can’t remember if he actually combined them back then. Now he declares that there is a number of these around already, as it also is in my story, and he spends a whole lecture on this phenomenon. He also mentions that time is not a straight line, but we already knew that.

It is one of those coincidences again. I have those from time to time, and they are usually not religious in nature (if one can call soul interviews of reincarnated aliens “religion” – it is kind of … not what most religions do.) Like one day I was taking a walk and thinking about how the world would have been if the tricycle had take off instead of the bicycle (still not sure why it didn’t, trikes are a lot more stable). While I was still elaborating on this scenario in my mind, the first adult tricycle I had seen in the area came into view. I had lived there for years and never seen an adult tricycle, nor had I thought about them for all those years. But as soon as I think about it… !

Several times I have dreamed about things that would make perfect sense to dream about, if they had only happened the day before instead of the day after the dream. I am not sure this is even supernatural: If we accept that time really is a dimension, then the sequence of past, present and future are necessarily continuous. Each part is “glued” to the parts before and after it. I have used the image of magnetism in the past: A magnet will easily attract a needle, but a needle also attracts the magnet. Usually the magnet does not move toward the needle, because the magnet is heavy and the needle is light. But if the magnet is placed precariously and the needle is stuck to something, once in a blue moon the magnet might move toward the needle instead of the other way around.

Let me take another example, which happened at the workplace where I was making my famous debt collection software suite. It is so long ago that we used cassettes for music. (They were self-enclosed audio tapes, popular before the age of the CD and some way into it, although they quickly disappeared when MP3 players arrived.) I had a combined cassette player and radio, and was playing one of my favorite songs back then, “Why Worry” by Dire Straits. After I finished playing that, I switched to radio. The radio was playing “Why Worry” – the same song I had been playing. I have heard that song only two or three times on radio, to the best of my knowledge. (I think I would have noticed, for it was special to me for many years. I actually bought my first CD player because I wore out the tapes by playing that one song repeatedly, then spooling back to play it again. This is much easier on a CD. ^_^)

So the time-switch between reading the book and writing the fanfiction is not in any way proof that Ryuho Okawa really is what he claims to be, the god of this world, chief of the powers of the invisible realm that surrounds our planet. But it kind of underscores his point that science still has a ways to go, I think.

I may be back with a full review of the book later, perhaps.

More imaginary books

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My elderly self-sim again, visiting the library.

Thinking back, my TSI (Happy Science) fanfic are not the only places that my love for books (lots and lots of books) make up a core of my story. I have several magic stories in various states of production where books are central. My Lightwielder stories tend to feature libraries, although they are only instrumental in one of them.

In my Castle Keepers / Living Stones universe, there is a tangent to the Lightwielder universe by the presence of the Songs of the Light, a small easy-to-read book featuring a collection of poems. There is the Commentary on Songs of the Light, which is in 20 heavy tomes, drawing out all kinds of theological and philosophical meanings of the book- Each of these have a commentary in 20 heavy tomes as well, named Commentaries IX on Commentaries VII on Songs of the Light (for an example). These are so heavy in theology and philosophy that they are pretty much unreadable for the untrained reader, and you need to study them all before you can participate in writing commentaries on one of them, which the intellectual and spiritual elite of the land is currently in the process of doing. No obvious allusions to real-world writing, of course!

The most “bibliolatry” of my stories may however be the original 1001st book. In it, those who have voluntarily read 1000 books are offered the 1001st book, which enables them to spend their dreams at night fully conscious in an alternate world where magic is real. The magic is not controlled by emotion or willpower, but by understanding the Sigils. These are very similar to Japanese and Chinese complex characters, with numerous strokes that need to be made in the right place in the right order. But drawing them is the least of the challenge in this imaginary world: The extent to which you can use a magic sigil depends on how deeply you understand it. Thoth, god-king of Attalan (Atlantis), wrote one book for each of the 4000 sigils. Only by reading and deeply understanding such a book can you truly unleash its magic. If you understand it poorly, the magic will be weak, unreliable and may even backfire.

Luckily for all involved in my imaginary lifelong learning of magic, the time spent studying the Lore does not contribute to your aging. So many of the sages reach an age of 175 or even 200 years, having spent over half their lives in the reading and practice of the Art. If only it worked like that in real life! (Actually, there may be a trace of it – sages tend to live to a ripe old age if nothing unfortunate interferes. The reason could be that they are more resistant to Alzheimer’s and other brain damage, due to a better trained brain – or perhaps they started with more brains to begin with. Once your mind goes, it becomes much harder to preserve the body without constant help.)

***

As you can see from all this, my approach to books is mystical and magical. Books are holy, powerful, transformative: They are not tools pointing outward toward the outside world, but are more like medicine or even implements of surgery, pointing inward to alter the very nature of those who read them.

This view of books is based on my own young days and my experience with the Bible and the books of “Smith’s Friends”, the Christian Church I was a part of for many years. Rediscovering to varying degrees the same effect now in my mid-life transformation (which I suppose is in some ways a second puberty), the longing for the Ultimate Bookshelf expresses itself in my fiction as well as in my non-fiction.

Jesus Christ chided (at the very least) the scribes of his time, who pored over books thinking that in them they had eternal life. Jewish Rabbis still tend to do this, and I can certainly sympathize with them. It is a beautiful dream, the more powerful because it is partially true: Books really can change a person. But there are limits, and eternal life is one of those, I guess. There are almost certainly other limitations as well. Except in dreams.

But even with limitations, I suspect I will love books as long as I live.

More Happy Science fanfic

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My Sims 3 self-sim during his late years, going on about his bookshelf. I would not be surprised if I do the same, if I live to be white-haired (or nearly so).

Whatever else you may say about the Japanese new religion “Happy Science”, it works wonders for my creativity. A year and a half ago I wrote a fanfic very loosely based on their movie “The Rebirth of Buddha”, or rather the world in which that movie took place. None of the characters from the movie appeared in person in my 50 000 words story. As I wrote back then, the story more or less wrote itself, to the point where even my wrists did not hurt the way they usually do when I write a lot. Not quite a miracle, I guess, but certainly unusual.

I’ve tried this two times later, the last being now. It really is baffling. I start with basically nothing – no plot, not even a character – and just invite this imaginary person to tell his story in first person limited view, the way a friend would tell a story to another friend. And there they go. The first one was pretty unstructured in that he would come with hints of things that happened later, and suddenly would get distracted by some point of doctrine that he would eagerly expound on. That was actually rather charming, I thought, and fun to write.

The one this summer is more systematic, more restrained, telling things in chronological order, sticking to what is relevant to the story. So it is a bit less exciting but more polished. Well, less exciting at the start. Things definitely take a turn for the exotic when he discovers that he is a reincarnated alien from the Pleiades, where he lived and died. After going to Heaven he and several others volunteered to incarnate as humans on Earth. He still has some trouble getting used to it.

This is a work of fiction and has nothing to do with my habit of referring to people as “humans” and “earthlings” and not understanding their obsession with romance and amassing property. Just thought you’d want to know. ^_^

There seems to be a  new personality each time I start one of these stories. Even the way they speak, although they do have certain common traits that they may have picked up from their common source material, the books of Master Taiyou Sorano, containing his Teachings of the Mind.

Am I the only one who finds this a bit… spooky? That I seem to have a bunch of voices from an imaginary parallel world in my subconscious?

***

I do consider that the reason for this effect is that there is a great deal of this type of personality in myself. It is not autobiographical as such, but I think I have the tendency. If I had been a little different, and Happy Science had been a little different (in particular not referring to the founder as God), I might have become a Happy Scientist in fact if not in name. It comes down to the books, you see.

There is in me a deep wish for there to be books so filled with light and life and power that they change the understanding and even the very personality of those who read them. There is the Bible, of course, but the Christian Church also had some books written by a few holy men, explaining the teachings in more detail and exhorting the faithful. I tried to read them all. And they worked, too! I was changed greatly. At first it was a confusing process, taking a few shortcuts through the wilderness outside of sanity as we know it, but I soon got into the light which grew brighter and brighter. I became the genius you all know and love.

It really worked – up to a point. There were changes that were never effected. There were limits never overcome. And a part of me has secretly hoped that somewhere I would find The Books, the ones that would unlock more doors and let the sunshine in. The Books that would change me without me having to go through strict discipline, without having to make great sacrifices. Simply by learning the Truth I would be set free – a rather optimistic interpretation of the Lord’s words perhaps, but why not? The words of Jesus were spirit and were life, as he himself attested. And he said to his disciples: “You are already clean [or pure] because of the words I have spoken to you.”

If Jesus had written hundreds of books, certainly that alone would suffice? By reading them, I could have become transformed into a being of immeasurable light, right? But for some reason he never did so. Neither did his disciples; one of them admitted that the world would not have space for all the books that would have to be written. Still, I would have appreciated a few hundred…

From time to time I come across another book that is so luminous, it changes the way I think, either temporarily or even permanently. (Well, so far.) Mainly books of timeless esoteric wisdom, these days, or hagiology (the lore of saints). So the dream remains alive.

So the TSI members who have a library of hundreds of luminous books, they are each in their own way an expression of my own dream.  Indeed, most of the few books of Ryuho Okawa that are in public sale in English have to some degree this effect on me, to increase my inner brightness, or so it feels. Am I wrong? Or are these exceptions? Am I the exception? There are supposedly sold millions of some of these books. Why has not Japan become transfixed with the glory of the Buddha or something? Of course, there have been sold millions of Bibles, and one may wonder how that worked out. Then again, we don’t know what society would have been without them. If something like the Viking Age, which was my direct ancestors before they got Bibles, I think we should keep the Bibles coming.

But in part I banish my relentless optimism to the realm of fiction, in which the whole libraries of miraculous books really exist and those who read them repeatedly become filled with unquenchable light that surpasses the normal limitations of the human condition. Even more than I have seen in this life, I mean. Of course, I sincerely encourage anyone who actually has become filled with celestial brightness through the reading of books to comment with their recommendations.

Chickening out

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"Strive to be infinitely beautiful and good"

Today I actually wrote and uploaded a decent length review of the movie The Laws of the Sun from Happy Science, based on their most loved book, the Happy Science answer to Genesis. Then I went to bed.

A bit over an hour later, I woke up alarmed. It was not quite a panic attack such as I had occasionally through my life (and may well have again, though it has been quite a while). Still, something was definitely wrong, I felt deep within. Reflecting on this, I found that the entry was the one thing I felt troubled about. I could not say whether I had been too critical or not critical enough. In fact, I felt I had no clear mandate from Heaven, so to speak, to opine on it. So I removed my entry from public view.

If you feel that you need to know more about it, feel free to contact me.