Tag Archives: books

The flu, or something

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I got up early today, wanting to take the early commute bus. But I did not feel quite sure about it:  I had a low-grade head cold lately, moving to the throat, but last night it settled in the bronchi. It stayed there through the night, so I had to wake up a few times to cough to clear them. My coworker had been sneezing a lot so I assumed I had gotten his cold. Well, it may be a bit more than that. I now officially have a fever, although still a moderate one. The headache and the pain in muscles and joints are very flu-like. There is a B influenza going the rounds, generally considered a weaker strain but one many of us don’t have immunity toward. Or so say the news.

As it happened, I got a box from Amazon.com in the mail yesterday. It contained two books by James V. Schall, and are somewhat ironically named “Liberal Learning” and “Another Sort of Learning“.  Actually none of them is Liberal in the political sense of the word: Schall is actually a Jesuit, and his idea of a liberal education is a synthesis of the classical Greco-Roman culture and the great philosophers of Christianity, such as St Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. Oh, and P.G. Wodehouse.

The small book, or even pamphlet, Liberal Learning, is also available online if you don’t want to support the printing of such books, or simply want to reduce your carbon footprint without eating less, traveling less, or in any other way restraining your greed. ^_^

So when I found myself staying home from work today, I thought this was a great opportunity to read some Schall. But as my temperature went up, my brainpower went down. So perhaps not the most ideal conditions to be introduced to stacks of heavy tomes…

Right now, I have 39.3C (102.7F) in fever. This should be pretty much ideal for the body, although I do have a headache now. Unfortunately the temperature is still rising, although very slowly.  It may not be a good idea to sleep for 8 hours while my fever is still rising:  By the time my normal sleep is over, I may have too much fever to wake up.  So I’ll try to sleep in shorter durations, so I can cool myself off if I get too weak.

Of course, it is far from certain that the temperature will continue to rise. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The Xanth effect

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I’m perfectly fine!

Thank you for your prayers and well-wishes! So much time has now passed since the unfortunate double meal, it really seems I will avoid my punishment this time. Of course, just waiting for the ax to fall has been a learning experience in itself.

Today I want to talk about another fascinating aspect of the human mind. I have called it the Xanth effect, after the long series of light fantasy novels by Piers Anthony. I am myself a foreigner to English, learning it as a third language. As an adult, I had my vocabulary extended, expanded and enhanced by the Xanth books like many American youngsters. However, like them I gradually found the later books less appealing than the first. This seems to be quite common. However, there is a big difference: My first Xanth books are not their first Xanth books.

The series debuted in Norway in its middle.  My first Xanth book was Heaven Cent, if I remember correctly. (Somehow I keep remembering it as “Skeleton Key” instead.) It was love at first sight. I had been writing for years, but the mix of puns, magic, drama and just random randomness was something I knew I could do better than anything I had done before. It influenced my own writing for many years. My fiction on the YouthNet BBS network was in my most heavily Piers-influenced phase.

I also loved the next books, Man from Mundania in particular but also parts of Isle of View.  I kept enjoying some of the later books, but eventually I found them lackluster. However, around this time new prints of the earlier books became available, so I bought some of them.  They were even worse.

Yes, dear reader. The quality of the Xanth books declined with the number of Xanth books I read, not with the number of Xanth books Piers Anthony wrote. The order of reading, not the order of writing, determined how good they were. In other words, it was all in my head.

The same effect, only faster, is observed with David Eddings’ epic fantasy books. Then again, they are basically the same book written over and over, if you skip the details. Of course, some people don’t skip the details.

I wonder if the same does not apply to my journal, but it is hard to be objective with oneself.  But just in case, just ask for your money back. ^_^

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.

Antichronicity

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Den Gode Kraften (The Good Force), autobiography by Joralf Gjerstad.

Yesterday I received a book in the mail. This is in itself noteworthy, for I do not habitually buy books, especially not physical books. If I do, it is usually because they are of a religious nature and so I expect to read them several times over the years to come. But this book was exceptional in that it was written in Norwegian. I cannot tell how many years it has been since last I bought a Norwegian book. Even in the rare case when I buy a book by a Norwegian author, I usually buy the English translation, since it is considerably cheaper. After all, the total number of Norwegian speakers in the world is less than a single large city in the USA, so economy of scale comes into play. In addition, Norwegians generally have lots of money and are used to paying prices that would shock people from most other nations. So this book, admittedly in hardcover, set me back approximately $60.

The book is an autobiography by a Norwegian psychic and healer. Actually, it is his second autobiography. He has always done his psychic readings and healings for free, so I don’t begrudge him if he gets a dollar from the price. I have heard about him occasionally through the last few years, but what caused me to order the book was a newspaper headline where he was said to chastise the Norwegian Princess who offers to teach people (for a price) to communicate with the dead. “SnÃ¥samannen”, as he’s usually called, said this was impossible and dangerous to try.

The man says that the power comes from God, the Creator, and not from himself. According to those who know him, he has fed himself and his family through ordinary work for all these years (he is now quite old) while healing and helping people on his free time. He is, from what I can see, a fairly mainstream Christian. So this should be pretty edifying literature, or at least mostly harmless.

My work commute is where I do most of my book reading these days. So today I brought the book, and read it for the duration of the trip, approximately 45 min. When I got off the bus, I noticed that my legs were stiff. Actually, my arms were stiff as well, and I felt cold and a little dizzy and sleepy. This continued to varying degrees through the workday. I also had some gut pains, but that is not uncommon. Overall, I have felt half-sick throughout the entire workday and am still not entirely well now that I have come home.

Carl Gustaf Jung used the phrase “synchronicity” about “meaningful coincidences”.  I am looking for a word for the opposite. Not just meaningless coincidences, which many people seem to have lots of, but coincidences that seem opposite to what one would expect.  Because it is a remarkable coincidence indeed to feel like the onset of a bad flu after 45 minutes of reading about a humble healer belonging to (supposedly) one’s own religion. I did not notice anything in the morning as I got up or when I hurried to the bus.

I am not drawing any conclusions from this. Moses specifically forbids taking omens from the things around us, which is what most people use “synchronicity” for. But it is certainly a story I want to write down for the future, if any.

“The Soul After Death”

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The unbearably bright Light of Heaven. This picture is, ironically, from the Happy Science anime The Laws of Eternity. A similar episode is recounted in the book I review, but the feelings the book inspire in me are completely different.

I recently bought the book The Soul After Death by Fr. Seraphim Rose, an Eastern Orthodox cleric. The book is written as a reaction to the spate of Near Death Experiences which reached media a few decades ago. These experiences were generally positive:  People were first confused to see their body from above, but soon found out that they could move about, and then a great Light appeared, filled with love and forgiveness and even sometimes humor, encouraging them to reflect on their life and what was really important to them. Deceased relatives and friends might make a brief appearance, and sometimes short journeys to a (usually pleasant) Elsewhere, before they had to (or chose to) return to their body.

Rose is not impressed. He compares this to the extensive Orthodox lore of after-death, and concludes that the NDEs are at best ignorance, but most likely demonic influence. The ethereal world around us is not positive or neutral, but utterly fallen and teeming with demons, who will masquerade as anything or anyone to convince people to turn their back on Orthodoxy, which alone can save them, and then only if you dedicate yourself to it without reservation for the rest of your life.

I think Fr. Rose has many good points, including some of his main points. People (that would be me) are too superficial and too easily convinced that eternal life is easy to get and Hell is almost unattainable except perhaps by Hitler and the like. The Bible certainly can be read as saying the opposite. And most of the messages from the supposed afterlife are inane and banal. True. I am not a big fan of New Age spirituality myself.  That is not the problem.

The problem is the overwhelming onslaught of darkness that radiates from the pages of the book.  About halfway through, when I frankly gave up, even I was starting to wonder if I have been misled by demons from my youth, if the loving Presence that has encouraged me to look hard at the evil in myself and distance myself from it, to understand and implicitly forgive others, that this Presence that has been essential to my life for decades now must surely be a demon. After all, God’s angels (much less God himself) would not have anything to do with people who are not Orthodox and following the proper Orthodox path of asceticism.

No, I don’t think so.  The effect of this book, whatever its intent, was one of despair, bitterness, doubt and darkness.  I shudder to think of this book falling into the hand of someone suffering from depression.  It projected a vision of a world where God has been defeated by Satan, basically.  Content to get away with a few elite souls, God simply watches passively as demons do whatever they want with pagans and most Christians alike, encouraging the evil and deceiving the good, with only a token resistance from Heaven.

I don’t really think that is what he meant to say. And perhaps the book ends on a more uplifting note. But for me, right now, I can’t go on reading it in good conscience, because I feel it makes it harder for me to love God and my fellow humans.   I don’t want to think of God as some petulant demiurge who sees his creation go haywire and reacts with anger and then resignation as it goes to Hell. Or like a constructor who has built a magnificent house which then catches fire and he stands outside, watching as the house burns down with most of his children still inside. There is something horrifying and twisted about this vision of a world abandoned to insane spirits of the netherworld.  I cannot believe this was how the book was intended, but that was what I took away from it. And I cannot guarantee that other readers will fare better, though I sincerely hope so.

I should probably watch some Happy Science to get back my belief in God and the future.

Online libraries revisited

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It will take its sweet time to restock my bookshelves after getting rid of the worthless stuff. But should I really fill them again? What is the chance that my heirs will want to read “The Challenge of Enlightenment”, “Meditations on the Tarot” or “One Cosmos under God”? Chances are they go on the fire or a landfill eventually.

This entry first appeared in my LiveJournal.

I have to say this Questia thing is somewhat impressive. If they had offered an Android client rather than just iPhone, I would probably subscribe. While it seems to be geared mostly at students and young researchers, there seems to be a lot of good stuff in there.

Of course, what I really hope for is that Google gets permission to do something similar. Millions of books, for free, on every imaginable device. It just might spell the end of the bookstore as we knew it. As it is, I use Google Books along with Amazon.com to scope out books before acquiring them (or not, usually).

But so far, there does not seem to be a “killer app”. You’d think governments at least would want to give their citizens an online Great Library, so as to surge far ahead of all other countries in the world and launch the next Renaissance. But perhaps an enlightened public is the greatest fear of a politician. In any case, leaving it to the market is even better. Imagine the world under Swedish hegemony.

There is also the Baen Free Library, but that is somewhat limited (to a subset of Baen books, naturally) and rather non-academic in nature, to say the least.

Project Gutenberg seems to still be geared toward download rather than online reading. It is one of the oldest attempts at creating a Great Library online. Constrained by its volunteer-based approach.

There is also something called “The Free Library” which has somehow been hiding from me until now. It is ugly as all ugly,with an undocumented and self-defeating interface, but it may still be worth much more than you pay for it, considering that it is free.

Anyone have any others?

Good Endings

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Not all love stories have happy endings, and not all frogs are princes. Well, perhaps deep inside, but it would require divine intervention in some cases!

It has gradually become clearer to me that my JulNoWriMo novel is in fact like a single play-through of a ren-ai game (dating sim or visual novel of romantic nature).

When playing such a game, you get to know a number of imaginary people of the preferred gender, and based on your choices, their relationship with you will rise or fall. At some point you will need to show preference for one of them over the other – and it needs to be realistic in terms of your personal statistics –  in order to get a “good ending”.  Depending on the maturity of the game, the depiction of a good outcome may vary, but that is somewhat beyond today’s lesson.

What I want to achieve is to write a novel that may or may not lead to a “good ending”, but that at least conveys the personalities of the girls so well that the reader in his or her imagination is able to go down the other paths to reach a “good ending” for their favorite girl without compromising her personality. It is a safe bet that I won’t get anywhere near a completion in July. Probably not ever, if I know myself, which I increasingly do.  But there is always a small chance.

One of the most unlikely inspirations for my writing is the book The Laws of Courage by Ryuho Okawa, the would be world savior from Japan. (Or Atlantis, or Venus, depending on your time horizon.) Despite the occasional (well meant?) blasphemy, he is a really interesting person. And he truly writes like a god – more exactly Hermes, the god of speed. A couple years older than me, he has already written over 500 books!  Only about 15 of these are available in English from Amazon.com though. This is the latest of them, though a new one is supposed to be released later this year.

The Laws of Courage is written mostly for the young reader, although there is also a chapter about how to keep the good part of being young – a “hungry” spirit – later in life. Even simpler than some of his other books, it speaks directly to the concerns of young people in the midst of making choices for their lives. As such, it gives me some good idea for my own writing.

His ultimate advice for living life like a roaring fire of courage, is to imagine your death.  What do you want to have achieved when you die? How do you want to be remembered? What kind of person do you want to be when you lay down the workbook of your life? In its naked essence, courage means to be ready to die.

(Needless to say, I don’t have a lot of courage.  Although a couple weeks ago I was lying on my bed, thinking about how the floor of this old house might collapse under the weight of my double bed, and suddenly I realized that unexpectedly I was not afraid of death. I am sure this is not permanent. When I get severely ill, I will probably feel fear again. To some degree I think this is biological. What I no longer felt was the deep conviction that upon leaving this world, I would surely go to Hell.  Maybe I will and have only been deluded by the writings of the Antichrist.  But then again, something has begun to change deep inside me.  I am more consciously thinking of how I can actually be a blessing, rather than how I can rig things so I won’t be punished.)

Perhaps the nature of love, even divine love, is  to go down the path to the Good Ending for the other person. Which, with pleasant irony, is the one that does not end.

Attachment and love songs

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Picture from last summer.  It’s the same sun, though.

Ryuho Okawa repeatedly writes about the danger of attachment. (Of the mind, not in e-mail. Perhaps I should write about that one day…)

Lately I have noticed that I am starting to look forward to reading his books in the morning. (Commute is my primary reading time.) So, starting last Friday, I am switching to Huston Smith for a while. I have had his autobiography for weeks or more now without getting started on it.

After I wrote this, the voices in my head started playing a song by Chris de Burgh, that starts like this:
“There is something on my mind
And I’m losing concentration…”
Checking. It is When I think of you from the album Quiet Revolution. It is basically a love song on behalf of the mentally challenged or extremely inexperienced. Relax, I don’t love Okawa that way! But the song is indeed a hilarious example of attachment. I must commend my invisible friend subconscious for excellent taste in entertainment. Of course, it is roughly the same taste as me, since it is me in a sense. Or the other way around.  Anyway, you can listen to it on YouTube or from my record collection while thinking “this is your brain on attachments”. In that perspective it is quite enlightening.

For contrast, the same CD has a much more mature love song, which is a pretty good example of  “love that gives”.  Love that gives is not an attachment. In the Greek Bible, there were 3 words for love, in Japanese there are two, so it is a local and temporary problem that we are mixing up our loves.  If we think of them as “love that gives” vs “love that takes”, it is pretty easy to tell them apart.  If you listen to it on YouTube or from my record collection while thinking “this is your brain on real love”, it should make sense.

“And if you’re crying inside, remember that I will be here;
and like the same sun that’s rising on the valley with the dawn
I will walk with your shadow and keep you warm;
and like the same moon that’s shining through my window here tonight
I will watch in your darkness and bring you safely to the morning light.”

See how the focus has shifted from “me, me, me” to “you”.  In the first song, it is the “I” who is on the receiving end, who is the subject and the center of attention.  But in the second song, the “I” has become an object, or more exactly a servant, a source of love, hope, strength and courage. And even a love that transcends distance and time itself.  This is what we seek to become.  Light willing.

Review: “Tips to Find Happiness”

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Suitable illustration picture from the animated movie “The Laws of Eternity”, also by Ryuho Okawa. Florence Nightingale points out that it’s up to us to become the force of love. This book applies this to the family, for those who have that.

I already finished reading through the book “Tips to Find Happiness” by Ryuho Okawa. It is fairly short, and quite a page turner, so it did not take me long to finish it.

Like several of his books, this one is mostly down to earth. There is no way to guess from the book itself that the author is worshiped as a living Buddha and divine savior of all mankind by thousands of Japanese. Sure, he does recommend his own books and recordings of his lectures to help drive away negative spiritual influences, but then again he hardly consider these “stray spirits” a worthy adversary: He compares them to roaches. Clean up your soul and keep it bright, and they won’t appear.

Most of the book consists of practical advice in different situations of life, with focus on the family. It is clear that Master Okawa favors traditional gender roles, which are still common in Japan. Here in Scandinavia a woman is just as likely to work outside the home if her husband is rich as if he is poor, whereas in Japan it seems to still be a bit of a shame to need your wife to work to pay the bills. In any case, workplace stress is seen as a common reason for disturbances in the family, and the home is seen as a place to unwind in a constructive manner. Parents are encouraged to spend time with their children, and spouses to be accepting of each other’s faults and rather work on their own.

There are also other themes, like how to live with elderly relatives, and how elderly relatives should live out their life. An intriguing advice (also found in another of his English books) is to assume a lifespan of 120 years. If you are called home before that, so be it, but it would be a shame to end up finishing your life while still alive and have to just sit down and die for lack of reason to live.

(Master Okawa does not mention this, but life expectancy in the developed world is still increasing with approximately 5 hours a day. Yes, despite getting fatter, we are still living longer. So it is not entirely impossible that Japanese in particular, already a long-lived people, may actually live to see 120. A few people already do. I guess it would suck to spend the last 40 of those just tossing and turning in bed! But most old people die quickly when they no longer have anything to live for. This may well be a mercy.)

Overall, the small book, based on questions from his readers, is an easy read and quite practical. It will appeal only to conservatives and preferably those at least a bit religious though. I cannot imagine a liberal feeling happy about reading this book.

There is some reincarnation stuff, about how the spirits of future children match up with their parents and such. This makes up only a small part of the book though, and Christian readers can safely ignore this. Of course, Christianity also includes some degree of reincarnation (of the spirit, not the soul) but it is a fringe part of the religion and most Christians barely even know about it. Most of the rest of the book should be familiar to the western reader though.

Infinite Prosperity

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Screenshot from the anime “The Laws of Eternity”, also by Ryuho Okawa. The protagonists visits the angelic realm in heaven and is surprised to find a number of famous Japanese industrialists there. Because creating prosperity for others is the will of the Light / God / Buddha. Just in case this wasn’t obvious, he also wrote a book about it.

Infinite prosperity — wouldn’t that be nice around now? What with the move and the frozen water pipes and all. But I am talking about the book I ordered from Amazon.co.UK before Xmas and which I found in my mailbox when I came home late yesterday. Another book by Ryuho Okawa, its full title is The Philosophy of Progress – Higher Thinking for Developing Infinite Prosperity. Both Okawa himself and the publisher inform us that the book will need to be read several times, but what don’t you do for infinite prosperity. Or even for higher thinking, I suppose. Your enthusiasm about thinking may vary. Then again, so may your prosperity.

The book is, as usual, made from several sections that originated as speeches and were later adapted to written form. They vary in tone, more than usual, with one being very simple, as if aimed at children or people with well below the IQ of the average Japanese. Okawa strives to be easy to understand, but this was unusual even for him. Anyway, the different speeches help see things from slightly different angles, which should be helpful.

This is not a New Age book about “attracting” wealth, like the popular understanding of “The Secret” and “Think and grow rich”. The idea of attracting wealth is an abomination to Okawa, as it is to any right-thinking person. On the contrary, the purpose is to CREATE prosperity, so that it flows out from you, not toward you.

In contrast to the right-thinking person, who wants to create prosperity and let it flow out to others, I sometimes talk about “left-thinking” people, who want to draw in prosperity from other people and consume it. This is of course a kick in the shin to socialism, which by historical accident has become associated with the left hand. But it actually goes much further back, to the Old Testament, where Ecclesiastes says that “The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.” (Ecclesiastes 10:2) The idea that we should all divide the cake and not bother about baking it is as foolish as they come. But this is not merely, or even mainly, a political problem.

For instance, you may feel that someone does not give you the respect you expected. A left-thinking person will say, out loud or in their mind: “You better respect me!” They may then go on to treat the other person with disrespect and even encourage others to do the same, to restore the balance. But a right-thinking person will first jump to another conclusion: “Perhaps that person sees some flaw in me that I have overlooked, or perhaps I have just not done enough to merit their respect. I have to do better.” It may of course be that the other person lacks respect and gratitude in general, but unless you are their parent, this is not something you can fix directly. And it could certainly also happen that you just haven’t done anything particularly impressive. (I know this is generally the case for me, but then I don’t expect much above bare civility either.)

Now in all fairness Okawa is mainly a spiritual teacher, and so the prosperity he talks about is mainly spiritual. But he certainly isn’t opposed to a little cash for the true believers. He does discuss Jesus’ warning about rich people, camels and needle eyes. Much like me, Okawa believes the problem was attachment to material things, rather than the things themselves. (Not unexpected, since Okawa claims to be the Buddha reborn and the Buddha was very much about getting rid of attachment.) Unlike me though, Okawa is fairly optimistic about people having lots of money without getting attached to it. That may be doable for someone who vividly remembers being king of Atlantis and stuff like that. But for us commoners, it is hard to not get carried away by riches. I would not be so sanguine about it. I’m more with Jesus on this one. Big surprise, eh?

Okawa does make the valid point that these days, if you go the route of poverty you will be tempted by communism. Jesus presumably did not have that dilemma. Also, according to Okawa, it would be a problem if only bad people got rich and not good people, because the bad people would have way more power compared to their numbers, and there is plenty enough of bad people in power as is. My problem with this is the good people who turn to bad people when they get rich, because they fall in love with the power and prestige and forget their original purpose in life. I tend to hold the attitude of Proverbs 30: Give me neither poverty nor riches, “Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD ?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.” Of course, “not poverty” today is a bit different from 3000 years ago…

Luckily Okawa goes on to focus in great detail on the purpose of progress in this world. It is not to hoard stuff for ourselves, but to expand our mission of causing as much happiness as possible in this world while we are here. And financial progress is only one contribution to that, not the goal. For instance, a company cannot be said to truly make progress if the employees don’t feel joy about working there. A company should be run in such a way that the happiness of the employees and business associates increases over time. The company should also contribute to society through taxes. Okawa foretells continued decline for America as long as the nation continues to see tax evasion as an admirable activity.

(As leader for the Happiness Realization Party, Okawa favors drastic tax cuts in Japan. What he refers to in his book is presumably not having as high taxes as possible, but being as honest as possible and paying the taxes intended by the society you live in.)

The book is quite multifaceted, as are his books in general. One of the unsuspected jewels appears while he discusses the hells relevant to greedy people, the Hell of Hungry Spirits and the Hell of Strife. While there anyway, he stops by the Hell of Lust for a paragraph or two. I think I will write about that in a separate entry, if ever.

Anyway, to not get completely lost in the details: Prosperity is not about having lots of money. That’s incidental, although people who know the Truth cannot possibly become destitute. True prosperity is about manifesting an ever increasing amount of happiness: First in your own life, and as soon as practically possible to begin spreading this happiness to people around you, in ever wider circles, until the whole world is brightly lit with hope and joy.

Okawa should know what he speaks of in this regard. From being a fairly ordinary young man he has brought forth an organization that is dedicated to creating utopia through love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress. Millions of people have bought at least some of his books, and if they enjoyed them as much as I do, that is a good amount of happiness right there.  And take my word for it, it is not easy to write in a way that fills people with hope and strength of will. I’m still working on it though!

As I said when I ordered the book: “When I have infinite prosperity, I’ll be sure to share it with my friends.” Work in progress!