Once we have our biological needs covered, the primate mind becomes obsessed with status in the pack and making grand plans for securing and improving that status. It will think up elaborate scenarios in the future, or obsess over unresolved issues of the past. This may have made perfect sense 40 000 years ago when the current mindset was born in the death throes of the Ice Age. Life was nasty, brutish and short. You had to secure the best possible mate and then compete fiercely for the few available resources if your offspring were to survive. We are the descendants of those survivors. It is written in our blood and bones to act in this way - but we are no longer huddling in a gorge near the glacier. Our challenges today are completely different. All we need to do is look around and see. The taxman is not a cave lion, so the adrenaline rush of anger is only going to give you a heart attack, not save your children. The winter is not going to come with no food, so there is no reason to double your body mass while there is still food on the table. And for us poor males: The chances of building a harem are quite slim (not to mentione that succeeding would probably be quite unpleasant with today's hard-nosed women), so it is pointless to try to impress every woman in sight and try to intimidate possible rivals.

The Ice-Age ego was a big step up from all that existed before, and it has benefited from many upgrades and patches, but it really is ripe for replacement.

A while ago I wrote for myself a piece of how a youngs person near the middle of the century would look back at our time. It was surprisingly fun, and even my English was different. One of the most interesting concepts, which I had never heard of before, was "Innerways". To the imaginary future person, it was a very real and everyday concept.  From the way he used it, I got the impression that it was like the spiritual practices of the world religions, but with the mythic context taken away and set aside as optional, only the techniques and processes being taught as a mandatory part of public education.

Fast forward to today, when for the first time in my life I find a webpage (http://love-or-money.com/literature/innerways.htm) that actually uses the word "innerways" and explains the concept. It is a bit different from the way my imaginary future person used it, the webpage is more complicated, but recognizable.  It is mildly disturbing (but not unusual to me)  to find such a connection. Causality reversed:  If I had not used the world "innerways", I would not later have googled it and found out that it existed.

I know I have never seen it before, because it is in the middle of my interests and I would have squeed over it, bookmarked it, thought about it and written about it.  Actually I'm doing that right now.

It should go without saying that as a Christian, I am not happy about the choice of name, seeing how it represents a) a polytheist "goddess" and b) Earth.  A Christian is mindful of belonging to not only the Earth but Heaven above all, and our materialist age could need more Heaven and less Earth as far as I am concerned.  We also seek a more unified approach to the divine than that of polytheism.  While I have no doubt that many polytheists of old were every bit as pious as I am, or more, the division of the Divine into many gods and goddesses represent a cracked mirror of the soul rather than a true division of the Godhead.

So, I am saddened by the name change.  But I have made a principle of not attributing to evil that which can be explained by stupidity or even ignorance, as the Lord Jesus himself showed us when he prayed: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."  In truth, none of us is always mindful, and all of us can wake up more in the future.

 

In fact, I have been thinking way too much. When I was young, I was quite proud of my thinking. I felt that the highest aspiration for a human must be to think as much as possible. But eventually, over a couple more decades, I realized that thinking and feeling both cloud the mind, only in different ways. They are both unavoidable, even necessary, but they get between us and the real world. If we whirl up too many of them at once, they can really make it hard to see clearly.

I call myself a "conscientious observer". This is a wordplay, but a deeply serious one, for it is my current aspiration. But it is hard. When we observe, the mind is eager to whirl up theories based on a few data points, even in those cases where we don't need to act right away. This is the nature of the mind, and rightly so, for there are times when time is essential. If a tiger attacks you, quietly observing for as long as possible is likely to remove you from the gene pool, therefore we descend from the hasty men. But this haste is not productive when observing the national economy, or even a budding human relationship. It is certainly not productive when observing our own inner life.

I have found that when we observe for a long enough time, answers often give themselves with no need for thinking. I suppose it is a form of thinking, it certainly requires a brain, but it is fundamentally different from logic. It is a kind of intuition. Like watching someone else laying a jigsaw puzzle. At some point the picture becomes impossible not to see. But it is possible if I am lost in thought.

Sometimes I see people in the main street who are clearly lost in thought (or possibly feeling). They are so unaware of their surroundings that they collide with other people or (more rarely) even with immobile objects. Actually walking into lightpoles is very rare, but bumping into things happens. The disturbing part is that most of these people probably have a car as well. Driving while thinking is like driving drunk or on drugs, except you can sober up faster. By the time you sober up, however, someone could be dead.

The ability to return to the here and now at will is a great boon, and I intend to keep practicing it. To not think because you are stupid is no great achievement and not very useful. But when the intelligent refrain from thinking too much, they can observe much, and
this leads to wisdom.

Yes, even I participate in the "creative stampede" of the National Novel Writing Month. It intrigues me as an experiment:  If morphic fields really work as proposed, it should get steadily easier for ordinary people to write novels for each passing year, as the growing horde of novelists clear the brush.  So far this seems to work according to theory. (It has gone on for some years already, and it keeps growing.)

As for me, I write a novel set in a world where there is less distance between matter and spirit than here (or at least than is generally supposed to be here, some of you might take exception). In that other world, a kind of holy aura simply called "the Light" is available to all who utterly desist from lies and deceit in word or deed, and who sincerely repent and renounce all their lies of the past.  They begin to channel the power that "reveals, warns, protects and heals", and by blessing people, animals, plants and objects relentlessly over a long time, their ability to channel the Light slowly increases to miraculous levels.  This year's novel is the second in a series about a young man of humble origins and ordinary wits, who has chosen the path of a Lightwielder.

In "Moonlit Path", our hero travels across the continent together with a young woman. A new focus in this book is on the relationship between the sexes when you are physically unable to lie.  It is family-friendly and written in a simple language, but it is not a children's book.  And of course, the characters may still have some surprises for me...

All spiritual paths converge before the bridge of Quiet. Whether you faithfully attend mass or sanctify the Sabbath, whether your meditate each morning or kneel in prayer five times a day, whether you count your rosaries or chant the holy names, it must lead you to quiet. A quiet that is so strong that eventually you will recognize it in the middle of chaos, the way you easily pick out the voice of a loved one even in a crowded room. This is where the bridge begins that takes us from being another well-meaning human to eventually becoming spiritual.

As long as there is fluttering of wings within our chest, we will necessarily be brought out of balance, at a time not of our choosing.  From the restless mind come unintended thoughts, words and actions. This cannot be avoided.

Staale is quite right in his description of the state of religion here in Norway. It is probably impossible to imagine for most Americans how different the religious terrain here is. Atheism is the norm. Old-school Christianity is almost extinct ... it is mostly found among the elderly, and they are dying off fast now. Among young people, only around one in ten is a Christian.  These are mostly absorbed into the Green vMeme; if anything, Green here has a fairly strong Christian flavor. Sharing wealth, helping the unfortunate, showing respect for the marginalized... all this is considered typical modern "Christian-Humanist" values.  The remnants of the Blue vMeme are mocked and vilified as a parody of Christianity obsessed with sex, preferably gay sex.

A prevailing idea is that you don't need to be Christian to hold Christian values. Actually, it is widely considered a bit weird and stupid to believe in Christian dogma, while the "Christian values" are considered valuable and universal. Christianity, like the pagan Asatru that preceded it, is considered a part of our past, from which we salvage the valuable parts and quietly bury the rest.

Despite the breakdown of Bue religion, Norway is still painfully ethnocentric. Probably less so than most other nations, but that does not say much. Media still report as if a Norwegian life is worth a thousand African ones. Only a small intellectual crust are aware of international trends in thought, politics or economy before the waves reach our shores and change our lives.

Religion is simply not as important to common people as most Americans think. Perhaps it really is mostly of interest to the very stupid and the very smart, as Robert Godwin sometimes says.

This morning I dreamed that I returned to the apartment where I lived before. And it had grown, so much that the corner where the bath had been, was now room for a whole apartment.  I could see the rest of my old apartment, still empty, stretching away into the distance.

In real life we cannot return to old homes and find that they have grown much larger. But we can return to old truths and find that they have grown much larger. Or perhaps this only happens when we grow smaller?

To learn from our mistakes is good, to learn from the mistakes of others is better. But who are the few who learn even from success, so that the next time they not only succeed again, but do it better?

It may sound like a good thing, to be on the cutting edge of consciousness. Not so. Oh, it is an honor of sorts, exciting, even intoxicating. But it is an incredible amount of hard work. And it is dangerous. To put it bluntly, it should never be attempted by anyone with a family history of psychosis, even if they feel fine themselves at the start. The problem is the lack of "support lines" with the larger society. This has two drawbacks:  You don't get feedback from people who see things differenly (or rather their views no longer matter, them being so primitive). And they don't "get" you either. Suddenly you are no longer the cutting edge, but an iron filing whirling toward the magnetic attraction of the "Omega point", while the sword is left behind unmoving and unmoved.

What is sorely needed are those who bridge or bind, those who can move the world just an inch forward rather than leave it behind. But who can carry the weight of the world? Mainstream religion had saints or bodhisattvas, who stood up for the world in the face of the blinding light of the Divine. But who today is willing to go back and wear chains to pull on the world, when they could soar away unbound?