In elite schools, colleges and universities, all over the world, bright young men and women study hard, sometimes very, very hard to get their degrees. Their parents are proud of them. Then they will pick a career in the arms industry, banking, a multinational corporation, the media industry or a government, and they will never ever question what they are doing. They are like robots. They will dress well, behave well and they will not worry about if their work is ethically defendable or not. They will construct the nuclear arms, the land mines, the cluster bombs and the splinter bombs. They will do the scientific research to figure out which weapons have the best effect. They will sign the contracts with the sweatshops in Asia and figure out the strategies to make sure that their particular company will not be hold responsible if criticism about child labor happen to pop up. They will plan the wars, the destabilization schemes and create the economic pressures on the poor to make them work harder. Often they hide what they are doing behind a mask of Christianity. They are the successful ones and they will not change.

A radical change is much needed here on this planet, a new way of living, an awakening. It is not warmth, joy and love that direct the actions of the elite. But they will not change and they will not wake up from their hypnotic trance. I can't wake them up. I can't change the way they look at life, nobody can change them. I can't even change myself. Tell me, how shall I deal with thoughts like this?

Science of today tells us that all matter was formed out of nothing some 15 billion years ago. And then life emerged out of the whirling dust and sand and gravel 12 billion years later.

As I walk across the golf course on my way to work in the crisp early morning, I feel I ought to be amazed. The sky, the heavy rain clouds at the horizon, the trees, my feet that keep on walking by themselves, my brain, my thoughts, my eyes and ears, isn’t everything unreal? No, everything is just as always. The swallows have left now. They must have been gone for some time now. I’m on my way to work and I’m in a hurry.

Life is nothing to be excited about. My heart is nothing but an ordinary little pump, my eyes are just little cameras and my ears are simply microphones. The brain is just a brain. Our planet is just an ordinary little planet. The universe is just an universe. What's so fantastic about a pair of feet?

There are many conspiracy theories in circulation on who was plotting the 9.11 disaster. Some people think that CIA knew all about the attack, but intentionally let the terrorists pull it through. It was not incompetence and negligence that made the attac possible. This was because they wanted to create an excuse to invade Iraq and to launch the war on terror to strengthen the American global dominance and the plan for a new world order.
Others think that Mossad in Israel planed it because they wanted a war to get rid of Saddam; or maybe the Skulls and bones or the Freemasons or PNAC or the Devil himself had a finger in the pie.

The conspiracy theories flourish because the official story doesn't hold water. Of course we create theories when we don’t know what's going on. This is one of the most important functions of the mind. We mass produce theories and then we form groups in favor of the different beliefs. And then we fight each other.

This is why we have so many different religions. We don’t know what is going on. We don’t know what life is about, really. We don’t know where we are coming from, who we are and where we are going. There is so little we know for sure. The scientists produce stark proofs and evidences that ten years later are proved to be wrong. We are all blind trying to lead the blind.

I have found a new extremely interesting book again: "The happiness trap", by Russ Harris. I feel that I'm not completely off track while I read it. This is what he says, filtered through my colored glasses:

Don’t try to get rid of your thoughts and beliefs, and don't try to change them. It won't work.

A belief is made of thoughts, so we can’t get rid of our beliefs because we can’t find a way to stop thinking. Not even the Zen-monks can free themselves from thinking.

Some beliefs are quite useful, though, and some are completely useless.

But how do we know if a belief is useful or not? Well, If you believe, for example, that you will wake up also tomorrow and that you will have your salary in the end of this month, it is useful thoughts. But you can sometimes clearly see that a belief or a thought is totally useless, how do you get rid of such thoughts or how do you change them? This is the point, you can’t; You will never get rid of your thoughts and you will never be able to change them, no matter how hard you try, they are involuntary. The only thing you can do is to see them for what they are, just thoughts. This is what I understand now, again. Thoughts are just thoughts, imaginations, totally out of my control, like dreams.

No one can make you change your mind. If you truly believe, deep in your heart, that the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese, or if you believe that all the poor people in the world are poor just because they haven’t read enough self-help books on how to get rich with self affirmations, or if you believe that you are an ugly old fool, whatever crazy idea that get stuck in your head, it is not the truth, it is your thoughts. No one can change you, not even you. None of the many mind changing methods has proved to be effective in the long run. And there is no way to be completely sure if a belief is useful or not. But it is possible to understand, for those who are not too dense, that all these beliefs are just thoughts, not different from all the other thoughts in our heads.

What can I do, if you truly believe that war is good and the law of the jungle still applies, or if you believe that you are Napoleon? I can’t change your beliefs because I can’t even change my own. But a growing number of people begin to understand now, that thoughts are just thoughts and that beliefs are just beliefs. If a crazy thought fly through my head, so what? It’s just a crazy thought. All sorts of crazy thoughts fly through my head, day and night. When I wake up after a weird dream I think: “ Oh, that was a weird dream” But I don’t believe that I actually met those talking cats, or whatever. It was just a dream.

This is a kind of awakening. I am right here, right now, writing down thoughts on my computer. The kids outside my window create an incredible racket. The sun is shining. It is a wonderful day here today.

This is from Russ Harris book `The happiness trap´:

The observing self is fundamentally different from the thinking self. The observing self is aware, but does not think; it is the part of you that is responsible for focus, attention, and awareness. While it can observe or pay attention to your thoughts, it can’t produce them. Whereas the thinking self thinks about your experience, the observing self registers your experience directly.
For example, if you are playing tennis and you are truly focused, then your attention is riveted on that ball coming toward you. This is your observing self at work. You are not thinking about the ball; you are observing it.
Now suppose thoughts start popping into your head like,” I hope my grip is correct”, “I’d better make a good hit,” or Wow, that ball is moving fast!” That is your thinking self at work.

Although we understand words as “awareness,” “focus,” and “attention,” most of us in the western world have little or no concept of the observing self. As a result, there is no word for it in the English language. We only have the word “mind” which is generally used to denote both the thinking self and the observing self, without distinguishing between the two.

When we look at life we will see different sceneries depending on were we have our view point. The north side of a mountain can look completely different than the south side.

Suppose you’re well-off, with a nice husband, great kids and a nice job, but you feel very miserable and unhappy with your life anyway; maybe you say to yourself: `I have everything I want but I’m so unhappy that I almost want to kill myself´. Suppose you wake up from that depression, maybe with help from a psychologist, from a spiritual counselor or maybe it happens spontaneously, by grace. You will now probably see that you were fooling yourself before and how your mind tricked you. (It was just dark thoughts but you believed they where the truth.) And maybe you will now have the feeling that you have woken up from a bad dream.

If you are very poor, on the other hand, and work 12 hours a day, six days a week, picking grapefruits or bananas, but still have serious difficulties to feed your kids, so that some rich shareholders in a big fruit company can get richer, then all talk of waking up from illusions and the necessity of not taking thought's seriously doesn’t mean much. Other things than self deception and thoughts will be much more important. To wake up from that nightmare you probably have to win money on a lottery ticket.

To wake up doesn't mean the same thing to all people. We have philosophies for the rich and philosophies for the poor, religions for the rich and religions for the poor. Rich people will read the Bible with rich people’s glasses. “To those who have, more shall be given” will be taken literally. And poor people will find that “many of the last shall be the first". In India they have also teachings and gurus for different tastes, slow-witted gurus for slow-witted people, smarter gurus for smarter people and crazy gurus for crazy people. But none of them have the whole truth. Those who claims to know it all, belongs to the slow-witted kind.

Can you endorse this: Religions have caused and are causing endless miseries and evils in this world?
(For example, the inquisition trials and torture chambers, the witch hunts, the suppression of women and children, the religious wars, the Crusades, Catholics against Protestants Jews against Arabs, Shia Muslims against Sunni Muslims, the Islamist terrorism...)

Do you agree with, that also non-religious belief systems have caused and are causing endless miseries and evils in this world? To abandon religion was obviously not enough.
(The Gulag, the Killing fields, the Holocaust, nationalism, racism, neo-Darwinism, the horrendous exploitation of fellow men, women, children and the whole planet in the name of freedom and democracy…)

Are you aware of the fact that your ideas about yourself and the way you look at life can create endless problems to you, and not only to you, but also to people near to you?
(I am completely useless. I’m ugly. There is not much point with anything. I don’t want to do anything. The only thing I care for is alcohol. Or: The only thing that counts is money. My career comes first. One has to fight like hell for a room at the top. One must not fail. Losers can go and fuck themselves. I have to have it my way because I know that I'm right. I’m entitled to this because I‘m from a rich family…)

However, many religious and superstitious people are not causing miseries and evil, on the contrary, many of them are good people. Many communists were really fighting for a just society without poverty, bondage and exploitation. And many neurotics with a low self esteem are also good people who do the best they can with the potty horses they have to ride.

I have a work mate who voted for the extreme right. When I asked her why, she said: “Because I don’t like Arabs.” She didn’t know anything about the political program she had voted for, because she doesn’t care a bit about politics, but she is nevertheless an easy going person, always truly enthusiastic and happy. Isn’t that quite common? Many people vote without any idea of what they vote for. I have friends that have totally inconsistent ideas but who are very pleasant to hang out with. I have friends who believe in astrology but that don’t make them evil. And I know of from my, way back, two unhappy years in scientific laboratories, highly rational and well informed people who were complete assholes.

So, when do ignorance, superstition and misapprehensions become evil? I don’t know. But I know that it is possible to relinquish religion, political ideologies and ideas about oneself and life, if we want to. Religious and ideological beliefs are not necessary for anything but holding a group together and we don’t need to belong to mad groups anymore, if we don’t want to. If you desperately need a group to belong to, no matter what crazy beliefs they cherish, because you are so afraid to be alone, then that is your problem. (As long as you leave me alone.) And we don’t have to admire or resent other people, or ourselves, if we don’t want to. Human beings have since the dawn of history been superstitious, ignorant and cruel, but we can, nevertheless, step out of that madness if we want to. It is not until recently we have begun to understand that it is actually possible to break the spell. I don't have to be a racist because my family and workmates are. There is no need for a belief system to make pancakes. You don't have to become an atheist to mend a bicycle. There is no need for scientific theories or religious mythologies about how the universe was formed to live here and now with whatever is under ones nose. You don't have to become successful, slim, radiating, wonderful or positive. You don't have to become anything. You don't have to think positive thoughts all the time. You are completely free to feel whatever you feel, think whatever you think, here in this moment. Get rid of your self improvement books. Get rid of your dreams of self improvement.

Are there any benefits with waking up? Isn’t it often much more pleasant to be pleasantly deluded? Maybe it is so. Maybe it is more pleasant to be asleep or half asleep. Maybe it is more pleasant to be drunk or drugged. Maybe it is better with comforting beliefs and ignorance of ones foolishness. Some people might even have to kill them self if their illusions are taken away. What I’m saying is that it is possible to wake up and sober up and that this insight is fairly new to us. We are like recently discharged long term prisoners or mental patients. We are bewildered and don’t know exactly what to do.

If we are borne with a free will, we have certainly not had many opportunities in our history to exercise it. The majority has always been slaves in one way or the other and slaves have no use for a free will. And we have always been sent to war.

This is from Richard Dawkins book, The God delusion: “From the high command’s point of view it would be madness to allow each individual soldier discretion over whether or not to obey orders. Nations whose infantrymen act on their own initiative rather than following orders will tend to loose wars. From the nation’s point of view, this remains a good rule of thumb even if it sometimes leads to individual disaster. Soldiers are drilled to become as much like automata, or computers, as possible.”

“Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses. For excellent reasons related to Darwinian survival, child brains need to trust parents, and elders whom parents tell them to trust. An automatic consequence is that the truster has no way of distinguishing good advice from bad. The child cannot know that `Don’t paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo’ is good advice but `You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail´ is at best a waste of time and goats.”


To sustain yourself or a family you almost always have to have a job, but only a lucky few have a job they love. Often you have to accept what is offered. And as employed you have to adjust to the policies and the atmosphere of the workplace. You have to follow orders. This can sometimes be a horrible experience. You are often forced to pretend that you are someone else. As a salesman you have to be positive, charming, competitive and result orientated. If you don't want to play that salesman game, if you have had enough of classes in positive thinking, team building, goal setting and neuro linguistic programming techniques to improve yourself and your performance, you have to look for another job. As a laborer of any kind you have to be strong and able to work hard without asking too many questions. If you don’t want to adjust to or feel like taking orders from sometimes complete idiots, you have to set up a business of your own, but you will still have to adjust to the rules of the market. To be free to do what you want, you have to be rich enough. For us who have to go to a job we don't love to make a living the free will is limited. It can often only be exercised at vacations and at times off duty. But something is better than nothing, isn’t it? The big risk is that when you are off duty you are not aware of it. You can become like an actor in a play that comes home at night, still in your Hamlet costume, still believing you are prince Hamlet.

We are often forced to act and play games to satisfy relatives, workmates or bosses. Many people certainly don't want to hear that their beliefs are nothing but imaginations; often, if we happen to be around touchy and quick tempered people, we have to learn how to keep things to ourselves, but we don’t have to sell our soul. It is possible to wake up. It is possible to break the spell. We are not the persons we think we are. The world is not as we think it is. It is possible to live without all these crazy ideas about everything. Often we have to put our lamp under a bushel, but we don’t have to put out the light. It is this that is new. Mankind is in the beginning of the disenchantment process.

Ramanand

These events took place in 1983, I think, and this is my recollection of them. I was staying in Rishikesh in India when I met Ramanand as I was walking to Muni-Ki-Reti, a small town some two kilometers outside Rishikesh.

Ramanand was an unhappy and disillusioned yogi. He had once been an engineer and his specialty had been air-conditioning and ventilation, but he had left his career to become a sanyassin, a monk. For years he wandered about looking for the truth. He came from Tamil Nadu in the south but had somehow ended up here in the north. For some years he had been a meditation teacher in Maharishi Mahesh’s ashram but had got tired of the place and left it. For some time back he had stayed in the Mangal nath ashram, which wasn’t an ashram really, but a very low class guest house. He helped the owner to bring guests to the place and had a room there for free as payment. Anyway, he asked me if I needed a place to stay and I said yes, so I moved to the Mangal nath ashram.

For months we discussed life, often at night in a night open tea shop for truck drivers in Rishikesh, smoking Panama cigarettes and drinking tea in the light of kerosene lamps. When we went home we always had a pack of growling wild dogs after us.

One late afternoon we visited some other people who stayed in another ashram on the other side of the river Ganges. This was a bigger place, near to the Maharishi Mahesh ashram but I can’t think of its name. I remember that they had a hospital for cows there, an old cows home. This place was more like a real ashram but it also served as a kind of hotel. You didn’t have to pay rent for a room there but you where expected to pay a donation. I think the donation fee was 10 rupees a day.

One of the guests was a Canadian woman but I can’t remember her name, which is very unfortunate because it would have been so interesting to get in touch with her to confirm what happened there. She was Armenian by birth, had lived in Egypt for many years, but had eventually moved to Montreal, I think, and she worked there as an art teacher in an art college. She was a big, very loud and intense kind of woman. She wore brown corduroy pants and a dark blue sweater, and she had very bad hearing. Previously this day she had lost her hearing aid and she was very upset about it. She couldn’t hear almost anything.

We were sitting there, a bunch of people, on the porch outside one of the “rented” rooms, discussing things and drinking tea. The room was a small studio really, a room with an adjoining kitchen and a bathroom. I can’t recall any of the other people but we must have been six or seven all together. They had just finished their meal when Ramanand and I came. When Ramanand learned about the missing hearing aid he said that he would see what he could do about it. So he went into his Kali meditation, as he called it. This meditation began with an hour or so of what looked like just “normal” meditation, a yogi sitting there with eyes closed in a lotus position. We soon lost interest in him and went on with our discussion about this and that. But after some time he gave up an incredible howl and fell down looking dead. What the hell was going on? The managers of the ashram came running, wondering what we where doing. When they saw Ramanand lying there on the floor they became as alarmed as we were. He was clearly dead. They couldn’t hear any heartbeats and didn’t know what to do. So they carried him to their office and tried to wake him up. They didn’t have any success with that and Ramanand was just lying there on the floor when he suddenly sat up and shouted from the top of his lungs:” GO TO THE BATHROOM! GO TO THE BATHROOM! GO TO THE BATHROOM!” And then he fell down again, but now he wasn’t “dead”. He was breathing and fast asleep.

When we went back to the studio and went in to the bathroom the hearing aid was there on the floor. The concrete floor was completely dry but the hearing aid was wet and probably ruined.

Isn’t all this very strange? We had been coming and going to the kitchen and the bathroom all evening without noticing any hearing aid there on the floor.

When Ramanand woke up in the morning he had absolutely no idea about what had happened. He didn’t remember anything, but he was very happy and a little bit proud when we informed him.

These events took place 25 years ago. As I write about it now I realize how poor my memory is. Some parts I can remember clearly, some parts I have faint memories about but much of it is completely hidden in a haze. It makes me think of the Gospels. Mark,the oldest of the Gospels, is written more than forty years after Jesus´ death. How much of these stories are real memories and how much are later constructions?

It would be very interesting to get in touch with some of the people who were there and who can help to confirm this, and maybe fill in where my memory is failing, but how can I find them? I don’t even remember their names. And where Ramanand is I have no idea. He left Rishikesh many years ago.

Ramanand was very adept at meditation but he wasn’t very happy with life. To conjure up hearing aids for tourists wasn’t enough for him. And though he loved the stories about the God Krishna he was very displeased with Hinduism, yoga, and the caste system that permeated it all. The Vedanta philosophy didn’t appeal to him. He used the expression: mental speculation. It was all mental speculations, not simply speculations. And to find happiness or bliss wasn’t enough either. Happiness could just be another self deception. Many people in Germany, for example, became incredibly happy when Hitler came to power in the early thirties. They had finally found a meaning and a direction to their previous empty hand to mouth existence.

I also learned many other expressions from him, for example: the false ego. A false ego implies a true ego, but with the true ego he didn't mean the Atman, he simply meant the true ego,the one you are when you are not lost in some crazy idea about life. Atman is the eternal soul. The body, the mind and indeed the whole world is but an illusion or a misperception, only Atman is eternal and real. This concept along with the karma theories and the caste system has caused endless miseries in India. Today India experiences an incredible economic boom. But the rich middle class hesitate to spend money on the poor. They just want to spend enough to ease their bad conscience and to take the edge off the arguments of those that criticize all the injustices. UNICEF has recently criticized India for its reluctance to build a proper health care system for the poor. India has a much higher rate of child death than both Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. And one third of the women in India are malnourished which leads to that they give birth to malnourished children, which makes them much more susceptible to all kinds of painful diseases. So what? This world is but an illusion and if someone suffers it is because of the bad deeds he or she did in a previous life time. In this way the Indian philosophies of life cause a lot of misery.

And I also learned from him this, for me, very meaningful and interesting expression: Yoga connection. With this expression he didn’t mean how to connect oneself to the greater source. He meant a special kind of synchronicity, a mysterious principle which makes it possible for people, who need to meet and who are supposed to meet, to find each other.