When a Thought Ceases to be Believable to You, You should Cease to Think It.

And whatever you do believe, you should also be able to think.

Eckhart Tolle - really Ulrich Tolle, admirer or of Meister Eckhart and honouring him having changed his name to Eckhart Tolle - was brought to my attention yesterday. I just looked him up. So very not my cup of tea. And so understandable why some nincompoops think he is, and so irritating to understand that. Because, they will probably try again, same message other package, as long as they think that message is appropriate enough for me.

Meanwhile I could be making money of my writings if A) someone else made money from my writings (I have given the necessary authorisations) and B) that someone else sends me part of the money he makes to my account. He does not need a contract making him exclusively authorised to use the one or other essay or group of essays or blog or group of blogs, because giving him that contract, I would not authorise him any more than I have already done, only disauthorise all the others I have authorised. And thereby break my word. He does not need a contract saying how many percent he owes me, I have already said anything he wants to send in return. Even nothing at all if he is poor, ideally at first, since he could get richer and able to send me some later, and since he would be making publicity for my writings and thereby helping other printers, more able than he to send me money for my writings in their print, to find out what I am doing.

But that is not what certain people want me to enjoy, they want me to be confronted with Eckhart Tolle and Veijo Impola, and other Avatars, not of Vishnu, but of Avatarism and non-Christian spirituality.

OK, Tolle says he admires Meister Eckhart, and I know too little of Meister Eckhart to know if he is Christian or not. But Tolle does admire Teilhard de Chardin:

Spirituality is not religion. You can be spiritual and not have a religious context. The opposite is true too: You can be very religious with no spiritual dimension, just doctrine.

Spirituality isn't something I believe in. It is what and who I am: a spiritual being having a human experience, as the French philosopher and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin profoundly said.

C. S. Lewis once remarked, and Tolle's remark makes it appropriate to recall, that spiritual does not equal good, being full because you have eaten (but not too full and expecting to digest it properly with drinks, including wine or coffee, and with sufficient sleep) is a bodily good and spiritual sins like pride are worse than corporeal ones like overeating. He also remarked that it is not mysticism that validates a doctrine or any and all of them equally, it is sound doctrine that validates a mysticism as not being diabolical.

Now, funny thing is, Veijo Impola thought he had refuted me and Mikael Rosén and a few other Catholic Traditionalists of Sweden by what he had to say, but he rather refutes people like Tolle.

He claims in a letter he sent us, that seven years ago, he had experiences of demons and angels corresponding to our experiences. He has now full, provable knowledge these experiences were psychotic. So, he claims, we should abandon our experiences and therefore also our doctrine of angels and demons, since our experiences are psychotic too.

He refutes Tolle, insofar as he points out that an experience one believes but is not able to think may be a kind of madness.

And Tolle refutes his claim on our attention insofar as Tolle mentions the fact we may have much more doctrine than spiritual experience with angels and demons. Actually I have neither seen any angel nor any demon so far ever in my life. I believe a doctrine about them, I believe it is validated by some who have had experiences explicitly featuring such beings as taking visible shape (see Book of Tobit), but also of everyday experience.

Some coincidences are so funny that I must either believe they come from the demon or from some conspiracy.

Very funny in such a case to be around a "psychiatric" science claiming both belief in spirits and belief in conspiracies to be symptoms of madness. Extremely funny. Or not.

I also believe that a baby was saved by the action of a few angels: one café owner could not roll in his canvas one friday or saturday evening, same weekend a baby falls from very high onto that canvas, bounces, and is saved by a rugby player passing by.

Not sure anymore if the player was a rugby player or other sportsman (ok, nearly sure it was precisely a rugby player), but it was in Paris and it was in the papers. In order to believe in angels you need not see one, you need only count the number of angels involved in the saving of that baby: one preventing the café owner from succeeding, another prompting him not to stay too long trying, a third prompting the stroll of the rugby player, and the guardian angel of the baby prompting the fall to happen the right moment for baby to be saved and for parents to get, for free except a little scare, a lesson about how to screen off the balcony properly.

And we can begin to count the holies connected to Paris: rue de Bac, St Vincent of Paul (body preserved from decomposition), St Genevieve (body preserved till French revolution, ashes thrown into La Seine), St Clotildis, and a few more.

A week or two earlier or later, a baby was killed in Versailles. A demon showed itself, six persons or so fled through the window instead of using holy water or rosaries. And one baby there was killed falling out of that window. The demon did not kill it directly, but by showing itself and inspiring fright - and fright of a kind that sound Catholics in a state of grace, using the Rosary and Holy Water would never have been too apt to fall into.

There too you can start counting the demons: who kept that father off going to Mass, who kept those youngster ignorant of the existence of demons and of how to confront them, but you will be able to find some of the demons in the politics of this poor country, leading to a corps of teachers that do not transmit faith because they do not have it, because one who has it does not become part of that corps but takes a job at a Catholic school or not at all in teaching.

But when I say you can count the angels or demons apparently involved, I do not mean I saw any of them, nor anyone else did except they who saw the demon who frightened the poor family out of the window. I do not mean atheists will admit angels or demons were involved either. But I do mean that the position of atheists becomes pretty weak in face of cases like these.

Making a Catholic believer like me a parallel of Veijo Impola seven years ago does not strengthen their case. Especially not if they started out by seeking him up as a kind of parallel to me.

Nor am I the least convinced he was not actually seing angels and demons (or demons only, some of which disguised as angels) back seven years ago. His conclusion that experience was psychotic may be a second victory of the demons, through the shrinks. I could say through the atheist shrinks, but in Sweden shrinks are often atheists, eastern mystics or modernist "Christians" who deplore fundamentalism.

Any Christian answering to the title of Psychiatries Doctor (or Medicinae Doctor, Specialitatis Psychiatries) who did something good to some victim of sectarian-esoteric or simply brutal abuse (if any) ... that is not what gives psychiatry the kind of power it has over destinies over here.

How could they convince Veijo Impola if they were wrong? Well, psychiatry does dispose of a few brainwashing techniques. Among others to deny the definiteness of the "patient's" positions, expose the same to both sleep deprivations and badgering, letting same understand it won't cease till positions are reconsidered.

There are two ways of depriving someone of sleep. If one is homeless, one can spread a rumour he is dangerous and thereby make people less likely to let him sleep in calm. If one is in hospital, one can allow someone to sleep up to ten hours per day and still deprive him of sleep, by giving drugs that make him need fourteen hours of sleep. Either place, he can be deprived of coffee and cigarettes (in the homeless case by spreading rumours, once again).

But they might have had some help of the fact - if it was one - that he had no basis in Catholic doctrine.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou Library
of Paris
14-III-2012