The effect Alma had on me was and is indescribable. When she left, I went into the deep end. This little chapter explains how I became dark and mysterious, silenced my being to full strength, tuned my radar for multi-dimensional pattern recognition, and unfolded my antennae to intuitively bottom-trawl everything.
The chapter shows how my perspective, i.e. my distance from people and everything, just got bigger and bigger. And the profound insights start to come.
Then I experienced thirty years inside a metal box – so that everything deep inside me could bubble and seethe in peace while I tried, without much luck, to act like a regular ego-sheep/fish on the outside.
Don't push me cause I'm close to the edge.
Grandmaster Flash: «The Message»My story is getting long. The intention was only to outline the events that led to the academic in this book, i.e. part two about the scientific, abstract and subjective – the theory.
The point was to show how the insight has arisen. The book results from a spiritual awakening, so I had to explain precisely how that happened to me.
I have described this somewhat extensively so you will not be left full of questions and in an attempt to evoke the mood around it. But as you probably can understand, bringing forward the story of Alma is demanding. Just telling about Alma anonymously might hurt those closest to her and also the people around me.
Yes, it's tough because awakening changes people. Changes the exterior and brings out the interior.
I know spirituality is something many are concerned about but also fear, and many are confused because the spiritual «industry» is so chaotic.
I drew a mini-portrait of the woman who was my muse, teacher, lover and soulmate. I could not omit Alma from the story; she was central in my awakening – without being there when it happened.
Remember one thing. Everything I write here is my story. Alma is portrayed as I experienced her. Alma was essential to me.
It is only natural if you do not understand this importance.
Alma probably looks very different in Alma's mind and others'. It may be that I give a completely distorted impression of her. The reason is simply that the two of us have not had a sensible conversation for over thirty years.
You will soon have the end of the story of Alma and the awakening.
But first, a summary intermezzo; the thirty years of stagnation.
The first two years were dark and directionless.
I met her, who was to be my wife. There was a lot of back and forth, but I was directed there, resigned.
Something happened.
My head closed.
A while after Alma, before my future wife, my head began to «encapsulate» itself.
I could feel a physical, metallic lid slide over the brain mass. Slowly. It came from the back of my head and slid forward.
It took fourteen days; I was locked inside from the cosmic. From what I took in. From my intuition.
I was inside a mental vault.
Before this, I had roamed around, often in the dark in the evenings, often to concerts and parties.
There was a lot of alcohol. Lots of people and a lot of energy. I was still alone, as I always have been. I went in everywhere, as I always have.
One Saturday night, I dumped into a party with only unknown people. They were punks, black-clad young people from the «alternative» Oslo.
I was sitting on the floor with a tired, messy punk guy who was not in his best mood. I do not remember what we talked about or how the conversation developed. But I remember that after a while, he broke down in tears.
My words hit him so intensely that he shook. The big boy sat in the middle of this gang of scary-looking types with piercings, heavy boots and chains – and cried like a child.
That's how I was.
I also remember Wim Wenders’ film «Der Himmel über Berlin». In English, the title is «Wings of Desire».
It came to cinemas in Norway in 1987, one year after Alma, and has since been «my» film.
It conveys precisely this world I experience so clearly. The backroom where everything happens out of necessity. The steered interaction. The subtle hints.
We sense it vaguely. We sense the souls that surround us, dead and alive.
The film shows our world as we see it, and also the next floor.
It is about the fact that Berlin, after the Second World War and then the Cold War, is a city full of angels, i.e. dead souls who watch over and protect the city. We follow several of those who walk around as figures in black and white, among most people who are rendered in colour.
One of the angels, played by Bruno Ganz, who later played Hitler masterfully in the film «Der Untergang», falls in love with a female trapeze artist in a circus, portrayed by Solveig Dommartin. He observes her from his position as an invisible angel.
She senses the presence. They are drawn toward each other.
The film ends with both – driven by necessity, vocation, intuition – seeking out a nightclub where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds hold a concert.
She slowly strolls through the room full of people and intense music. She enters the next room because she feels that this is where she is going, and there he is, sitting at the bar, the angel who has chosen to take the step down to man to meet her, complete the task, and fulfil the |, the necessary story.
He says nothing.
She walks over to him at the bar counter.
Then she performs this fantastic little monologue.
The scene is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful in the entire film history. The text is written by Peter Handke, who is an exceptional author.
He is in touch with truth.
Handke received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2019 and was awarded the Ibsen Prize here in Oslo in 2014 but was met with intense political protests. He has stated that in the war in the former Yugoslavia, one must be able to understand and forgive everyone, including Milosevic, the warlord who was indicted for genocide.
Handke is a defender of the real in man, not the deeds, not what we were led to do by everything that harmed us. Handke points to the mechanisms.
My wife worked on the Ibsen Prize. Later, she was involved in a Norwegian war film in which Bruno Ganz had a leading role.
Coincidences. I still felt close to Handke and his contribution to this film from Berlin.
The monologue of the woman in Wim Wenders’ magic film, Marion, can be
seen here.
And here is
a complete analysis of the mentioned scene, it's not just me who is completely mesmerised.
Of course, I will also reproduce the dialogue in text; in English, it must be, even though it sounds better in German:
It must finally become serious.
I've often been alone, but I've never lived alone. When I was with someone, I was often happy. But at the same time, it all seemed a coincidence. These people were my parents. But it could have been others.
Why was this brown-eyed boy my brother and not the green-eyed boy on the opposite platform?
The taxi driver's daughter was my friend. But I might as well have put my arm around a horse's neck.
I was with a man in love, and I might as well have left him there and gone off with the stranger I met in the street.
Look at me, or don't. Give me your hand, or don't. No. Don't give me the hand, and look away.
I think tonight is the new moon. No night more peaceful. No bloodshed in all the city.
I've never played with anyone, and yet I've never opened my eyes and thought: Now it's serious. At last, it's becoming serious.
So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious? Is it our times that are not serious?
I was never lonely, neither when I was alone nor with others. But I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means I'm finally whole. Now I can say it tonight; I'm at last alone. I must put an end to coincidence. The new moon of decision. I don't know if there's destiny, but there's a decision. Decide!
We are now the times. Not only the whole town – the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We're representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn.
You hold the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants... invisible... transposable... a story of new ancestors.
Look. My eyes.
They are the picture of necessity, of the future of everyone in the place. Last night I dreamt of a stranger... of my man. Only with him could I be alone, open up to him, wholly open, wholly for him. Welcome him wholly into me. Surround him with the labyrinth of shared happiness.
I know... it's you.
In my eyes and my whole being, this depicts reality, the real, abstract, mental world I experience myself in.
The text describes the psychology of a loner, a wolf, uninterested in the everyday world and the people in it, but who feels being directed, through necessity and attraction – disguised as coincidences.
It describes the seriousness and gravity I have mentioned before. I must add that in Norwegian, the word for both seriousness and gravity is the same; «alvor». Alvor, again, is a short form of «all-vàr», which means «aware of everything simultaneously».
The word «varhet», once again.
I never imagined it would be possible to depict how this is experienced before that film came out. It confirmed that everything I know is authentic and genuine. Alma, Marion and I are related.
We are many; I realised that then.
The fact that this perceived metal lid came in over my brain saved me – in a way – from going further into this landscape. The time was not right.
I became a little more «normal» in other people's eyes. I stopped experiencing so intensely because now, against all odds and expectations, I had suddenly got my own family.
My own flock.
But at the same time, it killed an essential side of me.
The intuitive, authentic was commanded to take a break.
I wrote a little note on a sheet of paper to myself at the time in which I said that now the encapsulation is a fact. It was necessary if I was to get through the next phase as a family man.
«It will take twenty years before the lid disappears, but I will return,» I wrote.
It took thirty.
Then I moved on in life.
I married a missionary's daughter who had grown up partly in boarding school in Japan (the church again…). We had two daughters.
I took a one-year introductory course in psychology not to become a psychologist but to find out what the «serious» science says about us humans. What «are» we?
Why do I feel this unrest all the time? Why do I sense and know there is more?
Why is there a vast domain in life that we can not figure out? This area between religiosity, mental illness, attraction, necessity and an almost ghostly quantum physics where everything we think we know is disintegrating?
Where are the answers?
Psychology hardly gave any answers.
Then I took a journalism degree.
I worked in a popular science journal for a while and wrote about everything from UFOs to superconductors, space probes and dark matter.
I ended up back in the information department at NRK, close to the management.
When the internet came in the early 1990s, I was perfectly positioned.
A colleague and I convinced the top manager of NRK that the phenomenon was of strategic importance. Broadcasting could experience a revolution. We were right, even if the management was mostly sceptical.
The result was the formation of
nrk.no, which these days is about to outcompete traditional broadcasting.
In the process, my colleague and I disagreed on the progress. I was still no good at cooperating efficiently with others and had a much «bigger» analysis of the way forward than most around me.
Thus, I instead asked for permission to establish NRK's intranet, and I also created a website in the private sector that was intended as a research tool for all the company's journalists, ABC Startsiden.
It turned out to work for the country's other journalists as well and for teachers at higher levels, librarians, researchers and most people.
Startsiden.no took off.
The offers hailed, and the service was sold for a reasonable sum, which has given me the freedom I needed to stay afloat.
Then it was all about the web. I learned to program and created one site after another. I was in and out of NRK and Aftenposten, the country's largest serious newspaper.
Let's not spend more time on this.
After a while, I ended up in a permanent home office.
I'm not a team player; that can never change.
I was frustrated.
I had lots of anger in me but had no idea why.
Every day I spent hours in the office in the big house we had bought for some of the money. There my head could work undisturbed. There I was effective. There I escaped all the daily challenges with people, all the uninteresting, impossible.
I also started cycling. I've always cycled.
In northern Norway, I was the boy who stood with my Apache bike, fully equipped with all sorts of electrical things, at the ferry berth to draw in the world and observe people and movements.
Alone. Best alone.
For the last twelve or so years, I have cycled at least forty kilometres five days a week, all year round. In the scorching sun with a rented bike on Greek holiday islands. In minus ten degrees Celsius and snow with spiked tires and electric heating elements in the shoes everywhere in the fantastic area in and around Oslo.
At least ten thousand kilometres a year. I'm soon completing my fourth round around the equator now.
There have been many hours of alone time.
Observation and contemplation.
Cycling is my meditation.
