Author: perceptionflow

What is the deepest truth about social interaction. Why do we need it? Is it a physical need or a purely mental need? Is it conditioning dependent or independent? What exactly feels bad when I’m alone? Is being with people like expanding your mind by attaching other modules which communicate with you in a certain protocol (cultural rules) through a certain medium (language)? Is that the main reason? OR is it related to safety? A feeling of being safe because you have multiple minds invested in your security? If it was just physical security, the solitary confinement chamber in prison would guarantee great security. But probably social interaction is security for all your mental troubles.  If its a need for stimulation, it is there everywhere abundantly in all the sensory objects around me. But sensory objects do not really exist beyond perception and it is the perceptions we want. Maybe being alone locks you into a certain perceptual state and interacting with other people provides a change of perceptions. But interacting with one person or group for too long again locks you up in a similar situation from which you seek to escape. So the greatest fear seems cessation of experience or death. The second greatest fear is locking of an experience in a certain paradigm for extended periods like a 9-5 typical job assuming doing exactly the same kind of things for decades. The most limited our scope of experience, the more our fear is until it collapses at 0 (death). By the universal principle of duality, having fundamentally different and altered states every single day will wipe out predictability and stability. That would be the fear of losing all coherence and absolutely going crazy. The most fearful areas seem to exist on the ends of the continuum. So we think we want pleasure, but actually what we really seek is freedom of perceptions. Craving arises when the reality is unbalanced. Imagine your right side of your body is heavier than your left side causing you to tilt to the right and you have to put constant effort to be straight. So you pray that your body should be heavier on the left side. But if that happens once again, you tilt to the left and you want the right side to be heavier again. So here the left side could be suffering and the right side could be pleasure. The ideal would be an equally balanced left and right sides and you have the freedom to tilt to whichever direction you want anytime which is the case now, which is why you do not even have this desire.

Awareness itself occurs continuously against a background of nothingness. If you background is nothingness, you are supremely alive. If your background is what you call the subconscious or aspects of reality outside your awareness then your reality is accordingly evolving. The social structures which allow manifestation of emotions are highly slow moving and subject to many many constraints. Thats why its so difficult to perceive these higher truths. You are often locked into a particular identity and functional expectations and roles, a certain culture such that you are in a way trapped. So you keep making small efforts in your everyday life to break out of this and dream of total freedom. But this whole dream is fueled by the lack. The poor dream of being rich and die with that dream. A man with a boring life dreams of adventure all his life. The great adventurer if unbalanced dreams of a stable loving safe secure home environment. The fantasy drawn individual dreams of wonderful utopian worlds which are wonderful only with the background memory of your current situation. If you were born in that utopia, you would not even perceive it to be ‘UTOPIA’. The utopia would be the ordinary in that case.

Another difficulty in understanding this is the whole fragmentation of our awareness. Our awareness jumps between numerous micro identities throughout the day. Each of these identities is an unbalanced reality and therefore having a certain desire. We are confused because which one would you satisfy? One of them would want adventure and one of them wants comfort and security. You may plan the adventure while you are in a certain identity and then suddenly want the opposite when the date arrives because you have shifted to a different identity. The ultimate ‘Point of seeing’ or depth possible is nothingness. So we deepen awareness by increasing our power of observation of these states.  Starting off with the gross and then penetrating to the subtler and subtler planes. Gross and subtle are not 2 different things. The particles of the gross are progressively splintered in subtler and subtler states. Like crushing sugar into smaller and smaller particles. Every single aspect of the self: memory, concentration, awareness, outer sensory reality should be investigated at finer and finer levels. Scientific investigation is a long way off this depth since science itself is resting on a particular paradigm. Its basically does not take into account the aspects of the observer itself. It does not delve into the non-material aspects which are bundled up into metaphysics, subjectivity, pseudo science, paranormal, mystical stuff. It is a certain method developed for investigation of truth and belief in this is so strong because it offers explanation to most of the outer observed phenomena. Its function dependent. ‘How to do something’ in the material/sensory world is in the realm of science. Not why you want to do anything in the first place? why are we even here? what is the nature of everything I know etc. these are hard problems not addressed. Objectivity is just consensus reality and this reality is just a small bunch of currently popular paradigms. These paradigms are not true objectivity, they are just loyal to the rules and assumptions not to the truth. An entire human civilization of billions of minds may communicate based on certain basic assumptions for convenience. But the assumptions are like lines of longitude, numbers etc. or concepts. That is why untenable arguments are possible because it is very difficult to spot those assumptions in the massive tight interconnected web of all concepts built over the basic ones.

Centered in nothingness/everythingness with absolute freedom is the ultimate dream or enlightenment.

Most groups form because there is an implicit knowledge they share. If you had a very different upbringing, this knowledge would not be implicit. In some ways it’s also tendencies. For example: If you have never been a groupie, you are unlikely to move to that mindset in future unless there is a real need. The tricky part with social relationships is investments. Social investments take time, energy, freedom and time from you. But these investments also accrue with time. Lets take an example of a person who had a  lifestyle with minimum investment and much higher solitary time during childhood. He would have therefore not have gained a lot of exposure to the various relationships that exist in social life. In adulthood, if he wished to suddenly switch, it would be difficult because of lack of foundation. It’s like wanting to be a millionaire overnight when all your life you have lived in middle class. 

Societal structures involving money and social relationships are slow moving and take intention, energy over a certain time to manifest. If you personality is in a unique exotic place, then that is exactly what you’ll be. It’s like again and again trying to mix incompatible substances and expecting them to dissolve into each other. 

The fun of this game is that, an identity gets created in childhood until you are 6, and then in adulthood, you seek to reverse engineer the whole thing and reclaim all of your freedom along with a deep understanding of all the ways this realm of reality works. Most people just perpetuate their childhood identity and live life in that psychological space with limited awareness. If it is serving most of their needs and if they have enough dreams in their identity blueprint that they believe in, they would not inclined to really understand the matrix itself.

The definition of all objects exists with respect to the context i.e. in relationships to ALL other objects. There are infinite definitions for objects possible because there are infinite grouping combinations possible.

The physical reality is part of our experience. It represents the lower vibration of all physicality. We also experience thoughts, desire, mood etc. which are higher vibrations. Creation comes from the infinite to the finite i.e. from infinite vibration to the lower vibrations. Depending upon your awareness level, you would either feel the world is very static and unchanging or that the whole world is in an ever changing ecstatic flux that operates in harmony when seen from the whole. Along with the physical elements we can also perceive the invisible thought, emotion (feeling), desire, proprioception, energy level, intellect, memory, time and space. So these are some of the higher dimensional realities.

When you do something you do not really want to do or believe in, it is pure resistance. You could do it with dedication and steady incremental effort, but you would only get more of what you don’t want. This becomes a habit pattern and you end up with the mindset that life is hard and we have to work hard for success or any attainment. Do you work hard to get involved in an excellent movie or documentary or an interesting hobby? Do you even call that work? Naturally inspiring things just move our attention to them effortlessly. That is exactly what is meant by flow. Even the mildest form of resistance felt means you are impeding the flow. I had seen both the sides intensely since, when I’m alone and intensely reading, I am in flow while in many social situations I am putting a lot of effort in trying to entertain them and make them accept me. There are elaborate logical systems we use to justify why we oppose this natural flow – culture, society, family traits, concept of habits, conditioning etc. So all this creates a basic lack of TRUST with very detailed hypnotizing elaborate stories to hide this fact – like mythology, religion, evolutionary sciences. We are told what our fears should be in a very subtle way.

Perception and language are so finely intertwined. The person with finer perception would have longer descriptions for things and would try to improve on vocabulary. Our language also denotes our persistent perceptions. If I use the word “I” everyday 100 times, that means I perceive this “I” word experience that many times too. My choice of words determines my personality, interests, passions, what matters to me, meaning etc. We all have the same basic senses, but language adds whole new layers of concepts. It is connecting engine among humans. Each human has a language (verbal) module and we convey and receive information through this. It’s like a router.  Language and memory are also totally connected. We convert our experiences into language symbolism to encode them in memory. It is the descriptive layer of memory that allows us to be selective in our focus, differentiate, categorize etc.

Because we never put full effort we can never know what we are ultimately capable of. At some level we are afraid that we might discover we are no good at something, so we never try OR we try with partial effort so that we continue to dream. It’s almost like we are divided in such a way that a part of us purposely prevents us from putting full effort since it’s very afraid of failure or hiding from us some deep unpleasant truth. That’s why full effort totally allows you to see what you is true and what is not with far greater clarity. In fact full effort = quite analogous to perfect clarity on whatever it is applied to.

When you drop everything, you reach an undifferentiated state without verbal thought. Basically when you pull yourself back to see the entirety, there is just experience. I use thoughts and break this pure infinite experience down into space, time, objects, other people etc. If I just totally pull myself to observing the entirety or the whole, I see that there is just ever changing experience. All value lies in the experiences themselves. All our categorizations of good/bad, right/wrong, self/other, inside/outside are just coming from our mental models of reality which we collect over our lifetime. But the model will only be an accurate as the depth of our investigation of reality. Generally people get lost in an infinite horizontal space and fail to see that this space they are standing on is itself resting on some unquestioned beliefs. In diving to the depths of consciousness, we see that there are only 2 states – awareness and non-awareness (sleep, part of dreaming, perception in waking life). You could take it even further and ask the question, who knows about the unawareness part – well awareness knows. So there is ONLY awareness and nothing else. The experiencer, experienced and the experiencing are happening in awareness. Awareness/Consciousness/Light is all that there is. Everything just is. Every moment is full of it, including illusions, mental conceptions, preoccupations, physical reality etc. – all of them are mental concepts occurring within awareness. You are everything there is. The magic of questioning helps to get through the layers of illusion.

This was my 2^nd attempt at Jhana meditation without a timer. Sat in a room which was mostly silent with very mild road noise and a clock tick. In this session, I was able to concentrate on my breath for up to 60-70% of the time. On closing my eyes the mental plane started mildly swirling and dancing but I tried to look at the entirety of the movement from an empty space again and again. I noticed that I needed to relax further down, this helped get rid of the ‘holding on to an image’ problem. The perceptions were still dancing about initially, but this time, I stayed more firm with my observation frame and caught the breath. The breath in the very relaxed state felt non-physical. It was a pure feeling and I could not locate it in space. I could not even feel its direction beyond how I chose to visualize it: as a sphere expanding and contracting, as a piston moving back and forward etc. I could drop the physical aspect, space and direction of it. It felt like a ‘subtle feeling’. I tried to reach this place again and again during my 15 min meditation and then concluded.