Author: perceptionflow

Probably 99% of us live in conceptual – language dominated minds, which means the importance of anything is judged by our collection of so called idealized concepts or by weighted comparison, we compare ourselves with this ideal and decide the value of whatever we perceive. This value translates into satisfaction/some kind of really sought after feeling in the body.

In our normal lives, there is a hierarchy of how we get our reward. For example: You desire money, which opens up a possibility for material possessions or buying certain kinds of services/experiences. The external objects have no intrinsic value. Its how they make you feel. Sometimes the external object works to satisfy concepts held in our minds and this provides a much greater component of the feeling.

Say a person wants to possess a BMW. Some of his reasons could be that it represents a particular strata of society, the cream of it(concept)…an elite possession(concept)…only the rich possess(concept)….defines luxury(concept)…a comparison with all the people around you could give superiority – this superiority is actually not because you have something they do not possess…its because you have something that the common public considers highly desirable(concept).

I feel that satisfaction of the concept gives much greater pleasure than the pure visceral component of it. The visceral component or the concept getting satisfied creates a sensation in the body and it is judged. The sensation+judgment = Feeling(pleasant/unpleasant etc.).

So this long hierarchy leads you to the feeling which is the reward. Drugs cut through/pierce this hierarchy straight down and directly give you the feeling you are looking for without any of the in-between part. For an analogy, they act like wormholes in the space time fabric. Thats one of the reasons why it may be so baffling and disorienting to a person who has never thought in this perspective. And i’m still talking in the intellectual plane, leave alone the actual experience. It gives you what you are looking for all this time and you may never achieve that feeling ever in real life and in that intensity.

But here are some of the catches. Since we understand something only from its opposite, you real life will seem really low in comparison to that. Because you’ve witnessed that high, all the events in your life will seem extremely meager. Nothing will seem worth pursuing besides the drug itself, because nothing can give a reward that is even close to that. In other words your sensitivity to real life would get drastically reduced due to this new benchmark that has been set. All your experiences would now be judged according to this benchmark.

Things like meditation or sensory deprivation do exactly the reverse. They heighten your sensitivity to make rewards appear larger and clearer, resulting in happiness. The way I look at it is, both these methods do show you a lesser known secret of life. They may be equally overwhelming/transformational/disorienting(for a normal way of life). But they nevertheless represent polar opposites in the way they are done.

Its funny sometimes, people spend most of their lives in front of their PC/laptop on the internet…either chatting with friends, using orkut, FB, different email boxes, watching movies/television on net and general reading…..A friend of mine would read almost every single review of movies released….has he watched all of the movies?..NOPE barely any…maybe 5% of them…he is a voracious reader….and has REM with overflowing nervous energy and impatience all the time….almost like a crow….he is extremely opinionated on everything….and barely trusts his own intuition….everything is based on what “he has heard from other sources” and even for grading those sources he would look outwards again and read about the credibility of that too……How does my description sound?…..it evokes a certain uncomfortable feeling in me….its like something so essential is missing but I cannot put it into words…..this guy has an array of talents and is fairly impressive “by the book” otherwise…..but lacks something so profound we all know….

Here is my attempt to put that discomfort into words….I think internally he is lost……he completely relies on external sources to tell him what to do and what will give him a reward/how rewarding that thing would be…….no matter how intelligent or smart one may seem what really moves us is essence……the real essence in a human being is spirit….in his case, it is enclosed in a black box covered with a cloak of all kinds of logical manipulations and constructions…..real admiration and beauty too comes form the spirit and we easily spot that in others too….but that feeling cannot be expressed in words….this person would need to see that “Our every single action seeks a reward from the reward center which is within us”….and that is the only place we can find true knowledge which anyways cant be conveyed with language…..language was constructed to convey something much more profound….it does a fairly good job at it but nothing comparable to the concept underlying its creation…..this person is essentially living in a dream…..trapped within his own beliefs and ignorance about some fundamental truths….its a prison that is growing in his own mind…its expanding and further getting entrenched

Extending from the trench analogy, I was thinking about what implications could being judgmental/critical have. Then I got an interesting insight. You get a reward only when you fill up a trench fully. If you fill it up by just a little you would feel unsatisfied and a bit discouraged.

When we are extremely critical of others, the voice that pops up in your mind telling you “That is totally worthless, average, not good enough, just decent etc.” would get strengthened with each reinforcement. Once its totally reinforced, you cannot suddenly turn it off, esp when you are dealing with yourself. You could deny that nothing applies to you, have clear double standards, generate elaborate logical explanations etc. but you cannot fool yourself at a deeper level. The very fact that you have those ridiculously high benchmarks of what is considered ideal in every department will trigger a comparison each time you achieve or do anything. So with this comparison happening, all your achievements would appear meek in front of these crazy standards. So in effect, you would be getting very little reward because you’ve created extremely large trenches to fill.

Infact even while gossiping(usually bitching about people) the person indulging in it gets pleasure due to the sense of ‘moral superiority’ their ego feels. Even the simple fact of sharing a news provides pleasure to the person sharing because at that point of time this person knows more and therefore enjoys a certain ‘knowledge superiority’. In other words this is a different strategy to do the same thing, feel superior. When you put down everyone around you, you automatically become superior in comparison.

I don’t think the concept of double standards really exists beyond our rational thinking mind. Our reward centers hardly work by this kind of mind anyway. I think real truth is what we should always be aware of. Avoiding or masking that just messes up your reward system, the reason for all your activities. Sometimes I feel, why beat around the bush, why cant we concentrate of lifting ourselves up instead of trying to belittle everything around us. It essentially does the same thing in a more efficient way?

A desire represents something that you need to feel complete/a need. The need may vary in intensity and maybe intellectual – desire to solve problems from thinking
emotional/sensations – desire for social connection, bonding, purpose, inspiration, passion, hope, various highs, meaning
spiritual – desire to understand the truth, beauty, clarity
We look for reward in all the 3 spheres.

But the interesting question is what is this reward?

In my experience, I’ve noticed that we use our thinking process/conceptualizations to create trenches that we try to fill. A desire is kind of like a trench, the deeper the trench the harder we try to fill it up.
Immediate gratification works more on impulses. You feel a strong impulse to do something, it instantly creates a trench and you immediately do an action that fills it up. The “reward” is acquired when you fill the trench up. Maybe this has to do with the fact that we understand everything from their opposites. So an acute lack of something makes you maximally sensitive to it. So when an acute lack is satisfied, you feel a glorious reward. There are other day to day examples, water tastes the best when your need for it is extreme/extremely thirsty. Maybe, that is why people like drama in their lives because it harnesses this play of creating trenches and filling them. This may also explain why someone may watch a horror/murder film because in contrast to the panic shown their own life’s safety is revealed. If the trench is too deep and whatever action you take just fills 5-10% of it, then its a case of depression. But there is one more aspect to this, the trench needs maintenance. You may also lose reward because of not maintaining them. It can be deepened or made shallow by changing thinking patterns or by external influences. For example: Everyday, I hear a particular song and conceptualize a situation while hearing. Each day I do it, the conceptualization gets strengthened and the reward is correspondingly more. If I stop doing it for 5 days the trench may get deep and I may enjoy the song much more. But if I leave a really long gap then the trench might have got shallow like how wax flattens with time, I would need to rekindle that memory. Maybe that is why they recommend keeping short goals so that the trench doesn’t get too deep and you lose reward. Even in romantic relationships, with time, we build a deep trench that is satisfied each time you interact with this person. That is why a breakup = some kind of depression since you have the deep trench but nothing to fill it up. I think this concept is very similar to ‘Samskaras’ in Buddhism. I realized this when I started meditating and becoming more of a neutral observer. I felt something big that I used to enjoy is missing now, whenever I maintained the observer state. Then I hit upon this idea and realized that when I plainly observe, I am not a part of this game of trenches at all and that’s what I was missing.

My opinion:

Scrubs: Colorful, Creative, Imaginative, Drama based, Surreal, Dreamy, open kind of humor
Scrubs is like a kaleidoscope:

The Office: Dry, creative, imaginative(domain specific), More real life based and inhibited humor
The Office is like a defined algorithm that manipulates the picture:

I enjoy both these TV serials. But my vote would go to scrubs since I can identify more with the characters. Also, according to me there is a world of a difference in the relationship between Jim-Pam vs JD-Elliot. The former is a bit bland and shows limited situations while the latter is like a rich tapestry covering so many subliminal aspects and complex dynamics of a relationship. Also, scrubs uses its imaginative, childlike, uninhibited style to explore humor.

• Dimensions of sex/physical + psychological
• Fear of the dark/unknown
• Dimensions of humans and relationship with nature
• Overcoming fear technique – adrenaline response – spider technique
• Talking to a tree
• Endo-reality and Exo-reality are intrinsically perceived the same
• We get social energy only from identification
• Shifting into 5th dimension awareness of possibilities. How habits, preoccupations, fears greatly limit the 5th dimension.
• Focusing on the larger picture of the jigsaw – knowing a map that extends far beyond entities in immediate perception eg: egs: participating in school, helping ppl, engg project stuff, job related
• Attracting people towards you technique: mimicking their body language, any kinds of identification with them
• My Lucid dream WILD’ing adventure
• Desires get stronger the more you chase and satisfy them: sexual, romantic, situations, academic, job related etc.
• Symbolic meaning of a light shown at the end of a tunnel or in the center of the screen in many of the dreamy song videos, psychedelic state inducing videos etc, they all seem to converge on a bright light at the center.

These thoughts came to me from an interesting discussion about meditation/awareness/alcohol.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread547291/pg2

I guess broadly there are 2 parts to the mind:
1. The judgment part, thinking/conceptual mind
2. Non conceptual, non judgmental awareness

• It sometimes strikes me that, if I just hear music without association i.e. with a blank mind, I just feel plain bliss, no pleasure, no pain. Maybe this is like the 2nd part of the mind.
• So its like, my thinking mind/conceptual mind and judgment has to switched ON for me to really get a kick out of the music(turning on the conceptual mind).

– That is why maybe after consuming alcohol, I enjoy music far more as it strengthens the activity in the thinking/judgment part of the mind and dulls the 2nd part.

– So what is the intrinsic value of music then?Is it only through associations/concepts/judgments that we feel the real pleasure/kick out of music?

Higher dimensions can be imagined by looking at how you view lower dimensions. For e.g.: If you want to imagine something 4D, you need to understood how we interact with 2D objects. How would we appear to an entity who is 2D. They can only see edges (actually this edge too had 0 thickness, but for practical purposes lets assume they can see very thin edges like the thickness of a paper). Such 2D entities can never see us in our 3D entirety.

For e.g. say a circular 2D entity and we pass our finger through a paper, they would just see a circle forming with increasing diameter till its circumference is equal to that of our finger and then when we take our hand off, this circle would reduce in size and then vanish.

You(a 3D entity) can touch the center of the circle(2D entity) without breaking its edges. In a similar way, maybe a 4D entity could touch our inner organs without cutting us open.

The movie “Flatland” portrays this concept really well of 2D entities interacting with a 3D entity.
This can be supplemented with further reading about the allegory of “Plato’s cave”.