Category: Uncategorized

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Happiness and love concepts too ambiguous

The concepts for happiness and love are just too vague. People all around the world use these words indiscriminately, and they could represent anything in a very large set of experience. When I try to combine everything together, these words almost seem purely subjective. I feel these words are simply distractions for a truth seeker, they can be done away with. We are told since childhood that the ultimate aim in life is to love and achieve happiness. But these definitions themselves are crazily unclear.

Conventionally society claims that happiness is a passing thing and needs to be earned again and again. Certain religions on the other hand claim that happiness is a permanent state and has nothing to do with your changing situations. Buddhism claims that unconditional love stems out of emptiness (we may as well call it by any other name) and this state is after all concepts are dropped including our ‘conventional love’ notions. If that is the case, why should we even label things and constrain our thinking within these illusory concepts?

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Twilight(Dawn, Dusk), Day, Night

While considering a day, I think the twilight element is often not really emphasized. Its a beautiful transition period where all the wavelengths of light transition from white(golden) to VIBGYOR. As individuals, each of us also has this twilight period just before waking up and just before falling asleep.
Every time I see a parallel in nature to what happens within me, it makes me feel awe like I’m part of a much larger system.

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Martial arts block breaking analogy

In Martial arts, while breaking blocks, for most efficiency the rule is that you need to break the block/blocks in the first go. This way your deceleration is not as abrupt as when you fail to break it. If you fail to break it, by newtons third law, you would get a reverse reaction force and this can injure you. Many of the professional block breaking martial artists need to make sure this backfiring force does not kick in by ensuring that the blocks are going to break in the first go. They do this by conditioning their body part to progressively break more and more such blocks. Each time, they take a load that’s just sufficient for them to break through.

It struck me that this analogy applies to many instances in our lives too. If you take up a challenge that’s too hard and if you do not succeed as a result of that, there is a negative reinforcement. The opposite happens when you take up a challenge and succeed. Along with the success you get a positive reinforcement for future endeavors. So its almost like if you succeed you get 10(success)+10(positive reinforcement/motivation)=20 points. But if you fail, you lose 20(failure+negative reinforcement/de-motivation) points from your current position.

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The magical ‘Wonder’

‘Wonder’ is an interesting phenomenon. It usually happens when you encounter a powerful experience for the first time. Now, the power of this experience is proportional to how incomparable it is to whatever you have seen till date. It strikes ‘Wonder’. The other side to it is that it gradually diminishes as it becomes familiar.

Familiarity and prior knowledge is the enemy of wonder. There are so many examples in our daily life. Sometimes I hear a song that totally appeals to me. The first time I hear it, I am overwhelmed by it slightly. Then in the 3rd or 4th time, the enjoyment reaches the peak. It is vaguely familiar and feels very good but once the song ends its difficult to recall the tune. This enjoyment continues until I totally memorize it. Once that happens the song becomes totally familiar and the feeling of wonder reduces a lot.

Another example from my early childhood is looking at a tiny ant like airplane flashing lights in the sky and flying into the clouds. I saw a real airplane for the first time once when I was 18 years old. So this thing was a great mystery. How would the world look from that height? Whats inside that plane? How big is it really? What are the clouds surrounding it? Can I sit on them? What is this vast blue sky?. Looking at all this without any prior reading or conceptualization was simply magical. At that time, even though I had seen wire-frame sketches of an airplane and a few vague ideas like it has seats etc. everything was still vague enough to create enormous wonder.

When I look at things from this perspective, children today are simply deprived of all this wonder or the wonder spell lasts for a very short time. They go to the internet and pull out every facet out – 100’s of pictures of how an real airplane looks, its dimensions compared to a human, view from the airplane itself. There may be no need for the child to really use his/her imagination because everything is available on the internet ready-made.

I still remember a few story books I had read which stimulated this magic of imagination. The faraway free, basket of flowers, prince and the pauper etc. These books would just provide wire-frame pictures once every 10 pages just to give mild direction to the imagination. I can still mildly recall the worlds I created in mind for these stories.

Not knowing = mystery, and its a beautiful rapturous state open and full of possibilities. As adults the world becomes quite boring because novelty slowly dies down. When I think about travel, almost anything I project about the experience seems to be within what I already know. I cannot foresee something unusual, totally new and rapturous.

Say I am planning to go to typical tourist spots, say Hawaii. I have seen 1000’s of pictures and videos of Hawaii. If I go there, I might go with 4-5 friends. I can easily recreate the beach experience in my mind because I have already visited at-least 50 beaches in my life. I have had a lot of alcohol in my life so even that is familiar. I cannot see how it could give me a thoroughly unusual/rapturous experience. Am I expecting too much? I just want back the wonder created from the totally unknown.

Another example is my trip to redwoods. When I first read about the biggest trees in the world, I was so fascinated. But when I actually visited it many many years later, the wonder was gone or very little.

If I look at it scientifically, each experience creates neuronal connections in the brain. I think this creation activity that happens with a novel stimulus is immensely pleasurable and we call this wonder. Once your brain has formed an enormous number of interconnections, everything seems to fit into some permutation or combination of these precluding the need to create anything new.

I guess this fits in with the time passing faster as we age concept too. A child growing from 5 to 6 years old has lived 20% of his life while an adult going from 30 to 31 has only added 3% in comparison. Another analogy is of water filling in an ocean. Assuming it is filling at the same rate, the % percentage keeps on progressively reducing.

Another misconception people have is that really visiting a place is very different from you reading facts and stories about it with pictures and videos. Its not very different because anyways that is the way we prime our perception through beliefs. In a way you are just validating your projections by visiting that place. Your mind would only pick up information and store based on this framework which you have primed by your prior reading. Even if you don’t read you are already primed because of your conditioning.

Certain drugs like marijuana can temporarily make you relive this wonder. In our ordinary adult consciousness it is very difficult to be truly open and see things with the same wonder as a child. Is there a way to drop all beliefs, ideas and concepts and look at everything with this magical wonder?

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Each real/drug experience shows what ‘you are not’ and ‘can be’

While having unusual experiences (drugged or real), who is the experiencer?
The real you is like the ultimate observer. It is like the bed of the ocean. The entire ocean represents your experience but it is not you. And this water over the ocean is always moving and changing by many other forces but you are the bed is never touched. In daily life, we may be conscious of only a fraction of it like the upper 100ft of water and can actively manipulate only that much. Certain drugs can make alterations much deeper like 2000-3000ft showing you a new world temporarily. For a person at the 100ft functioning, he may think the bed of known is at 100ft. Its worth observing your most unusual, most far out, and crazy experiences because they reveal this very well.

No matter what the experience the REAL YOU is still watching unaffected detached. So the craziest experiences do the best job in bringing out what ‘you are not’ and ‘can be‘.

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Focusing on my uniqueness in the enjoyment of music

Nobody can hear the same song as I do. This specific enjoyment that I derive is totally unique from the way I interpret the music, the way I feel it, the way I emote with it, the images I bring up, past experiences recalled, projections etc. Another person hearing the same song would have a very different mental landscape. Its very profound and exciting to think about “what exactly do ‘I’ enjoy in this song?”(the enjoyment is absolutely unique, special, intimate and personal). Its magical when you look at it from this perspective.
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Thoughts – 15 Mar

Repeating a word makes it lose meaning. Staring at your face in a mirror for long makes it lose meaning. Doing the same thing again and again removes its meaning too. Meaning is a very fleeting feeling…if we grasp on to it, it quickly dissolves. So I would interpret moderation as just doing things while they are still meaningful.

Everything seems like a piece in a much larger puzzle. Everything is only partially known, I do not know the underlying connections. It’s like all the individual icebergs are connected underneath the water deep.
Happiness comes from being relieved of burdens more so than acquiring something.
I am just not able to extinguish all the to-dos. They are just overflowing and multiplying. When am I going to reach a day when there are no to-dos. It’s like a Tetris game and I do some hotch potch and make it ok but I am always in some kind of pressure. In fact getting a job is to primarily drop this pressure. How can I drop everything?
Living purely in the present moment requires trust which gets rid of all fear. The more change you witness, slower is the time passage.
Body image can be tested – It is a static unobserved unconscious entity, but when disturbed creates lot of turmoil…say I lose my front 2 teeth, or I lose my hand or leg…how would I feel about myself?…If I am unaffected then I am truly detached from the body both in function and in maintaining a certain image.
I guess there is lot of such unconscious rock like structures present in me now. For example this employment tension is one such. The happiness I get from getting a job is getting rid of that rock that I need to do this, which is conditioning. If I am truly free of conditioning, ‘getting’ and ‘not getting’ will feel the same: Bliss.
Acquiring bliss and deep understanding with everything is the highest that intelligence can offer.
When I am totally awake there are no dreams or day dreams.
Anything that touches time has an end. Fear is tied to time. If we have no interest in something, it does not need to be transcended, it does not even exist. The power to believe, identify and give attention fuel the thoughts.
If a thought creates a particular kind of reality then that is imaginary and not the absolute way things exist. Drop the thought or importance of it.
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Maladaptation to society as a precursor to exploration and creativity – Mastery over the game

People who are Mal-adapted and maladjusted to conventional society find alternate ways to please themselves. There are holes that they attempt to fill up by adventure. This is especially true when they lack love, social attention, admiration and belonging and if their childhood had disturbing emotions.

Even in my case, only a few pieces of my identity really fit in with society. A vast portion is private to me. My identity is fragmented in a way. I have built it on ideals and concepts rather than actual empirical social acceptance. These troubled parts keep fueling me to seek the truth. Real solutions for them may lie in the discovery of reality at a more profound level. Maybe this reality is not even in the mind. There might be infinite concepts and a psychotic episode might reveal that everything is a representation and therefore equally unreal.
In my search for reconciliation, I discovered so many alarming things common man assumes but are actually conditioned. This further creates larger swathes of identity separate from the accepted ones. In other words there has always been a gap between how I see the world and how others do; examination of why it is go has further WIDENED the gap.

Even ordinary life can be extraordinarily interesting if we can get back a child’s beginner eyes and cultivate trust and gratitude. I am like a nomad with multitude experiences and insights travelling myriad places in the conceptual and experiential plane. But there is something I am seeking which would satisfy me.

Maybe conventional society members are somehow fulfilled in the game and therefore not interested in seeking the unknown and exploring. If they decide to explore, they may challenge their status quo and this may removing their current sense of security. But what I have realized is that each life is a mystery and has the same potential to create meaning. All patterns exist everywhere. Maybe myriad forms appear from one source but it is this source that truly satisfies us.
The example that comes to mind is of: Is this wall light brown or light yellow? What difference does it make to you! What matters to you is the feeling of knowing it and if others agree with you and validate what you know, and the significance you give your knowledge sources. But why do you need validation for something you know! That’s because the very definition of knowledge is precisely that, a consensus reality. Now this consensus depends on who is around you, virtual and real. If everyone agrees with you on something, assuming you do not have internet, it’s unlikely you would bother questioning it, unless it esp. bothers you a lot in some way. There is the bliss of ignorance when everyone around you agrees on something that you even discount minor deviations.
All lives may be equivalent in their capacity for enjoyment, satisfaction and bliss. It’s relativity at its cream. Just like I am seeking new adventures and understanding, conventional people are seeking in the usual games they play. The relativity here is beliefs. Now the common man believes that this is the only legitimate way to live. He isn’t going to explore because he BELIEVES it’s not worth and not true. If he is forced into something unknown and is pleasantly surprised, then this may loosen up this belief a bit with a few special clauses added. But when the belief is functioning in full swing, then he would seek only the conventional ideals.
If he has had bad experiences with the unknown then he has developed fear of it. Even this fear adds meaning in the tapestry of emotions and motivations. If there was no fear, then that is a totally different snapshot. Each is an experience that’s equally true. Questioning and broadening beliefs is the greatest service you can do to your mind. It’s funny, we start off with a child’s outlook, get conditioned in adulthood, see the boredom and sterility of that, long to go back to childhood openness and then broaden our beliefs slowly to go back to our childhood openness. This too is an adventure and inherently rewarding.
The whole reward/punishment, courage-confidence/fear is the grand play of the yin yang. If this yin yang equation determines life where one implies the other, like sides of a coin, a man and his shadow etc., and if all of life’s experiences play by this equation, how are lives comparable? This level of complexity far exceeds my ability to think linearly about things.
A failure either reinforces stronger behavior or results in withdrawal. These work like spirals. A person in childhood who has been praised and well received will put extra efforts to obtain the same and will receive more and more attention. This goes like a spiral until there is drastic environmental or circumstantial change which the person would totally resist. A person, who is struggling to fit in, will struggle much harder to find what he is looking for and is likely to create strange things and have a lot of far out explorations and adventures. And this whole thing is a fractal again. The patterns keep repeating since everything disappears after a while, we need to renew by either doing the same thing again or coming up with something new.
Any life can be made ideal if it cuts through and masters this game of yin-yang. How can we go through this with maximum fulfillment and meaning? Our definition of ourselves as a personality is like a tortoise shell which only allows us to process a fraction of reality. You may have a grandiose, super broadened personality and outlook but this still does not compare with the pure experience of being nobody. The broad outlook person may have a much thinner shell but the real reality is ‘No shell’. This would make you the master in the yin yang game because you’re no longer in it.
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11 Mar thoughts – Perception filters and Judgement

Whats other think about you or tell you is more about them than you

This concept is related to the other persons’ superego and self definition. This perfectly ties in to the way they interpret you. The diagram below shows the perception filter. It is still a big simplification, but it is a good aid for imagination.

Lets say this represents your own image of yourself.
Each slider could represent

  • How you see an aspect/concept of yourself
  • The importance you give to something. Now the scale for each one could be infinite

Now there could be infinite such sliders. Each one could have infinite scales. You may consider yourself a musician if you make a play and create a certain quality of tunes. But who defines quality? Its society.

If you meet a new person who says “You’re no good. Its nowhere close to the level of Jimi Hendrix or Mozart” many different reactions can arise depending on how you perceive the other person.

  • If he is really extraordinary, then the question is can he help you achieve a higher level? If yes, then you would respond favorably because although he has increased the scale of the musician slider, he can take you higher.
  • If he is as good as you but has set astronomical standards for himself and has greatly increased the scale of your slider. His being hard on himself also imposes some hardness on you. 
  1. But you take on some level of discomfort if he is willing to include you in his striving (Assuming he wishes to strive)
  2. If his interests are in different areas, and he is personally not interested in advancing himself in this area then you just interpret him as being a bit harsh and develop a bit of repulsion.
  • Last case is when, he is no good in that area, is not interested in pursuing anything, but still has set astronomical standards and belittles everyone, then the guy is interpreted as a total kill joy, jerk and a high degree of repulsion ensues. He not only belittles your position by greatly increasing the scale of the slider but also has no interest in that area itself and does not consider that important. He is simply denying/depriving you the pleasure of feeling special. Its like he has hit your self image from being outside it like shooting an arrow into a person from a castle window vantage point. The usual reaction after this is to get preoccupied with some way of paying this person back his insult.

That’s why finding like minded people who give importance to the same things provide a lot of security. The would try to improve in the same areas, would be eager to share a more mutually helping relationship, a win-win situation. Even here sometimes, the person is good at something that even you are but hates that side of himself and that can again take it into the opposite direction. So what matters, both of you give importance to the same things. Even here its complex. The importance you give changes with time which is based on your changing circumstances and influences. So is there really a bedrock? Generally the bedrock is early childhood experiences. Only mystics and explorers of that mind would look into such things consciously. If that is similar (which is difficult for you to gauge unless the person is very willing and articulate in expression), then you may be apparently different but that would be more of a veil. When you uncover that thin veil, you would discover that you can be great friends with that person.

    Now, lets take it to the next level. This thing happens in every interaction warping the sliders in scale and choice. The blue bars on sliders show that they have been selected. The gray ones are the inactive ones. Interacting with another person may open up a new set of sliders and scales. The overall patterns uncovered after interacting with varied people for a long period of time imprints itself as a self image in our subconscious memory.

    So interacting with each person is a different world. However, we give importance to certain worlds because they been tuned to synchronize with our self image integrated by early childhood experiences.
    Early childhood is like a blank slate where entire survival programs (physical, social, mental) are written which forms the bedrock of our personality. After which we get an identity established and our whole lives are spent in furthering this identity and finding synchronicity in others.

    The concept of a an ultimate friend or soul-mate would be if their bedrock perfectly synchronizes with ours. According to me, opposites attract is a myth. When I say synchronizes well it means their importance frameworks are a perfect match. She is everything you give the most importance to and you are everything she gives the most importance to.

    But even here, the bedrock can be transformed if you can see through it. Very few people would dare to really look at it head on. In-fact we are not scared of death of the physical body, we are REALLY scared about death of this bedrock. Without that bedrock, we do not exist as we know it. A child is born almost as a blank slate with certain genes that determine its predilections etc. But this has nothing to do with the child’s self image. Everything that matters to YOU is independent of your genes etc. What the child feels once he/she is an adult depends on society’s response to what the child is which is what creates the Ego. The Ego is a social phenomenon. For example: Say the child is good at music. If this is greatly encouraged by the society as a whole and rewarded, then the child will develop an excellent self opinion. But if music is given tertiary importance, and things like fitting into society like a cog in the job market is rewarded the most, then the artistic child would have a weaker ego.

    There is still a lot of room for further exploration. This is still a simplification of what happens in reality. Reality is a fractal firstly. Secondly we have not considered the impacts of memory fading or forgetting. Also, we haven’t looked into the power of living with someone for a long time and how it may change us fundamentally into loving this person or including them in our self definition.

    A rigid person is someone who keeps his sliders and scale fixed. We say such a person cannot be influenced and his confidence about the sliders fools us into thinking he may hold the truth or right view because “We don’t know ourselves”.  We start believing and adopt their beliefs as truth. If you do not hold on to any filter or belief or keep changing them unconsciously then we would fall in the category of being ‘easily influenced’. So either way is not ideal. The best is to see through this matrix.

    So back to the main point, since this whole thing is like a game, you have the power to drop it all and be unaffected. In that case, what each person tells you is about his perception filters, biases, how hard he is on himself, how open is he to see the good in others, how exploration friendly he is, how good is he self esteem, how harshly does he judge etc. He would be judging himself by the same standards usually. If he has double standards, then he is just purely fooling himself which is a childish attempt by the ego to protect itself. So how he interprets you is more about him than you in essence.

    Self proclaimed vs claimed by Others
    http://deoxy.org/egofalse.htm


    We inherently favor collective judgement over singular and assume that’s more accurate. Wisdom of crowds? For example: 100 people tell you you are a great dancer, should we trust that more than 1 person telling us? Should we trust this feedback more than what we think we are? Well here is the catch. Your definition from self is totally intertwined with others. If you examine your self separately for the purpose of finding something true, you’ll realize you have lost your frame of reference and you have nothing to catch. 

    You can hold on to concepts like a good dancer should have symmetry, balance and grace etc. and make your definition independent of others’ opinions. We also call them principles at times. But this conceptual grouping “Good dancer – best balance, symmetry and grace” is nothing inherent. Now what is best? The limit of your imagination at the highest level? This imagination limit is also variable based on what you see in real life. Sometimes we see a performance that was beyond our imagination, so we tweak our imagination to this next level. It is a game because, it is thought dependent. If I don’t think about it, it does not exist, therefore not inherently real.

    We create definitions and live up to them. If they have large social appeal, you get social praise too as a reward. But then if you get too much of this reward its balanced by people who will hate you too just for the fact that you have what they don’t have. Another way this duality could act is that since you have got so much reward from your actions a lot of your energy will be directed towards this goal and you too are pursuing in the same way as a cocaine addict. You may say ‘Oh, but I am doing something non-risky, which is good for society(moral crap)’. Excluding the moral crap, even the non-risky part removes the experience of the adrenaline rush of excitement for doing something forbidden. So it is not possible to have everything at the same time. Every experience is equal in the absolute sense. A scientist would say everything is just vibrations. So in a way duality acts on everyone equally no matter who you are. Its like a law of nature which applies to everyone.

    Underemphasis and Overemphasis play
    In Actual reality there are no filters, everything just is. We can balance our ego whenever we want by overemphasizing or giving special attention to what we under-emphasize.

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    Thoughts – 7 Mar

    If meaning is a choice we make…what is the best way to create this equation….would anyone voluntarily choose and follow society’s constructs after discovering this knowledge?….Deriving one’s sense of worth and meaning from society seems to be a huge postponement and a very circuitous way where you need to attain X at each stage

    The entire society is man’s collective attempt to create order and is always constantly challenged by chaos…

    What is the thing we take for most granted? Probably the air we breathe?What if we were grateful for every breath? Wouldn’t it give us the highest sensitivity for the sublime feeling of satisfaction?

    The whole sense of meaning/experience is completely unique to each individual and in a way all are equivalent.

    Each dominant emotion in humans is countered by its dual in others. The question is will black or white win? But nothing can win in a sense because they depend on each other. One implies the other so they are one.

    Pure concepts are imaginary and too simplistic to actually exist.

    If you want to maximize pleasure in a relationship, both the parties should have the same intensity of interest for the same. Not like one is interested in maximizing the relationship pleasure and the other is interested in his/her work life.

    Judging anything requires you to have a rubric in your mind at another level. These rubrics are known only to the individual judging can be deduced by observing his judgements.

    Playing with meaning is the greatest power. It changes the entire life of the person. Like the movie inception which implants an idea which changes that person completely in his time dimension.

    Knowledge or knowing something, understanding something happens the moment there is synchronicity of neurons. The more synchronicity, the more the feeling of understanding.