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Nothing can be truly explained in terms of a block diagram model. There are tons of layers and these layers are connected too. They may have symbiotic relationships, different types of dependencies and also circular, iterative and probabilistic relationships. Once we move to the metaphorical level, each thing can be not only be connected to everything else but also in myriad ways. I strongly believe each thing is connected to everything else at a higher level (like the concept in avatar movie). A mega chain of relationships may even connect something as remote as beavers in central america and  the quality of tea in japan or something like that. Each thing is inseparable from everything else, almost like a hologram or a fractal.

It seems that, the only way to construct any kinds of abstractions in reality such as block diagrams is to impose artificial constraints. The limits could be on boundaries and complexity of relationships.

For example:

• The stretch of imagination required to relate 2 fields should not be too much(subjective constraint depending upon audience)
• Metaphorical relationships are to be kept minimum(subjective constraint, in truth metaphors are equally valid)
• The chains should not be longer than 20 arrows across(to limit complexity and scope)

Like higher music volumes, certain perspectives and social gravity dominate our views. Once we de-condition ourselves by staying alone for a while (keeping the brain active), we once again regain most of our original views and feelings.

To me, a good analogy would be soft and loud music playing simultaneously. Say there is some mild music leaking from your neighbors house. It is possible to hear it only when the room is totally quiet. Then say you switch on the television at a moderate volume, the sound from your neighbors house is drowned. At the next level, you could put on headphones and blast some loud trance/rock music. Now even the television sound is drowned. You can once again quieten the place enough to hear the faint sounds again coming from outside your house.

I guess in a similar way, social gravity(societal influence, especially when you are in a heavy social situation) dominates our thought patterns and perspectives. It is difficult to regain your original thoughts when there is no much noise. Once alone, in a quiet place, the original thoughts return just like the faint sounds.

Though I have been reading about this concept for ages, it seems to get clearer and clearer by the day as I associate to my other reading as well. The latest insight was when I thought about my behavior when I knew I was seeing something for the last time. When I was suffering in my childhood days, I never imagined that my mind would be like my present state 12yrs later. Now in retrospect I wonder, had I known this, would my behavior have been different? I strongly feel it would have made a significant difference. I operate and think in a totally different way when I know its the last time I am seeing something.

There have been so many small instances in my life where I have noticed this. Once a guy dropped into my apt and was going to leave for India the next day. I had briefly met him in a trip previously that lasted for 3 days. He had a strange personality and not very sociable or welcoming. I thought the trip was just a temporary thing and that he was going to return to US after the vacation. Later, I discovered that he was permanently going back to India. This revelation totally changed my thoughts and behavior towards him. I started giving him much more attention and spoke to him for long since I knew it was the last time I would ever see him.

The deeper I think the more I realize that there are a lot of things we see for the last time in our lives. Its like stepping twice in a river, the river is actually different every single time. There are so many people we meet just once or places that we may never see again. You may say there is a probability of seeing them again, but a LOT of times that is extremely low especially if your traveling around the world, studying abroad etc, or a lifestyle that involves a lot of changing environments.

Even the stuff we take as constant are actually not on close observation. My thoughts are continuously changing if I observe them keenly. Even my mental state of mind and physical sensations are unique at every moment. There is nothing to grasp, unless I put a huge amount of effort to maintain a status quo. For example: Say I regularly fantasize about sex related content, but sexual content is just a concept, the kind of feelings, quality of mental images and creativity is very different even if I do this twice everyday. Even this effort is just a trap that makes us do the same thing over and over again.

The word balance always made me feel uncomfortable for a long time. Now when I think back on why I felt uncomfortable I got some interesting insights. Earlier my concept of me = all the experiences I had + my future experiences. So the word balance meant, I’ll have to live within a narrow band of experience – not going too high or low. This was imprisoning by itself. I felt it was too stifling and restrictive.

Now I look at the same word in a different way. This comes from a paradigm shift in what I think of me. Now, me = the blank screen on which all experience happens. Also, the fact that all experience begin and end. They have different life times but being born and dying and distinct start and end points to them. So now the word balance means something different to me. It is about you having the freedom to choose and control your experiences rather than being a slave to them. For example: if I get addicted to coffee, then it becomes a need and that controls me vs me choosing to have it. Now, balance for me is maintaining this freedom of perspective, choices, actions etc.

Deep learning however happens when you go far off the mean. If I take an atom analogy, say your experiences are the electron. If you are close to the nucleus, you would have a limited range of experiences but live a content life. On the other hand, if you are an electron with tremendous energy you could orbit very far, have journey’s, extreme pleasure or upheavals. Orbiting far away would make you have much more intense experiences and may result in high wisdom, knowledge and deep empathy.

The cause of suffering is said to be resistance to “What Is” of kind. This statement is so profound. Everyday I see new meanings for this simple saying. Almost any kind of suffering can be explained by this simple statement. When I get an injection, I do not suffer because I am ready for that pain which lasts for 4-5 secs. Whereas if someone punches me, that is suffering since I am resisting that person’s anger towards me.

Suppose someone asks you the question, where would you rather be right now, the more dreams you can come up with would show how far away you are from living your actualized life and this causes suffering. Dreaming causes suffering if you believe that the dream you conjured up is a much much better state than the present.I like to be in a state of day dream since I have freedom compared to real life which is much more restrictive. This addiction to dreaming of wonderful possibilities or free exploration coupled with a high desire for perfectionism manifests itself as torpor. This too causes suffering since I resist ‘what is’ in the social world and all that it expects from me. At a higher level beyond concepts etc. raw emotions need to be accepted for what they are. Anger is anger, fear is fear, joy is joy etc.

Relationships beautifully bring out your entanglements, attachments, obsessions, passions, fears and aversions  in an experiential way. Its one of the greatest teachers especially when the relationship is a deep one lasting at least for a year.

This needs to be disentangled. A dream is a dream, a concept is a concept, seeing is seeing, hearing is hearing etc. and lastly , ‘what is’ is ‘what is.

I wonder if I simply alternate between Intense seeking and a contentment phase where I just flow timelessly doing things by habit. Can all action be classified under seeking? It is said that even at attempt to be desireless is a very strong desire. Probably, there are just 2 states, desire/seeking and desirelessness/non-seeking. I think this state of desirelessness can be attained through a deep enough understanding of yourself. But however, it is sort of a plunge into the unknown. So all fears need to purged out one by one first.

Everything in nature is like a knife. It can be used for constructive or destructive purposes. Its possible to get addicted to anything: sex, passion, chocolate, food, crushes, attachment to physical possessions, workaholism, television, movies, some behavioral patterns, virtually any experience. Its not just drugs that are addictive. People treat drugs like a separate world. In some ways its not. Infact it may give you deeper insight into your own motivations. What matters is the level of self development and understanding in the person consuming them? Anything pleasurable is addicting and there is no reason to stop pursuing it besides your beliefs on what is supposed to be done in life.

If you ingest a huge amount of cocaine that fires up all your reward centers in your brain and body, it becomes extremely clear that all that we do ultimately causes the release of dopamine and what we really want is that. All our mental activities, beliefs, actions etc. may just be performed in a illusory world to ultimately get something real which is the experience. So if you are directly getting the experience, why would you choose to go through all the hardship through conventional socially accepted means only to get 1/100th of the reward say?. That is probably the reason for instant addiction and its potential for it. 

So the questions you could ask yourself are:
What are your current addictions? – they could even be mental states: like staying in fantasy or absorbed etc., reflection, physical activity etc.
What are your current beliefs? – Have you really examined them? Are there really valid? How deeply have you questioned them?
What are the things that you fear the most? Why? – Drill down to the real reason, like the fear of ghosts is the psychological fear of the unknown. Then ask, why are you scared of the unknown? What experiences in life are supporting these views? (don’t settle for something like “All humans are inherently scared of the unknown”, that is just a blanket unexamined belief).

Analyze all these aspects and contemplate on what kind of experiences the drug you wish to take might induce, read well on accounts of others experiences and then try to make accurate conjectures of their beliefs, states of mind and conditions.

A completely strange experience that you are unable to integrate will leave you extremely disoriented and confused till you manage to integrate it. You may either take the time to integrate it or decide to bury it if its too alien etc. So be aware of these aspects too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA6nBS-KHEc

Some of the basic stuff we observe:
Walk
Symmetry
Body Shape
Pheromones/Copulance (changes depending on cycles)
Voice (changes depending on cycles)
Anatomical adornments (or cars, gadgets, possessions today – influenced by advertising)

Patterns in choosing: Choosing similar ratings
Women might be wired to aim for the top of the relative status rung – social/financial

Testosterone and Estrogen – genetic base (can probably change due to other factors)

Being with another person is like a merging of your matrix world with another. Each matrix has its expectations and expectations create probability equations. Also, each matrix is dynamic and may change expectations from time to time.
Is there a way to move beyond all expectations or see through them completely?

Sometimes I think, that’s the reason why we have created this fixed values and other societal systems to escape the complexity that is inherent, the fire of reality. No matter what we choose, its after all a decision and every decision is inherently a trade off.

If I were to choose a partner, I would look for traits in her that resonate with traits in myself which I find most desirable. Sometimes I wonder, is our inner knowledge already complete and when we see some trait that agrees with our own inner knowledge it immediately resonates and is felt like an intuition.

All these sexual attractiveness factors maybe true, but I think there is a force acting at literally a higher dimension which controls our entire experienced reality and all these sexual aspects may be a small subset of it. The force is “beliefs”. This is the most profoundly interesting topic I have ever come across.

In spite of all this reflection, analysis, synthesis etc, after watching 1000’s of videos and tons of articles that talk about the absolute frontiers, I find that this state of satori or clear insight comes and goes. When I’m talking to someone who understands the flow and background of what I say, I can be extremely fluent and creative. Its like my brain performs at 9/10 creating complex metaphors, finding links between seemingly unrelated stuff and the stuff I say even surprises me. Even for all that I have written in this blog, sometimes when I go back and read some of my old articles, it almost seems like a pleasant surprise. Kind of like, if you go back and look at your engineering math books, you would be a surprised to find how you learned and applied complex formulas of derivatives and integration.

When I am in a passive silent mind state, I feel like I know nothing. Knowledge/Understanding seems like a state that requires effort and maintenance. My whole mind/self is at times completely blank and I would be shaken and might even hesitantly buy into any ordinary belief thrown at me confidently by an person who has never examined or even thought along these lines even once. For example: I was telling a friend that “Its not the brain before the doer, its the doer who determines how the brain grows and the brain networks are just a physical manifestation of the non-physical entity that’s you. And the example of Einstein’s brain and the myth of using brain network to prove intelligence instead of vice versa”. Now this friend knew nothing about anything metaphysical and was a person with very rigid beliefs about everything. She was like “How can that be? There is stuff known as genes that controls who you are etc.”. I abandoned the conversation but at that moment, I was in no position to prove my point or prove hers. When I am alone, I can think of a 2 page summary explaining how beliefs are everything but somehow at that time I was lost, I almost felt like believing her since she was so confidently throwing it at me. My open mindedness makes me so vulnerable.

I am still finding this dissociation a mystery. What does it really mean? It almost seems like I really dont know anything and this state of mind of insight itself is temporary The passive accepting state of mind is probably equally likely. Does it mean whatever I know isn’t really true? and I just put effort in constructing complex intellectual manipulations to explain everything?

If I truly knew something, I should absolutely not be affected by another person’s views on that subject. Maybe they are all just concepts and a concept is as real as any other concept. So there are 1000’s of concept kinds in this world. They may dehumanize, put you to shame, induce guilt or make you feel connected with love, beauty, joy etc. In other words, they may empower or dis-empower you. All are equally real so you just need to choose.

Then the question of what is the truth becomes even more pressing since you have lost your basis for believing.

Limitless

Tree of life
Groundhog day
Life in a day (sort of predictable tho)
Lost in Translation
Being John Malcovich
Mr Nobody
Travelers and Magicians
Siddharta 1974
Seven years in Tibet

Documentaries:
Surviving progress
Global Brain
Zeitegist – Moving Forward
The Freedom Movie 2
Ambition to meaning – Wayne Dyer
Global Brain
Primacy of consciousness