Journey to the Abstract

While looking through old photos today, I could recall vivid memories and impressions from my past. I could also get a quick glimpse of my experience at that time like what it felt like to see/experience through those child eyes. I had collected photos of myself in a chronological order.

I could feel a kind of unconditional love for my past selves and experiences. I was wondering, what if I could go back and comfort that scared child I was? Show it the right perspective and give it all the love it missed. I would be the ultimate mentor since it is the absolute height of empathy possible. I know and can relate EXACTLY to the feelings of that child/adolescent. I can directly address the deepest fears and insecurities. I can also share that the future is totally OK and nothing that is happening now matters beyond an interesting memory.

Why would someone want to control everything? Isn’t that power like a lucid dream? Technology can only be as useful or harmful as the mind wielding it, but what decides who wields it or what kind of consciousness takes control, what kind is a victim and what kind escapes?

Power and control always exists. Let’s look at the pure energy and not the forms. It’s just a play of energy. What’s the intelligence doing this is? Its different mimes and energy forms taking strength and dominating consciousness at different times. But our brain would adapt to whatever situation you put it in. Like the Nazi camp, people lost hope completely. Some other people are hyper motivated because they achieve whatever targets they set. Externally I see a human form, but what makes the person? His body with its automatic systems? His ideas which are got from social interactions with parents, relatives and friends? Where did the parents etc. get the ideas? What about genes? Who created the parent’s genes?

Logic falls apart as you expand the scope of inquiry. There is inseparability and nothing can be defined by itself as having any essence. Let’s move deeper into the individual elements. If a person is made up of mimes, ideas. Then what are these ideas? Energy forms? What is this energy? What decides which forms of energy dominate?

How do I know what this energy is? As I am writing this, what kind of energy is writing this? What kind of energy is there inside me when I am hearing words in my mind? What is the energy of seeing, hearing, smelling, touch, internal sensations? What is the nature of movement of these energies? What is the energy of sensations? As I indulge in different forms of thoughts, what is the energy of it? When I am stressed, what is the energy? When I am critically thinking in concepts, what is the energy? When I am relaxing, what is the energy? What is the energy for each of the social interactions I have moment to moment? When I think that I need to do a LOTTT and learn a LOTT to get enlightened, what is the energy? When I think enlightened is a very simple thing, what is the energy of that?

Even the word ‘energy’ I am using is just a pointer to feeling? Can I know anything beyond what I feel? EVERY SINGLE THING ends up into a feeling? The word feeling is a pointer to ….no words…, isn’t ‘THAT’ the irrefutable truth? It is a unifying field in which everything is happening and I am aware of this field at every moment of my life.

Seeking enlightenment is trying to find essence by going deeper and deeper into reality to find its elements. It’s a trip into the underground cave to find the core from which everything emerges.

I get so involved into conversations there is so much of reluctance to leave it incomplete without a closure. These incomplete convos happen so many times, in person, phone and the internet. If I move to some other topic then I have to deal with the discomfort of not meeting the success criteria for the conversation. Its like cutting a sine wave somewhere in between. Its like I have an obsessive need to get things finished to the extent that they match my mental image or success criteria. Its like I’m inbetween my lesson and have to abort. Its like stopping a movie just at the climax. I have invested so much and I do not get the reward of the sense of completion. This is similar to the hunter personality where you chase the kill with all your might and then it slips away at the last minute. There is so much energy invested but the reward just slips. There is a radical energy inside me that pushes incomplete things to completion. At times this wastes a lot of time. Like say I am eagerly waiting for a phone call from someone. During that period I cannot do anything else, my whole mind is consumed. But because of this, I give my whole attention totally into the conversation. I can see the same trend even in excitement about pleasurable objects (material/non-material). When I am in a state of intense anticipation, my whole mind is consumed and I am incapable of doing anything else. Its like a one pointedness but only for that thing and that is disabling. Could it be excess dopamine leading to excess pleasure on receiving the object? If someone goes away and says they will be back, there is a big risk that the high involvement I would need to maintain in-between would be wasted. If there is an interruption, again there is a risk of them not getting back to you. But what is the other option? If I don’t get that involved in the first place, I would not feel that extreme one pointed pleasure of mind too. Also I would not be giving my full involvement in the conversation and therefore it wouldn’t be as satisfying as it could be. I want to push things to the hilt in complete sine waves. But when I hit for a large wave, I am taking a big gamble. The risk is that before the wave completes it would get terminated. This behavior may have been created while playing computer games. There is a steep challenge and you got to complete it. The challenge is either time bound or related to exploration. I would sit with the challenge one pointedly till its finished or I get exhausted. Also, in studying for exams, I wait for the last minute because then I can sustain working at that high a level of energy and just get done with it. If I start much earlier then that level of energy is unsustainable. Its like you cannot run a marathon at your fastest speed, only a short sprint is possible.

While solving computer issues too, I would persist day and night and my mind would get completed fixated on solving that problem. When the problem does not get solved after repeatedly the force increases even more. This explains even my sprint running, desire to take up extreme short challenges, desire to perform short feats of strength. That explains why I like living in the extremes. Are my neurotransmitter levels wildly fluctuating? Do I intentionally indulge in that?

Maybe now the form that this obsession has taken is in elaborate complex integrated mental concepts and insights. This one pointedness works when searching for good material, seeking to understand, and explaining them to another person. The dissatisfaction is like imagine there is a math question paper with only 1 complicated question. You are excellent at solving it and you work full speed to complete it but just before you reach the final answer, time runs out and the paper is taken away. You get 0/100 since you did not get the final answer. Can you imagine the frustration?

OR imagine you are playing the last level of a computer game where you have to start from the 1st level each time you start the game. You painstakingly and patiently work through 17/18 levels in the game. When you are in the 18th level halfway, the power fails and now you have to start all over again once the power is back. 

Randomness:
Look for for and encourage any thoughts and patterns of randomness you see in your life. Why did you bang your knee to the table today? Why did it suddenly rain? Why did I miss my bus? etc.

Increasing the mapping between words and objects: Increasing the verbal processing and working memory
Firstly the object should mean something to you and you must want to remember the word.
The intention is primary in anything we do, it is like the fuel. Always ask yourself: Do I really want to? and why?

Imagine an object completely with all its qualities and then keep the whole thing in mind and then repeat the word for the object until its strongly imprinted. Find all the associations you have with this object and describe each feature in your mind in the most imaginative way possible. Get a FEEL for the word and the object it denotes and hold on to it. Each associative pathway strengthens the memory.

E.g.: Mapping a person’s name and face when we meet them for the first time. Or remembering a particular shop name in a particular street.

To feel real belonging: The opposite of dissociation
Look at the feeling of dissociation hard and ask yourself again and again: Who is looking, seeing and feeling this? What kind of heady/mental sensation do I think is me? Continuously look at that. Try to locate this invisible wall and identify: what is it protecting me from? Look at the present moment and stop thinking, and absorb all the direct perceptions in the moment. Ask yourself where else can I be? where else would I want to be? and then just open up to let everything in. Its just an act of trusting again.

Its like urging a turtle to get out of its shell. It needs to feel extremely safe and have total trust to do that. The shell is mental numbness to things that are painful and disliked.

Feel expansion of body:
Visualize I am space. Imagine you are the space for all objects in this room, in this locality, city etc. Imagine when your talking to someone, you are the empty container/space for that entire experience.
Imagine you are the space for everything you are feeling right now.

Try to find every single contraction in your mind (grasping, attachments etc.) and body (sensations) and release that energy and allow it to spread wherever it chooses to.

Floating feeling – like air
Try to imagine hard that you become air and the breaths you are taking is air inside air. Combine this with the “I am space” feeling to increase its intensity. Identify all the feelings of solidity in your body and imagine them disintegrating into airy vibrations and spreading across the whole room like a perfume.

To feel an artistic detachment – especially for sexual images
Look at a super arousing photo and then:
– Try to see the image as just an image on paper or on a screen. Feel the surface of the paper or screen to confirm that to yourself. See that it is just a flat piece of material. See the pores in the paper and pixels on the screen. Look at the shades of color minutely. Squint your eyes and try to see the image as a innovative wax candle or as a sculpture, monster etc., you can use your imagination.
– Notice that the feeling in your body is because of your projection to that image which is nothing but just some pixels on the screen or pores on a paper.

To love an annoying person:
Think about what kind of imaginary personality would love this annoying person. Maybe another equally annoying person – so he finds belonging, maybe someone who enjoys the domination and anger of this person, a masochist who enjoys being psychologically harassed etc. User your imagination and think about what kind of traits would his imaginary personality carry. As you think about this, your feelings of hatred etc. get diluted.

What would be the ultimate bodily experience possible:
Visualize and intensely imagine the best bodily feelings possible. Use the help of memory: all previous experiences where you have been extremely happy. Imagine those feelings slowly increasing in intensity as you are turning up the volume control knob.

What would absolute freedom feel like:
Imagine that suddenly you realize that your current reality is actually a lucid dream. What’s the first thing you would do. Think of a series of actions that would follow.Imagine it vividly.

Directly feeling ‘Ways of thinking’:
Logic, Linear: Think of a sequence of steps. Think of the sequence of your morning chores and run through it in your mind. Try other sequences. What does it feel like to use this ability? What is the essential experience of linear thought?

Verbal: Try to remember the names of all the people you know at your school or workplace. Try to list out the names of all the objects in your room. What does using this faculty feel like?

Temporal: Think about the passage of time. Keep track of the time interval of each second passing by. Ask yourself how long will it take to cook food, walk to the grocery store. Think of a new far away place and imagine how many hours/days of walking will it take you to reach there. Try to run this through your mind and concentrate on your temporal calculations and feelings.

Rational: Think about what is the best thing to do right now and watch yourself thinking through this decision. You may weigh different factors such as immediate feelings, to-do lists, the calendar date, long term goals etc. What does it feel like to think in this manner?

Analytic: Look at your computer and break it up into its individual parts – screen, keyboard, touch-pad. Now look into the keyboard and count the number of keys. How many colored keys are there. How many colors are there in your laptop? etc. If you had to recreate your room in a computer 3-D language. Think about how you would approximate and break down everything you see. What would be the modules, sub-modules. What would be the smallest unit you would use? Feel what it feels like to break things down into its individual parts.

Abstract: Look around you and ask yourself, how do you know you are in your city, locality. Imagine whats behind the wall of your room based on your previous knowledge. If I can walk through walls and walk around 200m north from my current location where would I be? What would it look like?

Symbolic: Imagine a person your know making various facial expressions denoting different emotions. Imagine all the traffic signboards and signals. Look into how you map meaning to the symbol.

Numeric/Digital: Count the number of rooms, windows in your house. Count the number of keys in your keyboard. Count the number of lights. Count the number of plastic pieces on your window blinds.

Intuitive: What is the person next to you feeling and thinking based on his facial expression, context etc.? Look at the painting in front of you and think about where that place would exist in the real world? Intuit which of your friends would like to visit such a place?

Holistic: What is your overall mood right now? (look at all the feelings at once and decide). Try to look at all cycles in nature and yourself and see similarities. The orbits, rotation and revolution of the earth, breathing, day and night, wakefulness and sleep etc. 

Non-verbal: How does each color in VIBGYOR make you feel? What imaginations come with each color? (Red – imagination of blood, blue – sky or water etc.) What song would represent your current mood? 

Non-temporal: Imagine you have lost all memory and all you know is what is in front of you. Nothing is even recorded since even that has been lost. You just experience the immediate moment and that’s all. Imagine this and see the timeless feeling it creates. 

Non-rational: What happens after we die? What is your intuition about what will happen 1000 years from now? How are you going to feel tomorrow morning? 

Synthetic: Think about how the droplets of water get together to form the ocean. Think about how all the employees together make a corporation. Think about all the bricks that have come together to make a concrete building. 

Analogical: Think about some analogy and feel the connecting of 2 groups of ideas. e.g.: How our life is like music and its about the journey more than the end point. How corporations and sports work on the same ideals. 

Concrete:
Feel your table, wall and feel its presence and concreteness. Feel the weight of your laptop. Feel the weight of your body. Feel the solidity, frozen-ness of everything.

Who am I?
Penetrative thinker, dreamer of dreams, visionary, genius, genuine, highly evolved, free thinker, extremely intelligent, very sensitive in observation, very perceptive, powerful imagination, radical ideas, evolved empathy abilities, fairly deep and profound understanding of relationships, strongly seek the real truth behind everything, ready to question/examine everything, power to directly question beliefs, integrator, larger/largest picture thinking, ability to see multiple perspectives, ability to stomach paradoxes and ponder, contemplator, very good at abstractions analogies metaphors, powerful perception of music – ability to really feel tones and separate the essences of songs, strong meditator, strong understanding of various emotions and mental states, psychonaut, reality explorer, seriously open minded and liberal, an artist personality of all forms, enjoy art is every possible form, take full responsibility of my life and choices, enjoy helping people in things that I think matter without expectation, deep understanding of sense of touch, body and pleasure, intensely value freedom, hedonistic, enjoy any form of dance with the right atmosphere, cherish sense of wonder, emotional volume is medium/low most of the time, dominance of intellect in actions, sprint runner in worldly actions, hunter gatherer personality – do extremely focused work and then day dream, lounge, contemplate the rest of the time, not very comfortable with social situations for long, daydream a lot, seek pleasurable mental states and relish them, revisit memories and consolidate the best ones, value deep connections with other people, physical quite fit, like to optimize, prevent or minimize wastage, fairly tolerant of people and things but only for a short duration, I feel extremely unique (search for similar people, like minded, similar projections etc online or in person), I feel like an unlimited being in a limited world, good at short bursts of concentration, feel the momentum of routines and obsessions fairly often, enjoy total silence for a short while, I am attached to my mental freedom and collections (ideas, views, perspectives, mental states, memories, sources of information)

Dual of the above:
very shallow thinking, totally practical/conventional outer world thoughts, stickler for social norms, big time follower with no original thoughts, average/below average intelligence, crude emotions and expression, totally insensitive to most things around, 0 imagination, does not question anything beyond 1-2 levels, absolutely no desire for truth etc., thinks external world is the only real thing, sees life through only one narrow perspective, extremely rigid, mind is highly divided, does not have any idea about his dreams, no capacity to visualize or day dream, cannot sit with one thing for long, very short attention span, absolutely no musical ability nor appreciation for it, very shallow understanding of his emotions, blames everyone else/things for everything in his life, stays safe in his well and least interest in exploring something new, highly conservative and dogmatic, thinks arts are a waste of time and looks at art practioners with contempt, keeps to himself and hates helping others unless he is getting some serious benefit out of it, loves rituals and routines, has a mundane view of what life is, hates dance and thinks its a pointless activity, does not admire anything, sex is about as profound and dirty as excretion – releasing his taboo tensions, cribs/complains all the time, highly aggressive about his beliefs thoughts and righteousness, angry and disgusted most of the time, a religious/cultural fanatic, stays in his own social group with like minded people as him, he feels nobody knows more than him and that they just show off all the time, physically not fit at all, wastes everything like food space money devices time etc, he can enjoy totally mindless games and argue about pointless things for hours, he always like noise around him and hates silence and will do anything to fill it up, attached to only things that the average society runs after like money, house, beautiful wife, car and job and nothing else matters to him, likes to have shallow connections with many people vs. deep ones, is a farmer personality – slowly, daily, routinely do hard work to reap fruits slowly and fruits gradually build up, is very simple minded and only thinks about very simple things, he simply uses people for his benefit and to satisfy himself and  has no understanding of relationship dynamics etc.

Imagine a headgear is attached to your head which can control all your electrical impulses in your brain. Say the headgear generates a very uncomfortable internal state making it difficult for you to breathe, choking you and starts endless painful thoughts.

What are you going to do, assuming you cannot remove this headgear? You would try to find someway out of the situation.

• If you think the headgear would stop after a while and things would be back to normal – then its Hope, Trust or Faith
• If you have to figure out a way to make it stop – then its analyzing the mind with awareness over a period of time to gain understanding
• If you worry about it never stopping – then you will suffer more
• If u think whatever the machine does doesn’t matter, because I’m not the machine – then its DETACHMENT
• If u think it;ll never stop – then you will feel actual FEAR and helplessness

Now, the analogy is that at every moment, there is an internal state inside of us, there is some sensation throughout the body, an undercurrent representing your general mood and mental thoughts running. What is your relationship to all of these?

What is the ultimate state we would like to be in? Would we be happy with any ONE state like that?

Another related question would be, why do we think in the first place? I would presume because our mind is helping us reach better and better states. If you are perfectly content with your current state, wouldn’t you go into timelessness and super-consciousness. Your mind would completely stop.

Its like we enjoy the game of duality and want variety. But our attempt to constantly influence these duality paradigms is like a game. We have to keep creating lacks so that we can seek fulfillment. Fulfillment is possible only if there was a lack in the first place.

A step back from this game would be to simply observe its mechanisms and working with detachment. The truth I believe is that the true “I” is not in this game at all.

There are 100+ neurotransmitters in the human body and many of them have only been partially understood and many more are yet under exploration.The neurotransmitters are also heavily present in the gut – almost like a second brain. Most anti-depressants work on monoamines and work for most people. However, it seems like there is a LOT more complexity and factors at play here.

Our neuro-pathways are reinforced by our thoughts. For example if you talk about the same problems again and again, only those experiences are reinforced and strengthened. Our neuro-pathways shape perception of everything. To any event, our first reaction may be of a two year child, then our reaction is tempered by our beliefs, experience and conditioning. So doing meditation, focusing on all pleasant feelings, focusing on beauty, inclusiveness etc. simply strengthens those pathways and allows us to feel them more deeply. Constant self-doubt strengthens that pathway etc. Any thought we indulge and involve ourselves in strengthens that pathway. The neural pathways maybe what we call Karma. When its on autopilot, its a self created system that has taken over. We need to deconstruct our real self one by one from this universe of neural pathways which is what is done in meditation.

The amygdala has highway pathways to the cortex, however the cortex has only sinewy lines going back to the amygdala. Similarly most of our gut brain in used for digestion and extraction of nutrients.

There are certain factors or seeds which escalate and reach the level of a disease in the body. Once this stage is reached it gets the legitimate status of a disease and is treated in a mechanistic way with drugs to bring back your normal state. But this normal state is a mystery. What is normal? My normal state or baseline can be dramatically different from yours.

Lets take an analogy to understand the way modern medicine deals with health. In the health spectrum, say it ranges between 0-100 with 100% being the ultimate state of health. Lets say a disease manifests only when health % falls below 30. Therefore only a person below 30% is considered ill and treated until the health level goes above 30 to say about 40-50 where he can once again function in society normally.  This person may consider a range of 40-50 his normal baseline state. In my case, this maybe 70-80 etc. There can be huge differences in what we call normal. This analogy is actually a gross simplification to convey my basic point.

We can gradually increase the level of complexity of this analogy and imagine a spectrum analyzer of an audio system as the different hormone balances in the body. In some people, this may work much more synchronously than others etc.

The disease stage is like reaching the red in your engine’s pedometer, but there have been factors that have lead to it and these factors are very often ignored unless the correlation is gross enough. The body is treated like a machine and its parts are treated in the same way a mechanic would work on a car.

I discovered this term from a really dark and intriguing movie ‘clockwork orange’. When I started to bring myself more into the present moment all kinds of doubts popped into my mind. These doubts were quite intriguing by themselves and prompted me to explore and gain a better understanding of certain fundamental entities such as memory.

I learned very recently that the idea that the idea of memory which most people have is a misconception.

Common idea:
‘we do not have any control over our memory, it is a continuous etching process that goes on as time passes by and everything gets recorded like a film tape. This tape can then be accessed at any time and this influences our current behavior and our projections. The tape is unchangeable and permanent in its content and we cannot choose to remember or not remember.’

The research in this field seems to open up new paradigms in relation to what we think memory is.

The latest discoveries:
The memory is less like a movie, a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid, and more like a play—subtly different each time it’s performed. In the brain, a network of cells is constantly being re-consolidated, rewritten, remade each time a memory is recalled and this is also dependent on your current state.

My daily experience also ties in much better to the new theories about memory. For example, every time I hear a song, though its with exactly the same headphones, the song creates a different experience in me. Sometimes the song gives me an ASMR euphoria, ordinary at other times and also outright unpleasant when I am feeling low/sick overall.

Having a drug like ecstasy can put a person in an extremely pleasant state. In this state, the original intensity of all recalled unpleasant memories can be drastically reduced.

Adopting this new view on how memory works can have a lot of profound implications on the way we lead our life.

Here are some suggestions to greatly improve your life experience involving memories:

1. Strengthen all associations of your happy memorable events when you are in a good mood. For example: You are in a very pleasant social setting, you have just had a great conversation with someone, while on an alcohol or cannabis high.

2. When you are feeling sick, miserable, in a very unpleasant state, or feeling very low psychologically, try to simply relax yourself and wait until this state passes away. Even if you do recall very happy times in this state (say your having fever or extremely low psychologically), it will seem bad and can scare you into believing that the memory is permanently lost.