Journey to the Abstract

This phenomenon of enjoying the journey but not the destination can happen only in an illusion (Maya).

Maya centers on the fact that our beliefs create all reality that matters to us. The most intriguing part about this is that, this illusion nevertheless functions. Its actually an issue in semantics while translating the Sanskrit word to English. In English, an illusion does not function. Beliefs are capable of creating full blown experiences. But the greatest power in our hands is to choose/not to choose to play the game of beliefs.

I read an interesting quote somewhere.

“The world we experience and the life we live, are the reflections of our thoughts. The mind creates a world of illusion. By changing our thoughts, we change the illusion and experience a different reality. We do not create a world, only an illusion that looks real. No unusual power is involved here. We are living in Maya and are changing the Maya.”

There are 2 examples I can think of:

In the movie peaceful warrior, the master tells the student that as a reward for all the hard work he is going to take him to a magical place. The master and student trek for long along a rough mountain path. The student is hyper excited all the while. When they finally reach the top, the master says that this is it. With this the student is instantly turned off and he asks the master if all he wanted to show was the view from the mountain top. The master says no, and lifts up an ordinary stone and says this is what I wanted to show. With this the student is even more disappointed.

There is another example I can recall from childhood. Once a guy was told by his friend that a girl in his class found him attractive and liked him. He trusted that friend and therefore thought it was really true. For the next 6 months, whenever he looked at that girl, he was primed to think that she was admiring him or giving him furtive glances. His whole opinion about her was transformed. He started to create a soft corner for her in his mind which was free from judgment. Also, he would be extra nice while talking to her. At the end of these 6 months, the friend revealed that it was just a prank and that girl did not mention anything about him. Now this guy was suddenly disillusioned.

So this example shows how a belief in something can transform the entire journey and induce all kinds of experiences. Now the complexity here is that though the belief was not based in reality, the experiences created by them were real. This is the power of illusion. It really creates experience inside you. In the above 2 examples, we can clearly see that the journey element was filled with rich experience. Though the final destination was not corresponding with the starting belief.

It is more like a barter system. The 2 people are mutually attached to each others’ personalities. This kind of love also involves a lot of attachment. So the 2 people involved are trapped in the prisons of their existing personalities. They may really enjoy this prison, but how long will they enjoy it? How long can this be sustained?

This game can be extended though and you can try to love more and more aspects of the other person. This might be the stepping stone towards unconditional love. But from what I see around me, there is PLENTY of room for improvement here. Society seems so intolerant for any behavior beyond its preset boundaries. People dismiss you as sick, crazy, weird, deviant if you do anything beyond its defined space. 90% of people seem to be heavily under the influence of this conditioning. So under this hypnosis they are only capable of loving you as long as your within this framework. So in essence they do not love the REAL you but a certain personality which you carry. Of course, your personality can have slack and movement within that would be accepted too. But in the overall picture, in order to live with such a person, you;ll need to greatly limit your freedom and keep your behavior mostly predictable within the personality archetype and its slack.

Thinking about it in the broadest sense, the real you is the ultimate observer behind all perception. It cannot be observed itself because that is a fire trying to burn itself. Everything that we can perceive is not us. If we do think it is us, then that is an attachment to a set of thoughts, feelings and images because of our conditioning or because we find them pleasurable. So we attach all those perceptions into our definition of ourselves. And we are afraid of losing these perceptions, which is why we fear death so much.

Even this conventional love can vary in its levels of depth and intimacy. The deeper the person explores himself and you, the more he/she becomes capable to loving. A person’s capacity to love depends on his/her level of self exploration and knowledge. The more intimate your knowledge of yourself, the more intimately you can understand the other and therefore the more your your capacity to love.

Here are the different levels I can think of in increasing levels of intimacy:
1. External possessions like car, house, money, social power
2. Physical body and its dynamics attraction
3. Common interests – such as a sport, playing musical instruments, common situations
4. The personality framework
5. Deeper more subtle feelings
5. Your dreams / ideals / core beliefs
6. The true essence of who you are (which implies he has reached the same level with himself) / unconditional love

But even in this hierarchy it gets tricky. Sometimes, it depends on what each person values the most. Some girls would have a good looking body and would value that even higher than their feelings. And many girls may value their feelings much higher than their physical body. So each has a value pyramid.

In the broad sense, we can say love moves from gross to subtle planes. The subtler the plane, greater the love.

We are originally born as a blank slate. Our mom, dad or people we met in early childhood pay a pivotal role in create all our major beliefs. Thereafter we pursue things that line with these beliefs throughout our adulthood. With very deep introspection and awareness, it should be possible to uncover these core beliefs. Even the above statement is a belief “That it is possible to uncover/modify/examine/understand or remove our core beliefs with enough deep thought” and another one of “I am capable of doing this deep thought”. These 2 can work together and launch a person into discovery.

For a lot of people, they may know a lot about how something is to be done, but this would often not have a corresponding “I am perfectly capable of doing it” to support it. Many times their experience is just based on the belief that “I happen to know the theory about how it is done and therefore I have the upper hand over someone who cannot articulate it as well”. But they would also feel pangs of insecurity when the people around them who are more articulate and know more theory. So if this person values theory, then his experience is created by the space of people’s knowledge on this subject and their skill of articulation.

This topic is actually terrifically complex. I can probably write books on the same. The startling part about it is that your beliefs create what matters to you the most, ‘Experiences’ themselves.  People are different from each other in their motivation, drives, interests etc. mainly because of this difference in beliefs. The fuel for all thoughts is our beliefs. Thoughts have no power over us if not for the supporting beliefs which can create an entire spectrum of experiences.

There are core beliefs in us that drive most of what we do. If any of these core beliefs is changed then it is like a clutch that is disengaged from the wheel. The old pattern continues but it only lasts till the residual momentum runs out. In other words, our whole being is driven by beliefs and it is these beliefs that create experience. So technically if all beliefs are dropped, then no experience would be registered, it is a state of non-experience.

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?

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.

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.

‘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?

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‘.

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.

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.