Journey to the Abstract

I guess the thing to consider while having drugs is that it might take your body into a completely different state. This state might be completely outside any normal experience. If any understanding has to be gained from this, this experience would need to be integrated into your existing knowledge based on your exploration. If this state is far far beyond what you’ve explored, its like a 5yr old child getting a glimpse of what it would feel like when its 45yrs old, just for an hour or so. How would it be able to integrate this experience once its back into its child mind?!. General an outlier experience is initially disturbing until it gets integrated with your understanding. If a lot of far away outliers are introduced in a short time, then it will put all your energies on it until you figure out how this fits into your definition of self. For example, the vipassana retreat created strong outliers which I kept working on for 6-7months. Now almost all of it is integrated and my perspective is at the next level on everything. So I have stabilized again. So in brief, a unique novel experience will trigger intense questioning and pull your energies towards understanding and integrating the experience. This journey is very interesting but heavily preoccupying, so external pressures will create problems. A lot of things are expected out of you in daily life. Fulfilling social expectations can take an entire lifetime out of you, and still you would never be completely satisfied.

I look forward and eagerly anticipate certain events. Usually the emotion is a mixture of anticipation, tension and some fear. When the actual event occurs, the feelings are mixed again. Its excitement, nervousness, some pressure etc. And with this the event come to an end.

But depending upon the significance I attach to that event, after the event is over, I rerun all that happened in my mental imagination space. Though the actual experience was pretty mixed and not anything substantial, this subsequent fantasizing add this new dream layer and after some days, the memory gives me much more pleasure than the actual event. Its like the best parts are gleaned from the actual event and stored. The bad parts are somehow pushed to the background. The real experience seems to pass through some kind of filter and the memory gets encoded according to that filter.

My current perspective too significantly changes the feelings and thoughts invoked while reliving past moments. When I’m on a dopamine high through some intoxicant say, everything seems excellent. Sometimes while watching a movie in the theater, it would seem incredibly boring. But later, if I happen to see that the reviews for the movie are excellent and reading about all the different layers of meaning to all that happened in the movie, the memory of the entire movie is updated.

The reverse of this can happen too. I may go through a very nice experience and later everything I read invalidates it and claims its harmful, the memory of that experience gets passed through this new filter.

When I’m with other people, their perspectives influence my mental state a lot, so I cannot truly enjoy anything unless the other people are having the exact same intents(very rare). So, more than the actual event, the memory of events is so much more appealing because I can pass it through whatever filter I want and store only the best parts.

This further strengthens that “Perspective(Maya) is a game of reality” and that “Almost all of reality(that which matters to you) is controlled by perspective”. So its almost like esp. during traveling, there are no substantial positive unadulterated experiences except when I have intoxicants.

The few experiences where the experience exceeded my expectation would be skydiving. It was the only thing that was more intense than I had imagined it to be.

I have been reading about this ‘What Is’ concept for so long. I had a epiphany about this recently.
“There is no good or bad. Instead stay with the truth of things. Things simply are the way they are. Focus on ‘What is’ and give your awareness to everything. Everything is in an eternal dance. There is no time.”

In the macro picture, my feelings are spread in time and change from moment to moment. There are 6 billion other human beings going through some internal state or the other. It could range from extreme pleasure, satisfaction, disgust, hate, terror and its all happening simultaneously every moment. Now hate, pleasure, terror, love are all concepts which are simplifications created by society and culture. Considering the complexity of each individual, I think each person would be gratified and terrified by very unique methods and ways. The question would be, do these feelings even matter, or do they matter only because I am attached to them? It is possible to live entire lives chasing them, but none of them last. Who am I is the next question? If I am not the feelings, why should I be so attached to them. What if I detach myself from them? What would remain from that would be great peace.

Sensory clarity – Seeing is seeing, hearing is hearing, smell is smell, touch is touch, mental concepts are mental concepts, feelings are feelings.
Equanimity – continuous neutral attention w/o judgement
Anything that you can observe is not you.

Some days there is this feeling of nothingness which feels really unpleasant. There is a strong aversion to this feeling and the mind tries to fill it up somehow, usually with negative thoughts and an undercurrent unpleasant feeling. I analyzed this feeling of emptiness and it seems that though there is no gross thought, there is a subtle undercurrent thought manifesting as a feeling. It does not have any content, but it is just a mild unpleasant restless feeling – the mind seems to strongly resist it. It is from this feeling all the other thoughts are generated.

If I observe the undercurrent itself, I may be able to reach a state of thoughtlessness. I believe thoughtlessness is timelessness since time is change and we measure time by the movement of our thoughts. So no thought, no time. I was wondering if the undercurrent is actually a frequency attracting other thoughts. If I can change that frequency to love, then all thoughts would be tuned to that.

The good part about this float was that, I slept for an hour or so before going. We lost the route on the way so it took a lot more time than expected to reach. We postponed the 9:00 appointment to 9:30 but we actually reached at 10:30. So the session was for 1hr instead of 1.5hrs for 40$. I quickly finished the bath and got in. I was quite alert and not sleepy in the float throughout. After relaxing sufficiently, Ｉ tried to examine what part of the body was having stress. I found it was mostly in my face somewhere along the forehead and nose. Also whenever I felt strong emotions or aversions it seemed to be coming from the middle of the chest. I could not really locate where the thoughts were coming from. They would just creep in any time without me able to trace their origin. I would catch it usually 1-2 secs in retrospect, after the thought has occurred. I also examined difference between day dreaming visuals vs staying alert in the present. I tried to examine the difference between different kinds of thoughts – visual, feeling, auditory and look for an area  in the head where I felt it.  Overall it was great and I was able to dig deeper than before. It felt like a really long time, even the 1hr duration.

At Each Moment:
someone dies, someone is born, someone is delighted, someone is in ecstasy, someone is in severe pain, someone is living your exact dream feeling, dream emotion, there is someone having a relationship with your dream soulmate, dream lover, someone is enjoying the best lust of his life, someone gets a fracture.

Imagine a garden with many flowers, shrubs, trees and grass. Lets use this as an analogy for our mental life. In your dream lover’s mental garden, what would you like to be?

• The roots = Absolutely not noticed but at the same time absolutely indispensable
• The grass = something that is everywhere but not really noticed, but is like the underdog, it will be really missed if gone but when its there its treated with neutrality
• All the trees = strong pillar of support, columns for a building, foundation, indispensable, again not specially noticed much when there
• All the flowers in the garden = A representation of everything that is beautiful in her life
•  A significantly beautiful and large flower = A special place of joy and feelings, completely unique, distinctly admired

Has evolution really changed who we fundamentally are? Have the core motivating forces changed? Do all our drives still originate from the biological need to procreate and other basic instincts? Do all our fears still stem from the fear of death? Are there differences in our different states of mind or what we keep pushing toward? What are we really progressing towards? Is there a higher metaphorical layer that explains all these patterns?

If you want goose bumps euphoria throughout your body, sit in a comfortable position somewhere. Make sure the place is extremely quiet, close all windows/doors. Put on some high quality headphones. Play one of your favorite songs at an EXTREMELY low volume, your breathing should be 10 times louder, it should be THAT LOW. Say in a laptop
(volume setting of 1, VLC player volume setting of 3 – 5). Since decibel level is a logarithmic scale, I would guess the sound level would be 1000’s of times softer than your usual volume.

Put a playlist of around 5-6 songs. Initially you would struggle to hear anything but keep concentrating on whatever little you can hear. Eventually it;ll get clearer and clearer and your sensitivity will increase. After a while once you get comfortable, increase the volume rapidly to your normal level or slightly more.

If its a favorite trance track esp, you;ll have a brief moment of euphoria where the music overwhelms you.