Journey to the Abstract

We keep trying to get something exotic and great in our life, be it an experience or something material. When we actually get it, we admire it intensely but at the same time, I think there is also a deep fear of losing that thing. In fact, greater the value of the thing, more is this fear. It seems to be a mixed emotion. I cannot pin it down as something absolutely positive.

If what we got was an exotic experience, then the memory of that experience becomes a possession you hold on. Your fear that this memory might fade, so you keep re-imagining it many times to maintain its vividness. If its an image a person is holding of you (which we call deep admiration, love etc.), then we keep trying to maintain this image through our actions and even in our memory (by preoccupation) and are fearful about just letting it be without controlling.

What is the way of out this fear? Why do things keep changing in nature? Why is it so difficult to be detached and see with clarity? What do we really want, that we try to obtain in so many ways, even in our everyday actions?

Here in Oregon Hillsboro, the place where I’m staying, there’s a crazy comfortable couch. Sitting on it provides the most comfort I’ve ever felt as far as I can remember. After a few mins of sitting, I totally feel like I’m floating. To add to that there’s an awesome surround sound music system which confuses me into believing a few sounds from it are actually from a real thing. There’s also a huge flat screen TV and an open garden with a small play slide visible through tall glass windows. The hall extends into the left side with a platform like partition and this side has a pool table and a very high ceiling. There’s a cool looking lamp which gives out a subtle diffused yellow light on the right and to the left there an chess piece like wooden object with a buddha statue over it. There are some interested decor items and a clock that reminds me of the Adyar terrace bedroom. The backyard to the right, faces the east side, so there’s awesome sunlight coming through in the morning and during sunset it comes in through the left window. To the left partition there is also a keyboard which sounds brilliant due to the high ceiling and openness. There are some stuff toys too from Disney land behind the TV which gives a very homely feel. In the platform to the left there is a bowl having dried roses which gives out a really pleasant smell. Everything is so airy, open and free with awesome/bright views through the large glass windows.

After having stayed in the US for almost a year, there is one phenomenon that has still stuck. I am not that attracted to foreign/American girls. I kept wondering why this is so, and figured out the following reasons:
Their skin, body shape, facial features etc. are just too different from me in a fundamental way. So I just see them as they are without any “dream overlay” which is very strong for most of the Indian girls(who look similar to me). I sometimes wonder if I looked at all the Indian girls with a fantasy dimension that has stopped happening here/

I never realized that this “dream overlay”, fantasy dimension made such a day and night difference. This dimension creates a nuclear attractive force and a sense of strong connection.
I miss that feeling here and I hope I get it back soon.

This may also explain why I like to keep my romantic relationships short since usually if they go for too long then the dream/novelty/significance aspects get broken and the whole thrill/experience of the romantic relationship lies in this fantasy overlay.

Its interesting to think about what kind of skills a director, VP or a CEO of a company might be having. These skills are said to be in the frontal lobes of the brain which are supposed to be responsible for executive function.

How does one develop those skills to maintain clarity of all the chaos around and make optimum decisions using judgement and understanding. How does one hold multiple ideas/priorities in the brain at the same time? I wonder what exercises would be good to develop that skill. It seems to be a pretty important skill in the corporate world as a whole in order to “move forward”.

I would  think the following activities should improve this function:
1. Practicing mental maths
2. Reading a lot of material and then writing an essay
3. Debates/Active discussions
4. Practicing Memory Recall, memorization
5. Trying to attend to more than one thing at once
6. Playing sports (almost all of them help in this regard)

We should try to let all the energy be free i.e. by not trying to control its flow and letting it free irrespective of circumstances. Even if a path is blocked, the free energy would transmute into some other form and still continue to flow like water.

For e.g.: If you are in the heat of society your free energy would create different goals vs. if you were staying in a much quieter place. The energy will change form into whatever is appropriate. We just need to make sure its flowing freely.

A good way to practice this is breathing meditation where you simply watch the breath exerting absolutely no control on it. This relaxes, wakes you up and releases the pent up energies.

We are attracted to people who bring unexpected familiarity. If they are extremely familiar, say a family then we are conditioned since long to not think of them from that perspective.If they are too dissimilar, then there is nothing to relate to and very hard to sustain.

Each situation/experience is completely unique:
After closely observing different states of my mind even during a single day, I found that it was really hard to compare 2 states. What we usually do is that, if something is not engaging or pleasurable we stop giving it concentration or attention. So only a narrow band of experiences receive this attention and this habit reinforces itself. After a while we spend all our time/effort trying to recreate those experiences and we ignore or get averse to everything else. In other words we are only awake when we recreate some pleasurable experience, else we are half asleep. The more I try to remain awake to everything including neutral experiences, the more I gain knowledge about all the aspects of an experience(endo and exo reality) and this makes me wonder “If I am fully awake to all experiences, would the experience itself even matter much?”

Analogy: Its kind of like, on the ground you think a 80 floor skyscrapers is so tall it almost touches the sky and you look at a 3 floor building beside it and think about how short it is. When you actually get to the sky, you realize that all the skyscrapers including the 3 floor building are not that different, all are pretty small in the larger picture. Infact the 3 floor building might have an underground foundation of another 80 floors which would be invisible to you. So in reality the 3 floor building is taller than the 80 floor one.

Reality is much much more than our perception of it. You can see so many paradoxes of this fact in your everyday life too. That’s why its important to be broad minded and keep exploring.

2 experiences cannot be really compared and rated since in each mental state, you carry different wants, likes, dislikes, cravings etc. So whats the point if I get something which I do not even want?

Its like a fractal, continuously morphing and changing with the inherent patterns being maintained somehow.

All these images are from the Mandelbrot set. They look so different to our eyes but the algorithm is the same. I am guessing even our deep self works in a similar manner.

Example: Want becoming irrelevant: A child may crave for a toy that is purposely kept on the top shelf. It might think to itself “Wait till I become 6ft tall, I’ll snatch away the toy and no one can do this to me again”. Do you think the toy would even be relevant one the child is really 6ft tall?. We use our memory to maintain this want state.

Example: Dislike becoming irrelevant: A child may hate cabbage. But slowly it acquires a taste for it and after growing up it may become neutral to it or even start liking it.

Example: Dislike become a like and like can turn to dislike: Sometimes you dont like a person, but once you get to know them, you find out all the similarities and then wonder “Why did I judge this person so harshly?”. On the other side of it, sometimes think a person is cool and later the more you get to know them, the more irritating they get.

We recreate wants by using our imagination and fantasy many times even during the course of a single day. For all these activities ‘memory’ plays a crucial role. That’s why in breath meditation if you concentrate on the smell, its a good exercise because you have no memory of smell, you are forced to be in the moment.

That’s why it is important to pay attention to every moment of your life cause each experience is unique and if you see things fully awake, as they are, you;ll realize that nature is pretty impartial.
All meaning as we know of is created by duality. Once this is known, everything can be understood more deeply.
We distort reality in so many ways: Cultural conditioning, habits, beliefs, mime’s from other people etc.

Rating of experiences:

• We usually rate an experience as higher if it creates meaning. A deep want is created and satisfied quickly. (Trench theory: Creates a deep trench and fulfills it quickly, so you can perceive deep meaning) OR the deep want lingers for long and then suddenly gets satisfied. If the want fulfillment is too gradual, you would be unable to perceive meaning since your memory would fade and according to me 95% (5% benefit of doubt) of meaning is created by comparison alone.
• We obviously also have a preset set of pleasurable experiences (high dopamine, high serotonin, dream hormones, DMT etc.)
• We also rate experiences as higher if they create meaning in any sense.
• When we are dis-inhibited, that freedom experience is also rated highly.

Synonyms for experience: perception, mood, state of mind, master metaphor

For a long time, I would concentrate on the physical component of sports like football, cricket, tennis etc. Since I’m physically really fit, I thought that’s all that was required. But somehow, in an actual game, I would always feel a bit lost, overloaded and used to experience very little clarity. Then I realized, these symptoms were related to my memory and attention.

Skills required:

• Tracking multiple fast changing dynamic parameters.
• High activity in the decision making center of the brain.
• High frontal lobe activity and thinking on your feet

I also noticed that these skills help a lot in later life in a lot of endeavors.The situations where I found the skills quite analogous were:

• In the business or work environment. Fast intelligent decision making in the present moment.
• In social situations, tracking what multiple people are talking, extracting the general topic, figuring out what to contribute and doing that.
• Any presentation like situation where you need to think on your feet.

So the mental skills required for sports and business are surprisingly analogous to each other. It is usually these skills that are glorified by society. In childhood, peers would admire you if you were really good at sports and in later life it shifts to the business world.

Why this obsession with sports, business and for that matter just about DOING instead of BEING?

Its the outlier truths that really disturb us or make us question or think. One such example is the Dark Knight movie which exposes how nature is much more than scheming and controlling everything. There is this element of chance or probability involved in everything. This probability could also be shaped by how much we understand and perceive. More the ignorance, more the uncertainty.

The joker in the movie even challenges basic morality and proves that threatening and desperate times completely remove ordinary morality we follow in our day to day life and makes us act purely on our deepest desires or instincts. This again brings out the question “Is Morality really something absolute/true or is it just something we have been conditioned to believe in?”

There is another dialogue in the movie where he quotes “People are their true selves only just before they die” since they stop acting out of all the created concepts and act purely on instinct at such times. But it is incorrect to say this too. If you create a life threatening situation for someone, his only priority may become saving his life or his deepest beliefs and conditioning may take over. But this too is not who we really are. We are truly just energy. Everything else is part of the situation and our conditioning, level of awareness, level of understanding etc. The nature of reality is still unclear and this theory is just a small fragmentary conjecture in the whole picture.

Sometimes, I walk by nature and observe different trees of different sizes, texture, shape etc. and also the streaks of grass in the ground and wonder:
Why is there so much diversity?
What is a grass blade a grass blade and why is a tall tree a tree? What is their inherent meaning?
Why are the grass in the ground so similar looking? Why is there so much difference between them and the other living plants and trees?
Are we also that different from each other like a big tree and a shrub? Could we also be as similar as the blades of grass next to each other? How is there so much similarity and yet so much diversity too?