Journey to the Abstract

I believe the founders of all the religions such as Jesus, Buddha etc. would have perceived the real truth in an altered state of consciousness. But however, as these religions stand today, I guess they have severely distorted the messages from these people. Besides, its extremely difficult to explain these things in our languages.

Even I have a really tough time, explaining some complex existential concepts to people. It took me a lot of work over many years to really be comfortable with questioning certain beliefs even. I am misunderstood MOST of the time. I cant even imagine how difficult it would be for an enlightened person to pass on the knowledge.

Its best to trust your direct experiences the most.

I’ve noticed a peculiar funny thing in society, even among all of my friends. Their judgments of you are always based on societal expectations in one way or the other. For e.g.: As a person, you can tremendously evolve when you do activities like questioning your core beliefs, understanding your thought patterns through reflection or pursue forms of contemplation. You may come to the realization that most people are trapped in a large number of beliefs and they are far from even aware of this fact. But this evolution is simply disregarded in society. They simply judge you using their societal filter.

This filter is something like:

• Are you really good (ideals defined from society) at some sport?
• Are you very good at academics?
• Do you have lots of money?
• Have a large sphere of public influence?
• Are you good looking as per standards defined by media?
• Are your efforts towards improving your chances in some commercial endeavor?

Any activity that I pursue which is beyond this sphere is considered a pastime, irrelevant, insignificant and unimportant. So if I do not do those typically acceptable activities for a long time and spend more time with other things that interest me, then I’m judged as a person who is wasting his life away. I’ve noticed this even among my parents and close friends. Its astonishing.

I strongly believe, ‘society is not your friend’ (Terence Mckenna), all its activities are related to itself and not to help you evolve. Society doesn’t care whether you discover your true self or not. All it cares about is that, you fit its conventions and defined acceptable paths.

Bird’s eye view vs Fork road view:
Motivational speakers and people generally keep saying what you perceive as a problem is related to the way you look at things. I’ve tried reorienting myself a few times but this change never really gets ingrained in me. Its usually just temporary and if you stop paying attention, you revert to your original behavior. For example: positive thinking techniques etc. You could create a strong pattern by repetition and habit but this would not stem from real understanding so in essence it is still vulnerable to thought manipulations by other people.

Nowadays, I started looking at solving this in a different way. I think “A real change in perception would be more from WHERE you perceive the problem from rather than how you perceive it“. Its like understanding truth at a higher level and comprehending how things fit into the larger picture help in literally eliminating some problems or drastically reduce their emotional effects.

There are some profound truths like: 

• “All meaning is self created, in essence an illusion”
• “The body is something that is within the field of awareness and we are the awareness itself. The awareness is everywhere, universal, shapeless and formless”
  

Just imagine the impact of actually understanding and internalizing these truths. Thousands of problems would simply disappear in the light of this new knowledge. But these truths may also destroy illusions which mean you may lose the positive highs too from false meaning. That is why its not something that’s really straightforward to change. I guess there are different levels of awareness and moving to the next layer can fundamentally change you perception in many ways. That is why its important to maintain fluidity with respect to your beliefs. The entire physical reality is perceived by our beliefs, which is essentially what we call reality.

Normally we associate being naked with just removing all our clothes. That is just being naked in the physical sense. But the complete concept of naked is to truly strip yourself of everything. Even when we remove our clothes, we still carry our expectations, assumptions, judgments, interpretations, impressions, opinions, beliefs about everything in reality. Only when we drop all of the above too are we truly naked, original and pure. This concept also leads to perception of real truth about oneself, peace and freedom.

Core-beliefs are invisible to most of us. It takes quite a but of hunting, awareness and reflection to really pin them down and analyze the truth behind them. Most of the reality we perceive is based on core beliefs.

Here are some sample articles that helps to analyze core beliefs:
http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/writings_core_beliefs.htm
http://www.growingaware.com.au/Negative_beliefs_examples.htm

People who have smoked DMT report crazy experiences and encounter with strange entities. We dismiss all that calling them hallucinations. But what is a hallucination really? What if its a parallel dimension coexisting with our reality? And what if we are accessing that by switching our frequency channel? What if this dimension is the super set/mother-ship of what we call reality in day to day terms?Maybe you are getting to experience something far beyond even our imaginations and thoughts about what reality could be?

We dream every night and most people dismiss that as random electrical activity in the brain of no consequence. But what is the inherent meaning of a dream? Maybe our waking world is a dream and every night we revisit the higher dimension and acquire energy and understanding? It can’t be ruled out, can it? Maybe we need much greater awareness to see its significance?

Technically, if consciousness is animating the electrical networks in your brain causing you to have experiences then isn’t the consciousness itself switching to a different channel during REM sleep? The brain receives twice the blood flow during REM. How can this random activity or subconscious processing of information (as called by psychologists) provide energy? What happens when we go to deep sleep? Where do we get our energy from? The answer cannot be just food and water, and an endless process of a form of recycling, can it? We spend almost a third of our lives sleeping and we still pay no attention to it?

If a person talks in this manner, you would dismiss him as crazy and there would be a consensus that he should go to a mental hospital or rehabilitation center. But is consensus good enough to believe he is really crazy? What if we are the deluded ones and he is at-least questioning? Culture is just a boundary defining engine, a virtual reality where your forced to think within specified limits.

Rational thought is just a small part in the spectrum of thought, yet most people think that scientific and rational thought provides context and answers to everything. I too had this belief throughout childhood but I always felt a strong desire to explore philosophy and other ways of knowing. The blessing of broadband then came and opened my mind.

Once fear is removed, we start moving towards immediate pleasures and fantasies. This is why there is fear even about even removing fear. We are afraid that we might endanger ourselves in the long term. But this too is one of the important intermediate stages before reaching an elevated state. After we get reasonably saturated with our immediate pleasures and desires then we move on towards things that we are expected by society. Now, the fear is drastically lower compared to how it was before the fear removal process.

Ways to remove fear: Insights through knowledge from associative thinking chains and direct experience through exploration:
Now that we have the entire internet at our fingertips, we can start off with just about any existential or religious question that you have and look it up on Google. Now, you would have access to other people’s views on the topic and you also find some related terms to your basic question. Start exploring all of them. The interest is maintained since, you still have the impetus of your original question and the other things that you encounter build upon it, so it stays aligned and you continually gain energy for your exploration.

What is the common reason for people to get tired at work? Its because they are doing something which they don’t really want to do right?. However, when you explore something because of true interest in it, you only gain energy from it.

So now to give an analogy, you start building this expanding sphere which started as a point. Its an entire associative network that you start building from your single question. This network is what we call knowledge right! in common language. You start seeing how different fields overlap and start exploring many more questions in a similar manner. So you have this continuous burgeoning of expanding bubbles of knowledge. You will find that they overlap a lot too. The overlap is important because that is the connection. The more the connections, the deeper the knowledge and wisdom.

Along with intellectual knowledge, it is very important to gain direct experience as much as you can because direct experience is far closer to the truth than stuff that you read. Check out ‘Terence Mckenna’ if you want a shocker.

This is the method I use to acquire knowledge through exploration. It is inspired from nature in a lot of ways. For e.g.: It is surprisingly similar to the universe expansion which continually expands in all directions like a balloon being inflated. It also resembles evolution where simple forms evolve to become more and more complex and this happens simultaneously because knowledge is surprisingly interrelated. Once you reach a threshold, you;ll start to look at the world a lot more metaphorically. The ultimate metaphor is enlightenment after all :), where all knowledge is connected and you are one.

Very similar to the Socratic approach:
I find a topic then continually explore all related terms then look for contradictions in my view. Each contradiction provokes further interest, and means more exploration – reading, watching videos, introspection.
This continually expands outwards. Sometimes one view can challenge 100’s of my previous beliefs. In that case it requires mass rewiring to accommodate this. I guess my experiences after reading about Buddhism and meditation have been the greatest rewiring effort i’ve ever done in my life. It has been an exciting journey and very fulfilling.

 A somewhat strange/novel thing has happened to me recently. I have been intensely questioning and seeing various mind bending kind of youtube videos for the past 1.5months. It had almost reached the peak of its intensity around a week back. Three days back in the afternoon, I tried a guided meditation for around 25 mins and reached a hynogogia state which was the deepest in a while. After coming out of it, I could feel the boiling water like flashes in front of my eyes, similar to the way we see when just woken up from a dream. Then, that day night I decided to sleep early at 12:30am. This was unusual since I usually slept at 3:30am. When I got up in the morning, I was surprised to find that I was surprisingly awake and not groggy. This awake feeling has a different feel to it. It was like there is something beyond my body and brain that is awake. It lasted throughout the day. In the night, I was feeling elated for no specific reason and I couldn’t pinpoint it. It was like my experience baseline was uplifted and my conscious mind was blanker than usual. It was really quiet. Even if I put effort into thinking a thought, the thought did not affect my emotional state. This was highly unusual. Usually even if I was in a good mood, I would get affected by bad thoughts but this state seemed to be the same unaffected by thoughts. I looked up this on the net and found out that it was called “Affective ego”. Meditation affects the affective ego. In my experience it seemed to have reduced it by around 50%. So I felt pleasurable feelings and painful ones with only 50% deviation and the basic baseline was elevated. I feel a sense of freshness, brightness and clarity which is difficult to put in words. Also I do not feel sleepy for the entire day till 12:30am in the night.

The best analogy I can give is that, imagine an AC filter that keeps getting clogged often. You take it out, clean it a bit and again it gets clogged after a while. Imagine if the filter itself is punctured. Then the cool blast of air would come out from the hole in full force and the filter wouldn’t affect it. If I compare, the filter is probably my false self. Maybe it has suddenly loosened up releasing the real self energy which is the cool blast of air.

This seems to be a hockey stick graph kind of development since I’ve been trying meditating for 2 yrs almost but nothing has created such a strong impact till date. The odd part about this experience is that, your wellbeing level is so high that your afraid you may lose your sensitivity for pleasure. If you cannot feel pain at all, how can you enjoy the pleasure. Similarly, since the connection between automatic thoughts and emotions has been broken to an extent it creates a very different experience. My emotional memory seems to have suddenly faded. I cannot recreate any powerful feelings by using thought. The positive feelings and negative feelings created by thoughts are numbed and I can feel an elevated baseline. As of now, its a mixed bag, but I’m learning to enjoy and appreciate this new state.

PS: The experience lasted for around 3 days total. After that, I got back to my old self.

Top of the list – Youtube vids:
Shinzen young
Eckhart tolle
Adyashanti
Bashar
18th april –  Terence Mckenna
Ken Wilber
Sadhguru

Blogs:
Steve Pavlina blog
Imaging the 11th dimension blog
High Existence
http://goodshare.org/wp/the-experiential-reality-beneath-the-language-game-illusion/

Cool websites:
http://www.pathwaytohappiness.com/
http://www.berzinarchives.com/ – use site map
http://www.eruptingmind.com/
http://www.abundancetapestry.com/
http://fundamental-shift.com/
http://www.messagefrommasters.com/
http://www.psitek.net/
http://shambhalasun.com/

http://www.calmdownmind.com/

Best general insightful website:
Ted Talks

I think art forms exist only because of subjectivity. Is everything was objective there would be no art. Each of us sees different patterns in this matrix of reality. Artists are able to extract, articulate and communicate these patterns to us, rich in emotional value. Art is a form of communication. It can communicate subjective experiences in ways that verbal, math or logic cannot.

The most classic example of subjectivity is revealed in dreams. Each persons’ dreams are completely unique. As an experiment, try to write down what you saw and experienced in your dream today morning. It is incredibly difficult to express it in words. You would have to use all kinds of analogies which are again based on your previous experiences. You may even need to diagram out some stuff, but it would still just represent its skeleton.

My roommate stuck to the idea that everything including the mind originates inside the physical brain and there is nothing non physical. Though I felt my gut totally opposing this thought, it was difficult to really justify the existence of a non physical distinct mind overlapping the physical brain and body. I looked it up on the internet and it was interesting to find that very exact question in: Philosophy – Epistemology – Dualism vs Monism. It does seem like a perplexing question without an easy way to answer. I think the only way to really answer this is to maintain awareness even in deep sleep since in this state the brain activity slows down to 1hz – almost dead.