Tag: Life

Posted on

The self is endless morphing

I read this great analogy in one of the essays from Nagarjuna:

shipathorizon

“When you go to the shore and look out, you see the edge of the world, six miles out. You see a ship get too close to the edge of the world; it falls off. That’s terrible; all those people die. It happens far too often. If you go to the beach, you’ve probably seen it once or twice. You are trapped in an illusion!

So let’s say someone sticks you in the space shuttle, blasts you into orbit. You look down, you see it’s a sphere. They explain gravity. You go back to the beach. It looks just like it did before, but you no longer can see to the edge of the world. You no longer get engaged in discussions about “when you fall off the edge of the world, does it hurt immediately, or does it hurt only when you hit the bottom?” That doesn’t make any sense; you understand the illusion.

This is what the Buddha’s saying about the self. Don’t get caught in discussions about the self–does the self exist, does the self not exist. That’s like trying to decide if it hurts when you fall off the edge of the world or not. Look at the world in terms of dependently originated phenomena. That’s all that’s happening.”

This analogy was so deep, it got me thinking.
I started to see other related metaphors that demonstrate a similar point.
I’ll cover two of them below.

Mountain climbing analogy:

conquer-mountain-winter-climbing-aolne-hd-wallpaper

Suppose you decide to climb a mountain.
As you gaze at it from a distance, it stands like a large mysterious awe inspiring object in front of you.
It beckons you to explore, tread and conquer it by reaching its peak.
The peak is usually covered in snow with a foggy haze around it, which stimulates the feeling of mystery and attainment even more.
From this point of view, you resolve to reach the peak and keep walking.
Now as you walk through all the various camps, at each place you see different worlds.
Initially, there is the forest portion, then there are the grasslands, then there is the harsh hostile terrain, and then finally you hit the tall patch of snow as you race to the top.
Various realms/worlds/points of view are traversed as you move along.
Finally when you do reach the peak, doesn’t it look quite different from your conception of it which you had when you were far off on the ground?
You are seeing from a brand new point of view, but at the same time, you are still there, and this feeling of you was not different when you were on the ground, nor was it different as you passed through all the intermediate terrain.
My experience of life has been that way since my earliest memory.
At one level I am moving through stages, goals, progressing, but at another level I am still the same innocence moving from place and place.
The innocence stays untouched, but the scenery keeps morphing.

Staring at a fractal:

Mandel_zoom_08_satellite_antenna

Have you ever played a video of a fractal zoom on YouTube and just stared at it for a while?
Notice how you see a destination, and you see the fractal moving towards it, but at the same time, as the destination becomes larger and clearer, your whole view is replaced by that, and the earlier view fades.
And in this way, there is a kind of endless renewal and an endless movement at the same time.
I think this clearly illustrates the symbol ‘Ouroboros’.
It also reveals the paradox of there being ‘change’ and yet ‘no change’ at the same time.
Posted on

Hierarchy of nested contexts

many-worlds

There is no ONE physical world in our experiential reality.
This is more of an abstract idea or concept we sometimes hold in our minds.
In experiential reality however, there is no such ONE world.
Rather there are many many worlds appearing as a nested context hierarchy.
A common context is the commonality.
It conveys “We both are seeing and inhabiting the same world”.

Transcendence is to move from your current context to a higher context.
So there is infinite transcendence(s) as there are infinite nested context hierarchies.
For example: From a geographical point of view, here is a nested context hierarchy:
…Multiverse -> Visible Universe -> Super Galaxy Cluster -> Galaxy Cluster -> Milky Way Galaxy -> Solar System -> Earth -> Continent -> Country -> State -> City -> Area -> Locality -> Building -> Floor number -> Apartment number -> Your room…
The 3 dots on either end is to show that it goes on indefinitely in both directions.
Have you seen the videos on YouTube where they would start from all the way out of the universe and zoom you all the way in until you reach quarks?

Coming to the social sphere, tuning into each context creates a different world inhabited by different people.
What we call ‘our world’ is the context we inhabit.
The status game in society:
People value/e-valu-ate themselves, and then sell themselves to others at a cost.
The whole status game is that: e-valu-ation.
The 2 parties evaluate each other on looks, talents, popularity, status, attractiveness, opportunities, commonality, happiness and so on.
People link up with each other in groups of equivalent status, which forms the common context.

Each context is a world, and you instantly access the common field of information that all the other inhabitants there are holding too.
In a sense that is what unites all of you, it is the context, or the common world.
I can speak about my experience:
– When I was in school (in India), the context was the same for all students in the state known as “state board”. So everyone had the same syllabus and more or less the same school system too. So that was the common context/common world. I was in the same world as most other students in the entire state and to a large extent the entire country.
– When I joined an Engineering college, that put me in that context world and gave me access to all other engineers in the country along with the status hierarchy inside that. There were some colleges which were graded at the same level as mine, and there were some other colleges that were of graded lower, and so on.
– Later, when working in an Indian IT company, I had access to all other friends fresh out of college working in the IT industry and many of my friends were working in similar IT firms as me.
– Then when doing my Masters in US, the university was the common context and that was the new world I found myself in. I could relate up, horizontally, and down the education ladder i.e. with PhD students, other masters students, undergrads and so on. I could share context with other friends doing Masters in other universities too, and so on.
– I then took up a job at a product development company in US, and I was in the world of post-grad professionals working for US IT companies.
So to summarize, I moved through 5 worlds:
– The world of school
– The world of undergrad college
– The world of post-undergrad work
– The world of masters program at a large university
– The world of post-grad work

Now I am in a different world and I do not know what mystical new world/context awaits me.
So these contexts are OUR REAL WORLDS.
Posted on

Conflict of values

conflict-of-values

This is a very vast and deep topic.
David Hawkins had a very interesting abstract picture regarding how values emerge: Context -> Meaning -> Value -> Goals.
So context creates meaning, meaning creates values, and values create goals.
I am going to narrow my analysis here, but the same could be applied to any set of conflicting values.

A conflict which I often face is between orienting myself towards “likeability” or “truth”.
When I agree with everything someone says, usually, I am not “liked” per say by that person, but I get a background of ‘acceptability’ in their life.
It is primarily a strategy to avoid conflict and rejection.
So “Conflict avoidance” and “Rejection avoidance” are some of my values.
Now, if I go out of my way to please a person by showering them with compliments, astute positive observations in a sophisticated subtle way (if you are too overt about it, it will backfire, make you look desperate and they will avoid you) or buy them gifts and basically give them a lot of loving attention, then I enter the “Likeability” territory.
So that is another value I have: “Secure Likeability points”

On the other side of the spectrum, I want to speak the truth to people and not filter anything out, whatever it may be.
It may be a combination of things I like and do not like.
OR I may want to ask for something I need from them.
This is my value of: “Truth”
Now, this is a dangerous territory.
Because, things are not equally weighed.
You may give 10 compliments and get +10 points, but if you are critical of something they are sensitive about, it may shut down the whole conversation and result in instant rejection or may greatly reduce all the goodwill accumulated.
And once they get defensive, now if you persist in what you said, the inclusion will be lost and it will become a war.
And this would go against my value of: “Inclusion”

Also, once I trigger something in the other turning them into ‘defense’/’attack’ against me, I have lost the inclusion and lost the trust in that moment.
This makes me fearful and makes me defensive too, in both cases, esp. in the attack case.
This goes against my value of: “Safety”

Always agreeing to everything the other says, is not “interesting” and neither is it “genuine”, and it also lowers the value of my agreement because I give it out to everything the other says. Also I may never express my own opinion about the issue.
So me doing that violates 4 values of: “Being interesting”, “Being genuine”, “Being valued”, “Being heard”

But I also value “Listening”, so I may not interrupt the other when they speak.
There are also some other values like: “Fair Participation”, “Fair involvement” & “Respect, i.e. both the people in conversation get to express all that they had in mind, both were equally involved in each other, both were equally heard, and both contexts were embraced.

My social life and interacting with others tends to invoke this chaotic soup of values in me which then drive my actions.
I am looking for a way to resolve this chaos.
There are 2 ways of resolving this in my understanding:
1 – Commit to certain values, polarize, and discard the rest
2 – Shift the center of gravity to a higher value structure that includes and transcends all these values.
Posted on

Night sea journey

nightsea

I often ask myself the question “what do you want?”
When I look inside myself for the answer I see a huge soup of impossible contradictions.
And because I want opposite things, it becomes impossible to move forward.
It is like a boat that is still in the middle of the ocean without a rider.
And say you ask the boat “where are you going?”.
And lets say it communicates the answer to you through its movements.
What would you see?
You would just see it randomly bobbing back and forth in random directions based on the wind forces around it and the undulations in the water surface.
My internal forces, drives and will-power have become like that.

Imagine you are in a boat traversing the night sea.
Say you had a map with you and now that is lost.
The waves, winds and other external pressures determine your steering and movement, but to you it all looks meaningless.
Everything is equally relevant, meaningful, and meaningless simultaneously.
My internal psyche feels like that.
This state of my psyche gets projected to the external world I inhabit too.
The world is only a prop for the movie that you project on it from your psyche.
This is a very strange, liminal, and limbo-like peculiar state of experience for which I have given a kind of poetic expression.
Basically it is the loss of the map.
It is being adrift and directionless.
Mirages of lands emerge at a distance, making me pursue that direction, but it is only temporary for it vanishes and it is replaced by another mirage somewhere else.

The map of reality tells you what is relevant, where to go, what to ignore, what to pursue, what to collect, and so on.
Without this map, now you do not know where to go(what direction), what is relevant or irrelevant, or what is to be pursued or let go.
You do not know what is a blessing and what is a curse, and the perception of things can flip flop too.
Your whole world views can change in a day which would reorder all your energies only for it to change again the next day and once again reorder all your energies.
So how can you make any investment if it can be voided anytime by a fundamental shift?
What can you do if your very ground and frame of reference is constantly shifting? (like undulating waters).

I don’t know if a stable map or a deeper map of reality will ever emerge again.
Will I learn a new way of living without having a map?
Will strong desires ever fill me up again? OR am I moving towards transcendent silence?
Such questions circle my mind.
But all the questions and answers in this territory are again only temporary appearances.
Every emotion arises and vanishes.
Every concern, Every doubt, Every focused area, Every meta-narrative is appearing and disappearing rapidly like a shimmer.
To say I am lost, is to imply that I believe I can be found.
But even that belief does not stay constant :).
I bob in and out of various creative potentials.
Posted on

The fire of desire enlivens reality

Fire

Desire is like the ‘fire’ or the ‘internal sun in you’ that upholds reality.
It comes from within you and enlivens all that you experience as the outside world.
The physical objects in the world are only “Props” for your “Projected desires”.
That is why when desire goes dim, all of consciousness goes dim.
Even the sensory world consciousness is largely/partly maintained from the “desire to survive”.
That is why when I’m alone in a safe place, I would often become oblivious to my surroundings.
The consciousness of everything rests on DESIRE.
Without desire, you would lose consciousness.
The world is kept alive and enlivened by YOUR DESIRE.
Posted on

What are we really responsible for?

butterflyeffect

On Facebook, nowadays I see a bunch of posts that show an emotion provoking video of some injustice done, and then people would be reacting to that with either anger, crying, or sadness emoticons. Like there was a video of male chicks being got rid of because they were not useful by allowing them to drown in water. I mean I did feel quite sad seeing that graphic video. But the recommendation and strong messages were: Every-time you eat meat, this is what you are condoning.

So I thought through that more deeply.
My every action enables every kind of abuse too, like every product in the supermarket contains the labor of the whole universe that went into making that.
The degree and proximity varies, but you know, I could have this reasoning for everything, like I could say the clothes you are wearing is from the exploitation of workers in Bangladesh and then show a really sad video about their toil and thereby recommend that you stop wearing clothes?
If that is true for every single thing, then not taking the action of eating chicken isn’t helping anything in the larger picture, right?
A reactionary action like that is not coming from a seeing of the whole.
This is the same issues with SJWs too. That just looks like tribalism to me.

I could do a DNA test on you, and then prove you are a descendant of Genghis Khan and thereby declare that you have his blood and sins on your hands.
Isn’t that same reasoning also applied for Jesus? That his blood is on your hands?
Where does this end?
What are we really responsible for?
Taking this thought all the way, I am responsible for every single evil and injustice and enabling that in some way.
This can always be proved by some intelligent person, who picks up a theme and ties the thread of connection so that it lands on your lap.
It is like the butterfly effect principle, and if all the connections are shown to someone, they would be bewildered by the responsibility that is revealed.
“Wholeness is a kind of attitude” – said by David Bohm, and I really agree with him on that, and that it is actions taken from that attitude that would really help.
Posted on

Every heartbreak is a disillusionment

Broken-Heart

Every heartbreak is a disillusionment.
Essentially every break up is a break up with a certain alive context in our experience.
Our life consists of multi-layered hierarchical contexts.
For instance, it could range from a context as small as losing your favorite wallet to as large as losing all frame of reference/your ego/your beliefs/your religion/how to live etc.

I’ll focus on breakup in the context of relationship here.
It removes the context of what you thought the person was and what their relationship to you was.
That frame of reference is lost, and to the degree to which that frame of reference was integrated in your whole way of being in the world, to that degree you are now put in chaos.
It is a separation, a kind of ripping apart, and that is painful.

It has disillusioned you, and revealed your previous conception as illusion.
But neither does it totally reveal what that person really is.
It leaves you in a limbo of not-knowing/chaos/grief.
You don’t know if it was your fault or their fault.
You don’t know if this is in their best interest or not in their best interest.
You don’t know if this is in your best interest or not in your best interest.
You don’t know if you should try to get the partner back or let them go.
You don’t know if you should even try another partnership or just abandon that whole path of trying to secure a relationship.
You don’t know if you can trust your perception anymore, because it has just proved itself to be empty.
You stand at the precipice of the unknown with a fallen frame of reference.
It can throw you into an existential crisis too with questions like – how can you trust anyone? How does trust even work? Are we just under the mercy of god, who acts like a chameleon and suddenly changes color casting a cruel joke on us?
Then it just comes down to faith.
In time, the void of this chaos is filled with a new structure, healing happens, and you have grown.
Isn’t this how all growth happens – Isn’t all growth disillusionment in a sense?

Another facet I would like to include here is about success in terms of proven lovability.
And this variable would affect the intensity of your breakup too.
Failure is tolerated only by a person who has succeeded previously.
What if you have never succeeded?
What if nobody has ever loved you, no matter how much efforts you put?
Will you try again? Where would this hope come from?
Would you once again trust your bursts of irrational hope? or just give up?
The most painful wound of this sort can happen when the parents are on the extreme end of conditional love or if they just keep the child alive and barely functional as a duty/obligation and thoroughly neglect the child and kill its spirit.
I very strongly feel, romantic love is a replay of that original bond.
Because that is when we were THAT SENSITIVE to feel it in THAT INTENSITY.
So it is THAT memory that makes us seek partners with a kind of LOVE MAP structure (that has a lot to do with our parental conditioning, unless we overcome that with extraordinary spiritual effort).
Children who were loved by their parents well, have tremendous resilience to rejection, break-ups etc. Like a positive spiral they are quite unlikely to go through a break-up in the first place because they attract the conditions that mirror loving environments and perpetuate that.
Almost seems like a cruelty of nature, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – even in the love department.
The only way out that I have seen, is to overcome the ignorance that keeps you repeating the same things and to just constantly keep growing.
Posted on

The relationship between fear and desire

Fear is a relationship between “Your desire” and the “World’s condition”.
Even your definition of ‘What is a fear/threat’ is relative to ‘Your desire’.
Right now, if your knowledge (whatever you have) gives you enough freedom to pursue your desire, you will have well-being.
Once your desire grows far beyond this world, you will want to transcend (maybe now or later this life or after 100s of lives).
To give an example, say a bird sitting at your window threatens to leave you.
It is not a threat at all, if the bird is not your desire at all.
Only things that are your desire can be threatened.
If you have insulated yourself from all threats and ensured your desires stay confined to only where you have 100% control, then you will have 0 fear.
There is no fear for LOSING something you never desired.
Fear comes only when we desire something that is out of our control.
For instance, desire of human relationships is much more precarious that desire of material objects, because they are not as controllable as the material counterpart. One then is more vulnerable to both fear, and the pain of loss which is the eventuality that the fear guards against.
All fear is a defense from loss.
Posted on

What is dissociation metaphysically?

dali fall apart
I see a spectrum here:
[Your true position] —<—<[fear[for survival/for acceptance],guilt[the should dos/sacrifices for respect]]—- Disassociation is when you see your social-self/ego as an object.
When looking from the shadow position, you look at yourself as content like a dissociated observer from far away.
When one is born, one comes straight from the source and is connected to the full vital dimension.
Then the ego is given by the parents, it can survive throughout life more or less if it is close enough to the child's truth(vital supply), but if it is too far away, there will be a depression and collapse.
This happens via an internalization of an others' judgment and identification with that position/vantage-pt/pov.
That creates the distance from source, distance from happiness, distance from god.

Judgment of everything is always from different povs(point of views).
It is ‘one pole pov’ judging the ‘other pole pov’.
Like say ‘washing vessels’ -> it can be judged as a miserable job or a really loved wonderful job.
OR even things like masculinity, femininity, the world system right now.
If you are against everything, then you are hanging out in the shadow pole of everything.
To doubt is to be estranged and in the shadow.
The person who doubts everything is in the shadow of everything.

That is why a lot of spirituality involves increasing levels of dissociation.
Now dissociation means dissociation from your dominant structure, and association with a fringe structure.
So technically dissociation refers to disconnection with your survivalist socially programmed ego (in common parlance).
But what happens in dissociation is that you associate with another structure which can see your social self as an object.
All dissociative states give you a vantage point to view your social/conventional/regular self.
But insight does not imply full control.
Because it is like seeing the ecology of a forest from a helicopter. You may see patterns you never saw, but full control only comes from total understanding/mastery of the whole machine/system.
Now dissociative states are all ASCs(Altered states of consciousness) compared to the D-Soc(Default state of consciousness) which is your sober state.
[I have borrowed these terms from the book ‘States of Consciousness’ by Charles Tart]
So altered states(ASCs/Dissociated states) could take you further from or closer to source.
This can be known from direct feeling.
When you feel much better and feel much power, freedom, riches -> then you are getting closer to source of light.
When you feel much worse, tired, depleted, narrowed etc. -> you have moved away from the source of light.
Often however, the tiredness results from you trying to hold onto your d-soc as you explore altered states, like a bird tied to a pole by an elastic rope. So this constant pressure to come back can be responsible for wearing you out too.

Spectrum:
Source ———[ASC +](closer to source)———-enriching/empowering——- D-Soc———-disempowering/depleting————[ASC -](farther from source)

An ego/D-Soc performs spiritual inquiry[which is basically exploration] when there is not enough energy to power its own full structure. When the D-Soc/ego/socially programmed self is fully powered, it becomes transparent and the person shines through and beyond that structure as working on the structure/forwarding it in the world/the person who goes OUT IN THE WORLD etc.
When the D-Soc is under-powered, then the structure starts struggling to maintain itself, and this struggle/resistance REVEALS the structure [remember all consciousness is from resistance, a structure reveals itself only in disease/lack of energy. If it is imbued with energy, it becomes transparent].
So in such a condition one goes into spiritual inquiry and exploration.
More the suffering/lack of spirit sustenance energy for the D-Soc, greater the exploration impulse.

To give an analogy, if a civilization is in a utopian geographical location, with abundant resources inc. water and food etc. then there is no reason to explore other regions.
Whereas say in another region people are starving thirsty etc. then those people would go out of their way to find a way out, it would heighten all of their creativity [there definitely seem to be a connection between deprivation and creativity].

In truth, all of us as egos are fundamentally DISSOCIATED from god, which is why god appears as an object to us (i.e. god appears as an other to us).
Posted on

Q&A on Dark night of the soul

A friend and I were discussing about the dark night of soul, and she asked some really interesting questions, which I pondered on, and then wrote her a reply.

Here is the Q&A:
Q1 – At what point does someone acknowledge the disorientation and start focusing more on integration than destruction…?
A1:
I can answer from my experience. (I’m gonna write a lot, bear with me 🙂 )
I think both the processes happen together in transformation, but the degree varies. Like to give an extreme example, if I explode a bomb in a region, the old in the region dies, while the new gets born.
Sounds good in principle.
The only issue is the new looks like a post-apocalypic dystopian ruin site.
It might take many years for there to be a steady pace of growth of structures in this region.

If we look at what is dying – it is the dark night, if we look at what is being born – it is rebirth. Although the higher principle of simultaneity is present, we also see distinct season like patterns. Like how in Buddhist vipassana practice they delineate stages of evolution, and the dark night basically falls under – greater awareness of death/passing, than of arising/growth.
The vice versa can happen too, once the death potential is complete like the swinging of a pendulum to one end and stopping because its momentum is finished (simplistic example of the pattern).

I feel there is something deeper and greater(the soul?) that matures through this mysterious birth-death process, like in my case, I feel there is a gradual increase of overall maturity, deeper knowledge and deepening of context intuition etc. which has helped ease the ride through these confusing states of being. So nowadays I do notice much better stability overall and a deeper trust and relaxation, and also a better knowing/apprehension/clarity/discernment of appearance.
Like how growing up happens, it is not a single experience that makes one an adult, but a series of mystical journeys and passages. Something really super mystical/deep/abstract/intuitive is evolving from all the passing experiences.

I think one can say the dark night has ended, when there is a noticeable swing in the opposite direction/upswing of life force/spirit? Maybe a crystallization of a new vision, a renewed vigor, hope, expansion, love etc.? It’s hard to be really precise though, I feel the dark night ends depending on your overall evaluation of your gestalt. Like when your system becomes emptier, fresher, harmonized and radiant with energy and allows you to expand? – I don’t know, I may be presenting new kinds of wishful fantasies and dreams here, but just trying to create art with my words, so that you can see through it? 🙂

Q2 – At what point does someone become comfortable with perpetual dismantling and generation so that it’s no longer a “dark night”
A2:
Hmm, yea, I can see what you are pointing to. Like there is the suffering component (all forms) and the process of death itself (endarkment). I would say technically the process is on until there is the upswing resurgence of spirit influx (like an inbreath), however, one may develop high enough equanimity and understanding in its later stages, that he can ride through the emptiness (meaning like what you described quick fast alternating cycles of discontinuous creations). Maybe growth could also mean the intensification of the discontinuous creativity until it swallows all of the observer, making observer-observed ONE. Like one may ask, to who is this dark night of soul happening to?, and this would point to a subject/observer structure, which may get further dissoluted when contemplating deeper on the subject of the experience.

At one point does one become comfortable? hmm, that is possible only if your energy output and structure transcends the fluctuations that are happening. And I feel the fluctuations that are happening are basically structures in your psyche dying out from spirit withdrawal. So once a LOT of the death processes are completed in the psyche structure, then it feels a lot clearer, brighter, fresher, emptier and this may increase available energy for fresh creativity too. So maybe at that point, a person would start to feel comfortable, like he/she/it rises above the suffering vs. being debilitated and disabled by it.

Q3 Is it possible that a fascination with the “dark night” and identification with it might complicate the surrender necessary to move through it
A3:
I can totally see your point. Yes, but I think the fascination with dark night is also a psyche structure. My methodology is – if you are fascinated, go all into it, so much that it completes/exhausts itself. Isn’t it like any other passion? and how do we get over passions? -> my method is usually I go all in and do it so totally, and experience it so fully and deeply that I transcend it. I think we identify with things, until we are bored. Boredom seems to be the real mover. And I feel boredom is an impetus for moving on/trying something new/flowing/reevaluating etc. It seems like the precursor of all passion/creativity. So yea, I would say: Give into your fascination, passion, curiosity, so fully, and satisfy yourself so deeply without an agenda, that you automatically ride the wave of spirit