Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Experiential Links to Digestion issues

Digestion problems seem to have clear experiential connections.
Pipeline: Perception entry (How much enters? How often?) - Information processing (How much is processed?, how long?) - Decision outcomes (final outcomes of the processing) - Archiving/Back burner storage (for processing later) - Excretion of the unused/unwanted (clearing storage)

Digestion problem summary: The gate valve allows too much in, the processing center is overwhelmed, everything is pushed to archival storage for later processing leading to lots of accumulation - hardly anything is excreted out since I want to extract so much and don't want to lose anything.

Simplified summary:
So the issue is I'm trying to do TOO much beyond my available resources. This is resulting in fatigue and burnout. Therefore there is not enough energy for happily fulfilling daily expectations and surplus is limited.

Questions to investigate:
Why am I trying to do that? What am I seeking? What is the emptiness I want to fill? What is unsatisfactory right now?

Analogy:


Archival, Storage - working memory, short term, long term memory
Processing center (Intelligence center) - Intellectual, Analytical functions - Categorizing, Hierarchy, seeing relationships, patterns, interrelationships, connections, dependencies
Decision centers - Buddhi, Discriminator, Emotional clarity for decisions, clarity on goals and desires, world model, deciding what is useful - what is not, what to keep, what to reject
Excretion centers (Colon) - Completely removing the unwanted, discarded and processed stuff to make way for new stuff to enter.
Input - Perception centers, gatekeepers (RAS in brain), openness qualities

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Virgins and first sex

 
We dislike porn stars, sluts, hookers, prostitutes etc. because the specialness quality of sex is removed. Most things revolve around this 'feeling of specialness'. There is a whole spectrum we use to evaluate. For sex with an ordinary girl, we would like her number of previous partners to be between 0-10. Once it gets much more than that, the specialness factor is drastically reduced. Say she has slept with 100 men and you are the 101th person. Your relative value is 1/101 vs. a virgin who would make your relative value an absolute 1. That's why virgins are rated so highly because they give you the highest 'special' value. You are their first experience and its incomparable for them. First experiences are special because their relative value is the highest.

Friday, August 23, 2013

Thoughts - Aug 23

I think my basic revolt, rebellion, dissatisfaction, frustration, disappointment, anger, irritation, rage, fight, struggle is because of the perception of being reduced to a robot in the work system of the world. The minute I can conceive of something completely, it becomes something automatable or robotic. Everything I do at work can be automated easily. I want operate at the edge or forefront of whats possible. I seem to have an instinctive rebellion against all forms of routine, habit, coercion, effort, restriction, imprisonment, self-control, discipline, force against one's will, any action against values. Its an exhaustion of will power that has happened with me.

The solution I feel can be found by exploring the dark side and seeing the mechanics on how its creating the bright side. Then once the mechanics is understood, I can move towards the bright side until its splendid bright, a kind of ascension. This is because any desire is ultimately seeking balance. Its like if your on -50 of the number line of experience you want a +50 experience to fulfill you. As you approach +50 you would feel the fulfillment increasing. This would lead to a complete balancing and me existing as a person (i.e. a lack) will disappear. Thereafter, there would not be any persistent lack driving me as a stable personality. I would be in a state of beyond everything until I am pulled back into ignorance. It seems like ignorance and knowledge also move in cycles like the Yugas in Hinduism  - alternating between Kalyug and Golden ages. Everything becomes much clearer when you see beyond narrow bounds of time going far beyond your 100 year lifetime and seeing causes and effects.

I cannot see how intense bottomless passion can exist without you simultaneously polarizing yourself as severely lacking. Maybe passion is the fun you have when you create a -100 for fun which makes you race towards +100. The more you think you lack something, the farther away you would be from the center of the wheel of experience. You need to have been intensely sad to know what extreme happiness is, because its relative. That is the nature of knowledge/perception/awareness/consciousness itself. They exist inseparably as one, like poles of a magnet.

There are 2 ways you can make a person extremely happy in the relative sense. Make him intensely suffer with a deep memory imprint of it and then bring him back to normal state. Now, when perception happens, it would compare the present experience with memory and make the person feel extreme gratitude and happiness. This is another way. Giving the person Methamphetamine is not the only way. In fact, giving a person an extremely powerful temporary euphorigen would amplify the person's dissatisfaction with his current state because perception would then use the euphoric memory and interpret the present as dull, uninspiring, depressing, frustrating and induce deep cravings. It seems like taking euphoriants creates a lot more karma/passions. It seems like passions and karma are equivalent, anything that creates passions is creating karma.

Intense suffering will definitely potentiate you for happiness. Thinking much beyond the time frame of your life (80 years) helps in thinking at this height. All this makes me rethink suffering, ignorance, limitations, dullness etc. because they exist inseparably with their opposites.

Perception and memory are so tightly interlinked. It seems having an experience is impossible without memory. Because perception itself happens by contrasts. Without memory there is nothing to contrast against. It would essentially be a non-experience. Which is why it is said the samadhi state is a non-experience literally, but it greatly potentiates your waking life experiences almost converting you to a child again because of the deep contrast between nothingness and aliveness. You need to plunge into the depths of nothingness to feel supreme aliveness. Just like music can only be heard clearly only in the background of silence. In childhood that's why things seem so much more intense and more towards simplicity or black and white. In adulthood experiences start becoming more sublime, rich because now there is much greater variety in memory.

The interesting thing is we assume we don't know a zillion things in the world that we are yet to  learn, discover etc. The belief in the notion of growth is a fallacy in the absolute sense. We assume a child is born as a clean slate with extremely limited knowledge. As he or she grows up, we believe he is 'Becoming' and 'Accumulating knowledge'. The notion of 'becoming' and 'accumulation' is a another fallacy. When you look at the real picture, its more like only the movie that has changed, the brilliant projector light is eternally operating. It can show infinite diversity of experience like a projector can show infinite pictures but is using the same light. Experience is always whole. There is only the transcendental reality operating beyond time and space eternally. Time, space, memory, intellect, physical laws, scientific stuff, notion of a separate body, notion of other people, notion of success, notion of growth, achievement, accumulation, becoming etc. are all characteristics or properties of the movie. But its all ultimately white light which is you.

Every moment is whole

All experience is in one space. There is only one giant space in which everything appears and disappears. The sense of doership, I, desires, ordinary physical reality laws, dream laws, rationalizing, memory, intellect, feelings, all of them appear and disappear in this space. Every night as I sleep I go back to the 0 point of experience and get back energy to move on the experience wheel. The 0 point has to be the true source of energy. That's how we get energy from our sleep every night. The relaxation potentiates arousal/action, arousal potentiates relaxation/rest. Whatever is there in this moment, is everything there is, in this moment. In the next moment, its a different experiential space appears. Even moment can be observed this way and you will notice that the observer is always transcendent of the thing being observed. Even time and space can be observed in this manner and the observer of these phenomenon has to be beyond them. There is a certain height of awareness where you are eternally conscious and whole all the time. Infinite diversity in varying intensity can arise and pass, but consciousness is the white light of the movie projector, always projecting white light in essence and you are that very light. The projected light can create infinite pictures, but you are the light itself and not the pictures it creates.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The ultimate 0 point


We move in the direction of our own momentums. When people around me desire to have the same momentum, there is a union experienced. If I encounter a profoundly similar matrix of momentum, then I have a soul mate. If the momentum's are totally different, there is the experience of individuality (being and feeling distinct, separate). Individuality and Merger also move in cycles, and potentiate desire for each other. If you move too far into sameness, you want to be individual (distinct). If you move too far into being individual (distinctness, separateness) a longing arises for belonging, acceptance. It appears we all are moving towards the ultimate 0, balance point of experience (non-experience in a way since experience is by contrasts). This 0 point would be the 0 point from which all dualities stem forth. A multidimensional 0 point, just like in a graph we have 0 point for x, y and z axis. The 0 point is like a universal attraction singular point from which everything is bobbing, dancing back and forth like pendulums. Whenever any point moves far enough from the 0, it is pulled back with a force proportional to its distance from center. Greater the distance, greater the force. An absolute relaxation should bring everything to 0 like a waking sleep where only the pure substance is seen like white light.

Friday, August 16, 2013

About momentum/karma/habits and self

Each person has - different momentums, accumulations, habits, tendencies, drives, desires - but all stemming from the ground of being.

Its like seeing the entire universe as it is, from a safe distance i.e. seeing all potentials as points, seeing all the stars as equivalent points of light from that distance. The subtler ones would get invisible as you go higher, as you go lower, you would see the smaller planets but the nearby star like the sun would be so bright, it would prevent you from seeing other stars.

Everything is momentum. Outside expectations are certain milestone points on the spectrum of potential directions. Which 'direction set' to choose? If this changes often, it results in in-decision because there is no stable point of view or perception.

Every behavior at every moment you choose is adding momentum to that direction. You are creating momentum every second of your life. When enough momentum is accumulated in some directions the other potentials become very very subtle almost invisible. Like how the sun obscures the other stars in the night sky, we develop a pattern of high level movement representing our personality.

There is only 'Me' and 'My accumulations/karma'. If I dissolve my accumulations, then only I remain in my freedom. Psychedelics temporarily take you out into unfamiliar places. Your accumulations are your prison.

The doer is not constant, it arises and passes. Doer's are basically desires. Each desire is an 'I' that is driven to fulfill itself. There are multiple competing I's but continuously changing. The desire matrix is what is 'You' or what you call 'You'. A certain attachment to certain directions, a certain momentum, accumulation. It can be said that the desire matrix gives us our experience of the doer. In this matrix again, it is continuously changing, however at different rates.

For Example:
Broad changes - childhood, adolescent, early adulthood etc.
Medium changes - when you move to a new place, change jobs etc.
Immediate - your current mood and how talking to a new person suddenly changes it

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Truth and ordinary consciousness is literally like night and day

Giving everything equal attention makes all things lose their hold. Instead of big blobs in your experience (like the sun blocking the stars), You see a uniform space with multiple dots and no solidity, like looking at a starry night sky with 1000's of white dots. If your current state is like a bright sun (personality) shining obscuring the stars, de-conditioning yourself is like gradually reducing the the sun's light intensity until it becomes just a dot like any other star and with this, the whole night sky becomes visible to you with 1000s/1000000s of stars, the subtler you go. At the subtlest you will see almost an infinite amount of stars. Its literally a day and night difference. Habit (gravity), Coolidge effect (law of diminishing returns) is overcome by seeing the infinity and understanding the higher laws.

Life is like free falling into a fractal

Life is like free falling into a sea of infinite potential points, whichever points you choose, they grow. If you want to completely change, give all of your attention to those points which are subtle and they will grow in expense of the shrinking of the ones that are big right one. Its exactly like free falling into a fractal, so at each moment you have the choice of choosing a point in attention and that element will grow depending upon how much attention energy you give. Removing the gravitational effects of the points for which you have accumulated momentum is detachment. Detachment is freedom from the gravity of attachment.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Thoughts - 12 Aug

I want to be meet the highest ideals of my imagination at every moment. Like if I perceive someone to be better, I want to be that immediately. If I could do that, it would be impossible to perceive lack. But if there is no lack, then what is there to do?. So maybe I need a combo of high challenge and high ability to put me in 'Flow'. But again 'flow' is just an experience. Its like saying, I want to figure out a way of having a 24x7 orgasm. Duality laws would make it lose its meaning. The duals potentiate each other. Your imagination of what others are and your ranking of them is like looking in a particular direction of the ocean - the direction could be towards greater fulfillment, connection, joy, love, harmony, beauty, ecstasy etc. Is it possible that there are people purely trying to move in the opposite direction where more suffering, torture, cruelty, limitedness, chaos, randomness, disorganization, scattering, destruction, reduction in consciousness is better, like the opposite of entropy? Is everything really ultimately moving in the same direction? OR is it just randomness? How would duality work the other way. Supposing I am moving towards greater suffering and avoiding pleasure won't it become more difficult to suffer because you would develop so much of tolerance towards that, just like we have developed de-sensitivity towards pleasure in the civilized world. A numb insufferable bliss? I cannot see that as fulfilling too. Again, this could also be interpreted as: the person trying to suffer more and more is trying to overcome something. What will it take to overcome all of experience in its infinite variety? The only way out seems to be going absolutely beyond EVERYTHING, a total salvation and release from everything. The puzzles seem insoluble for the mind. The key must lie in something beyond. Every single experience I investigate seems unsatisfactory in the broad sense. Is this because of memory? What if there was a way of making you recreate the first time experiences? But then, the lack-fulfillment poles would not even arise because before the first time you try something, you don't even want or can imagine what the experience is like. Any projection is possible because of memory only. Then what do we truly seek? Is it to totally, timelessly experience from a point of view which is beyond all (rooted in the source)? Timeless immediate all knowing?  Staying in the still point or center of the wheel of experience? Would this mean a regression to the unborn self?

I wonder, what is the meaning of all the multitude of experiences I had in childhood and in the recent past? The harder I think, the more the answer comes as "They are just what they are". Whatever meaning I create is created in this moment again and that is as unsubstantial and fluid as anything else. There is no past since my meaning creating system itself is a dynamic infinite changing fluid entity.

Sunday, August 11, 2013

You are the center, the origin point, whereever you go in space

The ground (down) and sky (up) would be valid all the time where-ever you go. They just update themselves creating the same infinity for the up and down direction in space. This is true for all directions. Wherever you go in space, you are the center. The point of consciousness is the source of everything and its radiating/projecting outwards. Its like you are in the middle of the ocean all the time, wherever you look you would find yourself with the same expansive infinity on all sides. You can compare yourself with other boats around you, but that depends on what direction you choose for the measurement.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Insights - Aug 6

All awareness/knowledge/perception is by contrasts. Change is what makes perception/consciousness even possible. We cannot be aware of something that is unchanging (like we cannot be aware of ether, or something that is continuously there, the persistent object is dismissed from consciousness). The unchanging is the infinite potential ground of being, from which we can even observe change. Anything that you observe cannot be you (like a fire cannot burn itself). When something is observed, it is immediately transcended. ‘You’ are the infinite potential ecstatic unborn space from which all experience arises/passes in cycles/vibration. Beauty is variety, harmony and movement and beauty is exactly what life (infinite diversity, harmony, impermanence(change)) itself is. Impermanence is what makes beauty even possible. Life is change, more the change, more the life, Less the change – closer it is to death. Death is a mental concept. You were never born and will never die (Do you experientially remember having being born?, It just happens in a seamless flow). There are no ‘Events’, events are created because of our mental conception or limited view of reality. Nothing is abrupt. Everything is flowing and dancing in perfect harmony in the realm of the absolute. Direct experience is the only thing there is. It would be more appropriate to just say ‘Observe what is’, and nothing more. You are ‘That’.

You are immortal because ‘it is impossible to be conscious of being unconscious’. So you are eternally conscious.
Attention is the primordial energy force. ‘Where ever attention flows, that aspect/quality grows’. This applies to ‘Every’ single thing.
Duality makes everything fair and all realities equivalent when seen from the larger picture/expanded consciousness.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

About Duality

- Desire itself could thought of as simply energy. A desire moves you to do certain things until that energy is used. A simple case would be, you reach your threshold for thirst, and this creates an intense desire to go drink water. So you go and get water. Now the question is, did ‘You’ really get up, or did the desire move you?. Each desire is like a mini ‘I’. We have many little ‘I”s or desires but there may be a small group of highly powerful ‘I’s which we may refer to as our core personality. So from this perspective, it could be said we are swimming in an ocean of desire being desire ourselves. Like a drop of water swimming in the ocean. So the duality here is that, there is only arising and passing away of multiple layers of desires at different rates in time. So identifying yourself with any desire is to get locked and limited into some viewpoint.

- Another interesting area is ‘prana’ (life force energy). The waxing and waning of life force energy. Activities that give us energy like sleep, meditation, relaxation vs. Activities that drain our energy like stress, worry etc. This cycle happens everyday. Like batteries we get charged in the mornings and it runs out by night. I would intuit deep sleep has maximum potentiality and it might be the 0 (infinite potential) point for all manifestation. Duality is the reason why everything in the universe is cyclical. I feel duality and the cyclic nature of everything imply each other.

- Another super fascinating insight I recently came across is that, awareness itself is by contrast. Without contrast awareness itself is not possible. All knowledge is by contrasts too. Like how do you know, you are feeling normal now? How do you know there is light around you now? The very perception of normality or light implies knowledge of abnormality or darkness. The definition of every concept, implies some kind of polarization, just like even if you shatter a magnet, even the smallest pieces will have the 2 poles. This can be applied to every single thing we know, both conventional knowledge and spiritual knowledge. It seems to be the very nature of knowledge.

- If awareness is because of effort from your part, then in the relaxation that follows (duality principle) you will lose this awareness. True and timeless awareness has to transcend duality and that can happen only if its effortless (At the center of the wheel of experience not at the periphery).

Here are some other great duality statements I picked up from an Alan Watts lecture:
- Happening and doing are duals again. You can’t tell the difference without the two-together. You need happening to know what is doing. Also, voluntary and involuntary are duals again.
- Sensation by itself is awareness of contrast.
- Non-existence is the very condition for existence.
- Where is the notion of improving, isn’t it absurd? White must win? Which side would you take: Black or white? Does the side really make a difference?
- Nothing is the source of something. It is the seed.
- Both white and black can play the negative role. We conventionally associate white with the positive and this is another illusion. For Example: Paper with black ink writing, the writing is the positive and the white is blank, and therefore nothing, negative. In this case the black is positive.
- Drugs take you more fiercely into duality.

- If I take a euphorigen (any of the super gratifying ones), because of duality, on coming down, instantly my ordinary state would seem miserable. The perception of happiness and misery itself is relative.That is way perception itself works and perception is the only reality we know, so its reality itself. Excessive pleasure for humans with ordinary psychology is very likely to create extreme compulsivity. This is not only true for drugs but just about anything, like even sex (That’s why the taoists advice Karezza instead of regular sex). So when you come down from the drug, you go lower than your baseline causing an intense desire to elevate the level up again. Now the setpoint of pleasure has been set to that first high experience, the memory of that make you binge on the pleasure stimulus until you reach it again. Now you go down even further the 2nd time and so on. So the sine wave of ups and downs has been intensified compared to a normal person’s happy/sad moods.

- All existence is painful validated by its dual i.e. the universal seeking of pleasure.
If I am seeking to improve my situation, seeking to get better, seeking to be at another mental state B, even the smallest seeking implies dissatisfaction with the way things are. This is what is referred to as suffering. If we say, all humans are universally seeking pleasure, it would be equally right to say, all humans are dissatisfied with the way things are.

- If you are absolutely satisfied, you will dissolve, you wont exist as a person anymore.....Think about it in terms of the consciousness of being a person....how do you know 'you are you'?.....that sensation of a core drive is fueled by a desire...and desires are fueled by beliefs....and beliefs keep changing in patterns....its like music......a song may have many different melodies with different instruments but yet maintaining its signature pattern by which you can recognize it......personality is also like that.....a music of overlapping constantly moving desires, yet maintaining an abstract pattern that you can recognize every time

- There is duality between predictability and unpredictability.
How can I know what predictable without being simultaneously about whats unpredictable, and vice versa?

- Duality of wanting – want also implies awareness of what is not wanted
When you want something, in that very moment of wanting something, not wanting of its opposite is implied. If I want a want a white object, then it instantly also implies I do not want a black object. Here black and white is simplistic. It can be an abstract quality too. An opposite can be found for every single mental object no matter how abstract.

- Hearing music in any form would not be possible without awareness of silence. So the duality is that if you are enjoying music, you are simultaneously aware of the background silence too. They happen concomitantly. Imagine a continuous note with no gaps, there would be no pattern, therefore no music.

Qualities of a diamond mapped to experience

The ideal +ve experience is where the mind is like an infinitely large diamond that is clear, does not hold anything but yet, reflects/refr...