Satisfaction from healing

Personal healing gives me immense satisfaction. I realized that this satisfaction/meaning would have not been there had I had a perfect childhood. Those unresolved issues and suppression is what is giving me this pleasure. My dad for example, is not that interested in such stuff, because he does not have any major issues to heal. My upbringing, conditioning, childhood has created this blueprint and identity character. Each of my bad/unresolved experiences provides a potential for pleasure, meaning, satisfaction and closure. I would presume my motivation for 80% of things is actually coming from there. In the yin-yang fabric of life the 2 sets of threads representing duality seem to be inextricably woven OR like 2 sides of a coin. My identity character, with all the suffering has left opportunities open at the other side of duality for pleasure, meaning and satisfaction. So they are inseparable just like light-dark, good-bad etc. One cannot exist without the other.

There are so many experiences in my life that validate this. It seems that all meaning is derived from some form of comparison.

When I bought the 'Korg Pa500', since I dint have my old keyboard for comparison, I must have lost almost 60-70% of the pleasure. In childhood my dream of owning this was magnitudes higher, and I would have been ready to get up even at 3am to play it for just 10mins. It has somehow diminished quite a lot from that intense state. However, the 40-50% of pleasure which I got from using my memory was quite a lot. Another friend visited me and he had unreasonable expectations from the keyboard, for e.g.: the grand piano should sound like a real grand, so he immediately remarked with condescension. That's what made me think, the keyboard was uniquely valuable to me because of my own experience blueprint with previous instruments and music in general.

I uniquely enjoy certain activities and I can clearly see how my blueprint of experiences creates this for me.

Projection map

 

Each island in this map represents different people in our lives in terms of the emotions and feelings we project towards them. The pink areas represent the good parts and the black areas represent the unpleasant projections. The larger central island represents a person with whom we have had a close relationship, so many more projections are stored with larger areas for good/bad projections stored. Depending on the mood of the 2 people, situation and context the brown circle shows what we might experience at a particular point of time. In this case its 50% good projections, 50% bad ones with a well known person. When the situation is favorable, all your projections might be in the pink area results in very pleasant emotions while its also equally likely that you may entirely move to a grey area where all the projections are very unpleasant. This could probably explain love/hate in relationships.

Now this diagram has been simplified to explain the basic concept. These projections may not be a static map, they probably continually change like a fractal and create similar patterns unless an external stimulus strongly influences its pattern, which in case might temporarily alter its behavior.

Worldview - Excessive Consumerism

A very complex subject that seems to wrap my mind nowadays is regarding the need to work. Why should we work? I have read scores of theories and articles on it but somehow I'm still not convinced of why its something that is so imposed on all of us.The minute I try to even raise this question to anyone the reactions are:

Who will pay your bills?
Houses don't build themselves
Work is a virtue and laziness and sloth are sins
You must work towards achieving success
You have to be of some use to people. Its not right to just sit at home.
Join the bandwagon before its too late
What other ideas do you have Smart-ass?

All these responses seems to stem from fear, a need for security and a set of hard coded virtues which have not been subjected to any serious questioning. I'm not really seeing any real open minded responses. To be truly open minded and objective, I believe you cannot operate from all kinds of fears and rigid unexamined beliefs. My gut feeling is that, there has to be a better way.

If I treat society as a common goal, for all of us to work in harmony, it also implies that we believe in it in the first place. Among all the myriad things that we could do given the 80-90 years we have on earth, is this really anywhere close to the best option. The more I think of all the possibilities, it strikes me how narrow the scope of experience is because of this system of work and society in general.

At the surface, simple facts like I'm gonna live in a human made fabricated environment in front of a laptop for 10 hrs, 22 days a week for the next 40 years, 15 days of vacation, covering your entire youth. The first thoughts I had hearing this in my childhood was "Whats this severely restrictive unnatural nonsense?","Why should I sacrifice my entire youth to a cause I do not even believe in?" and "Why the hell is it considered a virtue to top it all?" and I strongly opposed this idea. As I grew up, I continued with this view but once I got into my first job, I got to actually live that environment. I noticed some strange stuff. From inside this black box of work, which it had been throughout my childhood, I could see that it was far more complex than I thought. It seemed to be a virtual reality that satisfied the human desires for ambition, meaning, striving, passion, direction and the sense of being productive and useful and the quest towards perfection and mastery. This whole system of organizations makes this virtual reality even more complex. People share their experiences. There is a meta level ranking among professions, job positions and the image of the organizations. It is so easy for a person to get lost in this structure and totally identify themselves with all the rewards, recognition, social food it provides. People who are unable to fit into this virtual reality feel like losers while people who do fit in love this system and the cycle spirals and perpetuates in this manner. The point I'm trying to get across is that "This is a Virtual Reality", this whole framework. A clear tangible output from these organizations is money. What can money do for you? There are people who feel money is the end all, the ultimate goal of life. Money and media seem to have a close relation to each other. The media many a times esp. nowadays literally creates needs and ideas and sells them to you in incredibly creative ways sometimes involving deep psychological games and conditioning. We as a race are literally sustaining the production consumption cycle and it is getting intensified by the day.
During the industrial revolution time, people were working 15 hours a day. It was estimated that this would reduce to 4hrs a day with all the advanced computing available. But on the contrary, people today have become even more obsessive probably still working 10-12 hrs a day and having laptops, iphones means the work would encroach upon their free time too. The question I face is "If this is a game or a virtual reality, why is everyone being forced to play it?" What if I don't want to play. I'm obviously losing a huge amount of freedom on playing.

Different people may have different perspectives but according to me increasing the quality of life and happiness should be our main goal and an integral part of happiness is freedom. The kind of structures we have create are exploitative, plutocratic and unfair by very nature. They are hierarchical, capitalism intrinsically has competition as an integral part. How can we ever make genuine relationships in such a system that identifies you based on how much money you have and not on some truer aspects?. Only 10% of people seem to really get the best out of this system and the rest just comply or make a less than ideal arrangement.

About the question on, what should be the meta value that we all should drive towards, if the ultimate one is happiness then each person can just completely accept his variables, position, situation and at a deeper level, all his emotional, mental and physical states and reach absolute peace. But with freedom, the issue gets trickier. How can we satisfy conflicting needs and considering the fact that each person has a unique upbringing, its definitely impossible to satisfy this in physical reality. There is great hope in terms of meeting this need through virtual worlds. A step in this direction would be the social networking stuff available today. In fact systems like the society, culture, media and corporations strive to create a commonality between people, common goals, common needs and common values.

Another perspective is about me being narrow again in this article. I have still only spoken out of personal experience. The world is infinitely diverse though. There may be tribal societies and other unexplored communities which may be actually living close to my what I see as utopia. At a micro level, we see this in our lives too. Sometimes we are pleasantly surprised when we meet get along and make friends with totally unexpected people. There are really infinite possibilities if we are really ready to lose our fears and explore. But this is more at a personal level for each person, so when we talk about a system, its a different subject.

On the question on whether money should be the ultimate motivator. there are many perspectives that can prove otherwise.

For e.g. say we contemplate death. Most of us live like death is not going to happen to us. We do not consciously think about it except in very rare situations and even at that time we try to distract ourselves as fast as we can. The deeper we think about it, we realize that what we call ourselves is actually our personalities which we are holding on to as an identity. The minute we stop holding on to things we die in all the ways that matter and this is one of our greatest fears. I think the basic philosophical questions of life have somewhat disturbing answers. To overcome this, we have created all this media, entertainment and this work phenomenon so that we can be kept so occupied, that there is no room to really look at these truths.

Its actually quite hard to even accurately vision a utopia. Work has always intrigued me. It does seem like a virtual reality that satisfies desires at many levels. Many people seem to be OK with this system which is why it is simply going on without much opposition, questioning. In my case, freedom gives me happiness but I do see a people being simply content with whatever they have.

So back to the title of this article. How does my work map to what I'm consuming? In other words, what exactly am I producing and what am I consuming in terms of resources?
Say I'm working to make a website look and function better. What is my real motivation for this? I like to see good looking things and I enjoy organization of chaos and I want other people to get the same feeling when they look at my work. This is kind of an artistic/emotional motivation which gives me much more meaning than money because money is just social value - i.e. how valuable society considers your work to be. Personal value is always far more powerful as a motivator.


My map currently would be something like:
Say I work in IT, say for an insurance client. I am testing their website and spending a year on it running 3 cycles. I'm part of a large team doing this testing, so I'm contributing say around 1/100th to this overall task of testing. This would help the insurance company sell more policies probably, so they would make greater profit. If they make greater profit they would try to expand.to other regions and lure more people into buying insurance policies. Now what is insurance and do you really believe in this ideology of protection against risk? What are these policies that are being sold? Are they really something people need or is it a fabricated one? I would have to think about the system of insurance in the overall picture and see if its a convincing idea and then I would need to think about their specific situation. Is my contribution really adding any value? How much value? Could I be doing something more valuable?

Lets say the insurance company expands, this would mean more insurance policies would be sold in more areas. There are 100's of other companies that would be competing for the same thing. So its a game about who would be more efficient in capturing the market. Even this system has its own set of corporate ethics, rules and regulations. You have to work within this framework and the variables in hand to get the best possible outcome. The vision might be initially to expand to other states in the US and then it might be to expand to other countries and outsource and then finally diversify into other areas as well. Each of the 100 competitors too might be thinking on similar lines and are continually playing under this pressure put by all their peer companies. Not many companies really manage to continually expand even if they want to. There are a plethora of variables, some under your control, some not under your control that decide whats going to happen. In this quest for conquest of market cap and power companies use various strategies, like they try to distinguish themselves as a niche, if its a start-up they start providing service that uses superior technologies and new business models, a larger company may concentrate on providing customer support and strengthening loyalty, playing on the human tendency to get attached and loyal. Companies will also try to continually try to push people to think of out of the box ideas. They may make it a part of their mission statement, create environments and practices that are more conducive to idea generation or devise various hiring strategies that can help them pull in the people most capable of performing this task. Lets say a company performs exceptionally well and achieves its goal, whats next?. If will continue to enjoy its power until another fresh company comes up with a more innovative strategy and push it out of the race. For e.g.: Companies like Motorola, IBM have had to almost shutdown or get acquired by other larger companies due to competition moving ahead faster. This whole pursuit seems like a game that can never be won. If you are enjoying large market cap and power then you cannot have the nimbleness of smaller start-ups, so they can always overtake you with some revolutionary ideas any day. Its an inherent disadvantage. Nowadays to succeed in this power game, companies along with all the efforts described above, they are also closely working with media and social networking to actually CREATE new needs. Look at almost everything around you, a microwave oven is extremely harmful for health and this can be understood with a bit of research. About 10yrs back very few people had even heard of it and nowadays esp in US its there in every flat. We don't need this, it is causing more harm than good. Chemotherapy is being continued as a treatment for cancer instead of using alternative therapies(with excellent track records and proof) because of the huge investments and enormous gains made. This power game seems to be abused in so many ways by so many different industries at both a micro and a macro level. People are being encouraged to buy more and more things that they really don't need and for this we work our asses of 10+hrs a day to encourage this excessive needless indulgence. In this perspective it does not make any sense. What is the really motive of all organizations? We are also exhausting all our natural resources and creating problems in environmental configurations. What is this viral epidemic?

It doesn't seem to work towards the larger goals like improving quality of life, providing prosperity and happiness. It works towards short sighted goals like impressing stockholders and making better business decisions to maximize productivity, profit, trying to find innovative ways of being better etc. All this looks great on paper from a height of 1000-2000 ft but from 30000-40000ft things look very different. We are moving farther away from goals that really matter to human beings. Towards this life of obsessive consumerism and quest for power. This game is so intense, from inside it its even hard to think of a world that can exist outside of this framework. We have lost our true identities to this fabricated reality that does not really serve us on deeper thinking.

This is a global issue, and people consciousness and awareness levels really needs to be increased. Philosophy, mediation and other such areas should be taught to children at a young age so that they do not again become of victim of all this conditioning. Everyone is being forced to play this game and the sheer momentum of it is like a tsunami. In such an environment where everyone is thinking of profit/loss and 0 sum thinking, how can we make any true friends or genuine relationships. What will be the quality of your connections with everyone in this pressured state of existence that we are in?

Its not just jobs and corporations. The entire societal framework needs to be re-calibrated from its smallest roots. What is evolution really? Are we evolving in the right direction?

Frequency change?

Slowly many of the people I've been moving with have started thinking on similar lines as me. I am also meeting a lot of unexpected like minded people. Like my Hillsboro roommates, Seattle roommate, in many lunch conversations with my office group and some other folks in Seattle. I wonder if this is as simple as my own changed choices or does it have another frequency dimension to it. Am I attracting such situations and people?

Experimenting with Drugs: effects on psychological stability

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.

Actual events and the Memory of events

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.

Things simply are as they are - Choiceless awareness on 'what is'

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.

Thoughlessness, Timelessness and Love

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.

Float tank experience 3

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.

Each moment is extraordinary

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.

Garden analogy of significance

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