Even great experiences create discomfort

Recently, I had a terrific out of the world experience. This stirred up my entire thoughts and in a way hijacked my brain. For the next few days, all I was doing was reliving moments of it and trying to remember every detail. No matter what I thought about, I would ponder over it again and again. Its like a stuck logical loop where I would think about ideas like: What was it really? What insights does it give me? What should I do to have an even better one? Should I pursue something similar? How will other people react if I tell them? How would I explain it to them? Would they be able to understand my translation of it?

What struck me is that, this is not the first time in my life this has happened. Interesting experiences hijack my entire attention and make me continually explore their mystery. The more intense it is, the more I'm pulled in.

I don't know if I need to interpret this as discomfort in the first place. Its what I have been doing most of my life. I would be terribly fascinated with some object, game or person and keep intensely exploring that until the interest naturally fades into something else. I have seen a lot of people around me however, do not live life with that intensity. Even if they do, the intensity is only for certain things and not versatile or really broad. It also stays more or less constant. For e.g.: among the people I know, there is an obsession with knowing the latest gossip or information, maintaining a oneupmanship, tapping into the easiest sources of money, increasing one's value in the market etc.

About Dopamine:
Once dopamine is involved in the picture, it hugely dominates. The real obsessive experience starts when an entity stimulates dopamine. That makes the obsession much much stronger. I guess our whole motivation and behavior is biologically adjusted to all the activities that maximize dopamine. So they would theoretically be the most powerful forces. In fact dopamine is the key force of attraction.

Why the reward system may be fair after all
For a long time I felt, pretty girls have an inherent advantage since more people want to get to know them and their opportunity for interacting with others is maximized. However, if they get attention easily, they may not bother to develop other skills and attitudes needed for pleasure not related to looks. Average looking people usually develop in other areas and by virtue of facing rejections etc. develop greater empathy, stronger personalities and develop other talents and interests which help them gain rewards. The more I think about it, I feel no one has any real advantage. You can rewards in spikes or get it slowly but the wave will still be maintained with its crests and troughs.

Giving a starving man a loaf of bread gives him as much pleasure as a middle class man gets eating in a 5-star restaurant. In the pretty girl example: If some guy gives her a lot of attention, she would not be too bothered by it because she gets it in abundance. But if this level of attention is received by an average girl, she would be really moved and rewarded much more.

So, do some people really subjectively experience more pleasure than others?
We can never compare 2 subjective experiences, even my comparison would be my subjectivity. So the answer to this question is almost unknowable.
2 things strike my mind when I think about this.
1. Analyzing the biology of the person's brain, nervous system etc for the main neurotransmitters and chemicals influencing subjective experience.
2. Understanding the person's beliefs and how they are functioning: empowering/dis-empowering him

But even these factors may not indicate subjective experience. There is an inherent duality here.
Say there are Person A: with less dopamine and Person B with more dopamine. Person B may have more dopamine in his system, but he has always had it, he would know the value of it only if he can experience person A. Similarly person A would have no idea what having the level of dopamine person B has feels like. Person A cannot even imagine it.

So the conundrum is that wherever we are in life, we always feel we are in the center. The frame of reference itself moves along with us. We are always craving for better things, avoiding the bad stuff. We try to map our place by comparing ourselves to others and that gives us orientation. But this is a comparison in an artificial reality. There is no compass, no map, no circumference, no location in actual reality.

Journey of questions

Question: How can I get what I want?....then...What do I really want?....Is there really some unchangeable thing which I really want?

I can keep abstracting it higher and higher but I might end up with a vague term like happiness or satisfaction which is still not clear. Finding what I want may not be that straightforward. Because what I want is a dynamic entity and my priorities change from time to time esp. with change in my circumstances. The definition of me itself in fact is intimately tied to my environment from birth till date. I cannot exist in this manner without my environment at the other end.

I am so related to the environment in every way...I can literally see it myself...I feel very lazy if I keep lying down in a dimly lit room for long...when I have an intense conversation, it fires up all my brain circuits...socially I stay much more active...when I am in the college, lab or walking on the street in cold weather, I feel quite awake...a good event elevates me, while stress makes me feel ill, passive, dull and I try to escape it by withdrawing (sleeping or dull stupor)...If someone tells me to be spontaneous and not self conscious, that makes me feel even more self consciousness...certain people evoke certain feelings and moods out of me...infact each person I meet does that...everything around me evokes me

Questions about finding the right things

Now, the part which I am finding difficult to address is that, if everything around me evokes the 'I' then my environment is paramount...The executive questions come up...Am I in the right place? playing the right game? Meeting the right people? Pursuing the right experiences?

Questions about what is right

To answer that, is anything that invokes positive, pleasant emotions and feelings in me right?
If I answer that with a 'yes', then again there is another level. The feelings that objects evoke from us is dependent on our world view, conditioning and perspective.

Questions about what is real? Am I adequately exploring? Am I aware enough? What is true knowledge?

In that case, changing these parameters are like altering global variables. They could open up many new experiences and even dramatically change perceptions about events and objects I think I have understood. There might not be anything right or wrong in the first place.

Then I could end up being paranoid at another level that is 'what perspective is really real, one that includes all the others? Is perspective even real? What is real in the first place? Is there a higher self, higher mode of operation which I need to seek? Is seeking just another trap of desire again? What is this entire cycle about? What is the highest knowledge?

Now, after reading about zen etc, they even break down the system of language itself saying that it is only possible for language to convey distinctions and it is impossible for it to cover something all inclusive like the uniting truth. In that case, maybe everything is just vibrations and that is the highest knowledge and everything that I know right now could just be an illusion. Maybe I am meant to be just like a bird chirps when it wants to. In that case, what is the part controlling me right now? Is chasing experiences really as important as I think of it to be? (especially considering the rule of duality that the definition of pleasure itself is intertwined with suffering. In other words, if I have an extremely exotic experience, my whole frame of reference may shift and my current position may feel like suffering compared to that, thus maintaining the duality equation)

Question about Who and what is the 'I' that wants enlightenment? What is beyond this duality? What is the truth?

This is the more fundamental question. Maybe the I which is intellectualizing all this with language and exists inside me between my eyes does not even exist as something separate. Language is after all an abstraction for the real thing. The real reality may simply be experience without any words that can convey it. Its like God putting into words how he created an earthquake. It might take millions of years to even describe it, single language is like serial processing and cannot describe a reality where everything is happening at once. 

THE END

Thoughts - 25Jan

Wherever I go, whatever I do, I am unable to experience anything completely. Its like I am walking on a road with mountains on either side. When I start climbing any one of them, I cannot go that far along the trail since I need to get back on the main road. The main road is basically all the things I need to do in time in order to survive, acquire material possessions and have a well adjusted social life. Due to this pressure of having to come back to the main road within stipulated times, I cannot reach the summit of any of the mountains around me. I however keep imagining and fantasizing about what they would look like. I also often run out of company. People accompany me until a little but into the trail but then they all withdraw and get back to the main road. Then I venture alone as far as I can go without endangering myself and then get back. Sometimes I wish I could just freeze time, do something single minded till I master it and then resume it again. For example: I hear various kinds of music, but I don't know what kind of mind is required to create it. If I ponder about it for too long, I lose track of all the other main road priorities and I have to force myself to abandon it at some point. Things involving social aspects like a relationship with another person gets even more complicated since I have very little control on how far I can take it. Like say I want to explore the highest depth of intimacy, I can only give the green light and try from my side but otherwise have very little control. They are more like blessings that come and go. Among the things I have control, I cannot pursue them too long since I have to complete my overflowing to-do lists. As it is, I pretty much live on the edge by doing things in the last minute and spending just enough time to do a decent job. The intense desire to explore the peaks of all mountains conflicts with the social where there is an expectation that you complete the drill of all their expectations.

I would feel great satisfaction if I could find people who are similar to me and share all this. We could then jointly think about this issue instead of me being locked inside my own head.

Another perspective on living life

What if your life was an endless exploration and integration? and your meaning of life was wisdom acquired and the depth of patterns of investigated? In this style, your goals are fluid, more like water and change and evolve depending upon new revelations from exploration. You want to expand your sphere of consciousness in all directions. So you start on a question and explore all the answers from all perspectives and try to extract the larger underlying patterns.

This style of living is quite different from the way society expects us to live. In society, you are expected to have fixed goals and keep specializing in them. If you do too many things, you;ll acquire tremendous breath of understanding, but may not be able to form a cog into society and work. Work requires patience and its requires you to think within a constrained environment. So all your ideas, thoughts, imaginations and progress is within these artificial constraints (beliefs and momentum of investment).

Momentum of investment is an important factor. If someone has established an organization, it has to recover the investment and then reap rewards from it. So its a big commitment, and it requires you to work and think within its framework till you get financial salvation. Financial salvation is almost an impossible dream for the middle class. So they work their entire lives with this mirage. This may be viewed as a good/bad thing. These people are hidden from the philosophical truths of life because all their energy is consumed in chasing this mirage.

Why are people so afraid to look at the truth at its face? I have read a lot of advanced literature where it is said these constraints are purposely constructed to make life a game, to totally escape boredom.

The case that directly illustrates this is the purpose for sports. Just look at sports and the amount of energy people spend watching it, admiring the stars, and betting on who will win. It is an artificial glorification system creating newer value pyramids.

What is boredom and why do we escape it? An interesting question which few dare to investigate.

Views on a Messy room

For clarity, let me define the term:
Cluttered room -
A room where the locations of items is fluid. It does not mean dirty, dusty, germ or bug infested etc.

Do people feel more comfortable in a slightly cluttered home compared to an absolutely neat home?

It is intimidating. The extremely neat home may indicate the owner is obsessed with cleanliness and it may appear a bit inhospitable to a guest visiting since there is an unwritten obligation to maintain this level of neatness and to ensure that he/she does not disturb anything. So basically, some kind of very restrictive environment, so less welcoming in a way.

Whereas the houses which are relatively cluttered (I don't mean in terms of cleanliness, but more in terms of orderliness and organization) probably convey the impression of a more laid back environment which is ready for a "make mistakes and explore" kind of attitude. So in other words, more warm and welcoming.

Houses that are excessively neat may not feel "lived in". Its also a question of priority. Certain preoccupations may also relegate this activity of cleaning. Also, it is interesting to think about whether there is really any point in putting stuff used everyday in exact spots, which would mean extra work would be needed to put them back in the same place. For this point people might argue that an efficient architecture can be created to solve this problem. But then another problem crops up, of rigidity.

If the position and functions of everything is fixed, this rigidity passes on to the mind too. How can one think out of the box and look for crazy associations, patterns, be creative etc. if everything is set in stone?

There is also another perspective where, after a period of time, the organization of the room contents evolve dynamically to suite your lifestyle in the most optimal way. Its similar to they way a biological organism evolves depending on the environment its put in. In other words, it could be the most efficient self organizing arrangement for your priorities. The traits of a person that prefers this system of organization could be a mind that is like water, constantly adapting and trying to free itself from conditioning.

It could also be a form of rebellion against convention and desire to explore alternate untrodden paths.

It could also indicate a higher tolerance to disorderliness. Such a person could likely have a broad picture view of things where everything is optimized at the highest levels.

It could also be a symptom of an insecurity which causes them to hoard things. Usually, patterns get passed on from parents. The way your parents lived is the way you choose to live because that is what feels familiar and like home unless there is a really pressing reason to not do so.

Thus, a person's messy room could show a lot more than just the simplistic connotation of being 'messy' OR a stereotype of what a "person with a messy room" is like. Such a person might simply be optimizing different variables in his life's equation.

Also another factor in favor of the cluttered room, is you do not need to use your memory as much. Like say there are some items like keys, wallet, phone, wireless mouse, phone charger, USB card reader, car keys etc used every single day which need to be organized. Leaving all these items on a table top makes it easy to find them in one pass, though the exact location of these items is not known. Instead of remembering an table where there is 1-1 mapping for each of these 7 items, now you only need to remember 1 location for all the 7 items.

Thoughts - 21 Jan 2012

Whatever i do serves as a catalyst for the subsequent mind state/mood

• When I sit idle for long, my mind starts getting dull and empty and the subsequent state has even more of this inertia
• When I work in office especially in the morning after the 1st hour of work, my brain gets even more activated to plan and execute mode
• When I watch a movie, my mind get primed to those emotional states that the movie puts me in, it opens the door to my own associated memories and corresponding thinking patterns
• When I write this blog, as I write my mind gets primed into thinking in these directions even more
• Social interaction activates my mind and gives me new thoughts to think about
• When my brain is highly activated throughout an office day, it gets primed to totally relax and enjoy any music in the evening.

What is this priming effect on the brain? It seems to be some kind of momentum that makes it easier for me to reach states. This momentum channels my energies into the respective directions. When I sit idle for long, I generally lose all momentum. Maybe this is equivalent to wanting to get to a place 10miles away but I have to walk all the way because of no momentum. If I had been primed sufficiently, that would be equivalent of having a car going at 60mph where this distance can be covered literally 20 times faster.

I also use this principle for getting difficult work done like studying for an exam. The pressure on the day before the exam, gives the brain tremendous motivation and I spring into action since the fear that I might not do a good job does not arise since I am working at my own limits. When you work at your highest potential, fear disappears. Fear is only there because you know you are not even doing close to your best. So this situation gives tremendous momentum equivalent to a car going at 60mph vs walking 3mph. So I accomplish much more with greater endurance too.

On some days, getting the momentum to even do basic jobs seems like a huge chore. On other days, I am so full of energy and ideas. Getting yourself conditioned into what society expects you to think is an easy way to automatically gain momentum towards their approval and recognition. Then of course, if you want the approval of the masses and think like them, you would have to deal with the same problems as the masses and is mostly mediocrity. And besides, other people capacity to make you feel less worthy is great. They would find newer and newer ways of doing so. And even if all of them accept defeat, psychologically the extra pleasure you receive from their approval and validation will become your baseline and this would get converted to a need instead of a want.

A 5-D map showing my patterns in a day (in progress)

Breath analysis:
I notice that I hold my breath whenever I am trying to suppress my thoughts or suppress anything for that matter. The relationship between the breath and the mind is getting more and more fascinating by the day. I usually observe the breath for a short while, but its really difficult to do it throughout the day. I wish I had a machine to show me the pattern of my breath for one entire day. That would be excellent information for me to work on and analyze

Relationship insights:
As I dig deeper and deeper into the problems in relationships, I think one of the root problems is the basic differences in priorities of the 2 individuals. This difference is similar to how we all look physically unique. The bridge that connects the 2 distinct entities is communication. Each person has his/her communication module which is capable of expressing needs, wants, desires to the external world . The other aspect is empathy. The ability and extent of empathy in an individual depends on their direct experience (self knowledge) and knowledge in psychology and philosophy. After all everything you think the other person is feeling is from your own experience. It is impossible for a human to have a direct experience of what the other human is feeling. Psychology helps you understand yourself. Philosophy helps you think about why the world is as it is and other dynamics such as your relationship to nature, all living things, what is conditioning, different religions and their logic etc.

If we were all naked

- People interest in sex would diminish since we always seek only what we lack
- Strip clubs would close down, we might instead have a dress club where women put on seductive clothing
- There would be a dramatic shift in identity, whos popular, whos not
- body image would be much more important
- We would freeze in winter and get burnt in summer
- Body art, plastic surgery, shaving, hair styling business etc. with soar
- People may start looking more into the minds of others as an erotic turn on
- People would exercise more
- Either one of these would happen - Drastic Increase or Decrease in Population
In first 5 years the crime rate will increase and unwanted pregnancy will reach more than 300%. In the succeeding years the people would stop having sex with partners or with the opposite sex...they will get sick seeing naked people in public or in conventions..."lose of appetite"

Time - An illusion

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Wb9By-lODgk
https://sites.google.com/site/abriefhistoryoftimelessness/advanced-timelessness/prof-hawking-s-mad-scientist-paradox

An interesting quote I found:
'Time' is the word we use to describe the fact that matter 'exists and moves' - then, when we say 'matter exists and moves... over time' - we are really saying 'Matter exists and moves... matter exists and moves'"

So time just indicates the rate of change. It is not a solid dimension by itself. The past is like recalling stored memories in the present and the future is our imagination working in the present. So everything is happening now. Everything is present and changing all at once from moment to moment. The next moment is the same raw material in a different form and structure.

Time is something we use to record, predict and analyze and predict change. In the larger concept of cause and effect, time is as a parameter to understand their relative rates. But all of those are intellectual constructs/concepts like we have the concept of numbers. It is a mental layer which keeps on evolving depending on our breadth of experiences and awareness.

In the physical world, everything is continuously changing at different rates. Similarly even our 'perception speed of these changes' change from event to event. But all this is actually happening just now. So everything that exists is here in the now. Nothing absolutely new is going to come up in the future. The total amount of energy in the universe is constant. Things only differ in form and diversity. The same group of atoms may take a different form in future or split to form double the number but nevertheless nothing new is added as time passes. All the raw material is constant in the absolute sense. Its just their properties, form etc that change.

Love, compassion and joy, the things that really matter are timeless: exist beyond the mind.
Everything is continuously changing in form depending upon cause and effect laws which is what Hinduism and Buddhism refer to as Karma.

The way cause and effect manifests can be linear or circular. Patterns need not always be new in the future. The future can also be a past pattern repeating itself and its cycle. We cannot hold on to either of these concepts. At the highest level, time is neither cyclical nor linear. Every moment the form structure of the universe is unique. On what basis do we construct a linear graph from this? Linear time is a predictive control imposed on the infinitely complex changing of forms. Things can be controlled and predicted only if you choose some variables and create an optimization problem for yourself. Linear time assumes goals and tracks their progress in time. At the 'God perspective' level, there is no duality: Good, bad, right,wrong. All that is relative and these entities do not have any absolute essence by themselves. God perspective would be the perspective of infinity.

Is our mind capable of really grasping this concept of infinity? The biggest mystical moment I think would be when the realization occurs that, I am everything and everything is in the now and changing (at different rates). It would be an infinitely expansive and timeless state.

Interesting blog comment:
Lets say a person is 49 going on 50 years old. In no time at all the wedding anniversary, the vacation, football season, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and a birthday, come and go again in what seems like no time at all.

Now, think of a child of 4 going on 5 years old. The child is in school for the first time. Everything is new. The child is learning numbers, letters, how to interact with peers, teachers etc. The first hour seems like a day, the first day seems like a week, and the first week seems like its going to last forever.

This phenomena is what I call the “Esker Effect”*. When a person is 50 years old and goes through all the experiences during a year, there are not to many things that happen that are new and unique. In fact a year is only equal to 2% of that persons entire life to that point. All future years become a smaller percentage of the life experience. However when when a person is five, almost everything is still new and a year is 20% of that persons life at that point.

So at 50 years of age, a year is equal to 2% of a life, and time flies; but at 5 years of age, the same year is equal to 20% of a life, and time drags.

Great comments on this article:
https://www.socialtext.net/wired-mag/is_time_an_illusion

Mind tricks with masturbation frequency

Just after masturbating, or while doing it many days in a row, a small amount of those pleasurable still remain in the system. I think this is what causes the intense craving to do it again and again. Its like you get a continuous taste of that feeling, but it is very very mild. So you feel an intense craving to revive that peak feeling and do it again and again with much higher frequency. This sometimes leads you to think you sex drive is abnormally high. But on many occasions when I have abstained from it for sufficiently long, this mild trace also stopped. In fact this state scared me. I was afraid to lose this pleasure and again resumed it.

Surprisingly, I have heard drug addictions too work in a very similar way. The drug takes quite a while to fully exit the system. So when there is a trace of the drug in your system, there is a very strong craving to get the peak experience back. The more I explore, I realize that drugs reveal a lot of esoteric deep secrets about life.

Real knowledge

When it comes to REAL knowledge, I can only tell you something you already know within. All knowledge that matters is already known to us within. Sometimes while hearing some teachings, I realize that whatever they say is already known to me somewhere deep and this resonance is what gives it profound meaning.

Identity is a prison

Identity is a prison. All our vulnerabilities lie in this very definition we create for ourselves.
For example:
A girl may identify with her good looks during teenage years. However the effort required to maintain this identity would progressively increase as she gets older and gets subjected to various external events such as child birth, stress, hormonal shifts etc.

If a girl's looks were average to below average during formative years, she may adopt a different identity which may be based on goodness, humor, wit, performance in school or work, popularity, social likability, selfless service, power, influence etc. She may increase her attractiveness quotient by being very nice to people, seduce, flirt, smile a lot etc.

Beautiful girls identifying themselves with it would go to great lengths to maintain it. Similarly if a person identifies himself with his health, he too would put a lot of effort in maintaining it.

We generally quickly identify with all the aspects in which we feel we have an inherent advantage. Since each identity definition faces threats we identify with multiple aspects of ourselves. For eg: A person may consider himself a musician, writer, good father, good family man, moralistic, faithful etc.

Certain definitions last much longer than others. For example, if we identity ourselves with principles then it is at a higher level than identifying ourselves with our individual actions. Higher the definition of this identity, more the freedom.

Each identification makes us correspondingly vulnerable in those aspects and there are different levels to these identities. For example: Social validation might be creating most of your motivations. So the motivations you have currently may not have any essence, you may just be doing all those things to satisfy a higher need such as social validation.

If we dis-identify with everything then we would have the most freedom. We can progressively dis-identify, move to higher levels and gain more freedom.