Baseline mood enhancers

- Cool air (6 - 12 deg C)
- Fresh air
- Humidifier and dust filter for dust/pollen free environment
- Medium strength - Intermittent or Continuous breeze (in a beach, building terrace, traveling in a vehicle next to window)
- Physical comfort with strong and balanced posture (not lying down or slouching)
- Attractive visual setting with emotionally pleasing items and arrangements OR pleasing scenery (like sightseeing, natural beauty or novel environments)
- Comfortable soft fur/feather jacket that fits well
- Clear lungs - steaming + neti pot
- Cold water dip or shower - around 25 deg C or even colder
- Smooth unobtrusive effortless breathing
- Yoga and breathing exercises (eg: Pranayama)
- Meditation on pleasant sensations
- Hearing favorite music through excellent headphones or earphones
- Interesting stimulating social setting - friends/family/significant
- Intellectually stimulating conversation or reading material

Mental pleasures

Learning, Exploration, Mastery, Teaching, Creating, Intensity, Concentration, Focus, Fulfillment, Satisfaction, Freedom, Accomplishment, Success, Understanding, Integration, Connection, Truth, Beauty, Love, Knowing, Control

Random thoughts - 3 Dec

My energy levels are somehow much higher when I am engaged in some social activity like group meetings, informal meetings etc vs me staying at home. Today I spend 6 hrs outside the house with no lunch (just cereal inbetween) on a design group meeting where we had to go to the university and a friend's house for filming a video. Somehow after getting home, it feels so good to put on the music I hear everyday. The same thing used to happen when I used to get back from office and play the same music.
Why does the music sounding so much better and fulfilling after some intensive social activity/environment(work, outings, meetings etc.)?

Thinking/Learning styles

Learning styles:
Visual - lectures
Auditory - diagramming
Kinesthenic - learn by doing

Thinking styles:
Linear - Mathematics, accounting
Global - Literature, Philosophy

Plan to add on this list.

Random thoughts - 30 Nov

Food: looks vs taste: Totally different facets of experience

Today while I was eating my favorite, I closely observed how the food looked and then took a morsel in my mouth and felt its taste. On paying close attention, I discovered something strange. The visual part of food and the taste part of it are like 2 different worlds. There are some relationships, like something black indicates its burnt etc. but taste and visual appearance are so different in qualia. As a metaphor, I thought about how some people looked average but yet they can make you feel so good.

Wonderment food: Ancient man from villages or visits today's city

I was just imagining...what if I was a man from ancient times, say 3000BC, living in a simple village and I visit my current city for the first time.

What are the things I would wonder about?

• I would be surprised by all the mega organizations like food outlets, the standard look of buildings, infrastructural complexity, the common language of rules which people followed, superstructures that enabled coordination - in small villages, everyone may know each other and speak the same language with very basic infrastructure
• automobiles for transport - it was only horses or bullock-carts in the villages
• the kind of music in eating joints - the whole speaker technology would strike wonderment, its ability to re-create a vast array of sounds from just a small magic box and induce great pleasure....the village may just have live instruments
• Foods like ice-creams and the sheer variety and complexity of food available should strike wonderment - villages may have staple food made from only a few ingredients
• Artificial lighting with its reliability, brightness, consistency and longevity would astound - villages may just use daylight, fire and candles.
• The paving of the ground for roads, sidewalks with decorative tiles would be something to marvel at
• Planes in the sky would look like giant birds
• The variety in people's clothes, its quality and workmanship would induce wonder - villages may just have clothes covering basic parts. In cold regions, they may use coats from animal skins with workmanship just to fit the requirement
• I would feel so alien - since there are huge number of people following the invisible rules and fiercely moving about with purpose but I do not know anybody
• Typing on a computer keyboard would feel so unnatural and the screen technology would amaze. It can create representations of the real world, virtual imagined worlds. In fact it would take some time to get used to the flickering LCD screen and perceive the depth and 3-D perspective movement from the images on the flat screen
• Sitting in front of the computer for 10+ hours a day would look like a very strange and uncomfortable thing to do

There is so much to admire and wonder about even in today's world. We fail to see these perspectives. If this world can induce so much wonderment if you are coming from the past, imagine what the future would be like? Wouldn't it be as astounding for a present day man?

Deconditioned and inspired action: Taoism philosophy

I wish I could give up all my obligations, liabilities and responsibilities and stop this compulsive action from external force. I want to be totally at rest and all my actions should be out of inspiration  and not because I am forced by external stuff.

What would you ask?

If I could ask for a wish from a God, I would choose one of these:

• The most magical and euphoric experience ever and a strong memory of that so that I would stop craving for it and be satisfied even from just recalling it
• A glimpse of the ultimate truth so that I can reorient my life
• Kill me once and make me come back with memory of this experience throughout the process
• Bring me into the present moment, de-conditioned completely for a good amount of time

History of 'me'

The raw material that I possess from the time I was born is simply this dynamic body and a mind that only has certain innate wants, predilections and needs.

In our formative years 0-4yrs, we map this world with our pointers for what we need and desire. This mapping is the generator of core beliefs and conditioning. We even register certain facial features, gestures, behaviors that guide our intuition, love map, choice of partners etc. in later life.

I seriously wonder, all the knowledge I think I have, the personality I possessed has all been acquired from outside. What I am innately born with is just this dynamic body and mind empty of content. The mind at this stage may simply have basic instinctual information and pointers to desires and needs which may be dormant and manifest later.

Infact I can even go further with the reason and argue that, there is another level of cause and effect. What was I before I was born? and why did I get those specific pointers and body? Did I have any choice regarding that? OR was I just a fragment in the endless river of evolution?

What if there were past births that by some causal logic determined my predispositions and pointers?
Then I could go further and question, what was I before the previous births? Are the previous birth's limited to only the human form and this world? What if  other worlds, planets, other dimensions in the same world? I could have been any living creature imaginable or even beyond (beyond since what we can even imagine is limited to our experience with our 5 senses...there might be infinite senses, worlds, dimensions, realities or even universes) What is my original nature that cannot be broken down further? What is my true essence that has carried over all of this path? What is the essence that is mine and independent of time or space?

From this perspective, is what I know right now real knowledge? All this knowledge is acquired from outside. People's knowledge has been evolving too and what was knowledge many centuries has been debunked to a large extent. I really question our ways of knowing. Is it in science or religion? I could go further and wonder if a concept is real in the first place? What is it that is beyond concepts?
Is the mind something permanent? What is beyond the mind and body, beyond concepts, beyond space-time, beyond science and religion, beyond everything imaginable?

Its like a plunge into the space of pure unknown, disregarding all selfish concerns.

Favorite advertisement

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOWMGIpCkM8

One of my favorite advertisements. It beautifully brings out the sense of wonder as these kids try to re-enact the different phenomenon they see around them. Their expressions are so pure, genuine and innocent. I'm finding this pure wonder and innocence getting rarer and rarer as I am getting older. I wish all relationships would be this straightforward. They simply share the same goals and enjoy each others company without any commitment, expectation or other overheads. Its just the the beauty of the moment.

Are we controlling computers or are computers controlling us?

This is a conundrum. Its not as simple as "Ohh, we created computers, we are obviously superior". There are a lot of other higher perspectives of looking at the same riddle. If we see human evolution, we have literally moved from walking with a hunchback to sitting on a computer chair with the same hunchback. What we consider knowledge is 90% acquired from reading articles online through Google. Huge portions of our day is spent in front of computers and social networking has even offloaded a good amount of our social needs. It seems to be a synthetic reality layer on which most of our knowledge is based on. We think we know what people are really doing and feeling based on their social networking activity on sites like Facebook. Like good marketing, most people also realize this and make their profiles look glamorous featuring the best sides of themselves. You make be chatting with a 50yr old posing as a young girl in a photo and may think that's the truth till the end.

What is the deeper force controlling and manipulating our minds and making us start to believe it as reality? It is kind of like the system of clock time we created, and now we are slaves to our own created entity.

Models of others worlds

I am deeply interested in understanding how other people view the world and its patterns. I would love to create models of their worlds and understand them.

Random thoughts - 19 Nov

I guess we form a mental model of the real world and this model keeps evolving over time as we figure out more and more patterns. Its kind of like a game like oblivion where we start off on a map and as you explore, more and more of the landscape becomes clear to you. Shortcuts you never knew of could be used as much faster transport etc. So 'Understanding' is basically exploring the landscape and figuring out its entire architecture and pathways.

So the question still remains, what is the seeker? I think the most important tangible component would be attention which  I believe is outside the brain. It is like the torch that illuminates reality and changes the brain accordingly. I guess the ultimate tool we have is attention. If we can train one pointed attention, we can use it on any conceivable thing.

I read an interesting article about spiritual teachers being obsessed with worldly things like sex and other egoistic pleasures. What was said was that there is no need to judge them as fraud etc. It is simply that 1st order spiritual pleasures are far more than sex and other egoistic pursuits, so if a person is still obsessed at that level, he probably still needs to progress and is unlikely to have been enlightened. An egoistic soul is like a super interesting rubix cube for a enlightened person to solve.