Neurotransmitters

There are 100+ neurotransmitters in the human body and many of them have only been partially understood and many more are yet under exploration.The neurotransmitters are also heavily present in the gut - almost like a second brain. Most anti-depressants work on monoamines and work for most people. However, it seems like there is a LOT more complexity and factors at play here.

Our neuro-pathways are reinforced by our thoughts. For example if you talk about the same problems again and again, only those experiences are reinforced and strengthened. Our neuro-pathways shape perception of everything. To any event, our first reaction may be of a two year child, then our reaction is tempered by our beliefs, experience and conditioning. So doing meditation, focusing on all pleasant feelings, focusing on beauty, inclusiveness etc. simply strengthens those pathways and allows us to feel them more deeply. Constant self-doubt strengthens that pathway etc. Any thought we indulge and involve ourselves in strengthens that pathway. The neural pathways maybe what we call Karma. When its on autopilot, its a self created system that has taken over. We need to deconstruct our real self one by one from this universe of neural pathways which is what is done in meditation.

The amygdala has highway pathways to the cortex, however the cortex has only sinewy lines going back to the amygdala. Similarly most of our gut brain in used for digestion and extraction of nutrients.

Corporate game - Top dogs

We are like stray dogs (unemployed). Some dogs manage to impress their owners (people owning corporations) with their styles (communication skills) and tricks (skills) and as a result get into their mansions (corporations) where they are tied to a spot with a kennel(cubicle), given food, water(money), taken care of medically(insurance) and taken for evening walks (after office hours). The dog van comes and clears the stray dogs in 4 months, so stray dogs have to entice themselves to an owner. If they stay unattractive to owners then they are going to be taken away to another place (india) where the same trend exists more fiercely. Most dogs therefore dream about getting an owner (job). Some owners are more picky, have bigger mansions (multinational - microsoft, big 4 etc.), bigger kennels (cubicles) and a small play area for the dog (other facilities). Most dogs dream of getting into these bigger places.

The owners own multiple dogs (many employees) and even after getting in these dogs have to ensure that they entertain their owners. If they dont, the owner would discard them in favor of other stray dogs trying to get in. The security (job security) of dogs even within the mansion is not complete. They are just better off than the dogs outside (unemployed pushing their way). The top entertainer dogs(CEO and executives) get better food (money) and kennels (house). So even within the mansion the dogs compete with each other to be the top entertainer. These top dogs have to ensure that they stay ahead of all the other dogs in that place and at the same time impress their owners, so its a tricky job. The owners recognize this and give this dog better perks (money, power).

What is the normal state of health?

There are certain factors or seeds which escalate and reach the level of a disease in the body. Once this stage is reached it gets the legitimate status of a disease and is treated in a mechanistic way with drugs to bring back your normal state. But this normal state is a mystery. What is normal? My normal state or baseline can be dramatically different from yours.

Lets take an analogy to understand the way modern medicine deals with health. In the health spectrum, say it ranges between 0-100 with 100% being the ultimate state of health. Lets say a disease manifests only when health % falls below 30. Therefore only a person below 30% is considered ill and treated until the health level goes above 30 to say about 40-50 where he can once again function in society normally.  This person may consider a range of 40-50 his normal baseline state. In my case, this maybe 70-80 etc. There can be huge differences in what we call normal. This analogy is actually a gross simplification to convey my basic point.

We can gradually increase the level of complexity of this analogy and imagine a spectrum analyzer of an audio system as the different hormone balances in the body. In some people, this may work much more synchronously than others etc.

The disease stage is like reaching the red in your engine's pedometer, but there have been factors that have lead to it and these factors are very often ignored unless the correlation is gross enough. The body is treated like a machine and its parts are treated in the same way a mechanic would work on a car.

The 'clockwork orange' effect

I discovered this term from a really dark and intriguing movie 'clockwork orange'. When I started to bring myself more into the present moment all kinds of doubts popped into my mind. These doubts were quite intriguing by themselves and prompted me to explore and gain a better understanding of certain fundamental entities such as memory.

I learned very recently that the idea that the idea of memory which most people have is a misconception.

Common idea:
'we do not have any control over our memory, it is a continuous etching process that goes on as time passes by and everything gets recorded like a film tape. This tape can then be accessed at any time and this influences our current behavior and our projections. The tape is unchangeable and permanent in its content and we cannot choose to remember or not remember.'

The research in this field seems to open up new paradigms in relation to what we think memory is.

The latest discoveries:
The memory is less like a movie, a permanent emulsion of chemicals on celluloid, and more like a play—subtly different each time it’s performed. In the brain, a network of cells is constantly being re-consolidated, rewritten, remade each time a memory is recalled and this is also dependent on your current state.

My daily experience also ties in much better to the new theories about memory. For example, every time I hear a song, though its with exactly the same headphones, the song creates a different experience in me. Sometimes the song gives me an ASMR euphoria, ordinary at other times and also outright unpleasant when I am feeling low/sick overall.

Having a drug like ecstasy can put a person in an extremely pleasant state. In this state, the original intensity of all recalled unpleasant memories can be drastically reduced.

Adopting this new view on how memory works can have a lot of profound implications on the way we lead our life.

Here are some suggestions to greatly improve your life experience involving memories:

1. Strengthen all associations of your happy memorable events when you are in a good mood. For example: You are in a very pleasant social setting, you have just had a great conversation with someone, while on an alcohol or cannabis high.

2. When you are feeling sick, miserable, in a very unpleasant state, or feeling very low psychologically, try to simply relax yourself and wait until this state passes away. Even if you do recall very happy times in this state (say your having fever or extremely low psychologically), it will seem bad and can scare you into believing that the memory is permanently lost.

Is the mind just a creation of the brain?

• How can the wagon exist before the horse?
• If there is a piano and music from it, who is playing the piano?
• If there is an experience through biochemicals, who is witnessing this?
• All psychedelic drugs imitate neurotransmitters and certain movements. In spite of them operating in more or less the same mechanism, subjectively people report wildly different things. Where does this subjective dimension exist? In which dimension does this information exist?
• If our brain is a CPU in a computer, then what force/energy is responsible for animating its transistors?
• What is the subjective element of experience?
• The result is not the source of whats happening

The brain may just be a conduit to existing in the physical dimension as we know it. Its very similar to the movie avatar. The avatar may die, but you are not the avatar, so you wake up in your original dimension again. People in the avatar dimension thought you were only the avatar and therefore assumed the real you is dead.

It is like a person seeing through a kaleidoscope continuously and starts believing that if someone destroys the kaleidoscope, he would lose his vision. In reality, he would only lose that particular color pattern, he would continue to see things but in a different way.

The present moment - the parallel dimension

It seems to be impossible to grasp the present moment. To grasp it you need to use your mind and memory which take your attention out of it. If all your attention is on the present moment, there can be no mind. There is no space for the mind to operate in. We start of with staying in the immediate present and try to get closer and closer to the real present moment. In the process we keep dropping off all attachments and other mind occupations. Suddenly, we are totally open, like real time streaming in a computer without buffering. All the buffering energy gets freed up allowing us to go more and more deeply into the present. It definitely feels like a parallel dimension.

This moment is the seed of all potentiality

The potentiality and seed of all personalities, great things etc. are in this moment. All possibilities of manifestation exist at this moment. You can completely choose to be any of the trillion personalities you can conjure up in your mind at this moment and this immediate manifestation will slowly create artifacts that allow others to recognize this change in you. Imagination and mind is the higher dimension compared to the physical since the time gap to manifestation is much smaller. In fact, most of what we see in the physical world has originated as a thought or idea people's minds. So this mental plane is a precursor for all human manipulation on the physical.

People are deluded into thinking only the physical is real and thought is just a means to create something tangible. I can have much more freedom and tremendous speed in the non physical planes. For example, I can visualize my room in 10 colors within 2 minutes. How long will it take for me to actually paint the entire room with these 10 colors one by one?! Everything in an experience and all experience is equally real. The physical reality is nothing more real than our imagination just like gases and solids are equally real. They are just 2 different paradigms of consciousness. The physical plane is restrictive with all its physical laws and delay in manifestation. This delay differs depending on what we are dealing with. In other to sculpt on a rock, it could take a long time to get the desired shape. But on clay, it would take much less time. But our imagination can picture both the rock and clay with the same speed.

The only thing holding people into predictable patterns is their personality structure made up of beliefs. In order to function and survive in society, you are pushed into assuming a personality, following some rules and taking up some roles. Its a mass hypnosis that we believe our conditioning is what we truly are when its nothing more than ideas and concepts in our mind. They are just like clothes. The real you is none of that.

What you do is not you. Even, becoming is a side effect of our choices. What we become is not us. We are not even our choices. We are the entity (formless space, empty of form, no'thing'ness) that precedes choice and becoming. Nothing can affect the real 'us'. Anything you can perceive is not you. Anything you can observe is not you. The very act of observation separates the observer, observed and the act of observation. No experience is you. The very nature of all experience is temporal and therefore transient. If you are having any experience of any sort, then that is not you. You are the watcher watching this experience. This ultimate observer/watcher behind all experience is you. You are nothing and everything at the same time.

To get an idea of who we really are, just close your eyes and stare into the darkness behind your eyelids for 3 seconds. Everything that disappeared during this time is not real. All of what disappeared was a thought and belief created reality. Another way is to find out what was common in ALL the experiences you can recall from your entire life right from when you were 4 years old till today. When deeply examined with very high detail you would find that all experiences were impermanent. What was the common denominator for all of these? Was there any experience that stayed constant throughout?

Thoughts - 30Apr

I seek the highest meta-paradigm. From there all my worldly knowledge can be assembled into place. The problem with most people is that they accept a large number of assumptions without questioning and all their life's thinking is within that paradigm. Uncovering these assumptions is one of the greatest routes to freedom.

Any quantification of future value (money) or accumulation of a symbol for future benefit (money) is subject to all the uncertainties of nature - human, ecology, economy etc.

Every moment our energy keeps moving and our paradigm keeps shifting and we are always in the center. The only way to go against this is by using memory.

From knowledge acquired at the top level from deep thinking, a bedrock is created that can support all information in its paraphernelia

I am unable to hold on to any paradigm without effort no matter how much I repeatedly read or how many insights I receive.

In relation to money: What is value? Who defines it?

It is difficult to see the entire cycle - crest and trough when the wave is very long. For example: In nature a rock looks permanent, but it too has a cycle not visible during our 80-100year life span.

What is heaven?

The more I ponder over what a heaven should be like, the more I can see my inability to find a truly satisfactory description.

First of all I cannot really grasp happiness as anything beyond the temporary euphoria I experience. Sometimes, when everything is going well and external pressures are at a minimum, there is a feeling of satisfaction that ensues. But even this is dependent on me thinking about how my position is good. At every moment there are continuous variations in my experience.

If I think happiness is the general contentment when things are going well, then is it the predominance of pleasant feelings over the ones that are bad? But still the bad needs to exist to create necessary contrast. For example: say you move from Utah to California, initially the better weather is admired and gives you a lot of pleasant feelings when you think about the contrast. But this also seems as just a thought. For example: I love my camera, but while typing the first part, the camera was nowhere in my thoughts until I remembered it just now. So we get pleasure only when we think certain thoughts.

The interesting part about this game of duals/contrast is that wherever you are,  there is infinity on both sides of the spectrum. So you always feel you are in the center no matter where you are. That is why we are afraid to completely enter the present moment. If you are fully involved in a book, you totally forget about your body, whether your a man or female, where you are in the world etc. We access our memory and recall our relative positioning in everything we care about and position our-self on the scale. Now this is again a relative scale we use. For e.g.: I will rate myself as intelligent or dumb depending upon the people who are in contact with me and to whom I have given significance over a period of time. But these people may just be a small set of say 100 people. A person in the Mensa club, if he is only in contact with those 100 people all the time, he would soon start to feel very dumb if he is unable to compete in any of their activities.

Our feelings seem to depend on what paradigm we see ourselves in. People use memory to keep track of their overall position. Like if you ask a person about how good looking or intelligent he is, he could give you a percentile score based on his intuition using all the patterns stored in memory. Even our memory stores only 1/billionth of sensory input. Only information that is deemed significant is stored. We usually dismiss anything below a certain threshold of change as white noise. Very slow changing things give us the illusion of permanence. For example: Our body keep slightly changing in  appearance throughout our life but whenever we look in the mirror we do not see this dis-continuity.

There are core beliefs that keep us locked into believing this paradigm is reality. But when we really question it, it looks like an illusion. There are so many scientific facts which are counter-intuitive to all our senses. Can we really trust our senses for truly understanding reality? When we are dreaming we totally believe our senses are conveying real information.

Even in this changing experience, there is a feeling of me which seems continuous. I suppose that this is from some core beliefs firmly lodged in the subconscious creating the specific patterns of perception and bio-chemistry.

Maybe this reality we have is even better than whatever concepts we come up for heaven. Since I have the power to believe in anything or drop any belief. I may be everything and I can choose to be anything in this sample space by directing my attention and interest in that direction. The key would be to reach emptiness and see our entire lives from there.

No experience is fully satisfying

If I think about it hard, I cannot imagine any 1 state or experience that will be the most optimal for me, forever. Lets analyze the typical societal dream. Buying a good house, car, marrying a good wife and raising children for a man. Lets say someone gives this to me without any journey. Will I live happily ever after? Even assuming I went through a long arduous journey, how long will the euphoria of achievement last? Most people spend a significant part of their life acquiring this security for their future, just so that they get this temporary euphoria? Of course the strategy people adopt to deal with the emptiness that ensues is looking into other people's lives, circumstances and then either gossiping, making judgments or mentoring, helping other people reach this same stability. To maximize the variety in experience. People do both. They identify with certain people like their family, friends, certain relatives and form a clique. If you belong to the clique, this person is very helpful to you. If you are outside his definitions of how life is to be lived, you would be gossiped about, judged and discussed about in negative light.

Every experience seems temporary by definition. If something was so permanent, wouldn't you immediately stop registering it? Things make footprints in memory only because the information is deemed important. We are probably storing only 1/billionth of the sensory input we are receiving. Information by definition is entropy. Higher the entropy more the information.

It seems like life is life only because of this mystery: The paradoxes, ambiguity and uncertainty. Maybe this surprise element for each individual is why we are born in earth to experience this dimension. So this game seems like its not about attainment. Neither is it about the conquest towards absolute control. Its not even the game about acquiring one set of beliefs forever. What I want seems like a complex riddle in itself? To figure this out, I need to understand questions like who am I? what is life? what do I really want? and use my full power of imagination to ensure all that I experienced till this day is validated by the answers I discover.

Lets take a hypothetical case, where we discover an island which is entirely made up of gold. Even the people there are made of gold. If we go to a person there and tell them "Wow, you are made of gold, yo are gold!, how does it feel to be that?". He might respond saying "I don't know of a word called gold, I cant in the name of god see how I am special, everything around me is ordinary". Sometimes I feel our human consciousness is like that. We need to step outside it, to see the full significance of it. The value of anything is known from its opposite in the relativistic way. In the absolute sense the true value of anything is revealed when compared from emptiness.

For a normal person, the time just seconds after getting up is a state that is relatively empty and this could give him a faint taste of what real emptiness might feel like. How good does it feel to hear a good song just after getting up fresh?

The mystery of sleep

Every living thing with a brain is observed to sleep. We humans require anywhere between 4-8hours of sleep each day. There are obviously medical explanations quoting that the loss of consciousness is needed for the cells to slow down and regenerate. Every single night, for almost 1/3rd of our lives, we sleep and yet we are convinced by such a  simplistic explanation? Sleep being one of the major determinants of health and happiness, shouldn't it not be given more thought?

But I can think of many other explanations which cannot be proved or disproved:

• Since we have no awareness whatsoever while sleeping, what if we move to another dimension and have an experience incomparable to our current one? Maybe we recover all the energy needed everyday from this zone? Would it then be possible to consciously move into this dimension and pull out this energy all day long obviating the need to sleep itself?
• What if it is the inefficiency of operation during the day that causes us to crash in the night? If we learn to operate at the next level of efficiency: physically and mentally, would there be a significant reduction in the sleep requirement? (similar to yoga practices etc.)
• We still don't know the exact reason why we dream. We go through various sleep cycles every night which are probably related to a survival program that prevents us from staying in the deep sleep phase for long. In the modern world, since there is little need for a survival program that rigorous, would it be possible to figure out a way to induce deep sleep directly for a preset duration?
• Maybe every time we sleep our current soul leaves and another soul very similar inhabits our body. Because of the slight change, we do not feel its discontinuous.