Consciousness lies at the foundation of the material Universe. It is the basis of every form in existence, living and inanimate. It is the single animating factor and guiding principle without which the entire Universe would have no existence.
Everything is conscious. From a blade of grass to a cat in a tree to a mound of sand to the human mind. Every one of these entities is an instrument of consciousness. In fact, to say "we are conscious" is not quite as accurate as to say "we are consciousness itself". Because an instrument's potential is only made manifest by the player without whom it is only an inanimate object.
Think of consciousness as being like electricity. While the universe of electronics is vast and varied in attribute and function they are nevertheless united in one single truth - that without electricity they have no means of manifesting their realities. Whether the object is a simple appliance like a toaster which serves no other purpose than to toast 2 pieces of bread or the object is a complex super-computer that is able to calculate and process vast amounts of information intelligently, both are nonetheless rendered identically obsolete in the absence of electricity.
If you have ever had someone close to you die, and if you have ever witnessed their body laying in the casket, there is something rather striking that you will have the opportunity to observe. You may have a sense that somehow the person lying in front of you is not exactly the person you feel has left you. To the mind the image of the person, the hair, the eyes, the expression matches perfectly. Memory reaffirms that this is indeed the very same person. But beneath the grief, if you are able to reflect deeply enough in silence, it may dawn on you that what lies before you is merely an image, a mirage - a vessel that has fulfilled its purpose even if that purpose is obscured from your understanding. What is and has always been of the greatest essence about that person - the light, the animation, the compassion and the pain - in short, their humanity has vanished into thin air. The body and the brain that lie evidently in front of you are the obvious imposters. Never more than at the moment of death is it more obvious as to what the true identity of a person really is.
Consciousness is what animates every being. And this consciousness is universal and impersonal. It in itself has no material reality. It's only contact point in the material world is through form which it lives through for a while until the form has served its purpose and then it retracts, just like electricity animates the instrument until the instrument no longer is able to function. And even though the death of a person is a loss of the particular expression of consciousness, what we love the most about the other is what we love most about ourselves. Consciousness is the single animating energy that is common to us all.
Self-realization is the shift in identification from seeing one's Self as the instrument of consciousness to seeing one's Self as the root of consciousness itself. This "I" or this sense of being is the one constant and continuous aspect of our experience. Everything else changes: our thoughts, our emotions, our minds, our bodies, our relationships, our circumstances, everything is flux. Only this undefinable and unjustifiable sense of "I am" of "I exist" persists regardless and independent of the conditions in which it persists. That deep rooted sense of being prior to thought, prior to recognition, prior even to the perception of it, is not separate from consciousness. It is consciousness itself prior to it becoming anything, prior to consciousness manifesting as a thought or emotion or perception or recognition. In a state of open awareness pure consciousness can be experienced. And yet language necessarily implies a duality/separation where no duality exists. This is the state of pure being. Of pure awareness. And it is the foundation of each and every individual existence.
Each and every person, when allowed to fall quiet in meditation has the opportunity to contact that very same impersonal awareness. This state which has been given many names such as Brahman by the Hindus, no-mind (mu-shin) or Big mind by Zen buddhists, the Holy Spirit by Christianity, Fanaa by the Sufi muslims is none other than that vast impersonal consciousness as yet unmanifested. If a quantum theorist were to use their own jargon to coin a term for it, it would be something like the 'field of quantum potentiality'.
This consciousness is at the heart of existence. It is that sense of "I exist". It is infinite and unreachable by the mind because it is prior to the mind. The mind can only reflect on it through thought which is only the overlay of an image. The mind cannot experience it. And yet the mind functions because of it. It is the very ground of our experience.Whatever consciousness touches comes to life, whatever consciousness retracts from dies. Yet consciousness itself has no limitation nor does it have a beginning or end. It gives a seeming reality to all that it illuminates just like the sun creates mirages in the desert heat.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Friday, August 17, 2012
Mind Games (part 2)
(...continued from part 1)
This word Self-awareness gets tossed around a lot. We humans are considered a self-aware species. Most other creatures are not. But what does that mean - to be self-aware? Can the self be aware of the self? Can this "I" be aware of the "I"?
We live in a dualistic universe. A universe in which for perception to occur there needs to be a subject and an object linked together by the act of perception, the perceiving. The subject perceives the object, the object is perceived by the subject. The act of perceiving is the only thing that gives any reality to this subject-object relationship.
Now the question is can "I" be both the subject and the object of my own perception? In other words, can perception link an entity back to itself. So lets further analyze this. What are the different ways in which we tend to perceive ourselves:
1. we can perceive our bodies visually through a reflection in the mirror
2. we can perceive our bodies sensually through the 5 senses
3. we can perceive our self-image mentally through thought and emotion
4. we can perceive our bodies and minds through relation and reaction with our environments including people, places and objects
If you look closely enough, in all of these processes the subject that is perceiving and the object being perceived are in fact not identical at all.
In case 1, much like in the photograph example from part1 the object is an image in the mirror which actually is nothing but photons of light reacting with the silver lining behind the glass generating a virtual representation of a body.
In case 2, what we perceive as sensual experience - taste, smell, vision, hearing and feeling is nothing but electrical impulses firing between neurons in the brain that confirm a sense of ownership over the experience. If you were to lose your vision or hearing or taste you wouldn't feel any less you. There may be a sense of loss of ability but not of identity. In a sensory deprivation chamber your sense of self continues to operate.
In case 3, as discussed in part1, every thought/emotion is a mental response mechanism. Thoughts/emotions are reactions, they are triggered: by people, environmental events, by other thoughts and emotions. A thought/emotion is not a thing - it is an event. These thought/emotion events are occuring constantly within our minds triggering at split-second intervals. This continuous series of thought/emotion forms a thoughtstream: a seemingly continuous and real entity. Because most of our brains are going a mile-a-minute, thinking/emoting feels like the natural/resting state of the mind but it isn't. Just like you only notice that the air conditioning in the room was on when it suddenly turns off and you're hit by a period of dead silence. Similarly, the natural resting state of the mind is one of silence.
The issue is that thinking/emoting is a sort of chain reaction. If thoughts and emotions were only triggered by external events there would be a lot less stimulus to contend with. But in actuality, thoughts and emotions only trigger more thoughts and emotions leading to a sort of mental effervescing effect also know as stress. Extreme stress can lead to more serious mental and behavioural issues. Which is why meditation as a practice is so highly valued by many eastern cultures as a means of bringing the mind periodically back to its natural resting state. One where awareness is open and not preoccupied with mental content which has its own place and purpose. In fact, zazen which is the zen buddhist form of meditation literally means "just sitting". Its not an esoteric la-dee-da spiritual practice rather its a highly specialized and precise exercise. To 'just sit' means to allow the mind to rest in its natural awareness.
Just like the body when worked too hard breaks down under physical stress so does the brain under mental stress. The brain is after all only a machine and every machine breaks down when improperly maintained. While deep sleep is nature's way of guaranteeing a daily forced rest period for the mind, Meditation and simple awareness allows the mind a chance to recover and recuperate insight, perspective and most importantly creativity.
But to bring it back to point, very few of us have even experienced what it feels like for the mind to be free of thought/emotion for more than a second. Our brains have become so charged with mental momentum that it literally is a runaway train. We have very little control over what we think and when we think. The thinking happens, constantly, obsessively and we have no ability to stop it. Which is why we literally need to run to the furthest corners of the world to some remote tropical beach for a week to soothe our minds, such little control do we have over it.
But what is the energy or impetus that gives our minds this momentum. What is the juice fueling this runaway train on? This brings us back to the question of self-awareness. It is because the "I" perceives this mindstream as being itself. The "I" mistakes the image for its own identity.
Lets look at the story with Bart Simpson and the label gun again. We are currently attempting to investigate what this "I", this sense of being a self, a somebody, really is? Through a process of elimination we are seeing how the body, the mind, thoughts and emotions are all the various kinds of images that we create of ourselves. And so what looks like the Self perceiving itself is really only the Self perceiving an image of itself and not really itself. So why does the Self make the mistake of assuming that it is the image it perceives?
Think of the Self as Bart's label gun. Every act of perception is a new label triggered by the gun. And whatever the label sticks to is the object of the Self's perception. So here is the gun, firing continuously like a semi-automatic rifle at anything and everything it points to. And out go the labels with the letters M,E on them attacing themselves to all the furniture, the walls, the appliances and even the family dog. This is in a nutshell how self-identification works. The sense of Self projects itself outwardly through perception launching and attacing its labels. If it attaches to its mindstream, it identifies with the mindstream - "these thoughts are me, these emotions are me." If it attaches itself to the body - "this body is me." The more adhesive the label the more strongly indentified the Self is with its own images. The less adhesive the labels the more easily the Self is able to drop its preoccupations with its image.
In fact, by following this analogy it is possible to see how 99.9% of who we think we are is a complete figment of our imaginations...
(to be continued...)
This word Self-awareness gets tossed around a lot. We humans are considered a self-aware species. Most other creatures are not. But what does that mean - to be self-aware? Can the self be aware of the self? Can this "I" be aware of the "I"?
We live in a dualistic universe. A universe in which for perception to occur there needs to be a subject and an object linked together by the act of perception, the perceiving. The subject perceives the object, the object is perceived by the subject. The act of perceiving is the only thing that gives any reality to this subject-object relationship.
Now the question is can "I" be both the subject and the object of my own perception? In other words, can perception link an entity back to itself. So lets further analyze this. What are the different ways in which we tend to perceive ourselves:
1. we can perceive our bodies visually through a reflection in the mirror
2. we can perceive our bodies sensually through the 5 senses
3. we can perceive our self-image mentally through thought and emotion
4. we can perceive our bodies and minds through relation and reaction with our environments including people, places and objects
If you look closely enough, in all of these processes the subject that is perceiving and the object being perceived are in fact not identical at all.
In case 1, much like in the photograph example from part1 the object is an image in the mirror which actually is nothing but photons of light reacting with the silver lining behind the glass generating a virtual representation of a body.
In case 2, what we perceive as sensual experience - taste, smell, vision, hearing and feeling is nothing but electrical impulses firing between neurons in the brain that confirm a sense of ownership over the experience. If you were to lose your vision or hearing or taste you wouldn't feel any less you. There may be a sense of loss of ability but not of identity. In a sensory deprivation chamber your sense of self continues to operate.
In case 3, as discussed in part1, every thought/emotion is a mental response mechanism. Thoughts/emotions are reactions, they are triggered: by people, environmental events, by other thoughts and emotions. A thought/emotion is not a thing - it is an event. These thought/emotion events are occuring constantly within our minds triggering at split-second intervals. This continuous series of thought/emotion forms a thoughtstream: a seemingly continuous and real entity. Because most of our brains are going a mile-a-minute, thinking/emoting feels like the natural/resting state of the mind but it isn't. Just like you only notice that the air conditioning in the room was on when it suddenly turns off and you're hit by a period of dead silence. Similarly, the natural resting state of the mind is one of silence.
The issue is that thinking/emoting is a sort of chain reaction. If thoughts and emotions were only triggered by external events there would be a lot less stimulus to contend with. But in actuality, thoughts and emotions only trigger more thoughts and emotions leading to a sort of mental effervescing effect also know as stress. Extreme stress can lead to more serious mental and behavioural issues. Which is why meditation as a practice is so highly valued by many eastern cultures as a means of bringing the mind periodically back to its natural resting state. One where awareness is open and not preoccupied with mental content which has its own place and purpose. In fact, zazen which is the zen buddhist form of meditation literally means "just sitting". Its not an esoteric la-dee-da spiritual practice rather its a highly specialized and precise exercise. To 'just sit' means to allow the mind to rest in its natural awareness.
Just like the body when worked too hard breaks down under physical stress so does the brain under mental stress. The brain is after all only a machine and every machine breaks down when improperly maintained. While deep sleep is nature's way of guaranteeing a daily forced rest period for the mind, Meditation and simple awareness allows the mind a chance to recover and recuperate insight, perspective and most importantly creativity.
But to bring it back to point, very few of us have even experienced what it feels like for the mind to be free of thought/emotion for more than a second. Our brains have become so charged with mental momentum that it literally is a runaway train. We have very little control over what we think and when we think. The thinking happens, constantly, obsessively and we have no ability to stop it. Which is why we literally need to run to the furthest corners of the world to some remote tropical beach for a week to soothe our minds, such little control do we have over it.
But what is the energy or impetus that gives our minds this momentum. What is the juice fueling this runaway train on? This brings us back to the question of self-awareness. It is because the "I" perceives this mindstream as being itself. The "I" mistakes the image for its own identity.
Lets look at the story with Bart Simpson and the label gun again. We are currently attempting to investigate what this "I", this sense of being a self, a somebody, really is? Through a process of elimination we are seeing how the body, the mind, thoughts and emotions are all the various kinds of images that we create of ourselves. And so what looks like the Self perceiving itself is really only the Self perceiving an image of itself and not really itself. So why does the Self make the mistake of assuming that it is the image it perceives?
Think of the Self as Bart's label gun. Every act of perception is a new label triggered by the gun. And whatever the label sticks to is the object of the Self's perception. So here is the gun, firing continuously like a semi-automatic rifle at anything and everything it points to. And out go the labels with the letters M,E on them attacing themselves to all the furniture, the walls, the appliances and even the family dog. This is in a nutshell how self-identification works. The sense of Self projects itself outwardly through perception launching and attacing its labels. If it attaches to its mindstream, it identifies with the mindstream - "these thoughts are me, these emotions are me." If it attaches itself to the body - "this body is me." The more adhesive the label the more strongly indentified the Self is with its own images. The less adhesive the labels the more easily the Self is able to drop its preoccupations with its image.
In fact, by following this analogy it is possible to see how 99.9% of who we think we are is a complete figment of our imaginations...
(to be continued...)
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Mind Games (part 1)
The human brain is a complex machine - a multifaceted network of several highly specialized mechanisms working in relationship, interpreting and navigating reality. It is the command center of the body, simultaneously coordinating cognition, logic, emotion, motor skills, vital organ function, cellular growth etc. It is a computer with a complexity we are only beginning to understand. And yet, for all the breakthroughs in neuroscience the question of self-awareness - this entity of "I" continues to elude us.
There was a time when the brain was thought to be a useless mass of jelly with no particular function, similar to the appendix. The heart, was then misconstrued to be the center of self-awareness and intelligence. With the development of modern medicine and anatomy we were able to witness first hand the different processes that occur in the brain and how it responds to reality. But even more fascinatingly, science is now beginning to discover how reality is shaped by the brain.
We all live in relative worlds. And even though the general consensus is that there is this one objective world out the that we are all a part of, closer inspection reveals quite the opposite. And this is quite simply illustrated by the following example. When you look at a chair, photons of light reflecting off the chair's surface enter your retinas and are transmitted in the form of electrical impules (information) through your optic nerves into your brain. The brain then interprets this information by generating a visual image in the mind of the chair. Other parts of the brain then refer to this mental image of a chair to further analyze/dissect as is necessary. Now, chances are a chair is not going to inspire so much sensational mind activity although test it out the next time you take a trip down to ikea. Regardless, at all points of time all you ever have access to is the image of the chair and not the chair itself. In fact, there is no way to verify that the "chair" even exists other than by making the assumption that our image corresponds to an identical reality.
In fact, quantumn theory insists that there is no such thing as a 'reality' out there. There is only potentiality. Everything exists in waves of potentiality which, once observed, collapse into an object or event. The question is does the collapse happen 'out there' or 'in here' (in our heads)?
What is a photograph? Now I'm talking about the old school photos, the ones you had to diligently develop in a dark room. A photograph is nothing more than a chemical reaction. Light enters the lens of the camera causing a sort of patterned imprint on the film called a negative. This negative when developed through a chemical process then produces a "positive" image of the scene witnessed. Now imagine you go to Banff and take a picture of Lake Louise and show it to your friends and families once back. They begin to oooh and aaah about how beautiful it looks. Why are they ooh-ing and aah-ing? Are they that inspired by a mundane chemical reaction on a piece of paper? No, its because they don't see a chemical reaction they experience the image of it in their minds which is identical to the image you have in your mind except yours was derived from a completely different source.
Now one may argue that trying to compare actually being in Banff versus seeing a photo of it is ridiculous and you would be right from that perspective. But the only reason they don't compare is because the scope of the two experiences don't match up. After all a photograph is a tiny 2 dimensional object compared to hundreds of square miles of rugged wilderness. However, my point still stands. If you were to somehow increase the scope of the "photograph" to say a 3D hologram in a super IMAX environment with all the smells, sounds and other visual inputs necessary to mimic the banff experience you would have come remarkably close to forming an exact replica of the image in the brain. Or approach it the other way around. Imagine a friend blindfolds you in toronto and takes you on a plane to Alberta, puts you in a car and drives you to a specific vista point above Lake Louise. Then he places a black box over your head with a rectangular cutout roughly the size of a standard photograph. Then plugging your nose and ears, he removes the blindfold from only one eye, for exactly one minute and allows you ro see Lake Louise without allowing you to move your head within the limits of the box. If that is the extent of your experience of Lake Louise, the image generated in your brain would be nearly identical to a photograph of the exact same scene. Now these are 2 obviously different realities, one physical, the other chemical, generating identical images in our brain. As a result the memory of Lake Louise would be no different. In fact, the conclusion scientists are coming to these days is that the reality we take to be objective is really virtual or simulated.
True reality if it even looks like anything would be indecipherable - waves of potentiality collapsing into electrons - even time and space are only relative having no real existence within potentiality. The human brain is a mechanism with a capacity far beyond anything we can imagine. Not only does it interpret reality, it actually creates it.
Each brain creates an image of the world based on sensory input which it then constantly references as reality. Since each brain is separate for the next it follows that each person's image of the world is completely self contained and separate from the others. We literally live in separate worlds. This all sounds kind of interesting in theory but it paints a pretty bleak picture. Because if we are actually that separate and disconnected what does it say about human relationship?
Thats where I come in. No, not me Shiv, but the "I" the sense of Self : of self identity. This new paradigm of reality affords an opportunity to revisit the whole idea of how we approach ourselves and our identities. Because its this "I", the elusive scoundrel, that has been giving philosophers and scientists a run for their money for centuries. According to scientists, there is a function of the brain dubbed as the "Interpreter" (image of Nicole Kidman comes to mind) that is the storyteller of the mind. He's like that old uncle or senile grandfather who told the same stories to everyone as they tried desperately not to nod off, fabricating it a little bit each time until not only was he the one who poisoned Hitler but he also bought baby jesus a PSP for his first birthday. Its ludicrous I know, but the Interpreter is the "fabricator" of reality: making 'sense' of nonsense, using causality to link events and objects and filling in the gaps in between to form a seamless continuity: a story of ME. In fact, this sense of I is so discontinuous and full of holes it doesn't take a whole lot to expose it.
Most of what we believe ourselves to be is derived from perception and memory. We've already talked about how unreliable perception is, but memory is even faultier. Not only does memory use perception as its very foundation but all it really is the perception of a perception. If the very mechanism of perception is subjective then each iteration exponentially increases the likelihood of error. Try a simple activity - think about your day yesterday. Plain and simple - start at the beginning, from the moment you woke up and now try and recount exactly what you did, felt and thought on a minute by minute basis for the entire day. How accurately can you recount your day? A hundred per cent accuracy would mean your story of how your day went would take nearly exactly as long to recount as your actual day went. Most of us would be lucky if the story would take even 5 minutes, some of you particularly attentive ones may get up to 20 mins. But in a 16 hour day recollecting 5 mins means that you are able to effectively recall only 0.5% of your day. 99.5% of it falls into a black hole. Your memory is so unreliable and full of loopholes it would make the government of India look like one of the most honest and efficient institutions on the planet. And yet we believe in the relaibility of our own minds. We believe in its reality. Would you ever buy a piece of swiss cheese that is 99% hole and 1% cheese?
So then why do we believe the story? Why do we believe these realities our minds conjure up. If we are living in the Matrix, why then like brave but emotionally challenged protagonist Neo are we not able to break the spell of illusion?
There is a particular episode of the Simpsons where Bart is given a label-gun for his Birthday. What clever Bart does is he walks around the house labelling each and every item he sees with the words "Bart Simpson" including all the furniture, the refrigerator and even the dog. When questioned by Lisa who is far too wise for his nonsense as to why he claims ownership of all these items his response is because it says so on the label.
That is exactly what the sense of 'I' is. It is not a thing per say, not an object suspended in space. If you were asked to point to yourself you would most likely point to your body but soon you would realize that the body is an instrument that belongs to you and serves you but isn't "you" per se. So then you may point to your brain, the command center. With a little more introspection you would see that the command center is once more a complex mechanism but where is the commander? Interestingly, studies in Neuroscience have revealed that the command center functions quite autonomously and there is no such 'commander' to be found. There's no one in control, no one in charge. Its a phantom, a hoax. This so-called 'I' can't be found. And yet if there is one thing that each and everyone of us would defend to our dying breaths is "I know that I exist!" The world would be united in their chagrin, men and women, liberals and fundamentalists, protestors and corporate fatcats, oil companies and green peace activists alike would show their solidarity on this one issue. Because to undermine the existence of the "I" is to pull out the rug from beneath everyone's feet equally and unanimously.
(to be continued...)
There was a time when the brain was thought to be a useless mass of jelly with no particular function, similar to the appendix. The heart, was then misconstrued to be the center of self-awareness and intelligence. With the development of modern medicine and anatomy we were able to witness first hand the different processes that occur in the brain and how it responds to reality. But even more fascinatingly, science is now beginning to discover how reality is shaped by the brain.
We all live in relative worlds. And even though the general consensus is that there is this one objective world out the that we are all a part of, closer inspection reveals quite the opposite. And this is quite simply illustrated by the following example. When you look at a chair, photons of light reflecting off the chair's surface enter your retinas and are transmitted in the form of electrical impules (information) through your optic nerves into your brain. The brain then interprets this information by generating a visual image in the mind of the chair. Other parts of the brain then refer to this mental image of a chair to further analyze/dissect as is necessary. Now, chances are a chair is not going to inspire so much sensational mind activity although test it out the next time you take a trip down to ikea. Regardless, at all points of time all you ever have access to is the image of the chair and not the chair itself. In fact, there is no way to verify that the "chair" even exists other than by making the assumption that our image corresponds to an identical reality.
In fact, quantumn theory insists that there is no such thing as a 'reality' out there. There is only potentiality. Everything exists in waves of potentiality which, once observed, collapse into an object or event. The question is does the collapse happen 'out there' or 'in here' (in our heads)?
What is a photograph? Now I'm talking about the old school photos, the ones you had to diligently develop in a dark room. A photograph is nothing more than a chemical reaction. Light enters the lens of the camera causing a sort of patterned imprint on the film called a negative. This negative when developed through a chemical process then produces a "positive" image of the scene witnessed. Now imagine you go to Banff and take a picture of Lake Louise and show it to your friends and families once back. They begin to oooh and aaah about how beautiful it looks. Why are they ooh-ing and aah-ing? Are they that inspired by a mundane chemical reaction on a piece of paper? No, its because they don't see a chemical reaction they experience the image of it in their minds which is identical to the image you have in your mind except yours was derived from a completely different source.
Now one may argue that trying to compare actually being in Banff versus seeing a photo of it is ridiculous and you would be right from that perspective. But the only reason they don't compare is because the scope of the two experiences don't match up. After all a photograph is a tiny 2 dimensional object compared to hundreds of square miles of rugged wilderness. However, my point still stands. If you were to somehow increase the scope of the "photograph" to say a 3D hologram in a super IMAX environment with all the smells, sounds and other visual inputs necessary to mimic the banff experience you would have come remarkably close to forming an exact replica of the image in the brain. Or approach it the other way around. Imagine a friend blindfolds you in toronto and takes you on a plane to Alberta, puts you in a car and drives you to a specific vista point above Lake Louise. Then he places a black box over your head with a rectangular cutout roughly the size of a standard photograph. Then plugging your nose and ears, he removes the blindfold from only one eye, for exactly one minute and allows you ro see Lake Louise without allowing you to move your head within the limits of the box. If that is the extent of your experience of Lake Louise, the image generated in your brain would be nearly identical to a photograph of the exact same scene. Now these are 2 obviously different realities, one physical, the other chemical, generating identical images in our brain. As a result the memory of Lake Louise would be no different. In fact, the conclusion scientists are coming to these days is that the reality we take to be objective is really virtual or simulated.
True reality if it even looks like anything would be indecipherable - waves of potentiality collapsing into electrons - even time and space are only relative having no real existence within potentiality. The human brain is a mechanism with a capacity far beyond anything we can imagine. Not only does it interpret reality, it actually creates it.
Each brain creates an image of the world based on sensory input which it then constantly references as reality. Since each brain is separate for the next it follows that each person's image of the world is completely self contained and separate from the others. We literally live in separate worlds. This all sounds kind of interesting in theory but it paints a pretty bleak picture. Because if we are actually that separate and disconnected what does it say about human relationship?
Thats where I come in. No, not me Shiv, but the "I" the sense of Self : of self identity. This new paradigm of reality affords an opportunity to revisit the whole idea of how we approach ourselves and our identities. Because its this "I", the elusive scoundrel, that has been giving philosophers and scientists a run for their money for centuries. According to scientists, there is a function of the brain dubbed as the "Interpreter" (image of Nicole Kidman comes to mind) that is the storyteller of the mind. He's like that old uncle or senile grandfather who told the same stories to everyone as they tried desperately not to nod off, fabricating it a little bit each time until not only was he the one who poisoned Hitler but he also bought baby jesus a PSP for his first birthday. Its ludicrous I know, but the Interpreter is the "fabricator" of reality: making 'sense' of nonsense, using causality to link events and objects and filling in the gaps in between to form a seamless continuity: a story of ME. In fact, this sense of I is so discontinuous and full of holes it doesn't take a whole lot to expose it.
Most of what we believe ourselves to be is derived from perception and memory. We've already talked about how unreliable perception is, but memory is even faultier. Not only does memory use perception as its very foundation but all it really is the perception of a perception. If the very mechanism of perception is subjective then each iteration exponentially increases the likelihood of error. Try a simple activity - think about your day yesterday. Plain and simple - start at the beginning, from the moment you woke up and now try and recount exactly what you did, felt and thought on a minute by minute basis for the entire day. How accurately can you recount your day? A hundred per cent accuracy would mean your story of how your day went would take nearly exactly as long to recount as your actual day went. Most of us would be lucky if the story would take even 5 minutes, some of you particularly attentive ones may get up to 20 mins. But in a 16 hour day recollecting 5 mins means that you are able to effectively recall only 0.5% of your day. 99.5% of it falls into a black hole. Your memory is so unreliable and full of loopholes it would make the government of India look like one of the most honest and efficient institutions on the planet. And yet we believe in the relaibility of our own minds. We believe in its reality. Would you ever buy a piece of swiss cheese that is 99% hole and 1% cheese?
So then why do we believe the story? Why do we believe these realities our minds conjure up. If we are living in the Matrix, why then like brave but emotionally challenged protagonist Neo are we not able to break the spell of illusion?
There is a particular episode of the Simpsons where Bart is given a label-gun for his Birthday. What clever Bart does is he walks around the house labelling each and every item he sees with the words "Bart Simpson" including all the furniture, the refrigerator and even the dog. When questioned by Lisa who is far too wise for his nonsense as to why he claims ownership of all these items his response is because it says so on the label.
That is exactly what the sense of 'I' is. It is not a thing per say, not an object suspended in space. If you were asked to point to yourself you would most likely point to your body but soon you would realize that the body is an instrument that belongs to you and serves you but isn't "you" per se. So then you may point to your brain, the command center. With a little more introspection you would see that the command center is once more a complex mechanism but where is the commander? Interestingly, studies in Neuroscience have revealed that the command center functions quite autonomously and there is no such 'commander' to be found. There's no one in control, no one in charge. Its a phantom, a hoax. This so-called 'I' can't be found. And yet if there is one thing that each and everyone of us would defend to our dying breaths is "I know that I exist!" The world would be united in their chagrin, men and women, liberals and fundamentalists, protestors and corporate fatcats, oil companies and green peace activists alike would show their solidarity on this one issue. Because to undermine the existence of the "I" is to pull out the rug from beneath everyone's feet equally and unanimously.
(to be continued...)
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
The Gauntlet
The "I" is nothing more than an image frozen in time. The person is a series of snapshots taken in quick succession by the mind. a discontinuous and distorted album of pictures, a glorified flip book.
Each morning the pages of the flipbook are flipped, the images are strung together by some rudimentary mental processes until from the flurry some hazy, shifting image of a 'person' emerges.
In deep sleep are you aware? Are you still the same person with your trials and tribulations? Without your thoughts and memories constantly reminding you that you are suffering, are you suffering? Without your thoughts and memories constantly reminding you that you are "YOU" are you "YOU"? Can you even reference a person independant of the image in your mind? Without your image do you even exist?
Every idea, opinion or belief you have ever had or held true is linked to the primary image of the person you think yourself to be. If that very image is false than what do you truly know?
Are you ready to abandon the crutch that is the mind and immerse yourself in true introspection? Only Silence can reveal Reality. In order to see the light of truth one must first step out of the shadow of the mind.
Each morning the pages of the flipbook are flipped, the images are strung together by some rudimentary mental processes until from the flurry some hazy, shifting image of a 'person' emerges.
In deep sleep are you aware? Are you still the same person with your trials and tribulations? Without your thoughts and memories constantly reminding you that you are suffering, are you suffering? Without your thoughts and memories constantly reminding you that you are "YOU" are you "YOU"? Can you even reference a person independant of the image in your mind? Without your image do you even exist?
Every idea, opinion or belief you have ever had or held true is linked to the primary image of the person you think yourself to be. If that very image is false than what do you truly know?
Are you ready to abandon the crutch that is the mind and immerse yourself in true introspection? Only Silence can reveal Reality. In order to see the light of truth one must first step out of the shadow of the mind.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
The Dream of a Person
What is that which compels me to write? It is an unknown motivation in the deepest sense. It masquerades from time to time as a "need for recognition" or "artistic expression" yet these are only the ways in which my mind interprets that which is beyong its capacity to fathom.
The only way for me to approach it is by intuition rather than intellect. Any attempts to grasp it intellectually only serves to overlay it with another conceptual projection and in doing so only adds a layer of separation. So I approach it intuitively, blindly, groping and feeling my way towards it much like a man navigating his way through darkness. I have left my knowledge at the door. I proceed unprepared, uncertain.
What is that which compels me to attempt to grasp this? Strangely enough it feels no different. What compels me to write, what compels me to understand why I write. Feeling, groping, hesitant and faltering I have no choice but to focus entirely on this landscape as it reveals itself to me moment by moment. I am aware of moving, aware of being, aware that i am aware. Yet, what is it that compels me to be aware?
Every breath in my body, every step I take forward, every thought shooting across my mind, every emotion flooding my senses is compelled. My constant recognition of my self and my own existence is compelled. What is it that compels me?
This person is no more than a passenger. It is his paranoia that givs him his sense of control. Sitting in the passenger seat, steering an imaginary wheel, pressing an imaginary accelerator, stamping an imaginary brake, he congratulates himself when the vehicle responds his way and chastises himself when it doesn't. He is a fool who has created a world based upon fear and control. And yet he doesn't know from where he came form or where he will go. In fact, he has only just appeared, but don't tell him that because he doesn't want to hear it.
How long can you trace a wave with your eyes before it disappears forever? Love is all there is. It compels and is compelled. In this moment time cannot exist. Without memory, the person is the place where sound meets silence.
The person cannot experience reality. The person can only remember it in hinsight. He is gone the moment he appears. Birth and death are instantaneous. All else is the stuff of dreams.
Relax and enjoy the ride.
The only way for me to approach it is by intuition rather than intellect. Any attempts to grasp it intellectually only serves to overlay it with another conceptual projection and in doing so only adds a layer of separation. So I approach it intuitively, blindly, groping and feeling my way towards it much like a man navigating his way through darkness. I have left my knowledge at the door. I proceed unprepared, uncertain.
What is that which compels me to attempt to grasp this? Strangely enough it feels no different. What compels me to write, what compels me to understand why I write. Feeling, groping, hesitant and faltering I have no choice but to focus entirely on this landscape as it reveals itself to me moment by moment. I am aware of moving, aware of being, aware that i am aware. Yet, what is it that compels me to be aware?
Every breath in my body, every step I take forward, every thought shooting across my mind, every emotion flooding my senses is compelled. My constant recognition of my self and my own existence is compelled. What is it that compels me?
This person is no more than a passenger. It is his paranoia that givs him his sense of control. Sitting in the passenger seat, steering an imaginary wheel, pressing an imaginary accelerator, stamping an imaginary brake, he congratulates himself when the vehicle responds his way and chastises himself when it doesn't. He is a fool who has created a world based upon fear and control. And yet he doesn't know from where he came form or where he will go. In fact, he has only just appeared, but don't tell him that because he doesn't want to hear it.
How long can you trace a wave with your eyes before it disappears forever? Love is all there is. It compels and is compelled. In this moment time cannot exist. Without memory, the person is the place where sound meets silence.
The person cannot experience reality. The person can only remember it in hinsight. He is gone the moment he appears. Birth and death are instantaneous. All else is the stuff of dreams.
Relax and enjoy the ride.
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