The Depth of Choice

All that we think, feel and believe to be true about ourselves is a choice. It is a choice we make from day to day and moment to moment, consciously or unconsciously.

Most people are unaware that this choice even exists. We live our lives defined by what we feel and think, accepting them as truths and enduring their consequences. As a result, we come to believe the limit of our ability to choose extends as far as our likes and dislikes, our ambitions and goals, our purpose in life. We rarely ever stop to consider that this very person, this "I", with its name, identity, thoughts, feelings and motivations itself is a choice.

As we grow in self-awareness we become exceedingly aware that we are in fact actively choosing who we think we are. To be "self aware" means to be aware of yourself. It is to witness yourself, almost as a third person in the equation. To watch yourself as you interact with the world and with others. To watch your emotions arise, fears arise, motivations arise and thoughts arise. To see the subtle ways these catalysts move you and how in turn you energize them.

In order to witness this "person that you are", you must actually sit outside your person. Almost like standing outside the window of your own shop (which is your body-mind) and looking in. As you become more and more familiar with observing yourself, you become simultaneously aware that this "person" you are witnessing with its own particular flavors of emotion and thought is really a choice. No thought is believed until you choose to believe it. No emotion can be adopted until you choose to adopt it. Nothing you see in your store window has been placed there without your permission.

To realize this is extremely liberating. When you see that what you are is a choice, then you see that everything is optional. Fear is optional, anger is optional, struggle, resistance and suffering are optional. And even though you may continue to choose to experience these heavier emotions out of habit, the awareness that an alternative exists will gradually cause a transformation in your relationship with yourself.

Embracing Paradox

Paradox is something we tend to fear and avoid. Because paradox blurs the boundaries between things. We all like our lives, our things, our relationships and our desires to be one way or another, clearly marked off into neat little spaces, divided by obvious boundaries. However, reality is rarely like this.

In our minds, we want ourselves to be one way or another. We may want to be loving, generous, tolerant, determined, forgiving, powerful, free or a number of other images we might have of ourselves. Yet, in reality there are those moments in which we are spiteful, stingy, intolerant, hesitant, vindictive, weak and imprisoned. In those moments, we have a tendency to be harsh on ourselves. As if somehow we have betrayed ourselves in our own esteem. This tendency to berate oneself for not having a high enough sense of esteem is what leads to low self esteem.

So here is the paradox once again. The compulsive need to have and to maintain a high self-esteem actually breeds low self-esteem. On the flip side, introvertion, fear, spitefulness and feelings of inadequacy can paradoxically create a sense of high self-esteem. A great example of this would be famous megalomaniacs in history like Hitler, Tim McVeigh and others.

There is no such thing as a permanent high nor a permanent low in this Universe. Every living being is an embodiment of it all - the high and the low. You cannot truly be loving until you are willing to allow yourself moments of spite. You cannot truly be generous or tolerant until you allow yourself those moments of selfishness and intolerance, if they appear naturally. You cannot accept just one face of a coin.

Embracing paradox is the choice to embrace the totality of who you are, the whole being. Not just the good bits, the strong bits, the worthy bits but equally and more vitally the rotten bits, the weak bits and the unworthy bits. When you can accept all of it without judgment or preference you are one step closer to becoming whole again.

A Collection of Statuses

It was suggested to me that I post some of my musings from Facebook onto the blog so here goes:

We are encouraged by society to have a strong sense of ourselves as individuals; to be unique, to stand out, to be well defined. And while this is a great ideal to live up to, we have somehow misconstrued this "strong sense of ourselves" to be synonymous with solidity, with rigidity, with immovability, with being static.

 To have a strong sense of identity is quite the opposite. It is to see ones...elf in more fluid, changing, evolving, dynamic and flexible terms.

 When we look towards our minds and our thoughts to provide us with our self identity, we are really working with ideas and images that are outdated and frozen in time. Who you are and who you think you are is always out of synch, because your image of yourself is no more than a screenshot in time whereas your reality is perpetually evolving in real-time.

 Most of suffering generates from constantly trying to reconcile the image in the mind with the reality we see. The image is frozen. Like a glacier in the winter. Whereas reality flows like a river.

 When we are able to stay more present in our day to day lives, when we are relying less and less on those mental images we compulsively hold on to, then we begin to connect with a sense of identity that is less clearly defined. It is based on an awareness that is purely spontaneous, fresh and immediate. It is not burdened with the weight of concepts and expectations which make it sluggish and solidified like ice. Rather, free of past and future projections, it is fluid and flexible like water.

 Then the only rational response to any circumstance in life is no longer resistance/struggle but an immediate acceptance without blame/jedgment followed by fluidly adapting to whatever challenge the circumstance brings forth.

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Open, vulnerable, curious, trusting, spontaneous - this is our natural state. None of these implies ignorance. Ignorance is the result of a narrow mind, defensiveness, lack of curiosity, mistrust and premeditation.

 Whether we are willing to admit it or not each and every one of us is ignorant to a degree. So before judging another's ignorance are you willing to take a look at your own? When we ar...e able to own our own ignorance with grace and humility then we may be able to accept the ignorance of another.

 And in those moments when we feel superior, more compassionate, more civilized than those who are more ignorant than us and cast judgment on them from high up on our moral pedestals, let us reflect back on our own ignorance. So that we may see that we are all just blind men and women fumbling about in the dark. Just because someone is blinder than us doesn't somehow make us superior.

 We are all just afraid of the darkness within our own hearts. That is what makes us turn on ourselves and each other. When we stop fearing the darkness of ignorance is when the light of compassion can begin to shine.

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Your name is changeable, your body is changeable, your mind is changeable, your feelings are changeable, your faith is changeable, your ambition is changeable, your work is changeable, your dreams are changeable, your relationships are changeable, your sexuality is changeable, even your gender is changeable. There is nothing about you that is immune to change. To resist change is to oppose your very nature.

 Everything that happens is an aspect of change - positive and negative - it is all change. When you prefer and give value to only the positive in yourself you disown all that is not. The very nature of flux, of change, is ebb and flow, is crest and trough, is positive and negative. To embrace change is to embrace the entire movement not just the crests, not just the high tides.

 When you can embrace change in its totality, only then are you be able to see that within yourself that remains unchanging, eternal and constantly present. That deep acceptance where everything that is, is permitted to exist without judgment or favor. It is a vast open space of unconditional love. When you can begin to give this gift of clarity to yourself, you will simultaneously bring it into the world around you.

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Love is not just a feeling, not just an effect, not just something external that happens to you. On a deeper, more fundamental level, Love is a perspective, a cause, that source inside you from which every thought and action has the capacity to transform all that you come in contact with.

 Picture the Mind and the Heart to be the right and left lenses of the glasses through which we see the world.... Through the experience of living these lenses get scuffed, scratched, chipped and cracked. And each imperfection in the lens causes a distortion in reality - in the way we perceive life, the world around us and ourselves.

 Every grievance we hold for another is a judgment we hold of ourselves. The distortion and the blemish go hand in hand. It is unavoidable.

 Lost in the haze of our own imperfections and a world of distortion we are on a perpetual quest to feel better, do better, find better - to somehow fix these lenses consciously or subconsciously. To repair this Heart, to perfect this Mind.

 Love is the clarity with which we see when we are no longer disturbed by the flaws and distortions of the Heart and Mind. It is the realization that we do not become perfect in the absence of our flaws but have always been perfect in spite of them.

 Our true identity is not in the lenses but in the eyes behind them that see unconditionally. When we can reconnect with the miracle of sight - that is love. Then there is only an unconditional acceptance: of ourselves, of the world, of this moment just as it is - imperfect, distorted and infinitely beautiful. See more

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 Comfort, joy, anger and fear - these are the changing weather patterns of the mind. Passion, happiness, boredom and melancholy - these are the cyclical seasons of the soul. Each day's weather brings a different experience. Each season represents an opportunity for growth. It is possible to find comfort in the midst of melancholy like a clear sunny day in the middle of winter. Or to feel anxiety in...the midst of happiness, like a summer storm that drenches the heat.

 We may have our preferences of weather and season. Yet, the weather and seasons follow a deeper intelligence, one that is not contingent upon our whims and fancies. Each experience of the mind, be it sunny or cloudy, is an experience worth having. Each season of the soul, be it summer or winter, is a lesson worth learning.

 And while, the weather may change and the seasons me come and go, the Sun that is your true nature, will continue to shine everyday regardless of whether it can be seen. It is the one constant that has never forsaken you. It gives you the capacity to love and the courage to endure.

Zero and Infinity

In the Beginning

Life is meaningless at the beginning. In other words, it has no meaning, no reason for why it appears and how it appears. Life just is. This is because as infants we have yet to develop those faculties of the intellect that are able to take this holistic view and break it down through analysis. From that very first glimpse of an undifferentiated world our mind quickly learns through its surroundings to differentiate.

Prior to the beginning of perception there is truly nothing. The Zero. Yet, in that first moment, when the infant emerges from the womb and the world is felt for the first time there emerges the One. It is an overwhleming sense of existence, of one existence. This is the is-ness or the such-ness that the buddhists speak of. Yet even this undifferentiated sense of existence has emerged from the void of the Zero. In this primal state, the infant has yet to draw a clear line of demarcation between himself and the world. Everything internal and external is felt as one, as yet unbroken, experience. The sights, the sounds, the smells and colors of the outside world as well as the sensations, feelings, yearnings and pain of his internal system. The infant does not know that they are separate.

Yet, as the mind develops, so the infant develops self awareness. And as the awareness of the Self is born, so is born the awareness of the World = that which is not the Self = the other. And so 1 becomes 2.

The infant's rapidly growing self awareness now shines light upon its own needs and desires. It perceives certain factors/events/people in the environment as ones that can satisfy its needs and others that cannot. Its capacity to discriminate and divide the outside world increases in direct proportion with its ability to become more subtly aware of its own needs and desires. And so the 2 becomes 4 and then 8 and begins proliferating at an exponential rate. 

Yet, other than in moments where needs are felt strongly in which this awareness of separation arises, the infant's mind remains blissfully vacant and observant. Its awareness is open, unbiased and curious. You may have witnessed a baby wailing for a bottle becomes immediately quiet and at ease the moment its needs are met. It effortlessly returns to its natural open undifferentiated self. This is because it is as yet unable to use thought.

The Technique of Differentiation

However, as the child grows its mind develops the ability to think. Thinking is a curious activity because it allows the being the ability to construct abstract realities. Once this abstract reality has been constructed the being can make the choice to either experience the actul reality or an abstraction of it. It is a truly powerful ability that infants don't possess. When an infant's needs are met it doesn't choose to drop the issue and move on out of some deeper wisdom, it drops the issue and moves on because it doesn't have the ability to hold on to it. Because it can't formulate a thought (a combination of image, sound and language) its tools for abstraction are very rudimentary.

The growing child comes face to face with the greatest reality of life. The reality that all beings feel need and that needs are not always met. The infant feels this too, but its only mechanism for coping with unmet needs is to wail. Children, as their minds begin to develop, also begin to develop more sophisticated mechanisms for coping with this sense of unmet needs - the sense of lack. While most will still respond with some amount of chagrin, tantrumming, wailing, they also learn to develop techniques of denial, suppression, avoidance, self-identification and self-criticism. By seeing that externalizing doesn't always work, they begin to realize that sometimes internalizing can help distract the mind from that very raw and powerful sensation of lack.

Finally, as he develops into an adolescent and finally and adult the mind has reached a high degree of sophistication in its abiltity to differentiate. Yet somewhere along the way, that sense of self, which the infant could always default to so effortlessly, has become scattered and lost in the labyrinth of the mind. The thought processes that began with a very specific purpose have instead hijacked the entire experience of "living" for this person. No longer is he able to abstract at will but rather everything has become an abstraction. Thinking has taken over the act of perception so every sensory input is now forced through the additional filter of the thinking mind.

But why did this thinking begin in the first place? It began with the innocent desire to fulfil lack. There is an underlying assumption in every self-referential thought, that somehow the more true a thought is the closer it brings the individual to a resolution of that lack. But thought is an energy. And a thought believed gives rise to another thought. And like a chain reaction thoughts trigger one another creating a thought process. Each thought process feeds another need. And in turn is fed by need. And so while the innocent desire of every thought is to fulfil a need, the effect instead is that it magnifies it and makes it more acute.

This is easily observable in your own mind. Lets say you are starving and the need for food preoccupies your mind. The need is real and yet your mind generates a certain momentum of thinking around this need which magnifies it. Perhaps, it weaves a story around this need, of your plight, your poverty, of a past when these needs were not met, or of a world in which there are others who suffer just as you do. Immersed in thought this need becomes the most overarching concern of you life. You are no different than the infant who was wailing for his bottle. Yet your techniques are far more sophisticated and effective. Using a simple need that all creatures feel your mind has used its powers of abstraction and created an entire worldview and self-view based on it. And so while starving is painful, it is the mind made abstraction that creates the real suffering. At this moment, you get a call from someone telling you of some great news. Immediately, your mind shifts its focus. The pain of starvation is still prevalent yet the awareness of it has receded. Now you find youself immersed in a different story.    

This sense of lack translates into our material lives, political lives, family lives, spiritual lives. Every opinion we hold of the world is inextricably linked to an opinion we hold of ourselves which in turn is rooted in lack. Most begin believing that material ambition is the key to addressing material needs which is what they primarily classify this lack to be. Somewhere along the way, we realize that this is not just a material issue but is larger - it is perhaps an economic or political issue. And we then turn our ambitions towards solving the problems of the world. After spinning our wheels in desperation and finding no fulfilment to the sense of lack - we decide that perhaps the issue is not something out there but rather something that goes deeper - an existential/philosophical issue. And we immerse ourselves in the spiritual life and seek to find an end to sufferng.

The Zero that became the One and then the Two has now proliferated into the several thousands. The differentiation of the Self and the world knows no limits. the human mind has learned to differentiate reality into finer and finer layers. From the macroscopic to the microscopic, from the universal to the quantum and everything in between. Even our powers of self analysis have become exceedingly more intricate, subtle and sophisticated. And yet what is driving this growth and this over-arching need for differentiation is, paradoxically, a need to integrate - to become whole again.

The Art of Integration

At some point, in every individual's life the differentiation reaches a critical mass, a tipping point. Until now, the individual's entire focus was projected outwards into the world. Its drives were internal, mostly fed by lack, but its focus and solution-seeking was pointed outwards. The tipping point happens suddenly and is usually catalyzed by some traumatic external event or a culmination of significant psychological suffering. When this happens, the individual suddenly becomes aware of the lack as an entity, this bottomless void of need. Until now it has always been driven by it, but for the first time it becomes aware of it as a primary operating principle in its life.

Coming face to face with this void is a tremendously sobering experience. And can cause a deep sense of emptiness, meaninglessness, listlessness. In other words, the experience is one of deep depression. Because in perceiving the void, we have perceived, for the first time since our minds fully engaged as infants, the Zero. And this seeing is not something we are ready for. We are confronted with the meaninglessness of life for the very first time and it is unacceptable to us. And we respond the way we have been taught by our minds to - with denial, suppression, wailing, blame. And we may somehow learn to ignore what we've seen and find some way to rationalize it away for the time being but that can only be temporary. Because what has been seen once can't be unseen.

When we glimpse that void what we have really glimpsed is the end point. Where the journey reaches its final purpose. Now, the process of Integration begins. The process of becoming whole again. And for this purpose the mind becomes the secondary tool of choice. The primary tool is the heart, the tool of intuition.

This process of integration is not all that straightforward. The mind which has always been in charge is resistant to let go of its domination. The heart is a much gentler tool that does not assert its views as obviously. Yet, its motivations are deep and its currents powerful. If the mind is like a gushing stream which carries you away, the heart is like an ocean current that grips you and drags you into the depths of your self.

Yet we are more inclined to follow the motivations of our minds initially than the murmurings of our hearts. And so there is a bit of stuttering, of integration and differentiation and integration and differentiation. Somewhere along the process the benefits of the integration become evident even to the mind. It realizes that it needs to get on board with the program. And yet therein lies the ultimate paradox. Because the mind can never integrate. The integration must happen in spite of it and not because of it. And that is the ultimate dilemma. Because true integration can only happen once the mind has relinquished its throne and taken a backseat to a far more powerful force.

And so even in mystics or spiritual seekers there is a strong sense of identification that persists. Where the mind continues to entertain the fantasy that it is somehow in control of the integration. That it is responsible for it. In this way, it becomes the final barrier to the integration. Because it continues to differentiate its own existence from that of the being. It believes that there is the I and there is the Self. And as long as this separation exists, the seeking of the I for it's Self exists. "I am searching for myself", "I am trying to find myself". This is the differentiation created by the mind. It is a fiction. And the most obvious fiction of all.

Integration is the process, where the heart takes over. Intuition now begins to guide the being into a fuller realization of its self. And with each phase as the being integrates, there is a gradual dissolution of boundaries. The things/events/people that it previously perceived as separate and alien now begin to resonate with it. There is a deeper understanding an empathy less rooten in judgment which is a function of the mind and more rooted in wisdom which is function of the heart. Acceptance becomes a more prevalent state as opposed to the resistance energy of the mind.
Realization of Self

However, while integration is a process that eventually must reach its natural conclusion, its conclusion isn't necessary for the Self to realize its true nature. Rather at some point the Self sees what it is, with profound clarity. Let us return to that moment when the individual reached the critical mass, the tipping point. At that moment, as I mentioned it came face to face with the void. And it turned away in denial. That glimpse is what becomes the driving force for the integration. Because in glimpsing the void what the being has really glimpsed is into the entire nature of reality. It has seen that everything is ultimately void. Is nothing. Is Zero. Through a trust in the integration process, we are able to allow for the first time the inherent emptiness of everything. It is the same emptiness that is the basis of our entire experience.  From this emptiness the Self arises. And with the Self the world arises. And with the arising of these two, arise the infinite possibilities. This is the great realization that buddhists refer to as the No Self, the hindus as the Higher Self.

Quantum theorists have discovered that reality exists only in a potential form. That everything potentially exists in wave form and it is the act of observation or awareness that makes a wave collapse into its particle form. Until the moment of observation Nothing exists and everything only potentially exists. And yet in the moment of observation everything comes into existence. The Infinite is born out of the Zero. Reality only exists in the moment. Past and future are only abstractions of the mind. In every moment, it is our awareness that creates the reality of the infinite.

In university, I remember sitting in calculus class pondering the concepts of zero and infinity. Studying limits and functions, differentiation and integration I realized somewhere is my subconsciousness that all this had a profoundly deeper implication than we were being lead to believe. It is only through my own introspection and experience of life that I am able to see what all this was implying. The differentiation and the integration is the universal story of proliferation and a return to wholeness, of orginal sin and redemption, of the Big Bang and the Big Crunch, of birth and death, of suffering and enlightenment. The individual in this story is the function whose limit tends to infinity and then tends once again to zero always arriving from moment to moment yet never reaching its final destination. Because to be human is to grow incessantly, relentlessly.

But somewhere along the way there is a realization that what we truly are is beyond all of it. We are the awareness itself, the awareness of the Zero, of the One, Two and the Infinity. It is the play of Life. It is how the source of consciousness recognizes itself, becomes aware of itself. It sees itself by playing this game. By performing the calculus of the soul.

Consciousness is All

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.

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...)    

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...)