My Too (Many) Cents

 Beauty is life itself. Here I attempt to describe what I find beautiful within the intellectual landscape in which I exist.   Abstraction is a key idea in computer science.  Each piece of the technology we use has lifetimes worth of history and memory embedded in it. Generations of scientific progress, a historical march leading to the conditions for it's production and so on. And so, you cannot go by opening each and every door you see. The genuineness of your curiosity is determined not necessarily how deep you go, because it is rather easy to be that engrossed by any thing, but how much you can get back out from that plunge into the water.  You go too far down and suddenly you're learning assembly trying to debug some python code until you run out of mental space and give up. Or life forces you to with other commitments.  A balance has to be caught in Abstraction which one of my professors described as a middle out approach; Understanding enough of the bottom up description

 Advertisment and Propaganda thrives on humans insistence that there is something that needs to be "fixed" about themselves.  The conditioning creates the tendency to remain trapped in problems, and most solutions offered are but the transformation of the problem from one form into another.  Dynamic, alive solutions in business, sport, creativity are localized, personal and long-term - to bring a qualitative change in a person's state of mind such that they look at the problem from a qualitatively different lens, dissolving it altogether.  But the mind instantly protests when faced with the fact that there is nothing "to fix" and nothing it can fix about itself. It is the reflexive reaction of a parent when faced with the realisation that their kids are not theirs to shape, but rather have their own journey.  That reaction of a loss of control, and the turmoil which follows is not an expression of the truth; Rather it merely enunciates the insecurities and anxie

The human is engaged in a battle everyday.  A battle between the magnificence of his being and the finitude of his existence.  He does not realise this.  With all his movements through life, he is sloppy and inefficient. Excess prevails in every dimension of his existence.  All this is driven by an unchallenged assumption that has become societally ingrained among almost all of us.  You are not here forever. This life is but a moment in a cosmic cycle which leaves you with sheer insignificance in its wake.  Yet a human is also born from the same effulgent starts that make the universe go around. It is his birthright to actualize himself, to be so fully immersed in his experience of life that he pulls the whole of the universe onto himself.  It is only when one becomes empty, that the universe can work through him. That is the real training that produces a master: To love what one does so much, To give it one's all each moment. To die and get back up again and again, with a beginner

In the bustle of the everyday, when we adorn our masks and present confidently, callously in the world around us, we forget that people are not strong.  Life is never strong, never hard. It's a subtle magic that works through it and never refuses to give up no matter what the circumstance.  Self organizing into an intelligent response for whatever situation its put into. There is so much suffering and trauma around us all that the optimal method life has found through these people is to close up and harden up. If not through mannerisms and physical bodies then through actual dead and repetitive patterns in which they seek numbing. It is painful to see it happen. It is painful, and disheartening when I am watching and suddenly the beauty is gone, and I am just repeating a bunch of patterns. And the working of the mind is rather subtle. In the subtle flinch you have before taking a compliment, being unable to look someone in their eyes. The pathway of hurt has already been triggered.

 A human can only channel what he possesses. For a beginner to expect world class performance of himself is inauthentic.  A judgement free watching of the seed of our potentials is all we can offer to life.  All the while serving as a bulwark for its protection. With even a little sincerity, this seed blooms with overwhelming intensity, again and again.  Yet most of us do not get to experience this too much.  In comparison there is always conflict, for I do not know I am dull unless I do not compare to someone who burns even brighter.  The beauty of sport is the barenness and purity that can be given to such a comparison. This is the essence of the sportsman spirit; To burn as intensely as possible in the sincerity of your craft.  If you win, you realise that it wasn't you that created the oppurtunities ripe for winning.  It was something that worked through you.  And if you lose, sincerely - You stand quietly in the enormity of the presence of your competitor.  That quietens the m

Wherever pure awareness touches, it creates abundance;  In solving problems we uncover deep connections to areas of knowledge we would have thought never existed.  It furnishes the collective psyche.   The collective psyche is a store of information that can be extracted for solving problems.  The configuration in which the memory has been extracted predisposes you to certain patterns of behaviour;  that is karma.  This is also the specialist; Born into a location, into specific patterns of thought, action, movement, dance, technology creates a liking, an orientation towards these.  The focus on any pattern, beyond necessity is not love, it is attachment, desperation or insistence.  Like how the action of thought is forcing the framework I just cognized the beginning of with this post to come into being.  There is no reason for this exposition to continue, and it requires some actual narrowing of my focus to actually bring it to fruition; yet I continue to do this, almost as if I have

 At the end of the day, you are a being born of light.  How you live, how you spend each day is a reflection of this.  There is a subtle magic that comes as we become aware of things.  With our bodies, we start to notice constrictions and spontaneously moving in efficient ways such that our body can flow.  With our minds, the magic is how one becomes fluent in a language suddenly.  Language itself is structure in patterns of thought that help us solve problems a la Automata Theory. Each archetype in your collective psyche is an incomprehensibly large store of information, for recurring structures.  In moving your mind, you are forcing it when you constrict your attention and make it necessarily, mechanically become aware of certain loops. Yet when you leave it be, and notice the beauty of it, then a discipline arises from within yourself.  Like when you notice the subtle weight of your fingers while playing the tabla, it suddenly becomes an endlessly curious problem to uncover: The rel

Suffering is a gordian knot.  The one who is suffering is caught, in a spiderweb of silky steel. Each proverbial struggle only tightens the noose around their neck.  The light of reason can slash through it in an instant, but it doesn't even enter the realm of possibility for the one who suffers.  Their choice is limited, by the truth they know.  A master is someone who can show you that light in a given situation; A cold hard slap, or a warm loving embrace. The path to transformation scarcely matters to the one who desperately needs it.  Morality is a narrow crutch loaned from blind people to other blind people. In the understanding of the path, there is an intrinsic morality.  Commandments, prescriptions or any linguistic marker for that matter can never capture the essence of "goodness" that we desperately want to point towards.  It's the sand beside the sea. Once there has been a taste of the true essence, the world's all-you-can eat buffet of words and framew

 One of my favourite authors when I avidly read fantasy was Brandon Sanderson.  His world building and pacing was something that always kept me on the edge of the page while reading through the first few books of the stormlight archive. It reminded me of a childhood experience I had with Christopher Paolini's books. As the perspective shifts between multiple deeply fleshed out characters, I am tempted to read another chapter just to get back into the stream of consciousness of a character I had become absorbed in. Before I know it, I have devoured half of the book in an afternoon, the pages standing in my wake as Roran's epic battle with the hammer or an Atium fueled spree at the end of mistborn. But perhaps what I appreciate even more about Sanderson's writing is just how much of it there is. The cosmere is chock full of such stories which he has been putting out at an astounding pace over the past few years. If you put out a thousand page book every 6 months for a decade,

Impermanence is the nature of all things. This is not a platitude or something that merely meant to sound deep. This is a fundamental truth of life.  It is love that gives us a temporary relief against the great tragedy of this illusion - In loving something, or someone sincerely and deeply, one can really play this game as it is meant to be played, while bearing the pain of all the illusions that came forth before it. Really, we are all performers, and each movement of our language is a flow in the collective psyche.  It is dominated by conditioning, illusion, death and unawareness. But in the pure movement of love (that is also the fire of tapas), something is ignited. And that really, is truth - that is the revolution inside consciousness which Krishnamurti spent his entire life trying to muster. It is perhaps also a resolution to the movements found in marx - A society unalienated from its labour, its people - a creative and responsible society where each individual walks the middl

 This is me attempting to have a rational conversation with myself about something that I struggle with, because no one else in the world will really fully understand my experience.  At the end of the day, this is still garbage in, garbage out because my thoughts here are informed by my conditioning which I could not fully choose.  It is one thing to assert that you are not the mind in the serenity of your courtyard, where only perhaps a few crickets dare chirp. It is entirely another to say the same in the middle of a hurricane that is your daily social interaction. The world is not entitled to let you keep your peace. To let you see far and deep with your quiet eyes. It is like a raging bull that will rock you around everywhere.  Every human has this faculty of discernment. The more you discern the more your world shatters. To some degree we like this resolution - it breaks through the initial illusions, gives us a sense of moral and (to its credit) some executive functioning superio

 The pure sincerity of revolution. The fire in the revolutionary's eyes. The steadfastness of his being. That is the essence of truth.  In trying to express that through a framework, a need for others to understand betrays the purity of his truth.  It falls to the level of mere propaganda. When one writes to define and prescribe to others. To become the symbol of a movement, he has already surrendered to the unserious masses. The devotion to purity, the bone-chilling loneliness, nihilism. The desperation. All that is involved in a true exposition of truth.  The writing is but a mere excretion - of the process of coming towards a higher understanding. In the vestibule of this evermore intense moment, all that is untrue about oneself is killed. Sacrificed. We take this journey everyday. Coming face to face with this animal we call ourselves. Only when it is backed up into a corner, with nowhere to run can the mind really be conquered. Total absorption is what creates the invidual. No

 The child gleefully laughed as his parents pretended to be weak and playfight with him.  In the childish innocence of the fantasies the group had weaved together, he found reprieve from a world that was already growing too barren to support the fertile ground of his imagination.  And then suddenly the ground was pulled apart from beneath him. He had passed the trial stage, into the most elaborate game of them all.  Ambitions, drives, desires, struggles. The theater of a thousand lifetimes. Each day he woke up, his mind entrenched into the depth of this plot. Every turn of a cog in this mechanistic masterpiece would set off a cascade of reactions. The result - a mind always at odds with itself. Always restless, never quiet.  Getting consumed by his own suffering, as the world seemed to close in around him. The illusion threatening to really kill him. And yet it never did.  It just sapped his life force away more and more - in the expectations of the kernel of a company he kept, in the

 Another late night, spent alone in a lab. Another sleepy evening spent grinding iron, and kicking against the cobalt. Another average day spent sleepwalking through class. Another deadline forcing my brain to move from its sluggish slumber. Conversations with people that drag on as we are never quite able to say what we want to say. As we put unhealthy food down our throats, talk about how much suffering has been put on our plate in the chatter of a dishonest bourgeosie acquaintance, my mind grasps for something deeper. And in that grasping it gets submerged again, in limerent fantasies of someone's beauty, of the desire of being posesesed or possessing - reducing ourselves and others to playthings or objectifying them in our pedestalization.  Just commit to someone, to something, to some cause, to some greater purpose. Let this sisyphian struggle be over - with all the rationalizations bolstered by the chatter from an unserious world.  And then, when the game is up, when all has

 The limits of thought is a series of conversations between Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm. I remember being fascinated by this book two years ago, which made me stay up all night trying my hardest to grasp at the esoteric concepts being talked about.  The topics of conversation seemed reachable, because of K's simplistic language, yet subtly out of reach. Like my mind had to be very attentive to try and grasp at what was being talked about. This desperation to grasp these forms of knowledge has guided me on my journey uptill this point, and perhaps will continue to guide it further, but today I realised while reading a passage from Savitri by Sri Aurobindo that this is still incomplete.  Reminiscent of Kierkegard's question or anxiety about having faith, this question was encountered but at a much more subtle, much more real level. Our thought starts from epistemic axioms, lines so basic that without them you could not even begin parsing the content of your perceptions. Que

 The archetype of a rogue, a subtle, dandy mysterious thief - moving through life with a certain poise and lightness is what I wish to talk about here. This is a selfish excercise in the exposition of beauty I see. Life is suffering. We try to forget it often with our societal numbing mechanisms or with plain denial but the fact remains true. The beauty of one's life is in their reaction to this information. Like viktor frankl would say (echoing the thoughts of the stoics), even if everything is taken away from you, how you react to a situation is a slave's freedom that can never be taken. In a recent interview, I really enjoyed the analogy Ido Portal gave of conceptualizing this suffering as an ether almost, that we move through literally and figuratively. Small things like how we walk, talk, breathe and relate to others determine our experience of life to a great degree.  An 'intelligent' (I use this term in the way Krishnamurti would use it) engagment with life is th

The only question that matters in my life is understanding the mystery and wonder of consciousness. Over the past few years, everything that I have learnt and experienced has been in the background of this question. I have acquired practical knowledge sure, but only to be able to continue pursuing this question skillfully. However, I have realised that the practicality and superficiality have gotten to me in some aspects.  Some crevices of the catacombs this question uncovers require more than a superficial exploration. Perhaps every one does. There are lifetimes worth of knowledge in these treasure troves. Perhaps these valleys of the mind are the only places where humanity has ever been. Paths of movement through a manifold of resistance.  Time may be an illusion - all the knowledge is here for me this instant. It is only in expressing its truth that time comes about in the physical dimension. I had in my haughtiness considered myself to be better than a seeker now. Someone who had d

 Wherever you might be in life, there are a lot of things that are being thrown at you. But what you can realise is that a lot of it is really garbage. Societal expectations, projections, judgements. Your own conditioning of liking certain experiences. If you really look through the veil, freedom is always within your grasp. It is simply a matter of realising the current framing of your experience, figuring out the goals that come with that framing, finding an appropriately abstract way of acheving these goals and dedicating all the rest of the time to also engendering an internal place of love and freedom.  As a student and a researcher in a very intellectually rigorous course, I have a tendency to get overwhelmed often by assignments and readings. However, it is not an issue with how smart I am, rather I am just not allocating time efficiently when I do fall behind. Doing the readings before class and treating your class as a revision, doing all your assignments on your own and letti

 The best way to learn something is to create something with it. Every interaction in life is an oppurtunity to learn. I have let these thoughts ruminate in my head for way to long, I wonder if they have gotten stale in the process or just fermented to a more careful, beautiful potpourri. Sloppiness with your thought prevents the deeper flowering of something you hold in your mind. It disallows you from going through the process of solving more difficult problems that require more thinking through. Sure, writing down your claims for each problem also slow down the process of your thought, your intution yet at the same time, the ability to disentangle a web of observations about a problem and look at it objectively, slowly through them is essential.  In the pure state of perfection where I am pulling each next word out of the ether. In that tremendous clarity, perhaps this slow process of proving everything I know is meaningless and slows down the unfolding of truth, but other languages

 Why are there aspects of my life in which I continue to be apathetic and indifferent? I know that movement is life and stagnation is death, not as an intellectual observation, but as a fact. Then what is it that allows me to continue to be deluded about these aspects? Is it because the pain is too much to bear? Since the human organism has a tendency to adjust to any stimulus, one can condition themselves to the bitter truth - the croaking of the ugly frog from Mandukya Upanishad. In the pleasure of violation by the sheer bitterness of truth, there is no reprieve though.  Even though I tell you, that I am open to any truth you may tell me about. That I shall accept it with gratitude if it aligns with my sense of viveka - the process is brutish. Like maximizing for an extremely simple objective instead of the high dimensional masterpiece we inhabit. No, the pursuit is still insincere. There is still much further to go. It is a seduction of your own ego into the Brilliance of Brahman. A

 What is the relation between collective knowledge and personal ingenuity? In a recent interview Ido Portal said that there is immense power in collective knowledge. A fighter could train by himself in perfection for 20 years today and not even come close to today's modern MMA fighters.  What we are driven by, are goals. Sports aren't really competitions, they are potpourris of human potential. Given certain constraints, which organisms creativity is able to reach further, and develop more brilliantly. The goal is constraint.  While there is a saying that says constraints drive creativity - I would go further and claim that perhaps the constraint is creativity. Without a container for pure potentiality it is just meaningless perfection. How is that discussion relevant to my life as an ordinary human? I realise that we are molten perfection molding ourselves through how we move through life. Not as a romanticization or abstraction, but as fact. What is it that shapes how I live?

 I read a blog post recently which tried to lay out principles for group rationality.  I wanted to see how they could come about emergent as a set of interactions between healthily developed egos.  To debate, you need to have high self esteem; The idea is to get others to believe in what you want. The ideal platonic essence of a debate is to  My break with platonism - deleuze talks about breaking against it in the sense of focusing on a essential perfection in things beyond the form that is revealed to us. My enjoyment of my music or my movement of my body is in the sense the atium shadow (from Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series) of the platonic essence of perfection I have already cognized.  This is the 'natural intelligence' Krishnamurti talks about. I realised that there's no objective grounding for a concept of "self esteem", because it is never about focusing and doting on yourself. It is about nurturing it in so far as it can become something you let go

 Now that I have given this process a name, of exploring thoughts along fault lines, there is an anxiety for it to become a repetitive procedure instead of an active involvement. So too is always a fear with any discipline I practice; Whenever I get mechanically trapped in some processes, I plateau and stagnate. It is only in exploring further and deeper that my brain can develop along an entirely new axis.  I have been having fun in imagining life as a series of games. The idea of a game is that its consequences don't matter outside its realm of influence. Yet at the same time they should feel real enough that they are motivating incentives to someone inside the game itself.  A game is structured by a set of rules. It is these rules that define what is the objective of the game. To win a game we must perceive a subtler, deeper aspect of the truth and express it through our bodies and minds than the opponent. The opponent then isn't so much an enemy as he is a medium for us to

This is an expopsition of an internal dialogue (again following a feldenkrais approach, exploring around in the realm of thought that is comfortable to me and trying to expand further.) Axiom: You should be dedicated to perfection or truth in whatever activity you pursue.  Justification: If this were not true, why are you doing anything in the first place. Life is meaningless and you can probably just kill yourself and nothing would change.  It's not like anything is going to change either way. Is there intrinsic moral worth to pursuing perfection in each action? No, even that is not true. If you think there is a moral worth assigned to this action then you are getting the pleasure of slave morality. Of imposing on others what you cannot live by yourself. It is not "good" to pursue perfection, a creative and subtle path through life. It is simply the only effective path. That is a stronger claim than what I believe to be true. There is some degree of tolerance, an epsilon

 people are not who they seem.  in fact people are not people at all.  People are kernels of light. Of reason that guides how they move through life.  And that is not a romanticized or mystical notion.  How one breathes, How they orient their body. The sound each syllable makes. The silence in between. The space they take up. The relaxation of their muscles - of their face and their body.  Everything flows from the kernel of their truth. Human beings are sculptors and sculpted. Agents roaming the world with Kernel access to edit our own source code. Again, not in a romanticized self-improvement kind of way. But literally; To expose ourselves to our fears, anxieties and structure experience around us in a way that we can overcome them.  We are molten lava in the process of solidifying itself. Molten truth ossifying into the subject.  The clothes we choose to wear. How they rub against our skin. The way we touch each other, from a handshake to sex. Everything is moving, everything can be