My Too (Many) Cents

 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

 A sperm and an egg fused to create a spark of truth.  A mother labored for 9 months to birth pure potentiality. Glimmer in its eyes, Looking towards the skies. Hope, curiosity, and wonder colored its imagination. So free were its sights, set on an ideal far beyond. Plastic idols, Plastic ideals violently violated the space for serendipity. Where it earlier saw a vigorous interplay of forces, now arose the plethora of forms. Ambition, Talent, Acheivement. The need to have been somebody.  To a being born of thunder, such an insult could never stand.  But as a king loses his regality in having lived with beggars long enough, so too did the being finally surrender.  Without love and truth we crumble and wither away.  Being deprived of his lifeblood, the baker begged for little crumbs.  And then bigger crumbs.  Looking down the well of his discontentment, he saw darkness deeper and deeper.  Blood curdling screams, grotesque scratching.  Bloodied fingernails climbing the labyrinth with thei

 There are unfathomably deep truths scattered across our collective psyche.  It is these truths that nourish our existence. The signal that breaks through the noise of unconsciousness and suffering.  The brain needs an objective function, so as to not always be struggling. These truths are the objective functions that we converge to. Even if you say there is no objective driving you, that is itself an objective function.  The first truth is that life really is meaningless. Just a play of material reality. Or perhaps units of consciousness.  Each truth has a domain of applicability, used outside which it becomes untrue. Searching for truths creates one's journey.  This whole exposition is an attempt to discover even deeper truths.  It is possible to go infinitely deep into anything, to be one with the flow of the universe. When you are that master, then it doesn't matter what you do, you create art.  The hero's journey mirrors our evolution. We start in some state. There is

A new season of your life requires new axioms, new beliefs and new perspectives. Axiom: In any discipline, truth is the only effective thing. Define the truth as the shortest path to the desired action, making the axiom tautological.  This shortest path is not necessarily in the space of time or effort. The time or labour it takes for a truth to become imbibed is a projection of that shortest path along some lower space. The truth can be intuited through reason. By reason the essence of knowledge is referred to; the pure sharp faculty of the mind. Reason can only grasp for truths that are already in one’s field of awareness. Once a truth is in one’s awareness, there is no choice but to excercise our reason and grasp for it. Its shape only becomes clarified in the labour of its coming into being. Human beings are creative by nature. All our modalities of existence in their most exalted forms are creative endeavours. Creativity is subtelty; understanding and expressing difference. Unders

Why disturb serene stillness? It is to only to attain clarity about what the stillness already conceals We do not reside in true stillness.  There is turbulence and flow all over its surface.  In composing all those flows towards a single direction.  In watching the whole process of their movement.  They extinguish, and we are once again left in stillness.  The inner having expressed itself as the outer.  what does it mean to see? To really see without hesitation, without flinching.  Every wrinkle, every crevice and every surface of another's skin.  To use your eyes as a mechanism to be put in touch with the real.  do we know how to see? What does it mean to hear? Listening to every word uttered from the other's mouth? Or rather watching every single movement of thought, every flex of the muscles on their face and every dilation of their eye. Letting each note ripple onto the silence of your mind. Until you are one with the very flow of thought they are expressing.  do we know

 The mind loves to escape.  At the base level we are escaping the fact that our ego is limited.  Life is about creating our own games and playing them perfectly to conquer our mind.  To create a game, one needs to establish a goal, a desire that deeply burns within him.  If this desire is not genuine, there is no start to this game.  There is no hero's journey without the establishment of a villain.  In reaching for a goal we get buffeted.  Romanticizing that situation, pitying it, resenting others these are all the common responses to this.  We are fundamentally lonely, playing a single player game.  Excellence in any pursuit is really conquering the mind.  If one does not move to change a situation it is because he does not feel threatened enough by it.  Comfort breeds complacency.  The only thing I am concerned with is human perfection.  Even then I do not care about others, in so far as we do not help each other.  That is truth.  The truth is that spending time in a social grou

 RL Agents - there are only goals. Goals in life are frames. Linguistically and through the whole mechanistic process we have a way of setting up our life to change what goals we are maximizing for.  Or rather even if we don't, we still have the understanding of how we are to deal with life - Victor Frankl -> Even if they take everything from you, you can still find meaning in how you deal with the situations that come up in life. I propose that that is the only way in which we can find meaning - A slave's freedom.  The only way to have integrity in the process of your thought, to not be a second hand human being is to be integrated. Self education is a step towards it. Saucha of thought is also to check what you allow yourself to be conditioned by.  The truth might break me. I've been mercilessly conditioned in every way that even when sparks of truth like this arise they can't last long. I feel tired already. There's infinite distraction, an incentive to open n

The truth is not a bludgeon. It is easy for a truth to be conveyed in language for the form of language is too gross an instrument to convey the subtleties in truth.  Once conveyed, we have access to those mental markers. Yet, if it is something that you are not yet ready to live by, or doesn't correspond to your lived experience then it creates debt.  In the same way as having conversations about concepts that you assume to be true without examining for yourself creates epistemic debt, having principles or prescriptions for life given to you by others creates existential debt. I suppose that is karma in some senses. I have often used these deeper truths as bludgeons. They are guiding lights for sure, for example the metaphysical understanding of the Upanishads however, if one's body-mind apparatus is simply not ready to live by the truths it sees, these truths can break them.  It is no different from an addiction, an obsession. The life of a human can be seen in some ways as m

 Fragrances often have tones. These are differentiated on the basis of how long they persist after the fragrance has been used.  People's personalities are like fragrances. We wear these different masks which are archetypes of behaviours. Like onions with infinite layers. Depending on the social group or the situation we are immersed in, our personality changes. Yet there is still a semblance of going towards the core.  As we become more sensitive to this process, we can see that at our core we are like children, bundles of joy. This plethora of masks is nothing but a collection of defense mechanisms to life's circumstances.  In essence, it is possible to game the system once one realises this; there are certain masks that society loves. I have been reading Feldenkrais recently, and in his language it is possible to put in the reps mechanically to develop a certain mask but those mechanical and fearful reps do not arise from a place of sensitivity and love.  Language is a modal

We humans love to suffer. From the day we're born, or rather from the day we pick up some linguistic fragments and start violently attaching meaning to this mess of qualia we call the world. Suffering is like a whirlpool in the realm of consciousness, constricting its free flow. We love our suffering, that is how we create novelty and complexity.  Actually. There's no me here. There is an I. All writing is written so that it may be read, and passed on to someone. It's a selfish endeavour, and has always been. We create the constrictions in this flow and then we create a whole drama around it. We love the sense of tragedy, of wonder, of playing around and frolicking observing and touching different parts of that drama. That is the only way we can have the spark in our eyes that little kids have, the sense of wonder only an innocent mind possesses. To get lost in maya, samsara, illusion. The christians romanticize it best perhaps, to have a love so great for the world, a whir

In sanskrit grammar there are three types of implication ajahati Lakhsan (implication by exclusion)- original meaning of the world is totally substituted Jahati Lakshana (implication by non-exclusion)- original meaning of the world is not substituted, but a new connotation is attached to the  The third approach is called bhaga tyaga lakshana (literally 'abandoning parts') and it corresponds nicely to hegelian sublation.  There is a truth in the bare linguistic expression of the sentence, but it is unrefined. It is in the process of thinking through and interpreting it that the truth is refined and 'lifted' aufhebung to a higher unity. This is how the mahavakyas are to be interpreted in the upanishads.  Everything that is written, is written in the hope that someone else may read it, but writing words down necessary kills some part of the truth you know. 

 your life is a death sentence.  these beautiful buildings, with their clean marble floors. the board rooms, the suits, the team building meetings. It makes me puke, the putrid smell of inauthenticity.  Bitterness. As you go home, to your perfect bourgeosie lifestyle, a temple of plastic. Aesthetic tupperware as you cook the cuisine of some culture that got appropriated. As you taste the pasta to make sure it is 'al dente' and you pass a snide remark about your friends and gossip about the newest developments to your clique.  The beautiful kitchen counters, as everyone tries to keep up, the furniture you appreciate, the skincare routine that has been 'working wonders'. your skin looks so good lady! that doesn't change the fact that it will decay and go to death. Freckled, wrinkled, disgusting with warts and protrusions or perhaps just old and in a flash if you're lucky.  Into the ground, burnt to ashes, eaten by vultures depending on your culture.  Where are the