My Too (Many) Cents

 Terrence Tao said in one of his interviews that sometimes some problems are just not solvable within one lifetime.  Because of being born at the wrong time, your attempt to look at the problem is like trying to climb the sheer face of a mountain with your bare hands.  I suppose with the truth it is always like that. The sheer determination to bring something into being which does not currently exist. That is what brings forth greatness.  There is great sensitivity and hardness to that. Austerities are in some sense a bulwark for the inner sensitivity to bloom.  Two authors I immensely respect are Krishnamurti and Kapil Gupta. They have tasted and embroiled themselves in truth for a good proportion of their lives.  In some sense they are like Rumi, whose writing I have also been absorbing the past few days.  However, there is a lightness and carefreeness in Rumi.  It is a ecstatic sensitivity that in its highest movement reaches up to the gods. An...

  Those books do not interest me which are not written in the author's blood and tears The carefree bounce of the sunlight from the leaves of a tree. The child's carefree singing as he skips along a path laden with autumn leaves.  The parent's reluctant joining in on the child's wild abandon, freeing them from the anxieties of a middle class existence.  As they walk along together and feed the ducks splashing around in the pond.  That is a day I remember well.  The thoughts of getting ahead in the ladder of work.  The envy of comparison with those who had been around them.  The resigned hopelessness of a failing marriage.  Exploding into a flurry of rage.  The pure desperation and frustration of two children who never quite learnt to express these things. Or perhaps were never heard.  But that is not the story I lived through.  For it was the grating on my ears, of the sadness in their anger and the softness in their rage.  Tha...

 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 ...

 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 ag...

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 trigg...

 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 ...

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...

 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 endles...