My Too (Many) Cents

You were just a kid.  Society told you you were smart. You were good at the mathy stuff. The grownups liked it when they told you two numbers and you could add them really fast. They subtly encouraged you, to study more. Feed the machine.  Or maybe you were not smart. You realized that the world goes around smart kids. They compared you, with your siblings, your classmates your relatives. They gave you examples of striking personalities, feeding the tendrils of ambition in your tender mind. I want to be like X when I grow up. I will grow up and become successful. They never defined successful for you. You were implicitly promised that you would be loved and everyone would be nice to you when you finally became "someone".  Maybe like many of us, you fell into their trap. You worked on being good at something you didn't enjoy so that you could be better off than others, and finally they could give you some love. Respect comes with money, status and power they told you. If y...

here's a post that has been languishing in my drafts since last semester. Hello everyone, welcome to another rant. This time you get to see me at my most anxious, as I have an exam in approximately 5 hours and I should be getting to sleep but I got the motivation to write and I have learned better than to fight against the inner voice that rises inside and tells me to regurgitate something onto this editing page.  Of course, another semester of college has started and quiz week already crept up on me as I was involved in a plethora of other things.  Many different things seem beautiful to me and worth pursuing, such as music, fitness (not in a naive superficial aesthetic level which I believe a lot of gym culture (though a net positive in promoting health) has reduced it to), and also most esoteric (read schizophrenic) types of mathematics, physics and computation concepts (Category theory, Trinitarianism and Topology are somethings which I have recently become very interested...

 Hello everyone, welcome back to another unfiltered rant, this time at a more reasonable time as I attempt to fix my sleep cycle in college. I recently had the opportunity to visit the Krishnamurti study center in Chennai for a weekend retreat and have enlightening (i.e. discomforting) conversations with people who had been following K's ideas for much longer than me, but more importantly, people who were actually open to seriously inquiring about life and the human condition in contrast to many people in society today. Being on the beautiful campus was a great experience for me, though my definition of great also involves questioning everything I know about myself and society and going through existential crises. Once I came back into 'the real world' so to speak, specifically my college, I've been feeling as though something is off though there are perhaps more factors associated with that feeling than just the experiences. Here, I just want to talk about random thing...

 Hello everyone, I just felt like writing something which would get me canceled in the future today, so here goes. (Of course, I am just kidding, please do not cancel me, all my views here are transient and I am open to learning more about these topics if you have a more coherent perspective on them). These are views that have been informed by many things, e.g. Jungian Archetypes, David Deida, Kashmiri Shaivism, and One chapter I remember reading from Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy (and also possibly many other places which I forget mentioning. Well the first thing to clear, which seems so simple to me, yet I don't know how many people get wrong, is understanding masculinity and femininity as archetypal attributes of our egos instead of fixed essential groundings depending on our biology. There can be men who have a feminine temperament and women who have a masculine temperament. Now, In my opinion, the "politically charged debates" aren't exactl...

 Hello everyone to another random blog post. Today I wish to expand on some of the ideas I mentioned in my last post 'Stressed Out' from a different perspective which I have been evolving.  Of course all of this is just speculative and just my perspective so there is no authority from the position of which I am speaking. However, these are just observations which I have deliberated upon and which seem pretty plausible and interesting explanations to me. I had started reading Semiophysics by Rene Thom (which funnily I came upon by learning about catastrophe theory). It was very fun as the book has extremely dense but insightful concepts from varying disciplines. One of the main ideas mentioned in the book was related to salient forms which are basically discontinuities in the field of perception that allow them to be noticed (which he related to a different way of defining real numbers as discontinuities on a line). These could be anything such as colours, smells, sensations et...

 Hello again to a random rant of which the only redeeming factor is in my opinion the fact that it is as unfiltered as I can get. So apart from the fact that the title of the post is the name of a twenty one pilots song which I really like, I also want to talk about some ideas which have been zooming around in my head. I don't really expect anyone to read this however I just want to document these ideas because they seem interesting to me in their own right. So I've recently been reading to and listening to many talks by Gabor Mate. What initially started as a want to closely understand ADHD (after my lowkey insane rant last time about neurodivergence which I almost considered deleting) led me to his book scattered minds (which ironically I didn't finish) but I have also been listening to a lot of his talks. Many of his ideas seem strikingly relevant to me.  One of these for example is how genetics only increase our predisposition towards certain diseases and are not determ...

 Hello again everyone to a rant which is just going to be me talking to myself which I don't expect anyone else to be reading, so read at your own risk. Before even starting this rant I have the meta ironic image of a troll face emoji saying "I WON'T TAKE MY MEDS" or the meme of "This could have been prevented with regular therapy" being presented in my head as a possible satirization of what I wish to say here so I feel I should address that. Ironically satirizing an image to remove the romanticism associated with the perspective of the person in that situation is not an adequate response to their argument.  Okay, here we go. The first point I want to make which seems very counterintuitive to me even as I say it and all the rational parts of my brain scream at me to stop is that in purely intellectual terms or from deductive methods of reasoning, you simply cannot understand the intersubjective experience of someone else's consciousness. Actually on sec...

So, I recently watched a video by the YouTube channel natural hypertrophy (which is a great channel you should check out if you have time) titled "I am better than you". In Nietzschean terms he explains how saying that you are better than someone is something society constantly tries us to guilt trip over which is an example of the slave inversion of values in practice. He further differentiates between the humility of the strong will, which realizes itself to be strong and sees itself truly placed compared to all the other geniuses around us compared to weak humility which tries to downplay itself while enjoying the attention it gets from people saying that someone is so good yet remains humble. Instead of accepting the harsh reality of continuous improvement being required, it would rather stagnate itself and others around it even to the point that it starts feeling miserable about itself instead of accepting its true calling and engaging in a sort of Dionysian dance of cre...

 I haven't written here in quite a bit and it was like I was bursting at the seams to write about the new experiences I had, so I decided to just compile the things I wanted to write about in one post instead of going through the toil of fleshing out different and detailed expositions in different posts.  I recently started college and in a lot of my first semester courses, we have been studying about logic. The laws of thought such as the law of identity, the law of non contradiction and the law of the excluded middle are good enough crystallizations and approximations for the everyday process of life, but realistically they are like all our systems of thought, nothing but approximations. In a way thinking through thought is like taking a slower and more rigorous approach through the path made by the dynamic flow of awareness. I was trying to read the phenomenology of spirit, and in that it seemed that by very carefully threading language (as also seen in some religious metap...

 Hello again and to a 4 AM rant. I should probably wait and formulate my opinions on this topic in detail but thinking about this has left me with this sense of urgency, telling me that if I do not write about this now, I probably will forget about this idea. So without further ado My conception of problem solving To give an analogy, my conception of problem solving is like jumping over a hole in the ground. The harder the problem, the longer the jump. Between this end and that end of the problem, there is always that jump one has to take without thinking, for thinking itself enters new territory. As we solve harder and harder problems, the length of this hole keeps growing. For optimal growth we must confront problems which we do not know whether we can solve. If you truly do not know whether you can solve a problem or not, you do not waste time thinking about what if you can't and what if you do; you can devote yourself and your whole attention sincerely to a problem. The Process...

Here's a post I'd written previously and never published because I'd left it partially incomplete. "Change is the only constant" I'm sure you've heard of this well known platitude at least once in your life. But if you actually think about it, isn't it a bit contradictory? To say that change is constant implies some sort of constancy albeit at a meta level. As human beings we always look for things like patterns, causality and try to predict what may happen. Even though the sentiment of this statement is correct, it is this human need for everything to fall in line, perhaps only in an analysis at a higher level of abstraction which it betrays. A better image which expresses this statement would be that the universe is like a child which is only beginning to feel out its surroundings. It creates sand castles or expresses joy in the same moment as it brutally steps on and destroys some plants or bugs, yet we would never be able to resent it for its destr...

I extended a poem I'd written earlier corresponding to my deepening understanding of Nietzsche.  Standing on top of the mountain Contemplated the wanderer. What purpose had his pursuits Of only climbing higher? Tired and exhausted He finally wanted to sit down But he wanted to sit down Only when he knew others wouldn't frown He looked down for a second Into the deep dark depths A chasm of death and destruction Which cleaved the inside of his soul He shivered and backed away terrified And decided to continue his journey Higher, even higher Terrified of what he saw beneath. He didn't have it in him To confront the abyss It wasn't climbing which had tired him. Standing ever higher  Contemplated the wanderer  What purpose had his pursuit Of traveling higher and higher The toils of the world  Lay heavy at his feet As he looked down At a foggy jagged landscape He saw a chasm of stagnation Skeletons littered, the bitter and so was the snow. The sorrow of the world called ou...

Cleaning our room is something which we all know we should be doing but keep skimping out on. Recently, I cleaned out my room and my books and I had a unique insight which I thought was worth sharing (Yes, my blog is pretty random). So, how does a room or an office space or a toilet or anything get dirty? It happens with the passage of time, when you do not know the specified place to put something or when you skimp out on keeping it where you know you should. However, that which is not kept in order continues to remain where it has been put. Each time you leave your room, you are reminded of the fact that you decided to hang up your jeans right there instead of folding them and putting them back in your wardrobe or something along those lines. Over time, the pile of clothes reminding you of your laziness or your disorder keeps growing until it becomes unbearable to look at, so you either clean it all up with humility or start littering another part.  This I think, is exactly the m...

 As someone who just recently finished school, the phrase "someone is working really hard" is something that has been thrown around a lot for students, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that hard work or to be more precise, self-flagellating effort is pretty worthless and is in fact indicative of some deep rooted problems which need to be resolved. Now, just saying this probably has some alarm bells ringing for you, since as a society we romanticize such activity a lot, but once I explain my points I think you would have a better understanding of what I mean.  The Stories we Tell ourselves Our personality and our social interactions are mostly made up of stories; stories we tell each other and stories we tell ourselves. The fact that stories are convenient fictions created to derive meaning from objective reality does not deter them from having profound effects on that same objective reality; Money for example, is a story that we tell ourselves, but a huge pro...

I came upon this line of thought (I like the metaphor of a line of thought because it represents an image of a line of moves in chess in my mind, which is exactly what I believe this to be) while dealing with what this framework calls the problem of frameworks.  The problem of framework basically examines whether there is any grounding or consistent framework through which you can analyze the world at all. There is a deep sense of unease in accepting relativistic or nihilistic frameworks however even those themselves are consistent frameworks at a meta level. The brain, like Krishnamurti would say likes to function in total security. This problem deals with that very same meta level, and whether there is any consistent algorithm (for lack of a better word) to derive security or meaning or rather meta-meaning (if that is a word, since nihilism has in itself a sort of security built into it). Dogmatic ideologies would have you believe that the answer to this is a yes (these answers...