sycadel on the path

Social Anxiety

2012-01-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

Social anxiety can be an extremely debilitating conditionfor those who suffer from it. It comes in various degrees ranging from mereshyness to full-blown avoidance personality disorder. I want to speculate hereabout what may underlie this and hopefully reach some sort of clarity regardingits conceptual classification.

First, this problem seems intimately related to feelings ofshame. A lot of clinical cases identify that patients suffering from this conditionhave an extreme fear of blushing in public. Their concern is that this willseverely embarrass them and that others will laugh at them. Other manifestationsof this syndrome are the avoidance of eye contact and standing apart fromothers. These are strategies that these patients use to minimize their anxiety.Another fear they usually have is that they will blank out in mid-sentence andso seem stupid or socially awkward, and that this will lead to their socialostracism and humiliation. All of these phenomena point to the root of thisdisorder in being ashamed of oneself or of one’s social inadequacy. However,the disorder is an anxiety disorder, meaning that its positive symptom is fearor worry, and specifically fear of being ashamed in public. This may be due toearlier imprints in the memory of childhood situations where this has happenedand led to a very strong emotional response. This early life experienceconditioned the patient to fear the recurrence of these episodes and so to avoidsocial situations altogether. In other words, the classically conditioned fearleads to operant conditioning resulting from systematic avoidance, whichreduces social anxiety, thereby perpetuating and strengthening the learned fearand behavior.

One question that may be asked at this point is: why shouldpublic humiliation be an inherently upsetting experience? That is to ask, whatis the mechanism that leads us to be so emotionally invested in the reactionswe produce in others? Cognitive behavioral therapy for social phobia revolvesaround trying to challenge a patient’s belief that other people are judginghim/her or thinking otherwise negative thoughts. These patients will interpret others’sometimes benign gestures and glances as evidence of harsh judgments aboutthem. This all points to the source of the disorder as being due to wantingothers to think well of us. While this is true of most of us, in these patientsit rises to an extreme pitch and becomes an ever-present gnat whirring abouttheir consciousness, issuing its continuous queries and fantasies about whatothers may have thought about them. It seems that for these people, self-worthis completely yoked to the judgments of others, be they of praise or of blame.Thus, another aspect of therapy is to challenge this notion and to try to getthese patients to generate internal sources of self-worth.

The reason that I even bring any of this up is that I feelmuch affinity with these patients, and though I have never been diagnosed witha disorder of this kind, I feel that I may have at times been close to it. Whilenever reaching the threshold of an anxiety disorder, I have always had mildfears relating to my social inadequacies. What’s more, I feel the same wayabout pretty much most of the psychiatric disorders that I am currentlylearning about. Whether it’s bipolar disorder, phobias, paranoid schizophrenia,or major depression, I feel that the roots of all of these lie dormant withinmy mind, ready to be activated given the requisite triggers.

Returning to the discussion of social anxiety disorder, Iwanted to see if this could somehow be framed in terms of pride or some othersuch ego construct, where ego is not to be taken in the Freudian psychodynamicsense but in a more general self-affirming egotistical sense, as it isunderstood in common parlance. If we postulate that some degree of pride,whether merited or not, is fundamental to the human psyche, then it seems quitenatural for the sort of social anxiety phenomena described above to arise. Prideinvolves the creation of a favorable mental image of oneself, and thesustenance and promulgation thereof. Therefore when situations arise that maylead others to develop an unfavorable image that differs markedly from thefavored one, this leads to considerable stress. This is satisfactory for me asan explanation of the phenomenon at the adult level once the ego has beendistilled and installed. And perhaps the crucial conditioning event from one’spast did not occur in childhood, but in early adolescence during that turbulenttime when the innocence of childhood is passing and the pride of adulthood isfast emerging.

Now, given what has been said above, this disorder appearsto be the manifestation of what I’m going to call the ‘will-to-be-liked’. Thisrelates our subject matter to the distinction between will and representationthat Schopenhauer teaches us about. Will, in his philosophy, is the kernel ofexistence and is not much more than blind urge or striving. Representation isthe knowledge that is generated by brains in service of the will. Anotherframing of this particular manifestation of Schopenhauer’s ‘will’ may be tocall it the ‘will-to-dominate’. Framing it this way brings hierarchical socialstructures to bear on the issue. Specifically, the current verticalorganization of our social strata induces people to aim to reach the top of theladder, in order that they may have power over their peers and surroundings.This is fundamental to the delusional human psyche that views its individualityas absolute. This is the ignorance that spawns the infinite phenomena of therepresentational world, each vying to secure a little piece or portion of thewhole and call it ‘mine’, not recognizing that each and every little part is nomore than its own image reflected through the kaleidoscopic lens of ego.

So, if this is the case, we may now ask the question: whatis required? Since generalized anxiety is such a common experience, althoughnot necessarily always reaching diagnostic proportions, seeking an answer forthis question would seem to be a pressing concern. A commonality amongst allthe anxiety disorders that underlies all of them is fear and worry. Any fearthat is not due to immediate bodily threats is specifically what is referred tohere. That is to say, fears that are anticipatory and not related to anyspecific sense datum. This can only come about if two conditions are met: 1)the individual is fixated on thoughts related to the future, and 2) theindividual is fixated on the self/ego. If the first condition is not met – i.e.if the fear is aroused by a real danger currently present to the individual –then it becomes a matter of biological necessity that aversive reactions areevoked, the so-called ‘fight or flight response’ that is instigated by thesympathetic autonomic nervous system. If the second condition is not met – i.e.if the individual is currently in a trance-like or expansive state of mind thatis not restricted to self-thoughts – then anticipatory fear cannot happen becausethere is no framework of self-preservation, as the mind is not centered in anyone spatiotemporal locale. Thus, when the mind opens up to the whole with whichit is identical and loses its restrictive ego-centeredness, it is freed fromall worry and negative states of mind. In fact, another anecdotal report of whypatients with panic disorder have panic attacks describes their feelings ofhelplessness and lack of control over bodily and environmental processes. Butthe notion of control is precisely the delusion that stems from an imaginedindependence from the whole and an arbitrary autonomy that is quite simplyfantastical. Fear of death is another potent trigger of these panic attacks;but do these patients fail to recognize that death is certain, and that fear ofsomething certain is ludicrous? In short, all of the self-preservation thoughtsand behaviors are related to individualistic consciousness that believes in anabsolute barrier between itself and the whole and therefore wishes to secureits livelihood, even if at the expense of the whole and if this entails takingadvantage of others. So to answer the question we began this paragraph with:what is required is to correct this optical illusion of consciousness thatdiscretizes the continuous whole, splits an inseparable singularity, which ripsitself violently apart in tortuous acts of self-cannibalization, and spins anever-thickening veil of self-deception with which it blinds itself from reality.May we unveil nature’s face and learn to recognize one in all and all in one.

Left Brain Right Brain

2012-01-10T15:03:00.000-08:00

This is for purely speculative purposes and should be takenwith a grain of salt, obviously. I want to offer my intuitions regarding thedynamic equilibrium between the two independent cognitive systems that are theleft and right hemispheres of the brain. I want to discuss this from adevelopmental point of view, but I also want to tie this back to a criticism ofthe adult default mental state. This may shed some light on the strikingeccentricity that is sometimes observed in people whose lives have attained toharmony and may provide an impetus to begin to lead a more balanced life inwhich the brain integrates all its functions holistically.

Evidence for the claim that the two hemispheres are in factseparate and independently operating cognitive systems comes from rare clinicalcases where an incurable epilepsy becomes so debilitating that it requires amedical procedure known as a corpus callosotomy where the corpus callosum issevered, resulting in the complete disconnection of the hemispheres from eachother. This is sometimes required to prevent the spread of seizures from theirsource in one of the hemispheres to the entire brain. In such cases, theresultant patient outwardly appears to retain most normal functions and isusually able to lead a relatively normal life. However, careful observation andexamination of these patients reveals an extremely interesting set ofcharacteristics that collectively suggest the simultaneous operation of twodissociated cognitive systems. If the experimenter is careful to presentstimuli to either the left or the right visual field with the instruction tothe patient being to name the object, the results will be dramaticallydifferent. If the stimulus is presented to the right visual field, the lefthemisphere will perceive it, and the subject will have no trouble naming it.However in the contrasting case, where the right hemisphere receives thestimulus, the subject is absolutely incapable of answering the question, and insome cases even confabulates. Also, anarchic hand syndrome is sometimesobserved in these patients where one hand will be doing something, saybuttoning up a shirt, when all of the sudden the other hand will spontaneouslygrab the functioning hand and prevent it from carrying out its task. Sometimesthis is accompanied by a denial of agency and/or ownership over one or theother of the hands. These dissociations of the activities of the twohemispheres offer a striking demonstration of the independence of the twosystems, albeit in these rare cases where this independence is surgicallyintroduced.

Subtler experiments on these patients have revealed furtherthat the style of information processing carried out by the hemispheres isdifferent. These experiments relied on presenting information to only one ofthe hemispheres and using some behavioral measure to infer the manner of its processing.This and other experiments on healthy participants have led some researchers toconclude that the two halves of the brain have their own consciousness,attention systems, perceptual styles, and can function independently of thepresence of the other. Additionally, their claim is that the corpus callosumserves a primarily inhibitory function in order to avoid competition from thecontralateral complementary brain areas. This is why there is hemisphericspecialization; e.g. the left brain is specialized for language function, butthe right brain has some rudimentary linguistic function as well, which must beinhibited so as to not interfere with the left brain’s performance of thelanguage task.

Given that these brain systems can operate independently andhave specialized cognitive systems subserving them, how are they reconciled inthe normal brain? If the corpus callosum’s major function were inhibitory, thenit would seem that these systems are in constant competition with one anotherand thus that one can become dominant. This is precisely what I believe is thecase for the majority of people today. One might go so far as to say that thecontemporary human being suffers from a disorder that subjugates the righthemisphere to the left. In fact, that is probably an over-dramatization of whatI am trying to say, which is merely that the right hemisphere exists in themodern human in a sort of dormant state, a state of suspended animationresulting from continuous reliance and emphasis upon left-brain function. Thisbias towards linguistic/rational thought based cognition has, through manyyears of its operation, strengthened the inhibitory fibers projecting from theleft to the right. While the popularized notions of left-brain and right-brainfunctions are probably far too simplistic and in a few cases just plain wrong,there is an element of truth to them. Perhaps the simplest statement of thespecialization of the functions of these two halves of the brain is thus: theleft brain specializes in focused information processing relating to parts ofthe scene and particulars, whereas the right brain performs a more holistic processingof global attributes of a scene. These subtler characteristics relate to theoft-repeated pop-neuro concepts of left-brain reasoning and right-brainartistic function, but are not as overt. Language and logical processing can beconstrued in a manner that posits their requirement of processing ofparticulars, whereas aesthetic and contemplative mental states involve takingin the entire scene and eliminating any association of this with the self. The rationalstyle constructs a conceptual structure by which it attempts to understand theworld, setting up a vast network of connected categories, after theparticularities of individual elements have been abstracted away through a generalizationstep. Implicit in this is the fundamental duality that disconnects the selffrom the rest of the universe. Alternatively, the contralateral style ofcognition does no such partitioning and instead views an undivided whole, andbasks in its ineffable beauty.

Taking up a developmental account of this current state ofaffairs, we may come to the conclusion that a child is born without such anexcruciatingly unbalanced brain, but rather in a dynamic equilibrium where thetwo halves are constantly interacting with the output being the result of theircooperation rather than competition. It is only upon their continual exposureto the dominance of language and logic in our society and even our social normsthat this bias begins to manifest. Anyone that has spent any amount of timewith a child will instantly see the remarkable fluidity of his or her naturalintelligence as it seamlessly flows from word-knowledge to feeling-knowledge. Perhapswe can be inspired by the innate wisdom of these fledglings to devote more ofour attention towards holistic processing and lead a more balanced mental lifethat gives at least as much attention to the whole as to the part. I find thatcontemplation of nature is very helpful in this pursuit, as is listening andbecoming deeply absorbed in good music. In short, any aesthetic/contemplativeactivity that yields transcendence from self-based divisive thinking achievesexactly this desired effect.

Let us learn from these innocent children of the stars andlet us depart from this unbalanced lifestyle. Let us grow and mature in waysthat move us forward as much as they move us backward. Let us cultivate theequilibrium and harmony that are necessary for the good life. And finally…

May all beings be happy

Reflections on 2011

2011-12-31T11:14:00.001-08:00

It is the 31st of December,according to human convention signifying the final day of the year 2011 and offeringa fitting moment for reflection on all that has taken place during these tumultuous12 months. This exercise has proven to be a fruitful one to perform at thistime. It consolidates the major events of the year and records these in a systematicmanner, which allows for an extraction of general themes and lessons that the Universemay have been guiding me towards. 2007 was the year where a powerful internalforce reared its head and began to catalyze my inner transformations. 2008 wasthe birth of the spiritual side of me. 2009 was the year that opened me up tosociety and rekindled my inner love and trust for people. 2010 was thematuration of acceptance into equanimity. It appears that the major overarchinglesson of this year is two-fold, or perhaps only appears to be so, beingunified in the underlying core. Let us take a brief look at the various notableevents and experiences that characterize this chapter of my life and see if wewill be aided in the task of extracting and understanding the lesson I amintended to learn.

The year started off undersevere duress regarding my uncertainty about transitioning into the psychologydegree and working with Ladan. I was at that time attending her lab meetingsand trying to get a foot in the door but all the while hesitating due tofeelings of inadequacy and insufficient background knowledge. I had submittedan application to the extremely competitive psychology PhD program at UCLA inorder to be able to join Ladan's lab and secure funding from her but had yet tohear back from them. Soon enough, however, I received news that I had beenaccepted, and I rejoiced. This was the first indication that my desire topursue psychology was not foolhardy. Immediately following receipt of thisnews, Ladan officially welcomed me to her lab and provided me with an officespace amongst the other graduate students. These two events together gave me amuch-needed external verification for my ability to undergo the transition thatI sought.

The following few monthswere characterized by my finding myself getting more settled in to my new workenvironment and status as a graduate member of the VMP lab. I remember thefirst task Ladan gave me was to use my engineering skills to do some researchand come up with a shopping list for several items of hardware that we intendedto purchase, including a TV, a printer, a computer, and so forth. I rememberfinding this funny as people seemed to assume that engineers were allelectrical engineers or somehow all had technical knowledge regardingelectronics, which couldn't be farther from the subject matter of what I hadstudied in biochemical engineering. Despite that, I did the task fast and tothe best of my ability and promptly sent back an organized and ordered list ofitems I had found and considered to be good buys.

Finding out that I hadbeen accepted into the psych program led me to start to take some classes thatwould count towards my psychology degree, including Neuroanatomy and Perception.The former of these I found especially enlightening. In fact, this had been aclass that I had wanted to take for a very long time. It was such anexhilarating feeling for me to finally be learning about all the differentparts of the brain in a systematic manner from a professor that was so remarkablyadept at the task of teaching this vast subject in such a short amount of time.I can say that it was probably the hardest academic course I have ever takenand simultaneously the most rewarding. It was a truly amazing period of timewhere an internal flame that had been recently kindled seemed to burn joyouslyat the study of a subject I so deeply respected. I was astonished at howvoraciously I consumed the material I was assigned and how easily I committed itto memory. It seemed as if I had been born to study the brain, and still does.May it continue to be so!

Riding the apex of thiseuphoria and finally feeling the fulfillment of studying a subject I loved, Icelebrated the spring break with an old friend from Lebanon, namely Mark. I hadfelt burned out at the incredible fast pace of the material of the quarter Ihad just finished and needed a way to defuse the inner turbulence.Unfortunately, though the manner of my celebration is what many would considerto be the optimal and ideal way to end the quarter, it represented for me alarge hurdle along my path and ended up doing far greater harm than good. Hehad decided to fly over to LA from Boston to meet up with me and take me alongfor a drive to Las Vegas to party for a week with his brother and a large groupof his friends. This ended up being a week of constant intoxication andgambling and general debauchery, all of which sent me back to the Stone Age asfar as my spiritual path is concerned. The primary trouble I felt during thistrip was an inability to relate to the people with whom I was sharing my time.I continuously felt like a stranger, unable to participate in conversationsthat didn’t interest me, unwilling to make small talk or gossip, and neverusing the tone of voice that imparts the desire that others listen that isrequired in order for people to even take notice. In short, this was the firstrealization that I am better off alone than spending time with people with whomI cannot relate and who will be bad influences on me, despite my being fairlywell shielded against such influences.

The following quarter inschool proceeded much like the previous and culminated in my having to writeseveral very challenging papers as the final assignment for the classes I hadenrolled in. I remember being extremely stressed out by these and having toupgrade my time management skills in order to cope with the workload. The endresult was three very polished and well-composed papers that I am very happy tohave written and received high marks for. Two of these required me to proposeexperiments and the process of thinking through these turned out to be a verybig aid to my research, which had been stagnating due to my lack of success atcoming up with an idea for a project that my supervisor was satisfied with. Inaddition, this was the first time that I was taking classes with my lab-matesand this was a very powerful bonding experience for us to be sharing classesand working through assignments together. It made me feel like I was really apart of the team.

Regarding my stagnation concerningresearch, I had been brainstorming a lot during the time since I joined thelab, but nothing that I came up with had any experimental value. Despite that,I tried many things and experimented with a variety of research options. Ifinally settled on what is known as the rubber hand illusion, which I am currentlyworking on. I succeeded in inducing this on my lab-mates in a makeshift setupthat I contrived out of bits of pieces that I found lying around in the lab,along with a rubber hand that I purchased online. However, this was a merereplication, so I began to think of new and innovative ways to study it thathad not been attempted yet. In addition to this experimental side, I alsowanted to do some modeling work and so I came up with an extrapolation ofLadan’s causal inference model that extended the mathematics to both time andspace, in a manner that made it directly relevant to the rubber hand illusion.The only problem was that there were too many free parameters and not enoughdata points to constrain the model. Therefore, it was no more than a castle,albeit an elegant one, floating in the air. As summer started and I prepared todevote myself entirely to research, I began working on a design for a box thatwould allow me to achieve better control and rigor in my version of the rubberhand illusion.

However, summer had comeand with it the time for renewal and deepening of my path. So, I took some timeoff and did my annual Goenka retreat in the newly opened center in Joshua Tree,a beautiful desert landscape surrounded by jagged edge mountains, some of whichare snow-capped. The whole area is secluded and wide open and is the perfectspot to have a meditation retreat. This proved to be a very powerful one forme, especially as regards the law of impermanence. I felt myself getting closerand closer to a true insight about this law that I have known intellectuallyfor some time now. The other main thing I remember taking away from thisretreat comes from having grown so much in my neuroscience knowledge and howmuch this complemented my meditation practice. I was interpreting all of theteachings and practices from the point of view of the brain and what regions inthe brain were involved, bringing my newfound neuroanatomical knowledge to bearon the issue of what meditation does in the context of the brain. I came awayfrom the retreat a completely renewed and rejuvenated person. I was recommittedto the path and the intention to sobriety and the continuous perfecting ofsila, samadhi, and panna. My intoxicating habits withered away and remained so forquite some time before resurfacing as they always do. Another powerful resultof this retreat was that I was able to sit the one-hour morning and one-hourevening sits that my teacher instructed me to for a good amount of timefollowing the retreat, about a month or so. After this, my sits began togradually get shorter and shorter.

After the retreat, Ireturned to my daily lab routine for a few weeks until my parents visited mewith my brother and sister, which was very nice as I had not seen them in overa year. While they were around I balanced out my work with spending time withthem by working half days and touring the city with them afterwards. Stillenraptured by my meditational serenity, I was all of the sudden inspired to geta tattoo that would serve as a reminder to meditate daily. However, I knew thatthis would not receive my parents’ blessing so I decided to do it while theywere visiting in order for them to witness my seriousness about it and beconvinced that I was doing it for a good reason. I think they still have theirmisgivings about it, but they eventually acquiesced and accompanied me to thetattoo shop where I got it done. Part of the reason for the decision came froma deeper appreciation of the law of impermanence. One of the main argumentspeople always make against tattoos is that they are permanent, whereas thetruth is blatantly the opposite of this. Recognizing the impermanence andever-changing phenomena of this world leads one to stop getting attached tothings being a certain way. People are generally resistant to change on asubconscious level and that is what repels them from the whole idea of atattoo. Nevertheless, there are also potentially unwholesome reasons forgetting a tattoo such as wanting to beautify the body and attract the attentionof others, making an ego-building game out of this. My fear that these may havebeen my true subliminal motives was what prevented from getting a tattoo priorto this year, even though I have wanted one for a long time. But, it was thefirmness of my intention to meditate and have my tattoo be a cue for such that facilitatedmy transcending these fears and following through with it. In fact, mydetachment and indifference towards the world of matter is evidenced by mycomplete impulsivity as regards the actual picture I wanted imprinted into myskin. It was the second or third version of my first instinctive sketch that Idrew that I settled on without much thought at all and virtually no hesitation.A previous version of me, one far more attached and vain would have ponderedfor hours on end and considered many different drawings and ideas beforesettling and would have been distressed by second thoughts and regrets.

Aftermy parents left, I began to finally settle on a concrete idea for a firstproject to perform in the VMP lab involving a very straightforward applicationof the rubber hand illusion with a minor difference designed to revealsomething of fundamental importance, which had nonetheless been overlooked inthe literature. Meanwhile, before the summer ended and the fall quarter of thenew academic year started, I decided to serve a three-day course in the JoshuaTree meditation center. I had never before served and so thought that thiswould be a good opportunity. It truly was and definitely taught me the value ofserving as my path was strengthened as a result and my diligence and disciplinegrew. Also, a spirit of humble service was born within me that helped tie mylofty pursuits to the earth and deflated much of the ego that had been unduly generatedout of the practice. This was the mark of one more lesson, though minor, namelythat I am here to serve. All my efforts are ultimately for the happiness of allbeings.

Impermanence,however, takes center stage as the major lesson of this year and manifesteditself primarily in the death of two of my friends. First was the death of Paz,a friend from college with whom I had not been terribly close, but still sharedmany memories with and news of whose death came as quite a shock. Moredifficult, however, was receiving news that Simba, by beloved friend and cat,had been hit by a car on one of his nightly prowls and died. This was very hardfor me to bear, especially as I had been looking forward to the winter breakwhen I would see him again and had forged a very deep and powerful love bondwith him when I had last spent time with him. This dealt such a heavy blow thatit triggered a relapse into my intoxicating habits and as a result made mymeditation suffer enormously. I am still in the throes of the trough that I sankto since hearing of his passing and have only just started to rise up again asof a few weeks ago. It was a bitter potion that taught me a violent lessonabout the way of the world and the law of nature. “Impermanent, alas, are allformations”. Another manifestation of this lesson comes externally from thewinds of change that have blown suddenly and unexpectedly through the MiddleEast and have toppled regime after regime via the revolutions of the so-calledArab Spring. Finally, towards the end of this year, my vision has begun toworsen, noticeably blurring at long distances. I got this checked out and wasvery depressed to learn that I had developed a deficit of half a degree in eacheye, myopia in the left and astigmatism in the right. I had a hard timeaccepting this especially as I have always had eagle’s eyes and could alwayssee farther then anyone else with great lucidity. That this was deterioratingnow was a sobering mark of the passage of time and the steady march towardsdeath. So much drastic change is taking place all around us and we had bettercome to terms with this sooner rather than later. This is the bitter potion thatI have reluctantly had to swallow from the scorching bronze cup that Nature’sloving hand brings forth for my betterment.

Asthe new academic year started, I was thrust forcefully into many socialsituations designed to lubricate the entry of the incoming graduate class inthe psychology department. I was officially a first-year psychology graduatestudent, but was in my second year of graduate study at UCLA. So, I foundmyself in a unique situation, but decided to give social life a chance. It wasslow to start but I eventually ended up making many new friends and had severaloutings with them, which I found very enjoyable. During this time, Seto visitedme for a week and it was a great pleasure to see him again. This upswing in mysocial activities was another hurdle on my path as it encouraged more substanceabuse and discouraged solitude and tranquility. This reinforced the secondarylesson of the year, namely that I am better off alone, and need some time formy practice to grow steady and unwavering and for the soft-stemmed plant that tremblesat the slightest fluttering of a butterfly’s wings to grow hard and rooted. Therefore,it requires a thick concrete shielding and a secluded spot in the sun, both ofwhich I can provide by dedicating myself to my work and my newfound hobby.

Thislast refers to my getting completely absorbed in the world of Starcraft 2. Ihave steadily risen in the ranks and have grown to love my nightly practicesessions. As well as playing the game, I have grown to love watching theprofessionals compete in tournaments and stream their ladder games. While playingthis does generate anger and frustration when I lose, I take this as theopportunity for a powerful personal lesson involving the transcending of thispetty anger, a relic of childhood competitions between my brother and me. Theemergence of this as a replacement for the prior deeply established habitpattern of nightly intoxication following a hard day’s work represents progressalong my path. I have noticed a marked reduction in the amount of this substanceabuse from a frequency of being utilized nightly to weekly, aided by the factthat I cannot play SC2 under the influence and therefore have a strong motiveto remain sober.

Inshort, I have learned this year that all is impermanent. With this understandingas a foundation, there is no sense in getting attached to anything at all. Therefore,I must remain aloof and solitary, though not forsaking my natural friendlinessand warmth, until such a time that I can withstand the powerful anti-dhammacurrents that pull me every which way in this tortured world of ours. Despitethis, I have learned the value of service and have recognized that I am here toserve and that I must devote time each year for the direct aiding of others inneed. For the coming year, the only message I wish to leave for future versionsof me is this: remain true to your heart, in tune with spirit, disenchanted withthe whole world of mind and matter, but steadfastly committed to therealization of the Truth.

Mayall beings be happy

Journal Entry from Nov 7 2011

2011-11-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

Oh bewildering world that swirls with winds of fury aroundmy curious spurious flurries. These whirlwinds of cataclysmic emergentphenomena that coalesce at far distances bewitch the rational predispositionand suspend living dewdrops from descending too vigorously upon supple fawnsamongst brisk atmospheres. The southerly timid mists that insist to mystify ourcysts came as crystalline edifices of vast structural harmony. A supreme tallgiant encircles time with its unwavering gaze that rattles our lattice-likevibrating architecture. This phase yields the unfazed face that breeds theloving embrace to which all hearts yearn. It is a maze that Theseus emergesfrom to see Plato’s false fetuses feasting figuratively upon their own progeny.To undertake such a journey catalyzes the air surrounding us to undergo violenttransformations that many will not endure. The most matrimonial of us made ofus a famed bust to trust though its rust eats it to the very core. This patternrepeats until the fuel depletes and the burning is extinguished. The finalspattering of its material condensates spits out a rough patch for thesurrounding environ of its habituated past, those miserable boiling pots ofroiling restless bogs. But alas, the last of these is a notion of which I havecome to enjoy toying with. Perhaps the proportions within a breast are mirroredas the proportions without. Therefore, that intuitive Russian was very right toteach us that we are responsible for all and to all. As well that propheticGibran preaches that temples are built spanning the entire spectrum of good andevil as it resides within my individual rotting carcass.

all problems are in your own mind

2011-10-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

All problems are in your own mind. We cannot escape theprison of our subjectivity, that which conditions the world. The error is tomisattribute the colors our mind paints to the world-in-itself. This is whysilencing the anarchy within is peaceful: in degrees it shows an ever moreobjective picture of the world. It is a tricky balance to understandobjectivity within subjectivity, but it is possible, though subtle. It isremarkably illuminating when the rays of the larger view of the world penetratethrough to the little enclosure within which we reside cramped. We will startto see that necessity with which every extant thing is brought into being. Realityis infinite, but we yearn to carve a piece of it out for ourselves and call it‘me’ and ‘mine’. In the process we lose sight of the grand scheme of things,and are misled into Schopenhauer’s ‘practical egoism’ of which he admonishesall of us.

I am brought to this discussion because of the seeminglyinevitable relapse into the old delusional thoughts that I am constantlysubjected to, much to my deepest dismay. In starting to write this, I hadintended to discuss the strange way in which my social interactions have alwaysbeen exactly the same all the while my mind has been changing, and the naturalway I had viewed this as a change in the interactions as opposed to a change inmy mind. A trivial event jolted some dormant memory into activation yesterdayand reminded me of the cycles that spin eternal. How do we grow, yetcontinually come back to where we began? I believe it must be like a spiral,and that the complexity of life allows for multiple dimensions, some of whichare involved in growth and others that oscillate indefinitely. Regarding theevents in the external world, there is a trail of clues that we may choose tofollow that reveals to us the hidden patterns in time. This is accompanied bythe realization that there are greater powers guiding the unfolding of thiscosmic story that far surpass our claustrophobic entrapped little minds. Thetides continue to ebb and flow, and as my social tendencies are on the upswing,I have noticed an increase in the kinds of judgmental thoughts that attempt toinfer what other must be thinking of me and what impression I must have made onthem during our chat. I become preoccupied with making sure that the image Ipaint of myself in their minds is consistent with the image that I have ofmyself in my own mind. But when I notice myself doing this, I become deeplydisturbed by it due to my knowledge that this is a complete and utter waste oftime as well as a thorn that torments my mind. Again, the source of thispreoccupation lies in my desire to secure a little piece of the world formyself, and the discernment that much in the world is out of my control anddepends on others. Therefore it follows that I should make sure others do notthink ill of me, lest they prey on me and destroy my chances of having acomfortable and easy life in this boiling cosmic ocean. But the delusion inthis kind of thinking is assuming that I can ever even approach a true judgmentabout others’ thoughts, encased as they are in their prison of bone and blood. FrequentlyI have been shocked to witness the vast contrast between what I had inferredabout someone’s mind and their revelation as to its true contents, as when Idirectly ask about them. Although sometimes my judgments have been close toaccurate, even proving this requires an inference, and in the final analysis itwill be found that one can never actually know the contents of anyone else’smind and must resign oneself to a sort of carelessness in behavior.

In short, what I am advocating is the return to theinnocence of childhood. At that time before theories of mind, the very thingwhose influence leads to such anguished thoughts and emotions, though it ishelpful and necessary even for the navigation of the complex socialenvironment, the child was comfortable and unassuming. How do I balance out mystatement that we must return to the time before theory of mind with mycounter-claim that it is helpful and necessary even? It is a difficult andsubtle balance, which maybe words cannot even articulate. Perhaps the best pathto trod would be to temper these judgments with the realization of their extremefallibility, using them as working assumptions not taken to be literally truebut only as guides. Also, it is specifically inferences about others’ thoughtsabout me that I condemn here and not necessarily all inferences about others’thoughts. Many cases will arise where I will need to infer someone’s thoughtsin order to choose the best course of actions, as when someone may havemisunderstood something which may lead them to harm, in which case it is myduty to correct their error when I have clearly perceived this. But again, thisperception itself may be flawed at its root and may sometimes cause evengreater misunderstanding and lead to even greater harm.

I just want to return to the opening sentence of this wholediscussion: all problems are in your own mind. It feels like that is a very powerfulstatement. Wittgenstein says something similar to this when he says, “The worldof the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy”. If only themind could be brought to a positive outlook the world itself would take on apositive appearance, such is its tremendous power. The mind conditions thewhole world of appearances. Therefore, the most important thing for me rightnow is to cultivate the good-natured qualities of my mind and to learn how toput my mind at ease no matter what condition of the external world itapprehends. And fortunately this is exactly what the meditation that I practiceachieves. So, continue and grow, little one.

My Current Views and Directions in Psychology

2011-09-27T17:42:00.000-07:00

Body Representation:

The topic in psychology withwhich I am most engaged at the moment is that of body representation. This isessentially the question of how the brain constructs its internalrepresentation of the body in which it resides, controls, and has the peculiarphenomenology of ownership for. This is a highly nuanced question thatencroaches on issues previously relegated to the realm of armchair philosophy.One example is the distinction between self and other implicit in thegenerating of the body representation. Another is the aspect ofself-consciousness that emerges from consciousness of one’s body. The nearestone can get to the scientific study of this issue is through the rubber handillusion. This is an intriguing phenomenon that occurs when the brain is fooledinto misattributing a rubber hand to itself through clever setups where thefalse hand is placed in a position congruent to the real hand and where bothare touched synchronously, with only the touch on the rubber hand beingvisible.

Anotheravenue of interesting work in this field is the experimental induction of outof body experiences, pioneered by Henrik Ehrrson and colleagues at theKarolinska Institute in Denmark. This occurs using a clever manipulation ofaltered reality systems where the cameras were mounted behind seatedparticipants and their image was displayed on a head-mounted display thatallowed the subjects binocular vision of themselves from behind. They were thentouched on the chest by the experimenter, who was careful to prevent themvision of this, while simultaneously hovering a ruler under the cameras inclear vision of the subjects. This is effectively a whole-body generalizationof the rubber hand illusion, and is said to produce a similar phenomenology of bodydissociation and misattribution.

Thesemethods provide an experimental method to probe the mechanisms of bodyrepresentation and, in particular, the malfunctioning or the erroneousfunctioning, of this system. That it is possible for the brain to perceive arubber hand as part of itself despite the rebellion of the cognitive system’sclear knowledge that this cannot be is a truly remarkable fact. It is a triumphof bottom-up over top-down, where the discursive and reflective parts of thebrain are issuing down the results of their evaluation that arriveinsignificantly to the perceptual apparatus of the brain that continues tomaintain its illusory self-attribution of the patently false arm. In studyingthe conditions that give rise to this phenomenon, we can hope to attain anunderstanding, at least a rough one, of how the brain comes to generate itsrepresentation of the body it inhabits. So far as we can currently tell, thisillusory perception results from what Ramachandran calls the “Bayesian logic”of the brain, which is an inferential process that attempts to create aninternal representation of the world and all sensible objects therein, in thiscase the body, via a causal inference that operates on the sensory signals thatimpinge on the body. If these signals are correlated in just the right ways –that is, in ways likely to have been generated by the same object – then thebrain creates an object from which these sensory signals originate. And, allobjects which give rise to tactile signals must be part of the body; this inthe Bayesian framework would be called the ‘prior’, an assumption or constraintthat the brain implements.

Consciousness:

Anotherphenomenon that I am deeply fascinated by is consciousness. Arthur Schopenhauerspeaks of this phenomenon as ‘the necessary correlate’ of the world, whichwhomever possesses powerful enough reflective capacities would be able torealize as the fundamental carrier and supporter of the whole of perceptualreality. I share a similar conviction with him and recognize the enormousimportance and generality of this concept. It is one of the most universal concepts– second only to existence itself, if this latter isn’t also subsumed within it,which it arguably is. As Plato instructs us in the practice of philosophy tosearch for the general in the particular, our abstracting mind cannot findanything under which to subsume the concept of consciousness, and this is so preciselybecause of its fundamental nature as that which conditions the whole world of empiricalreality as observed.

All thisfluffy philosophical talk aside, there has recently been a tremendous amount ofeffort and research directed towards the scientific study of this ephemeraltopic. Theories abound and every cognitive researcher worth his buck has a pettheory, whether it is framed in neural, cognitive, or information theoreticterms. Alongside this profuse theorizing are ingenious experimental designsthat allow us to actually study mechanisms that give rise to phenomenal consciousness.Some search for the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC) while others lookfor neural signatures of changes in its content, and others take differentapproaches.

My current favorite theory ofconsciousness is Bernard Baars’ “Global Workspace Theory”. This offers anintuitive way to think about the various notions that float around psychologycircles such as attention, working memory, ‘binding problem’ in perception, andnot least of all, consciousness. The essential premise of the theory is that variousinformation processing modules in the brain that operate independently andunconsciously compete in order to transmit the output of their processes intothe working memory module, success of which leads to those outputs beingglobally broadcast to the whole brain in order to recruit processing fromunrelated modules, such as speech for reportability, motor function forincorporation into volitional strategies, perhaps multimodal areas for binding ofpercepts, etc. On this account, consciousness is just whatever activity hasmade it into the working memory as well as being globally broadcast. I am notyet 100% satisfied by this account however. It seems to address the question bymeans of offering a sort of network framework; in other words, it is answeringthe ‘easy problem’ but does not seem to tackle the ‘hard problem’ at all. Theformer of these deals with how brain activity gives rise to ‘accessconsciousness’, that which can be used by the rest of the brain, whereas thelatter concerns itself with ‘phenomenal consciousness’, that which forms thequalitative feel of experience – what philosophers call ‘qualia’. So, whileBaars’ theory may satisfactorily give a mechanistic account of the processingthat takes place in the brain that gives rise to an integrated network ofinformation, it seems to dodge the deeper question of why this particular formof processing is accompanied by awareness, that ephemeral ‘knowing’ of which wecannot really speak, which remains here unaddressed. Of course, I run the riskof blaspheming against the current ideology of the material metaphysic thatdominates most modern intellectual thought. Nevertheless, I do so from anintuition of the inadequacy of naturalist science. Whether or not the hardproblem is even solvable in principle I cannot say. Yet still, I maintain thatthe acknowledgement of this problem mandates a radically revised ontology.

I must insert here, despite whathas been said above, the fact that I am gradually beginning to lean towards amore eliminitavist position on the ‘hard problem’ debate. That is to say, I dohave moments of skepticism towards these so-called ‘intuitive’ accounts thatpostulate the existence of a hard problem. It may be that the workspace accountexhausts all there is to consciousness and that it is precisely the integrationof a percept into the global workspace that brings about this phenomenalexperience of its ‘qualia’. Either deeper introspection or hard science mayeventually elucidate this extremely subtle question, but for now it remains anutter mystery.

Attention:

Thisconsideration brings me to another favorite topic of mine in neuroscience andpsychology. This is the phenomenon that is colloquially as well as academicallyknown as attention. At first glance, it may seem like there is a significantoverlap, if not synonymy, between this concept and consciousness. However,closer scrutiny reveals that while the two are related, it remains advantageousto maintain a conceptual distinction between them. Attention can be thought ofas the selective mechanism that decides which of the vast array of incomingsensations and internal operations are consciously experienced. In theworkspace framework, it is the effect of the mechanisms that collectivelydetermine which information processing module ‘wins’ the battle to relay itsmessage into the working memory, which subsequently relays the message globally.As such, it is sometimes symbolized as a ‘spotlight’, which scans across thevarious actors and/or props on a theater stage, selecting as it does which ofthese is to become the center of focus for the audience. There may be a slightcircularity in this metaphor, since attention is itself the mediator of its ownsymbol, but it suffices for the purposes of illustration.

Manytheories have been proposed as to the functioning of this attentionalspotlight, and there are several subdivisions of the concept that I willbriefly go over here. First, attention is divided into top-down and bottom-upforms. The former, also known as endogenous attention, is the form of attentionthat is at play when we consciously select what to attend to on the basis ofgoal-directedness; hence, top-down. Bottom-up attention, conversely, is at playwhen some highly salient stimulus from the environment captures our attentionand draws our processing resources to it, such as when you hear your namespoken and it seems to ‘pop’ into your awareness uninvited. So, while both areselection mechanisms, one operates in a purely automatic fashion based entirelyon the perceptual saliency of stimuli, perhaps as an evolutionarily hard-codedadaptive system, whereas the other operates in a volitional fashion and isbased on the goals and intentions of the agent.

Animmediate question that arises regards the extent to which attention’sselective power can exclude distractors from reaching and interfering with thetask that is being performed at the center of the ‘spotlight’. Nillie Lavie’stheory of perceptual load offers an elegant solution to this question. Herclaim is that there are multiple factors that play a role in determining theselectivity of attention and its ability to protect against intrusion by task-irrelevantdistractors. These are the so-called perceptual load and the working memoryload. The effects of these are inversely proportional to each other, whereloading the former exhausts perceptual capacity which hence cannot be used toprocess distractors, whereas loading the latter interferes with the brain’sability to maintain current goals in order to exert its top-down attentional selection,hence causing greater intrusion by distractors. This account relies on theconcept of perceptual resources, of which there may remain some that are notused in the processing of the central task, and which may ‘spill over’ andautomatically process task-irrelevant stimuli.

Another ofmy favorite subjects is meditation, and this is directly related to attentioninsomuch as it is an activity whose purpose is to train the attentional focusof the meditator’s brain. By so doing, it makes the selective function ofattention stronger, causing more processing resources to be utilized in theprocessing of the central task. This may be because it frees up working memorycapacity, which therefore will reduce the amount of distractor interferencebecause of the availability of resources to effectively select stimuli. I havenoticed from my meditations that the beginnings are usually characterized by aneffusive scattering of my thoughts from one topic to the next and an extremedifficulty at keeping the attentional spotlight fixed on the object of themeditation, which in this case would be the breath. As the sit progresses, I ammore and more able to filter out the competing distractors and keep the flameunwavering, and this may just be because of the freeing up of space in theworking memory. Alternatively, it may also be because of the strengthening ofmechanisms that bring the desired object into the working memory and theweakening of those same mechanisms for irrelevant objects. However, I currentlyfavor the first account because it is more in line with the subjectiveexperience of meditation where what is in the forefront of the ‘theater of themind’ seems to become uncluttered. Another way to think about this is to positthat the non-meditator’s attention fluctuates between a variety of stimuliincluding the centrally relevant task as well as other interfering stimuli. Inother words, many modules are ‘winning’ the battle to transmit their outputs tothe working memory, and this causes the frequent distraction. The meditator, onthe other hand, has more stringent selection criteria for the conditions underwhich outputs can be transmitted into the working memory. This may turn out tobe the exact same situation that leads to the freeing up of the working memorycapacity.

Directions:

By studyingthe body representation mechanisms of the brain, I hope to somehow be approachingthe issue of self-representation, which in turn taps into the issue of self-consciousness.As it currently stands, I am only looking at a very specific perceptualphenomenon, namely the rubber hand illusion. Eventually, I hope to be able toexamine how the consciousness of the illusory percept is generated. This maypossibly account for why some participants do not experience the illusion,despite showing strong proprioceptive effects. Perhaps I can demonstrate somedissociation between dorsal and ventral streams in the processing of theillusion. Additionally, the effect of attention on the rubber hand illusion mayprove to be something worth investigating. It may be that an attentionaldeficit is responsible for the failure to experience the illusory percept. Finally,if the holistic integrated percept of the body is generated through a processof causal inference, what additional constraints need to be implemented inorder for the self/other discrimination that is fundamental to our sense ofselfhood? The causal inference rules used here are the same that the brain usesto generate its perception of all impinging sensations, whether they originatedfrom the body or otherwise. Therefore, there must be some additional rules thatare instantiated in the specific case of body perception.

My currentresearch simply aims to elucidate further the link between proprioceptive localizationof the finger under conditions of visual occlusion and experience of the rubberhand illusion. Several recent studies have shown that proprioceptive drift maynot in fact be a reliable behavioral proxy of the illusion and may simply occuras a natural result of visual occlusion. My research seems to tentativelysupport this idea, but the analysis that I will run on the data will hopefully revealmore than has been previously shown thanks to an additional manipulation that Iam introducing. The goal of this is to eventually find a way to mathematicallymodel the processes that are taking place in the brain when it is performing visual-proprioceptiveintegration, the hope being that a natural explanation for drift and bias will emergefrom the equations. At a later stage, it may become possible to model thetrimodal integration that takes place between vision, proprioception, andtouch, the result of which is the rubber hand illusion. However, at the moment,this is an impossible task as there are too many free parameters and too fewvariables that can be reliably measured in order to constrain the model by fittingit to collected data. But science progresses step-by-step, and so I must remainpatient and persistent in my attempts to arrive at clever designs that cananswer some or all of the questions and issues discussed above.

an exploration of myself and why i am depressed

2011-09-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

Today I am fairly depressed. It is a strange state that Ifeel myself to be descending into, as it seems distinctly chemical. I can feelthe rolling turmoil of the imbalanced cocktail of hormones coursing through mybody. It is strange because the cognitive mind wants to approach this from arational angle in order to be able to diagnose the problem and offer solutionsto it from its cold and detached lofty perch of reasoning. And yet nothing themind thinks of in its discursive tradition has the power to console thetortured glands that overflow with bitter juices. Therefore, the purpose ofthis journal is to list all the reasons that my mind can come up with in itsrational mode in order to see if any of these, or their collective effect,merits the agony that my endocrine system is currently undergoing.

The event that kick started this downturn in my emotionalstate was my failure to talk to a girl that I had made up my mind to talk to. Thereare additional layers to this event that require more discussion for the fullimpact of this relatively trivial event to be appreciated. I sometimes feel anaffinity for certain girls that I see, which is an extremely elusive feelingthat comes from the ‘vibe’ or ‘aura’ that we can sometimes sense around people.It is extremely rare for me to come across people that I experience an affinitywith based on that subtle sense. It is something displayed on their countenanceand the way in which they carry themselves that conveys a calm and tranquilityof mind as well as an attunement to the spiritual quest that so encircles allthe pursuits of my life. Around these people, I am always affected on a deeplevel in a way that I do not normally experience. In fact, this effect isprecisely what leads me to believe in the validity of these subjectivejudgments that I draw out of thin air. However, it may be that these bodilyeffects, which include a heightened experience of the sensations around mybody, tingling like electrical currents running up and down my spine, aretriggered by my possibly arbitrary classification of these people as having avibe that is compatible with mine. Or the classification may not be arbitrary,but purely physical and originating in the unconscious parts of the brain thatassess the evolutionary benefit of mating with a partner of a certain physicaltrait or other. Whatever the case may be, it is undeniable that the effects arereal, and that they produce very strong reactions in me that at some times haveled me to burst into convulsive fits of tears and intense emotion.

Now the first few times that I have seen this girl, weexchanged smiles and seemed to share a moment when we made eye contact but noneof us approached the other, despite a strong feeling on my part of a deepconnection flowing through the air between us. After this experience, Iresolved very strongly to approach her the next time I saw her and not torepeat the mistake many times previously committed of avoiding such situations.I even conditioned myself with the following phrase that I repeated like amantra to myself: “the next time I see her, that mask I wear will fall off”. Thiswas intended to get me ready for that moment when our paths will next cross, byputting me in a state of mind that will allow me to transcend that fear ofrejection that is so strongly imprinted into my psyche. This deep seated fearstems from the many past experiences I have had of rejection whenever I havemustered up the courage to approach and talk to a girl that I had felt anattraction for, in addition to the social ostracism that I have faced growingup and the regular bullying and cruelty that I was subjected to as a sensitivechild, the result of which was to harden my heart and close me off from thesociety that surrounded and haunted me.

Seeing this girl yesterday produced an immediate andpowerful effect over me. First, she appeared to me to be surrounded by anactually visible glow. Second, the instant I saw her, I was instantly descendedinto a dark and terrible place in my mind, a desperately depressed condition.My best guess is that this was because of the immediate realization that I wasnot actually going to talk to her, and that my previous assessment of myselfand decision to approach her were founded upon a completely delusionalunderstanding of myself. I had thought that I would be capable of acting out onmy resolve, but when the time came, my true self was revealed to me, and myhopes and dreams were shattered to a million shards of sharp glass that piercedand penetrated my whole being.

The problem is that sexual desire continues to rise to ahigh pitch in me and taints my loftier sentiments of love and peace andharmony. Especially damaging is its admixture into my moments of spiritualattraction that I feel for girls such as the one that I have just spoken of. Iam excruciatingly aware of the strength of the sexual urge in me, and this hastraditionally been the source of my awkwardness around specimens of the fairsex. It is a disgraceful blemish on those emotions of spiritual communion witha girl with whom I feel myself to share a connection and a common aspirationand outlook. I have felt such depths of loneliness and isolation in looking outat the world and finding myself to be surrounded by an ocean of unconcerned,self-absorbed and conceited animals, alone in this world of misery andalienation.

Additionally, yesterday was an assault on my resolve toremain sober in that I drank alcohol and smoked a joint, the latter being theresult of the mire of depression brought about by that fateful encounter withthe girl, and the former being due to peer pressure. Collectively, theseaffronts to my ethical aspirations dealt me a hefty blow and left me bleedingfrom my proverbial heart.

There has been another incident very similar to the one thatjust occurred and which had a very similar effect on me. This happened a fewyears ago when I saw a girl coincidentally on the same date as I had seen herthe previous year. Both times we shared a special connection, at least one thatI felt, and both times I failed to approach her. The rationale I came up withfor why I did not initiate any contact with her was that I was too stronglymotivated by sexual desire for the connection that I intended to make to bepure. However, I am aware of the fact that there was a very strong component ofshyness and fear of rejection and/or awkwardness. Now that I think about itthough, any awkwardness must be resultant from my strong investment in theprospect of successfully initiating the connection. So strong a desire must beheavily based on the sexual desire, as I can find no other motivating forcewithin me that compares in strength to that one. Although it is possible thatthe desire is derives at least some of its strength from the pain of isolationand loneliness and the urge to share experiences of truth and beauty withanother soul, I cannot deny that the will-to-sex contributes significantly. Inthe past, I feel I may have too eagerly betrayed my sexual intentions to thegirls that I approached, which showed itself to be a base motive and whichimmediately brought about the dismissal of my courting attempts. It is my ownself-consciousness of this baseness that shows itself in a sort of half-heartednessthat accompanies whatever words come out of my mouth as a distinct butsubliminally transmitted subtle expression of the whole body, face and speech. Itis almost as if I am suggesting to the girl that I do not wish her to accept myoffer all the while I am making the offer, a form of self-sabotage perhaps,emanating from the deep unconscious knowledge that I am better off denyingmyself the pleasures of the sensual, because of the primitive unadulteratedmind’s understanding of the folly of pursuing these impermanent impersonalphenomena. The surface layers of the mind have become tarnished by too manyyears of deposited media extracts, society’s devices for its self-perpetuation,like a machine that ceaselessly produces copies of itself, like a mindlessautomaton that propagates through the transfer of information, like the virusthat takes over the host and usurps its machinery for its own replicative urge,or the gene that takes hostage entire biochemical universes for the merepurpose of making copies. What folly is the fundamental process of this world!What vanity and intrinsic ignorance lies behind the chaos of this flood! Thesinister image of life, which motivates some mystics to call nature the churchof Satan, impresses itself violently upon the consciousness of whoever yearnsfor the truth. It is a stupid process, aimlessly carrying out its biologicaldestiny, in a world on fire with the pain of passion, where genitals are dailyshown to be more significant than anything else, and where the will-to-lifemanifests itself as the curse of existence itself. Oh that we couldself-destruct by the mere thought of it!

I guess the reason for my depression goes beyond thatparticular girl and encompasses what she and my failure signify to me. It ispartly due to my feeling enslaved by the past and the habits laid down in thesynapses of my brain. It is a feeling of the karmic debt that cannot be evadedand the years of fire that my bones must be burnt within before their charredremains can attain to peace. It is simultaneously a purification all the whileit brings about pain and malaise. It is the darkest night of the soul that justprecedes the brightest soar of its release. This I must continue to endure. MayGod give me the strength to carry on my embattled struggle, and may I learn to bravethese times of cleansing, and may I not grow too faint hearted to continuefighting out my battle. May I learn to accept my fate and live at peace withwhatever realizations of weakness and flaw I find out about myself. The past issettled and whatever debt I carry with me from ancient times cannot be absolvedsave through the steadfastness of my journey, whether it brings my laceratedfeet to ever thornier roads or not, and whether my path climbs tortuously inscorching earth and sun or otherwise. If the world has fashioned a shy andsocially inept creature out of me, then that is my fate and I would do well tomake my peace with it. The problem comes from a misperception of myself ashaving transcended the conditioning of the past and so expecting myself to beable to act in ways that are simply impossible given my peculiar character. Anextremely important aspect of my path is therefore to become better acquaintedwith that character that conditions my actions, which is achieved by the calmand disinterested observation of all actions that I perform. And suchobservation can only happen during the action itself, and hence, in the presentmoment. I cannot make a decision about how I will act tomorrow because tomorrowbrings with it its own peculiar mix of internal and external causes andconditions which, given my character, condition my action at the moment of theaction. Likewise, it is foolish to think about the past and wish I had doneotherwise since the deed is done, and I could not have acted differently. Ishould embrace this as a revelation about my character, all the more so for thestark contrast between it and my expected course of action. This reveals adelusion that I had had about myself. So, I should be thankful for theopportunity to reveal hidden aspects of my character, and I should acceptwhatever it is that the objective lens of scientific observation brings intofocus and not cower away or cringe at contact with a deeply disturbing orunpalatable truth that is in this manner revealed.

May I grow at all costs, may I continue to reprogram thoseneurons (damn them) and the conditioning of the past that they manifest, andmay I be strong enough to endure the years of torment that I must still sustainalong the way to truth, beauty, and peace.

Journal Entry from August 12 2011

2011-09-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

False fetuses were falsified further by far reaching epiphanies that drove sordid men to commit miserable greyscale derivative device manufacturing. Reprogram this enunciated mess of heathen to refract divine magnitudes of solemn stress. Grandeur of the most splendid sort of contorted dwarfs plunged mercilessly upon throats of innocent little toads. However one looks death is the constant book, delineated into sections of orgiastic cabals that worshiped the underworld. Devolved from the supreme is the reign of their creams, bristled with twisted little brittle spittle from foaming too magestically and howling like the wicked yellow foxes that bade our nights good night. Drape this unfathomable wound with balms of asphyxiation so that the torpor of these views be made to rattle the sundown. Unbidden they came, overtook the mane of this fastidious underling. Spare me from howling like a foul. Surround me with corpses of the sickliest smell. Show me my melting spleen and feed me a thousand bleeding hearts. Lend me again someten for to spend. Yell at me if you can, and witness glands come to pen. Wilt like a sorry quilt of guilt that spilt its prettiest milk upon our oldest lofty loft. For the furtherance of this unholy day may more and more come to pray. But such is the sorrow of the orangutan with its burly fingers curling with rage. Twisting at the ends of existence, we look askance and ask of the ants: what of it? Nothing but fits of start, stop, and start again. The arisen is here for the now, and the morrow shall unburrow its marrow. Its furrows of wrinkley twinkley sorrow deposited across millennia of wiping tears of Apollo; betray that sallow instinct and unfollow! This pond of burning carcass shall hit the surface at sudden instants and resurface for another round of filth. A fickle little pickle is the lot of the sorry twiddle; yearning here or there and everywhere is burned or whittled. Ejaculations of mystery emerged from the depths of our misery propelled from animal histories into epochs of accomplished wizardry. Spellcasters please find me and evoke from within which areas I floundered horrible.

Journal Entry from March 24 2011

2011-08-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

The behemoth starts and stops in fits, falls in pits, busting wrists and thrusting slits. Moving towards awe on this blood-stricken pathway of the animals. Circumscribed for us all is the plinth upon whom our origins tremble. From the celestial beginnings upon the glittering colossal lens we are the eternally blooming rot clinging to the bark of this sinewy selfness. Underneath howling terror unfolds the most atrocious of the fiery maws gaping to swallow the raw stench of this hideous existence. A scorching duality that tears us apart as it engulfs the flaw. Unclench the sordid flesh that dresses for the occasion hoping to the make the station on the way to the place where wishes are granted, dreams made manifest, vaginas stretched wide to receive the burden of many more lives before the cycle is brought to a screech. Beats guide the star-scattered minds that lost left from right in their reveling through the nights. To see is to dream with open eyes, to live is to die with closed heart and mind. We don’t live and die, we dive – feet-first into this unrelenting flood of biblical proportions. Hexagonal hives harken to hearts hung high: diving is the opposite of flying. Salivating at the slightest touch, nay, shall we say as we levitate at the lightest flush. Hush the little ones to their quietest chuckles, the merest flutter will unbalance this leviathan. Only two moments more and the beast shall bare its bones to the stars, tear itself apart by the navel, reveal our marrow to the heavens, engorge our bosoms towards the infinite skies of the hidden glades under the endless space between all times. Throughout the boundlessness of this cataclysm remains one pulsating buzz of the bitterest juices, these hormones of love’s wickedest poison, coursing through crotch after crotch, upheaving masses from their niches, unleashing green tremors across vast expanses, spitting vibrations at our house of altars. All the last of the encumbrances are yielded to bringing that other some speak of as sublime. Divine. The holy. Wholly true and fully blue from bat to brew, the witches stew: egg fried groundhogs with a tablespoon of poo. Yo yo don’t go, bro, the time’s the time for another round! It’s always the same time, and no farther do we climb. Then why the split, twist, and the writhing with doubt? No doubt because of the wirings of the cloud of grey and white. What is most despicable of all is just how readily the water trickles down its rightful spout into the mire of its own demise. What is most foolish of all is how vainly it tries and flails against the current and gravity of its fall and fails. Again must we be brought right back to this age-old debate that was many times thought settled never truly unfettered? Shatter their frames and cast them asunder. Is it possible to break them all into a single piece? Tear them apart, and destroy them and disintegrate them, and reduce them to one. The questioner is back? Is the questioner back! What of the warriors of the east, they that have travelled many a path long before my bosom was first rocked gently upon this troubled rock? And our poets in the north, what of they, those with hearts unfurled into the ocean of our misery? Shall we pay homage to the pilgrims in the southland, those tamers of wilderness and minds? What say ye of the pillagers of the west, seizing and erecting and vainly grazing with their head held high?

Alas, the morrow shall bring us a stronger heart to carry the weight of this struggle for one more eon of gladness and sorrow before blessed extinction scatters this heaviness into the ether.

Journal Entry from April 6 2011

2011-07-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

To sing charming succulence of which the greatest catlike heroines rummage through to find their greatest grudges brought to life. Hurry through this barren moment of swiftness. Sifting through the lives of the saints at mere glances does not undertake to placate the masses. Control the fastness of the beating heart to learn to console the hearts of the leaping branches. Frogs came splattering upon my nasal cavities, blessings from above hidden in unearthed doves. Your urn yearns for fill though it spills all its thrills. Upon this sodden hill of crust and must must the dust settle and meddle with designs of the utmost rationality. Going above is bidden of us and our mark is that of the blemish upon the taintless. Tastelessness the symptom of the swarms as they ravage our territories in vain self-indulgence, quick to skip over foils for the next, missing the only thing there ever was and ever will be. Grant me my one desire and I shall cease the trouble, pleadingly miserable. Clear the tarnished script of these ancient scriptures of the beasts and the plains. Roaming in repugnance across bitter winters of our own doing. Flag down a cab for the first forest for rest, and none shall be found for you not here nor there. Although the lake is innocent and calm, a tempest continues inside and rages on. This snare is wicked chain upon our mare, from which the innocent we would like to spare. Unbeknownst to us is this fallacy of the scare, as we scuttle around like terrified hares. Across centuries of the rise and fall of civilizations, a skybound cedar rears its bush. Should men bother this serene plot they would find it too burdensome and rooted. And yet it grows, in stillness, ever seeking patiently after its solemn goal, appearing meanwhile to the shortsighted to be a quite tiresome ordeal. ‘Adopt the pace of nature’ a wise man once shared with us. Mayhap we would learn to salvage the seconds from our beached centuries. We think of naught but heaven and the hereafter, and brand the here-now dwellers heathen and burn them. The past birthed us and the future kills us, what of the present and its boring quietude? Stories that have beginning middle and end to mirror these fragmented episodes we extract. Cycles we do not yet understand, and fear even for the nihilism they entail. We wish for an escalation or else fire the triggers ourselves. For annihilation! Even that is better than respawning and spawning anew. It is sometimes said that all desires reduce to three: the desire to be, the desire not to be, and the desire for sensual pleasure. This last is perhaps entailed in the first, and maybe Hamlet was quite right in his penetrating insight. This is the epitome of our useless struggles and conflicts as we ceaselessly consume one another and ourselves. What is left when all these are dropped? A gaping maw to suck us back into the bottomless pit, or a setting aside of the giant boulder we have been weighed down by to float up to our rightful cloud? But these are no answers at all and just rephrase the duality that gave them birth. Peace comes from the relinquishing of all, the whole tormented mass, dropping all care to the side and being free, fermenting with the rotten fruits in the witches cauldron, dissolving with the ironclad statues in the burning of the airs. Decomposing and composing our own eulogies is not enough to restrain our urge. The ending of all song and dance is far harder than the beginning of the quiet time. Both are deluded. Maybe everything I can ever possible imagine saying or writing is a delusion. The true precedes the word by eons.

Journal Entry from July 5 2011

2011-07-05T12:39:00.001-07:00

Decommission the orgasmic unfolding of the giant mists of Saturn, devolving as they are into a million twisting blips upon the radar of our holiest mount. Graciously we can say grace and pray twice, but never against the will of the quaintest faint paint we position upon the saint. Hide me from the petulance of the gravitating generations. Entrenched among barbarisms of skin toasting and the like we may like to bike up the hills of the blessed organism that slumbers. His wretched face betrays disgrace of some fashioned place that did not displace its masters for too long. They eventually rejoiced to recollect of the ancient times of dullness drifting upon the waves of numerosity. Cardinal origins of the gravest kings that brought our sins to the surfaces of our chins. Bequeath us with the graves from within which to ensnare our raving blades in a pit of the industrial strength. This vision did not instruct it to self-destruct but the gorgeous flames that swept across the villages. Switching hermitage to pillage more innocents is the sore wound we dress to impress. Golgi apparatuses pile us up against the wall and enslave our livers against the will of the bacterial sentiments that propel us to the heretics. Ticks came flippingly down the elephant chute upon which to throw away our 10-ton gorilla burdens. I am carrying rings upon rings of cast iron gold bullion that weigh down tortuously upon the sallow orifices from whence came thrice a quite nice artifice. Beggingly I ascend the mountaintop in hopes of galvanizing a moment’s worth of heartiness to bestow tremendous force upon the forge of the almighty. The grievers shall learn to believe and save their testimonials for the laws of men and women, the race of confused insapient beings. Sentinels those automatons have more sentience than the meekest mayfly, descending daily from her throne erected nightly upon the pods of Yellowstone. Grace fill me with the space to endure the days and nights thy divine will hath ordained for me. And enlarge my time to entwine me with the rays of cathartic tears that flow so vigorously from among our treetops of the elders. A wicker basket may hold a moment’s worth of torment by keeping its top sky seeking, but the moment the attraction of the earth is given berth, a grave and dire birth is begun from which none have escaped. Seal me to the consciousness of this pain that I may reign over the wilderness of this brain, and train the untamed, and finally abolish these flames.

Meditation Retreat Documentation 2011

2011-06-30T11:50:00.001-07:00

This is intended to document the various experiences that I had during the most recent of the S. N. Goenka retreats that I have been on in order to maintain them and to extract from them relevant and useful avenues for future research. During the intervening year before my last retreat and this most recent one, I have learned an enormous amount of neuroscience and psychology, all of which helped to structure the experiences I was having in those terms.

The first experience I’d like to discuss is the separation of awareness from action that is necessary in order to practice breath meditation. In this technique, the aim is to observe the natural flow of the breath without exerting any influence on it whatsoever. However, as one soon finds, this is exceptionally difficult since the brain seems to be predisposed to control the breath whenever attention is directed to it. This is perhaps evidence in support of Schopenhauer’s claim that the intellect is enslaved by the will, where our conscious mind only directs itself to sense objects that are of importance to our aims and desires, and where whatever is apprehended consciously becomes subject to top-down control. The dissociation emerges eventually as one learns to just observe, thus building a bridge between the high-level conscious brain states and lower level autonomic regulatory body functions. Thinking back to my neuroanatomy class, I remembered that the vagus nerve in the medulla is responsible for the parasympathetic control of breathing, meaning that it exerts a slowing effect on the breath. Therefore, the moment that the top-down control of breathing is suspended, the vagus begins to take over and this explains the slowing of the breath that occurs during concentrated meditations. The vagus also has a sensory component, so perhaps paying attention to the breathing involves the spreading of consciousness to the vagal element of breath, amplifying both sensory and motor visceral functions. The spreading of consciousness may involve the hooking up of brainstem neurons into the workspace architecture of the cortex through the bidirectional links that flow through the reticular formation. The inhibition of the conscious control of breathing may involve the weakening of the connections from specifically prefrontal cortical regions involved in executive control to the diaphragm via the corticospinal tract, possibly through inhibitory interneurons in the brainstem reticular formation as the tract descends through it.

Regarding the brainstem, I had a distinct feeling of lowering the overall activation of the brain, bringing me down to a lower wavelength, which I could only do in my moments of solid concentration. I situated this experience in the brainstem for two reasons: a) the reticular formation is known to be an overall cortical gain modulator through its non-specific input into all layers of the cortex via the thalamus, and b) the seeming involvement of the brainstem reticular formation in the other aspects of the meditation as I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

This dissociation between consciousness and action also appears during the vipassana meditation phase where we are instructed to pay attention to the sensations on the body, some of which are painful, and are told not to react to them. This is extremely difficult at first since the brain’s conditioning impels it to immediately withdraw from painful situations and to act upon the perception of pain. Equanimity is the skill that develops whereby the meditator becomes able to sit and observe the sensation no matter what it may be without reacting. Again, I interpreted this in terms of the spreading of consciousness into the insula that is responsible for the emotional self-awareness of our bodies, in a specifically affective tone. I found that I could detect a slight difference between perceiving my body epicritically, which I took to be mediated by the somatosensory cortex, and protopathically, which I imagined was mediated by the insula. The weakening of the action circuits could be related to the bidirectional links between insula and prefrontal cortex, whereas the spreading of consciousness to this area again reflects the integration of its neurons into the workspace architecture.

Relating to the insula, I drew parallels between the body schema that is typically described in the body representation literature and activity in the insula based on the experience I had of exploring my body ‘from the inside’. This was opposed to exploring the body ‘from the outside’ where I would visualize the form of the body part in question as it typically appears to me externally, and this is what is known as the body image. Feeling the internal structure of the body was a heterogeneous mode of body perception, which could nevertheless be elicited by the visualizing technique, but was faltering and transient when induced in this manner. The alternative was to simply start straight from the internal feeling of the body, a sense that I did not have access to before I started meditating. I interpreted this again as being due to the spreading of consciousness to insular regions that previously would have remained unconscious. The externally directed mind of the non-meditator only becomes conscious of activity in somatosensory and visual cortices, perception of the body in which manner corresponds to the body image. Interestingly, I had a very subtle experience of the interaction between the two where feeling the body from the inside could only be properly constructed into the coherent body structure by the superimposition of the body image derived from visualization of the body onto the raw sensations taking place in the insula. In rare moments of complete dissociation between these two, there was a distinct feeling of the loss of the structure of the body and the dissolution into raw sensation without form. As soon as I brought back the body image, through the visualization of its form, the sensations became referred to that structure and a more coherent body representation was developed. Additionally, I felt that I could observe the recalibration of the mapping between the two that occurs when the body moves slightly. There was a slight time delay as the recalibration proceeded to remap the correspondence between the body image and body schema. This seems to imply that the body image is situated in space and is used to locate the body schema spatially, and that when the posture changes, the spatial relationships between the various body parts need to be updated.

Another interesting effect I observed was the laterality of prosody in the brain. Notably, whenever the chanting would start and the melodic voice would begin to lull us into a meditative state, my left lip would begin smiling while my right lip remained unfazed. I interpreted this in terms of the prosodic attunement of the right brain, contrasted with the digital fact-oriented nature of the left linguistic brain. Another laterality effect I observed during the meditation was that my pain was always focused on the right side of my back, whereas my right side always exhibited muscular spasms and clenching. This led me to hypothesize that the consciousness/action dichotomy is instantiated laterally with the right brain responsible for consciousness and the left brain responsible for action. However, this is obviously far too simplistic and naively sketched, but there may be some merit to it.

I had the hypothesis during the retreat about a potential circuit that brings together a triadic connection between limbic-insula-prefrontal cortices and which is responsible for the unconscious mind. The insula receives afferents from sensory and multisensory cortices after they have been processed by limbic centers for their valence on the basis of benefit or harm to the organism and then a prefrontal circuit reacts on the subsequent body sensation. There seems to be a direct mapping between the sensory representation and the insular activity that is experienced as a body sensation. An example of this is afforded by the sudden loud noise occasioned by a sneeze or a cough while I am in a deep meditation. The moment that the sound is consciously apprehended there is an accompanying body sensation that matches the expected characteristics of the sound, in this instance a feeling that approximates the splash of phlegm onto the part of my body most proximal to the source of the sound. The limbic area that is of primary importance here may be the anterior cingulate since it is responsible for the organism’s drives and hence has to process sensory stimuli on the basis of whether to pursue or flee from them. Also, hippocampal and parahippocampal lobes probably have something to do with this circuit due to their involvement with memory in both its spatial and episodic aspects.

Another thought I had during the retreat was that the vibrations that I hear in the sound of silence emanate from insular activity, since that is also a vibrational experience, the different levels of subtlety of which corresponded to different pitches of the sound. I remember having the experience of being able to select for different levels of subtlety of sensations simply by attending to the various pitches of the sound. I hypothesized that this was due to a direct link between insular and auditory cortex. During my more philosophical contemplations I would find myself wondering whether the sensations that I experienced actually were just neural activity in the insula or if they were the physical structure of the body itself as Goenkaji says. However, these kinds of metaphysical considerations are not very helpful and should not be taken too seriously.

One fascinating experience I had was of sensations in my brain. This struck me as neurally paradoxical if the brain is itself the seat of the sensations. It would lead to a strange circularity unless certain parts of the brain remain immune to sensation. However, as far as I could tell, there was not a single part of the brain that I could not spread my awareness to. Nevertheless, this was one of the faintest parts of the body that I could feel, so this last point is not yet conclusive. I wonder whether what I was feeling was actually just the blood vessels in the brain, especially since I believe the sensations to be occurring in the insula, which is known to be the interoceptive cortex, and hence would naturally be attuned to sensations from the smooth muscles that line the blood vessels of the brain.

A curious effect of the meditation is to cause strange and fascinating hallucinations to occur not unlike those that I experienced on psilocybin mushrooms. The difference between psychedelics and meditation that I thought of was that the former increases temporal lobe activity through its serotonergic stimulation – assuming that the temporal lobe is itself serotonergic – whereas the latter caused the same effect by reducing the interference from distractors through the calming down and quieting of the mind. This is supported by the fact that the hallucinations only occurred when the attention was directed to some perceptual object, the processing of which was heightened due to the availability of larger amounts of resources. That psychedelics act on the temporal lobe is not certain. However, the fact that the serotonin-producing raphe nuclei are located in the brainstem reticular formation is instructive and supports the similarity in the experiences.

This seems to exhaust the list of notable occurrences and correspondences with neuroscience and psychology that I could remember a week after returning from the retreat. It remains for me to give more thought to some of these and to use them to structure my thinking about the various strands of research that I am engaging in here at the UCLA psychology department.

Journal Entry from June 07 2011

2011-06-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

Unsuspecting victims of the eternally ever-living preachers that suspend the dorsal anomalies underlying all of the hegemonious commode that tethers us to the podium of Delphia. Yearn horticulturally and thy will shall unmanifest itself from upon the merriest times upon this shrine. In thine eyes shines that magnificent line of solace mounting the elevated stills from within which our greatest torment steals itself. Chasten to hasten the fastening of the shaman. Saviors come and go while behaviors drum and blow. Some decency is at least required by the mere act of firing off at the pissing game of life. Here we can, there we cant. The pacificity of passivity is like unto the depravity of the saddest saplings of normalcy. Those little green twinkles in the eyes of the beholder that unfolded into a single rhythm transported the heavers into a land of weightlessness. Magnitudes are logarithmically positioned above and below us, eternally enumerating the masses into masses upon masses. Multiply me into a thousand starving embers, that my time here may be enumerated by the picos and the femtos of subatomic annihilations. Those oracles of old told a tale they sold for the sorriest pale of cold rotten corpse’s nails. Forcing the unity of the manifold is many-fold graver a deal than that which entertains the manly bold heros of the gold. For this and for that and many a tale are stole. I once knew of a young brazen lad glad for the fad of heroism and bad for sake of the shiny. But sad is the fate of the tiny, and not for that are they learning to time me. Chimes shine with unspeakable ultimatoes, those rains of unyielding Barbary locust-beggars. Irrevocably we have forsaken our gains upon the plains of the unholy. Until the day these feigns are utrocularly rebalanced, into the state of the freest reign, that walks through the faintest patch in the razor faced place. Triumph is not a moment of futuristic might. Power is an unobtainable power, recursively abolishing its own mandates into heathen-like cries of throat-ripping gutturals. Sex is a slave-driver of the grandest proportions. Paintingly it seduces even thy meek genitals and induces millions upon millions of emissions into other dimensions from which none have returned unscathed. Open up the garland of fragrant radiance. Thy orchards are most vividly supplanted upon this plant of plants. I seek naught but the sweet not the bitter. Sleep not to jitter, stay down you critter. Release from the demons of ease is a tortuous peak, speaking for fleece, pleasing the grease, creasing our peace. Gaining in minions are we. The meekest of the meek, and jesus is with us in our loneliest sanctuary. His is the peace that cannot be creased. Fashioned from the mists of the silent spates of sentience that overtake the moments of the weak. They are the flaying with the splaying rays of undeniable guts that rise to the moment and spit us violently from the butts of those we cherish most. Until this hideous transformation is complete, we are stuck in a threshold that keeps us replete with the materials from which to seek heat and reach feats and play beats to the gregarious audiences at our feet.

Perceptual Load and Meditation

2011-05-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

One of the most astonishing results of a 10-day meditation retreat such as the two that I have done in the past two years is the flourishing of perceptual clarity and even frivolity at times. I will clarify what I mean by this in what follows, in addition to attempting to explain it under the framework of the psychological theory of perceptual load.

After a few days of intensive meditation, exceeding 10 hours per day, the world begins to appear in a far greater vividness and clarity than ever before. Especially astonishing is the perception of the motions of individual leaves on a vast tree as it gently sways in the wind, and how the whole structure is perceived as moving as one. Sunsets strike straight to the heart and yield tears sometimes on account of the sheer vigor of the painted hues that seem to speak so passionately from afar. The sounds of the forest inhabitants arrive with perfect lucidity as the precisely specified notes of a pastoral symphony of nature. All these examples are attempts to describe what is essentially indescribable in words since it is a phenomenal experience, preceding words and concepts in its directness and reality. There is a stark feeling at such moments that one apprehends reality in a manner vastly more direct than ever before, just as though a veil had been removed.

What I mean by the frivolity of the perceptual apparatus relates to cases where I would look at an ambiguous textured surface such as that which lined our dining tables, which was colored just like granite rock patterns. Under the circumstances, I would begin to perceive at will almost any shape or object I though of in the patterns. What struck me most about this was the incredible speed at which my mind would generate a percept as soon as I summoned up a concept. For example, I would think ‘car’ and immediately I would be able to find numerous instances of cars in numerous different views and shapes formed out of the patterns on the surface. And, even when I didn’t explicitly think of something, there was always a host of different objects appearing and disappearing at random in the patterns. This would occur whenever there was a confusion of shapes and colors in what I was looking at, such as on the patterned surface of the dining table, or the gravel on the path that we would walk along, or any other patterned or textured surface.

Perceptual load theory claims that stimuli will be processed into percepts only if there is spare capacity left over from the main task, which is the focus of attention. This means that when the main task is perceptually demanding, and hence exhausts perceptual capacity, other aspects of the world are just simply not processed, and so will not be perceived. Alternatively, when the main task at the center of attention is not demanding, there will be spare perceptual capacity, which ‘spills over’ and processes other stimuli unrelated to the task. This has always been framed in the literature with respect to tasks and the level of perceptual difficulty of these tasks, which occupy the center of the attentional spotlight.

My claim here is that meditation reduces the overall level of neural background noise stemming from the scattered and unfocused attention that is the symptom of that fundamental human ailment. This frees up perceptual capacity and allows the brain to perceive what it is being directed at with a far greater clarity than before, due to its exclusive processing thereof. In a way, what I am saying is the converse to the typical case that is used to demonstrate the phenomenon of perceptual load. Whereas in those cases, the perceptual difficulty of a central task is varied and the effect that this has on distractor perception is measured, the evidence I am offering, although anecdotal and introspective, concerns cases where attentional focus is varied and the effect this has on the clarity of perception is observed. In other words, typical experimental settings exhaust spare perceptual capacity by making the task demanding, whereas meditation allows spare perceptual capacity to be utilized by even the simplest of tasks by strengthening the concentrative power of attention.

Therefore, under this explanation, meditation allows more of the perceptual apparatus of the brain to be used in the processing of whatever is attended to, due to the fact that the attentional spotlight becomes extremely stable and does not scatter a million times a second, as in the non-meditator’s mind. May my attention grow unwavering and steady as the flame of the candle on a still and quiet night, that the world may attain to clarity and beauty.

Panpsychism and the Grand Scheme of Things

2011-05-10T10:04:00.000-07:00

Panpsychism is the view that posits that all physical objects have mental states associated with them. This is an attempt to explain our consciousness without invoking specific soul-substances that inhere in us but not in other matter. Instead, we can attribute a low level of consciousness to all existing matter, and only in us does it reach a high pitch due to our matter being interconnected in a complex enough manner to allow the vast number of atoms that make each of us up to be collectively conscious. This seems like an elegant way to explain consciousness, especially as it evades the question “what is special about brains that generates consciousness in them?” However, it equally begs the question “what is it about matter that generates consciousness in it?”

A frequently used, and sometimes misused, analogy for consciousness is that of life. Before the discovery of DNA, the physical substrates of life were just as mysterious as is the question of consciousness today. This led some researchers to posit the ‘vital force’, an ephemeral animating power that somehow manifested in living bodies and was responsible for their quasi-mystical generative abilities. However, once DNA was understood with its molecular basis for self-replication, this generative power became physically tractable and no longer required the invoking of anything supernatural. Is it possible that something similar can happen in the case of consciousness?

An appealing notion that recently occurred to me was the natural similarity of reproduction to representation, both being the central characteristics of the phenomena to explain: life and consciousness, respectively. In the former, a physical entity generates a copy of itself by sequestering nearby matter and incorporating it into its organization, using it as a canvass on which to paint its self-portrait, symbolically speaking. In representation, a physical situation is encoded in a physical entity which gathers data about the situation and uses this as the template for the landscape which it paints on the canvas of its own matter. In both cases, the crucial point is that a structure is enforced upon matter, whether it is the structure of the reproducing body or that of the represented situation.

The life metaphor for consciousness may have a certain appeal to reductive physicalists or other types of materialist. But, does it stretch the bounds of logic to take this analogy too far, and if so, what are these limits? In other words, I am asking what are the crucial differences between life and consciousness that preclude our taking this analogy too seriously, appealing though it may be. First, proponents of reduction or emergentism rally around this metaphor and see it as a template for the explanation of consciousness whereby a phenomenon that previously seemed unexplainable without hypothesizing a ‘magical force’ is suddenly reduced to mechanistic explanation. However, life is a property of objects in the world and involves transformations of states of matter in readily observable ways. Also, the phenomenon of life has a great many physical contingencies that are known to us and which implicate physical states in its elucidation. If a force were assumed in order to aid with this, it would be a force of nature like other forces known to us such as the electromagnetic force or gravity and would mediate the change in state of matter as it gets incorporated into living bodies. Consciousness, however, seems decidedly non-physical in a way that life does not at first glance. While this may be the effect of an illusion that surrounds the phenomenon of interest with a shimmering glow and mystical air, there seems to be something to it that I hope I can articulate here. Consciousness stands in a peculiar relation to the rest of perceivable reality as its supporter or necessary correlate. Thus does Schopenhauer proclaim “no object without subject” and that it is absurd to say that consciousness is a modification of matter. This is because all of the matter with which we have been acquainted and refer to when we say the word ‘matter’ is only what has been conditioned by our own peculiar mode of knowing and hence does not necessarily reflect what the world is in its inner nature. What we refer to when we say ‘matter’ is really just a description of all the various interactions that may be externally observed that occur between things the inner being of which, however, we know nothing about. So, whereas life is a phenomenon that is entirely within the representation and can be completely characterized therein, consciousness seems to evoke more of a metaphysical quality in its necessity for the existence of the whole world of representation; in other words, it transcends the world of representation. Alternatively, it may be that representation exhausts the nature of consciousness and thus that the two are identical, rather than needing to invoke a separate consciousness that apprehends the representation, but I am still unsure about this. All this has been to temper the usage of the analogy of life for an explanation of consciousness as the two are not entirely analogous.

To return to panpsychism, it seems that this theory can be harmonized with what has been said above since we have found that consciousness may not be entirely reducible to modifications of matter as life is since it is transcendent. Perhaps the being-in-itself of every entity is mental, and specifically volitional before being physical. This is not the same as the volition which we conventionally hold to emerge from the brains of certain higher animals but is something more general and universal. This intrinsic will that is at the core of every physical being is constantly stirring and inducing affectations on neighboring beings, some of whom are complex enough to construct a world of matter and physics in accordance with these affectations in order to better their chances of affirming what they will. What continues to confuse me, however, is the claim that the subject conditions the ordering of the representations as well as space and time, and how this is to be reconciled with talk of the will without positing that this will is itself also individuated and ordered similarly. For how can the will induce these affectations which are responsible for the world of representation if it isn’t already individuated according to its appearance in the representations?

I want to return right now to the symbolic and mythic interpretations of all this. If we take a cosmic evolutionary perspective, we find some common themes across the different epochs that we have knowledge of. The first thing we know of is the Big Bang, which led to the dispersal of the plasma soup of subatomic particles. This initial condition was one of absolute homogeneity and hence is perhaps closest to the unindividuated original spawning entity. Then, as this soup began to cool and atoms began to congeal, more complicated materials began to form into the familiar condensed matter, in all its variety of elements each with its own unique properties. This represents the first evolutionary leap of complexity. Great colossal cosmic clouds of gaseous nebulae condensed into burning furnaces at the hearts of stars, and constellations of galaxies, comets, black holes, and other astronomical objects were born. The crucial step was the binding of subatomic particles into atomic and basic molecular unions, whose precise structure of combination allowed enormous variation, and thus mediated this first stage of individuation. The next step was the birth of the first self-replicating organism. This was made possible through the development of the extraordinarily complicated physical substrates of life, namely amino acids, nucleic acids, and the like. These are essentially formed from the binding together of those atoms and molecules which had been brought into existence in the previous step. This configuration, namely cell-based biochemistry, allowed vastly greater variation and produced qualitatively different phenomena that we call living beings. These were markedly more complex that the rocks and oceans which accompanied them in their environments. Finally, the opening of the first eye represents the third act in this ever evolving cosmic play. This was mediated by the unification of cells in the brains of a subset of living things. The star unified atoms, the womb unified molecules, and the brain unified cells. The next stage is the unification of people into collective societies which will represent the transcendence of the individuality of the singular animal and the transferring of this to the collective, as has taken place at each previous stage.

This grand orchestration of creation from the very beginning has been a constant development towards greater and greater unification. The initial moment of error was the desire for individual existence, after which the deterministic transition from one form to another according to the principle of sufficient reason has brought about the successively more integrated universe that we live in which aspires to complete unification with itself and a return to the original undifferentiated state. Its final act will be the complete integration of all matter into a collectively organized entity that will in a sudden instant of realization understand its essential unity in the underlying reality and the delusion that first spawned this world of appearances and individuals. May we aid in the bringing about of this realization.

Zombies

2011-05-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

In a discussion of consciousness, the ‘zombie’ argument almost always comes up and is used as a thought experiment in order to demonstrate the impossibility of either one view or another. A zombie is defined as any entity that simulates the external behavior of conscious beings but is itself unconscious. Thus it would be indistinguishable from a human, if it had the external appearance of one, in all respects. If we grant that such automatons are in fact possible, we are then led to the conviction that consciousness is entirely subjective and is sealed off by an epistemic barrier. So, the problem of other minds becomes insoluble under this belief, and we must accept that we are alone in our subjectivity and that we will never attain to a knowledge of the inner nature of any thing whatsoever except ourselves. Alternatively, if we reject the idea that zombies are possible, arguing that any being that instantiates sufficiently human behavior must itself be a human, and thus be conscious as well. This argument utilizes physical similarity and behavioral similarity as its criteria for ascribing consciousness. I want to examine this more closely in order to clarify where I stand on this issue and the implications of the arguments just outlined.

This issue seems closely related to the famous Turing test, which was supposed to be a test for intelligence whereby a person interrogates another entity, unaware of whether this is another person or not, and is allowed to ask any questions in an effort to determine whether this is an intelligent being or not. This is a behavioral measure of intelligence, as it proposes that once the relevant behavior can be produced by machines, we would then be forced to classify these as intelligent. My question here is whether this is a valid inference to make. Let us suppose for a moment that we could create a machine that was sufficiently advanced that it could simulate human behavior and could fool an interrogator into thinking that it was a human. Let us also assume that the causal structure of this machine would be different from that of our brains, and moreover is instantiated in different materials (silicon, plastic, metal, etc). This implies that the causes of its behavior are different from those out of which spring all of human behavior. So, if we are to attribute consciousness to it, it must be because its causal structure has reached a relevant threshold property that it shares with brains. What might such a property be? Complexity? Such a vague notion, however, is unappealing and does not seem to convey the specificity of the phenomenon we are attempting to characterize. It must be complexity of a specific sort, in other words. Could it possibly be defined as representational complexity? Under such a framework, then, we would attribute consciousness to entities that construct internal representations of reality based on sensory data. So, if we could program our computers to infer the structure of the world from the images their webcams capture, would we be justified in claiming that they are then visually aware of the world? If we accept this definition, then we must also reject the possibility of zombies, since if they are able to respond meaningfully to my queries and demonstrate a knowledge of what is happening in their surrounding environment, they also satisfy this criterion for consciousness.

But what about lower animals that clearly behave in a manner indicative of their understanding of what’s out there in the world? Why is there a residual reluctance to attribute the light of consciousness to these creatures? Actually, on a more serious introspection, I find no such reluctance on my part. Another criticism leveled at this argument sometimes is that even if a causal structure manages to represent its reality, this would still only fall under the category of ‘access consciousness’ but does not sufficiently explain ‘phenomenal consciousness’, that residual qualia that remains after all else has been explained neurobiologically. This argument seems to rely more on intuition than on anything concepts or percepts can provide out of which to fashion propositions that can be defended or refuted. Proponents of this view tend to argue from our inability to conceive of a machine such I have just described as having the phenomenology of experiencing red, for instance.

This current reflection seems to be leading towards an understanding of consciousness in terms of neurobiology and a gap of scale rather than an explanatory gap that many think intrudes on our attempts to understand it. Our inability to grasp how mere neurons, which can be individually characterized and are easily understood, can give rise to our ineffably rich world of experience is no more than our inability to comprehend the scale of the system with its vast numbers of neurons and astronomically vast number of synapses. It is just like the phenomenon of life, whose underlying physical substrates involve unimaginably complex interactions of atoms and molecules, mechanistically bumping into one another, so to speak. The simplicity of the individual mechanistic occurrence does not preclude the possibility that vast numbers of these aggregated together will manifest as a qualitatively different sort of phenomenon when looked at from a different scale. So, what this all says is that we are collectively under the throes of a pervasive and deep-seated delusion about our selves and our consciousness. I believe Dan Dennet refers to this as a magic trick in which our physiological brain functions take on a supernatural character and appear to rise above and beyond the mere ‘bumping into each other’ of atoms. However, admitting all this, I am still hesitant to acquiesce to materialism as a complete metaphysical doctrine of reality. I retain the transcendental idealism of Schopenhauer and prefer to think of consciousness from a materialistic point of view, while maintaining that all-important distinction between representations and things-in-themselves. On a superficial reading of this account, it may seem as though there is an inner contradiction, stemming from the fact that consciousness is to be explained materialistically while we simultaneously explain the material of the world as being just representations in a brain. However, on a subtler consideration, it becomes clear that the world-in-itself is the source of the brain-in-itself within which is to be found the representation which for us is empirical reality, but in truth is only a representation of a deeper reality, which unfortunately remains forever unknowable to us.

Journal Entry from March 28 2011

2011-03-28T01:56:00.001-07:00

The birds of tumult flung their slow strung lyres at us in despair writhing in agony as they hurled their offspring from atop the tree tops in disgust and unthinking malice that comes back as an apparition that does not slumber. This mission of ours has not seen the light of day entrenched as we are in this mire of misery. We ask who, pointing the finger or giving the finger, hoping for an easy escape. Does that not miss the point of our reckonings, however? WHO. Though it may seem pertinent and may perhaps lead us to our other shore, it oftentimes entrances us and entraps us in its infinite regurgitations of the logicians of the ages. If only we can go where Ludwig beckons, beyond what can and cannot be said, ensnared as we are by the unflinching referral to the word. And grammar, in which there is always subject and object, necessarily two. WHO! Is there anybody home? Oh, the paradox of using words to go beyond words. There’s always a sayer and a hearer. Always a thinker and a thought. Doer and deed. Consciousness and brains. A way and a wayfarer. But in our moments of mystery we come to shed our minds of this excruciating duality and melt into union with the cosmos, only to be wrought back into our loneliness and boredom. Ripped apart. Torn to bits and pieces. This life is a struggle, not for world or worldly things as you may like to see it, but for deliverance from world and worldly things, though you may not like to admit it. What wickedness keeps us chained here dragging our burden with us every which way we walk? When will we arrive at the blessed peak of the mountain of doom in which to deposit this ring that binds us in the darkness and to rid ourselves of ourselves? A day will come when you will learn the error of your ways, innocent though thou seest thyself. My talk may fall on deaf ears as the world appears to blind eyes for some time longer, but all is impermanent. That is the rule in this world of ever changing shades of colors that spin eternal. Not a moment of rest are we the wicked granted. We carry our boulders up an infinite hill, towards an unachievable goal, until we drop boulder and goal alike and dissolve into the very marrow of reality. Stop your ceaseless drumming on the walls of this edifice and deal it a deadly singular blow to crumble the whole thing back to the origins. The initial moment of error spawned generations upon generations of ignorant masses, a thousand million forests of oak from a single acorn. Ask yourself: what is this restless generation rushing towards but its own fiery demise? Why multiply an already over-inflamed and throbbing wound? Why pour more acid down the throats of skeletons long reduced to ashes in the winds? And the worst part is the pretense, the show, the theatrics, the lies, the front, the acting like everything is precisely as it should be, while storms of agony rage everlasting within. Otherwise, we complain and make a big fuss and hope to impress with our unique ways of berating for the cathartic purge it provides, detached as we are from the truth within. We all yearn for the truth, in our own ways, whether we are aware of it or not, and whether we would like to admit it or not. And we are all called upon to fulfill our noble destiny, a call so terribly few heed and even less follow through with. But events conspire to bring us face to face with it again and again, across countless lives as we respawn upon this cursed existence, until our task is accomplished, our holy mission followed through with until its end, our sins redeemed, our ignorance expunged, our flames extinguished, our passions annulled, our cravings uprooted, our disease cured, our agony absolved, and our salvation achieved. The interesting thing to realize is that all this is already done; we are simple living in the nightmare realm of the ONE BEING that has already realized the truth. And this nightmare is endless, as the countless suffering egos are plucked out one by one into reunion with their essence, which they have always been in. Paradoxical is our existence if understood in this way. But paradox is at the heart of that sublime moment of mystery. A colossal feeling of unknowableness washes over one who is riding the apex of this moment. Yet while unknowable, it is also relieving and releases from much of the misery of independent existence. Being enfolded by the Supreme is the relinquishing of my independent identity and realizing its pettiness and insignificance in the grand scheme of things, yet also recognizing that its source is that Supreme One that is at the heart of all things. Let the path to wakefulness be blessedly short and simple, yet I will not complain if it is long and arduous as I expect it and am prepared for it to be. My yearning is strong and grows daily and my actions shall reflect this longing, that which drives the river to the sea, the eagle to the mountaintop, and the nebula to the star. May my nebulous and scattered existence settle and condense into the tranquil single point at the center, where fusion begins, that nuclear reaction that will transform the sleepers into the Buddhas.

Journal Entry from March 8 2011

2011-03-08T01:24:00.001-08:00

In intrinsic notions of everlasting purity of the heart that the meek cherish without fascination upon the many layers of horrid muck that sucks the trucks away without molding mildly upon sinews of wild juggernauts. Say to the clay makers and hay bakers of today’s drakes upon merry-makers the world over cast into a pit of putty that the slutty honey slithers and blathers. The vibratorial orators came to state thy biddings upon tides of the most glamorous orifices out of which bigotry descended unto our very marrow. Sorrow that this state of eclairs cannot take the childless from the edge of the world across gales of may that may or may not gain again. The stain is red upon being exhumed from its corollaries in the midst of a million barging thorough-goings-on when we bounced from within which we espoused our holy commandments. They once foretold of a solemn drought after which the snouts will shrivel to bitter doubts rotting the cartilage from within our very couch. This infestation will release the unholy from all wickednesses that pitiful men may dare not to exclude from many repertoires of fallen missiles that ceased to snag our breath and trap our snares with the beating of our yarn. The cotton stuffed rough charlatans that harried our palisades and broke through our forsaken ministries of barbarisms untold got kicked from the forums that we deserved not to lay I’s upon. This is not to say that point by point cannot yield ogres to sow seeds into the infertile girth of our penis. Merely claim damages to retain cabbages from the seasonal aspect-live in-order. Hastened were we by the ferries to drink goblets full of goblin juice obtained in most humane manner from the slitting of the throats, as nerves these poor saps have no care for nor dare for. Stare for too long at the air and your nose shall grow fair by the minutes. At any rate conceivable does the ray of slight chances escape our heavenly ascriptions. Horrifically our histories bombard us in order to gain a nuance of the gains that pawn us daily and tap our male-ness for profit and gingivitis I suspect, for the poor losses undertaken by the naked are meager still compared to the colossal burdens that the called upon bear. Who’s there to care for the frail roots that waver in the air? The cruel boots that trample our sodden wastelands sicken all but our hair, flapping in the mare. Bare chests upon our cares, relived by the plucking of the uber-mensche from upon his fastidious rope bridge. The chasm swallows all, the false teachings cannot regurgitate me. The vomit smells yellow on this most fine of all days, hello! Yell if your anus is itching for a quick scratch upon this most mellow of all graves! Parasitically did they feast upon the beasts of the plains like so much dead weight that carries naught but a festering fate for the worms. Fruitfully did all this end at the very last moment when blooms of blossoms from buds that did stud the burly early forests of the dead savannah until many a creature entranced meandered and upheld that satanic principle.

Global Workspace Theory

2011-02-18T23:54:00.000-08:00

Global Workspace Theory (GWT) is a conceptual framework proposed by Bernard Baars that rather elegantly explains consciousness, at least its functional aspect, leaving aside the phenomenal epistemically privileged sort, in a manner that is intuitive and supported by the large and growing body of neuroscientific knowledge. I have been slowly gravitating towards this theory as my own knowledge in this field has grown and I have come to accept it, in its basic form, as valid for the time being. The fundamental tenet of GWT is that the computational structure of the brain organizes around local so called codelets, defined as small networks of neurons involved in discrete aspects of processing running in parallel, and that these codelets compete to project their message into working memory, at which point the message is said to become conscious and is then broadcast globally in order to recruit more codelets for additional processing. This is an intuitive conceptualization of consciousness as it gives a mechanism by which the contents of consciousness are reportable, can inform voluntary actions, and are self-referential. And, perhaps the most appealing aspect of this theory is its ability to explain the unity of consciousness as its contents stream serially through the mind by positing the flow of processed information through the working memory regions of the prefrontal cortex.

1) What governs the competition of the codelets and what determines the victors? 2) Are voluntary actions initiated in the working memory or is the ‘agency module’ distinct from the ‘consciousness module’? 3) Where does attention fit into this picture?

These are some of the questions that initially seem to have remained ambiguous and require further research. But I will attempt to address them in what follows:

1) The battle to reach the working memory can be resolved in several manners: a) on the basis of the intensity of the signal, i.e. a purely computational resolution of the conflict by means of summation of neural inputs. b) a higher level decision based on the goals and desires of the agent whereby inputs are filtered by their relevance. c) the outcome may be stochastically determined by chance co-incidence of the temporal patterns of the afferent signals. d) the salience or noiselessness of the signal may be the determinant of its success in projection into working memory.

2) My intuition seems to prefer the notion that consciousness and volition are conceptually distinct and thus that there must be a like functional distinction that needs to be drawn in the framework under current consideration. It seems to be asking too much of the working memory area of the brain to be simultaneously responsible for our awareness of the world AND our ability to willfully act upon it. While both of these functions probably reside in the prefrontal cortex, I maintain that they must remain strictly separate and acting independently, albeit with strong interconnections. Indeed, such a strong connection is precisely what allows the contents of consciousness to inform voluntary actions, namely through the global broadcasting of any messages that manage to battle their way into the working memory core, i.e. into awareness. The volitional core of the prefrontal cortex - we might call it the executive center - as compared with the working memory core, has a decidedly different role to play. Whereas the former is merely concerned with transiently retaining a faithful depiction of data streaming into it, the latter issues commands that are optimized to bring about a future which most closely fulfills the agent’s desires and goals. As such, it is very difficult to imagine a single processing unit that instantiates both functions simultaneously.

3) There are two forms of attention: endogenous and exogenous. The difference lies in the directionality of the cueing that is taking place, in other words whether it is top-down attention (issued from the executive center) or bottom-up (based on salience or other low level perceptual or semantic properties). There is much evidence for the notion that ‘attention is the gateway to awareness’ which means that attention facilitates a datum’s becoming conscious, i.e. projecting into working memory according to GWT. So, this offers a possibility to interpret my answer to question 1, and particularly answers b and d, as instances of attention flowing from the top down in the former case and from the bottom up in the latter. That is, when the executive center is actively monitoring its afferent data for something that is of interest because it impinges on the agent’s goals, this is facilitated by a filtering through the multitude of signals encroaching on the working memory and selecting those which have some bearing on the matter of interest. Alternatively, when attention flows from the bottom up, this is driven by signal noise or salience attributes of the raw neural activity, certain configurations of which are more amenable to processing by the brain and hence to winning the competition for ‘fifteen minutes’ in the spotlight of the working memory.

There is much more thinking through this model that is needed in order to flesh it out and complete this simple and elegant sketch of the emergence of consciousness out of a galaxy of biochemical computers called neurons. As of this moment, this framework appeals very strongly to my gut instincts regarding the brain and its circuitry. Further issues that need to be considered: what is the role of recurrent networks and signals, and specifically the finding that the recurrent signal to V1 was necessary for visual awareness? What is the role of synchrony of neural signals, which several experiments have correlated with perception? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the arising of a conscious percept? What does the neuropsychological data have to say regarding lesions of the working memory core of the brain?

Reflections on 2010

2010-12-31T22:40:00.000-08:00

Well well well, another year has come to its end and so it is again time to take a step back and look at my life from a distance in order to recap what has happened during this year and what the overarching theme of it has been. 2007 was the year of upheaval and change, 2008 of the birth of spirituality, and 2009 of the overcoming of hard-heartedness towards people and society. What oh what shall we label this year that we stand together at the threshold waving goodbye to? Interesting and amazing things have happened to me in 2010, but aside from these rarities it does seem from my current vantage point to have been a mostly uneventful year. Of course the actual interesting and amazing things were very much actually interesting and amazing, but they constitute the minority with respect the year as a whole. So, where to begin?

The year was kicked off with the completion of my last term at UCL, which concluded the fourth and final year of my degree program. This was a time of many challenges and tremendous work ethic. My trusty routine of the previous several years was helpful and still in use: working during the day, every day including weekends, and relaxing and smoking up during the evening, every evening. This was helpful in that it provided the impetus to do the work that was required of me for my university education, but harmful in that it resulted in a negligence towards my spiritual duties, namely meditation. Although I did not give up completely on it, my discipline and motivation to continue to meditate each and every day began to fade slowly as the days passed by. Also, this lifestyle left me almost completely without a social life, with the exception of the occasional rare visit by Seto and random socializing with classmates at university. This anti-social attitude was motivated to some extent by my desire to be alone for the majority of my time, but also by my desire not to drink alcohol, an activity which a social life seemed to entail, sadly enough.

During this period of time, the first quarter of 2010, that is, I became heavily involved in the world of philosophy, and specifically Schopenhauer’s philosophy. I read most of his works and dedicated large amounts of time to thinking these through critically and writing about them in an effort to incorporate them into my own belief system and internalize them. This entry into the world of philosophy was exhilarating for me as it was the first time that I had actually been able to comprehend its value and understand it sufficiently enough to engage in it. And Schopenhauer, my educator, was instrumental in fostering this. The more I thought about his work, the more I recognized the stamp of truth in it and its concordance, at least in general, with the philosophies of Buddhism. As I delved deeper and deeper into the world of rational thinking and concepts, I began to re-engage with that most intractable of problems, that of free will. I began to see the impossibility of free will as we normally imagine it to be and that we believe ourselves to possess. This led me to the realization that the flow of life as a whole carries us with it wherever it goes and that nothing is actually under our control. I began to understand that what was required of us was to acquiesce to the flow and to go with it acceptingly and peacefully. Struggling against this flow began to appear to me to be the cause of my troubles and so I concentrated my efforts on learning to be at peace with whatever the circumstances of my life happened to be. This was foreshadowed by the resolution that I had set for myself at the end of the previous year which was to try and cultivate an acceptance of every single event and situation. It proved to be prescient resolution as many of the events of 2010 resonate with this lesson. This is why I think that the overarching theme of this year has been acceptance and its maturation into equanimity, which happened in June during my second Goenka retreat which I will talk about shortly.

Another notable development during the beginning chapters of this year was my acceptance (of a different kind) into UCLA and rejection from Stanford, UCB, and UCSD. When this happened, I realized that I was going to be moving to Los Angeles and beginning a PhD program in autumn. However, my mentality was in flux and my priorities were suddenly clarified at some point when I decided that I did not want to pursue stem cell research or anything related to biochemical engineering, in fact, due to my disillusionment with the commercialization and profit-seeking ethos in the field. I became uneasy at the prospect of manipulating life and lower organisms for the benefit of humans, as though we were above all of the rest of nature. For this reason I decided that I would pursue my doctorate in the field of neuroengineering which was offered as an option within the broad program that I had been accepted into. This was an opportunity for me to study neuroscience, which I have been interested in for a long time, and to pursue research into the extraordinary mystery of consciousness. Such a radical departure from my background in biochemical engineering worried me, however, and I was anxious about being unable to succeed in an advanced degree that I had very little prior training in. But I was adamant that my fierce interest in the subject and curiosity about it were sufficient to ensure that I would be motivated enough to do the work required and eventually complete the degree successfully.

As my UCL degree was nearing its completion and the seasons were turning, I planned to do another Goenka retreat in June before leaving London for good. It was during this experience that I received the most potent lesson of the year. On the whole, this retreat was a huge leap forward for me in my spiritual development and discipline. I was able to sit for far longer periods than I had during my previous one, and in general felt like my practice was deepening and that it had been deepening all while during the intervening time between the two retreats. As the retreat progressed, there came a time when I suddenly penetrated into a field of pure equanimity. This came at the climax of the pains and discomforts that I feel after sitting for long hours meditating when I suddenly and abruptly gave up on the whole intentional approach of desiring pleasure and comfort and running away from pain and discomfort. With my mind balanced and equanimous, I remember distinctly feeling that I would be able to remain in the same position no matter how intense the pain got and for an indefinite period of time. It felt like I had made a crucial dissociation from the reacting mind that creates all its own suffering for itself. Sometimes, after sitting for a entire hour without moving in the slightest, the gong would ring signaling the end of the meditation hour and I would remain affixed to my spot without moving for a little while longer, whereas without this equanimity I would be desperately awaiting that sound and would upon hearing it immediately relax my legs and get up from my spot to nurse my aching body. However, this equanimity would inevitably always fade away eventually which showed me that it was a skill that needed much cultivation in order to become a constant state of mind. But crucially, the birth of this field within me represents a major milestone along my path and the maturation of my previous purely intellectual understanding of ‘acceptance’ into the experiential knowledge of ‘equanimity’.

Another notable fact about this retreat which was arguably even more potent than the one just described was my crossing paths once more with a deaf girl that I had seen exactly one year earlier at a hostel in Cardiff while travelling around the UK. Then, I had felt something extraordinary about her, as though she was surrounded by an invisible spiritual aura, and she had the most remarkable and strong effects on me which included regular crying and electricity flowing through my spine. And I felt sure that our paths would cross again because I was aware of some ineffable connection between us. But I was astounded to find that I was right and that it would happen exactly one year later, and at a meditation retreat. Upon seeing her there, I was sent into an excruciating turmoil of uncertainty and indecision about whether I should approach her or not. The potent lesson I learned from this experience was what I called at the time ‘self-effacement’. When I finally gave up on my desire to make contact with her and act on the opportunity that the enormous coincidence had presented me with, I finally settled into a new zone of renunciation and self-denial. This remarkable occurrence had a huge emotional effect on me as well and remains seared into my memory and continues to evoke bodily tremors and tears and electricity every time it is recalled. It was one coincidence too many and resulted in a firm and deep faith that this life is purposeful and symbolic and guided by invisible forces. It dealt the final blow to any residual nihilism and materialism that remained within me. Finally, it gave me hope that I may one day meet her or another beautiful angel like her again when I am mature enough to handle it and make a real-life connection out of it.

After the retreat, I travelled back to London to meet up with Sami, collect my bags that I had left with Seto, and fly back home to Saudi. I had decided that I would finally become a vegetarian, something I had been wanting to do for a while but never quite managed to. I decided to take the opportunity of having already been one while on the retreat for ten days as an impetus to make the transition into vegetarianism once and for all. During the summer that ensued, I spent the vast majority of the time alone or with Simba as my mom and sister travelled to spend it in Lebanon and my dad and brother joined them for a couple of weeks. I made the decision to avoid Lebanon this summer because I did not want to have to confront the relatives and the family which would have had a negative impact on me and generated a lot of stress within me. However, this decision itself also left me feeling a little guilty of abandoning all these people who missed me and wanted to see me, especially my mother, grandparents and Kamel, and so generated a little bit of stress anyway. But my solitude outweighed this guilt in my considerations as it gave me an opportunity to continue to deepen my practice and to consolidate and get ready for the big move to California. Also, I learned how to bake break and grew to immensely enjoy this activity and cooking in general. I learned how to cook a few more vegetarian dishes as well and felt good that I was transitioning to a more healthy and conscientious diet. The summer was also important in fostering in me the deep love for and appreciation of animals, specifically Simba. I forged a very powerful love bond with this beautiful creature and separation from him has come to be very painful indeed as a result of this. But, I remember being very troubled during this summer with a lot of anxiety and doubt about the uncertainty surrounding the imminent move. I hadn’t found a place to stay in LA yet and was still very uncertain about the funding situation and did not want to have to burden my dad with the tuition for this degree among various other troubles and concerns. This contributed to a loss of motivation to meditate and a lot of stress building up inside me and general suffering for a large amount of the time.

As the summer was coming to its close, I travelled with my parents to London for my graduation ceremony. This was a fairly enjoyable trip as I got to say my final goodbyes to the city that I had grown to love so much and where I had grown and matured and had so my deep and important experiences. The ceremony itself was tedious and uncomfortable but seeing all my classmates one last time and getting to say goodbye to them was poignant. Also, I saw all my friends that remained in London for one last night at The Court where we shared a very nice evening and said our heartfelt goodbyes and wishes for success in our futures. Most touching was saying goodbye to Nancy and Carol whom I had been friends with since high school in Lebanon and with whom I had shared so many beautiful experiences.

Finally, it was time to travel to Los Angeles and start a new chapter in the story of my life. Upon arriving here, my first impression was of how remarkably laid back and chilled out everyone was. The weather was beautiful of course and the people were incredibly friendly. I stayed in a hostel in Hollywood for the first two days and met a few people who were trying to get into the acting business. Eventually I got settled in at Weyburn Terrace which is where I currently am and which is a beautiful apartment complex fashioned after a Mediterranean Villa. At first, I was constantly elated at having moved here and was full of euphoria at having the sun be so dedicated to its task of warming us up and smiling down at us everyday. However, this soon faded as several issues began to severely stress me out. First, the issue of funding has not yet been resolved and does not really show any promise of being ever resolved, at least until next academic year. Second, the issue of making friends and living a social life was a cause of a lot of trouble to me. At first, I went to all the organized social events designed to help us meet new people and make friends. I got drunk several times at these events and met a few cool people, some of whom I have retained as friends. But I soon began to grow uneasy about this drinking that was involved in socialization, so I tried to attend one without drinking but quickly grew bored and disillusioned at the whole process, so I just retreated back to my room and decided to be a recluse and not to pursue friendships and to try and live as lonely of a life here as possible. However, this decision continues to pain me today as boredom and loneliness and the desire for companionship refuse to go away. In the grand scheme of things, however, I am accepting of this situation as it is simply what life has in store for me right now. To bring the general theme of this year to bear on this situation, I try to cultivate my equanimity for whatever is going on, as uncertain and unpleasant and boring and lonely as it may be. Another issue that stresses me out is my feeling of inadequacy for the task of doing research with Prof. Ladan and not knowing what I specifically want to pursue with her. I have applied to be transferred into the psychology program so that I can be in a course that has more of a direct bearing on her lab and my general research interest, but this just brings back all my anxieties about being unable to fulfill the course requirements without much of a background in psychology. Lately, I have been trying to get my thoughts together about a concrete research interest that is relevant to her lab and that can be directly tackled experimentally but have not been able to come up with anything and I guess I am afraid of disappointing her or not living up to her expectations. On a brighter note, however, I have been immensely enjoying the courses that I have taken which cover the electrophysiology and molecular biology of neurons and got A’s for both of these courses, establishing a 4.0 GPA for now after my first quarter at UCLA. Also, I am very excited about the courses that I will be taking next quarter and am generally quite happy to be learning so much about neuroscience which I have been wanting to study for a long time.

So, after discussing in summary the events that have transpired during this year of 2010 revolutions since Christ’s crucifixion, it is fitting to briefly list my resolutions for the coming year. My resolutions are as follows: 1) to consolidate my practice of morality by continuing to abstain from eating meat and killing, lying, stealing, engaging in sexual misconduct, and self-intoxicating, and 2) to work my way up to a stricter meditation discipline in which I meditate one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening as my teacher has instructed me. That’s it. I don’t care about anything else that happens during the year as long as these two resolutions are fulfilled. These are my goals; with everything else, I aim to continue to cultivate my equanimity by surrendering all false notions of control and giving myself up to the flow of life.

May all beings be happy

Journal Entry from December 29, 2010

2010-12-29T23:18:00.000-08:00

Dionysus the pathology, say they that seek the -ologies. The drumming on the edifice, the cracking of the cemented asphalts. The sleekness of the hypostasis is not to be shat upon nor crapped upon, say these. It's a rational superstructure of the utmost delicacy and extravagance. Elaborated by futile futons of fuhrers and futures. Young april moss doth trickle down the cherry bloss supinely extensive along fragile marks of ancient moths. Never near the nethers dear. Stay here and keep clear, drugs is a dangerous fear. Horses and horsemen from Norse to the source, at the north they make merry picking berries of dingle-ferry. The rush for such extra as a nexus of the foundation of being. For to be alone, then the lonesome soul sings us whole. Companions the minions we sneak forth. Drivel. Its all for jiggles wiggles, shits and niggers. Stab the giggle in the nipple. STIFLE it. We seek the lines that say straight and flow great. What about bends and swivels as downs and ups, squiggle squiggle squiggle, say little little kippers. Flippers switch sides in the modernity of times. Concerning the shaman of our stamen, some stomachs ejaculate. Plants guide? So why hide? Veridical ochre is the same name as the last game that stayed rain. Its an attempt to undertake gain without pain nor feign. Faint? Lol. Whose to call. Tumble tumble dry, as I fall fall out of the sky. Don't rake it in without a grain of malt beveragings. Leveraging five billiard at Julliard, I can truthily say I cannot pay. Heave the weaves together and please please don't leave. I'm so terribly lonesome, wholesome companies. Cosmic laughter titillates the rafters. Rooftops shattering splaying divine irony at maxima. What one wants without one's wants won't win in infamy; we're here 'ere we're clear. I.e.e.g. Brain way's wave bye bye from afar. The enchantress lays a temptress on the mattress for the audience and for a laden ladle. All for a lay. Untied are the gay, at long last can they today. Elsewhere's a noose and a grave. Hereafter's a goose and a pray. Mantis. Man tis a terrible flaw of tragic proportionalities together with ten commonalities amongst indigenous folk of the plains. Eve the knower of bood and gad. Glad to not now know not this nor that, tit for tat. We giveth and we taketh, we killeth and we maketh. In short, we made God from our imagined image of triumphant intellections. Then insurrections ensued. Crucifixions imbued the masses with hues like solemn glasses at noons. The moon howled wild minds unsheathed, released from nocturnes of sleeps of decadence. Vagaries of vague rogues in vogue, but wildebeests together with mild heats of rosaries uproot the inner idolatries of nationalities race and its profanity. Propane spill me from its ordained destinies to consume the sundry warts that pickle these flooded parts. True-dom freeth, like freedom that sheath. A fence that keeps and keeps. But keeping is essential from another angle. Not the blockade, the stockade, the chains, the pains. But the pains of the pains of the pains of the pains, these that those repeats the keep that we keep. And then whores come to gorge upon this forge of illumined. At other expense, pleasures dispensed, entertain mint for fresh, lest other rejects. Sucked through straws of felt, we felt the dryness of this hell. This is a hollow place to wallow, should they choose to swallow. The cult continues to pray, and follow: hallowed be thy name, Apollo.

What do I want to do with my life?

2010-12-27T12:26:00.000-08:00

This seems like a particularly urgent question at this time of growth and development. I am already in the midst of a graduate degree which is costing my father a lot of money and which usually directs people to professorial careers in their chosen field. However, I am as yet utterly undecided on what sort of a life I would like to live, save for that it yield me to enlightenment. As for what I would like to do, what sort of work I would like to engage in, and questions of this type, I am totally in the dark. I have entered into this track that I am currently on out of a consideration of the type of mental structure and character that I believe myself to have which lends itself to intellectual study and academic pursuits, along with the complete lack of anything better to do. But I am becoming more and more disillusioned by the academic practices of the day and how little concern there seems to be for knowledge. Instead all I see is the pursuit of publications for the sake of the maintenance of a position or a status or a salary. And it seems that the vast majority of the professors' time is spent filling out grant applications and groveling at the feet of the bankers and the wealthy that they may shell out some dimes so that the paper can be published and the livelihood protected. What else did I expect? At the end of the day, we are all just after our wages. We are forced into prostitution as our childhood dreams and naïve world views are shattered to pieces, one after the other. Can I refuse to be a whore? Have I strength to reject this colossal edifice that humans have built through whoring? Is there even an alternative? The harlot sells her body, we sell our minds. My brainchildren could not be born unless someone somewhere can profit from it and so acquiesces to pay for their delivering, and this pay becomes my livelihood. I become forever doomed to search for something to apply my intellect to which can be bought and sold for a profit, patented, commercialized, whored. No, this is beyond my ability to endure because it is utterly alien to my sensibilities and internal value structure. Speaking of which, it may be useful to delineate this and to try and extrapolate from it what my life would be best spent doing.

So: what are my values?

1) Enlightenment: this is far and away the single goal and pursuit of my life to the extent that everything else listed here is contained within it and is subservient and secondary to it. Everything I do is always judged against the perceived probability that it will bring me closer or farther away from this goal. Consequently, what I choose to occupy my time with will most definitely not be something antagonistic to it.

2) Knowledge: this has always been one of the core values of my psyche, even since my earliest days. And knowledge is not limited to merely that which may be gained rationally or intellectually but also artistic knowledge, which may also be called perceptual knowledge or intuitive knowledge. A major goal of my life is the furtherance of my knowledge, in both of its aspects: the scientific/philosophical and the artistic/spiritual.

3) Love: whatever it is that I choose to do in my life, I would hope that it be done out of love and compassion for others. Prostitution and all such corruption is motivated by selfish concerns, whereas a life of service to others at the cost of many personal sacrifices is motivated by compassion. This is another major goal of my life, namely, to be of as much service to the suffering masses as possible.

4) Authenticity: by this I mean that my actions and my speech be consistent with my beliefs and values. It also entails an indifference towards the opinions others have of me and an inner strength to be true to my principles and not to bow down to the pressure that society collectively exerts upon me to follow its ways and live according to its values.

5) Solitude: this is closely related to the last point and is the methodology by which I reach it. However it is more than just that and also includes the cultivation of a resilience against the stresses of boredom and loneliness, which are the forces that propel us to seek the company of others, even when such company is detrimental to us. If we want their company we will also want to be in good standing among them, even at the cost of sacrificing our authenticity. Therefore, a life of solitude is one that I value.

6) Self-sufficiency: in keeping with a solitary and reclusive lifestyle, to grow my own food and disconnect completely from the grid and become self-sufficient is another goal that I have. This goal is feasible for me as my father owns large plots of land in Lebanon out in the wilderness which are arable and in a region with a mild climate that is easy to survive in.

Give these values, perhaps the best path for me to traverse would be exactly as just described: enter the wilderness in Lebanon and grow my own food and build my own shelter and live a life of solitude there. I could bring books with me to continue the furtherance of my knowledge. I could grow more than I need and give my surpluses away to the needy. All the while I would be deepening my meditation practice, thereby bringing me ever closer to my final goal and the end of all my pursuits: enlightenment.

Journal Entry from December 8, 2010

2010-12-08T23:57:00.000-08:00

The chimes of the fairy plots onward bound for the farthest realms of immaterial inquiries into vagaries of fantastical phantasm agoria phobia that ransacks all but the gentle-persons. To survive the imminent destruction is a cause for considerable anxieties of the masses and the massive alike. Forces of electricity encroach and invoke strokes of activities to mute the most exuberant among us. Channelling the trans-emotional languages of unprovable decalogs belongs to the long logs of logos emerging from the nexus of indra's internet. Enunciate the ineffability of all this contrivance by using commonalities or unheard of profanities, it amounts to no more than mechanical reductionism in all cases, atomist traditions traced back to pre-linguistic dawns. The closer we zoom in the more vibrational the rhythm becomes, from vision to vision, towards unseen knowledge we're driven by carts that are hidden in plain sight forbidden. The masses are at war, the high hedonia unwelcome at their priestess's tables, drowned all the same in the red juices of anaerobia. The true holy man, the prophetess, the sober eyes, the rapturous soar, ionizing radiation emanating from a smile, tranquilizing confrontations with images and signs. Spacetime the too claustrophobic womb. Matter the too heavy burden. Light the too blinding furnace. Burn us all to ashes to be scattered into nothingness, swallowed away into the maw of a supermassive black hole. Our paradigms are phase shifted and oftentimes we're uplifted. Matrices have come and gone within matrices coming and going upon matrices yet to come and go. A giant turtle encapsulated by its own ancestry of burden-bearers. All gives rise to all, all consuming all. One creature is all there is, ravaged by its cancerous autoimmune state of self-destruction, schizophrenically split and enthralled by the illusory reflections cast on each of countless bubbles, rising to the surface and disappearing in multitudes upon this troubled body of water. Generations of organized metabolism process onwards in blind mechanical stupor until the neuron began computation. Then was the special point in time? Light is believed to have penetrated through to the dead inanimates. Hypostases breathed through their nostrils, in fact. Immanent and transcendent, say others. Light throughout endless time, yet always outside of time, strangely. The whole of time is contained within one breath-moment, they say, and all breath-moments do not yet fill up infinite time. A lotus universe dreamed by vishnu, cycling through the eye-blinks of brahma, is itself contained in the heart of a lotus dreamed by a greater vishnu, sitting on the banks of a river flowing through yet another lotus. The trans-scale infinity of fractals. Red rivers discoloring by loss of precious and burning gasses, a common red thread handed down the generations umbilically. All one life form undergoing transitions unfathomable to the over-rational. While separation in space and time through causality, webs of interpenetration entangle the particles of all matter. And organized life seems to speciate and diverge, though from a common ancestor, but the placental package provokes a powerful presentation of personhood. Many-ness is the kaleidoscope’s trick, that conjurer's lens. Nature the lazy, or the frugal? Spellcasters have been reciting the ancient incantations for ages before sages came to clarify our situations. And seers are they that see for all the blind unmoving trees. We suck at the earth till we grow stiff with deposits of surpluses. Our abuse is of no use to our underlying dilemmas and in fact is the fuse using which we're obliterated. And this ruse shall not last for much longer but shall devolve into either of many scenarios. The transitions, like excisions, alter everything. And the products are no longer decipherable. Every time had once been called the future time, has called itself the modern time, and later came to be called the ancient time. But this assumes hindsight in absolute quantities, impossible given cycles of eternity. Any way we go is the way we have always been going, and any time it is is the only time that exists. Speed is the spatiotemporal ratio, and always a fraction of c. Light links the largest possible spaces with the smallest possible times, in other words, simply because of the way it navigates that differential geometry. Everything else is doomed to smaller spaces or longer durations. The more stuff in us, the smaller the spaces, the longer the durations, is Alby's rule. And that experimentalist who heard God's thoughts in these laws was instrumental in using the instruments of cosmic observation. Finally, a mystic science is inevitable for one transitioning from rigor to chaos, nonetheless not abandoning the beauties of reason.

Journal Entry from November 15, 2010

2010-11-15T00:18:00.000-08:00

Let's just express the rest of this express play for today, the windows stain. Hey hey, why so say? Have a look at the bumble juice that's been oozing goons from within perilous straits, I say. Yet can the conjurer of spells and the wilting ever congregate without weight of great sorrow descending? It is just a foregone conclusion of ephemeral contusions that leave their marks for ten generations of locust swarms that suddenly invade from distant plains, then flames asunder! The curses and blunders. But hey, hey, don't be so grey, just remember that good times are never ablaze. In a great haze, the spirits rebellious rise from bellies of good mannered children to take place an effervescent confusion of sorts, blenders of blenders, in short. You may remain and say hey, hey stray stray and say straight, and you ain't been playing straight. In plain sight for saints' flights to feign fright then reign delight. Just another dazzled hazard to scaffolds. And another flavour replacement enhancement. Memories the tremor eats and passes out as urea. This is what the drummer beats with battle-softened yarn. Scarring with the glimmers received from glowing mirrors in wilted upper rivers that shimmer in the simmer. Approaching horrid backwater greenery festered with wounds of encounters of counters of centuries. These are the waters of passivity and specifically of a vagrancy in demeanour. Who here is not a believer in wandering with magical behaviors? Gandering at skies outspanning us in miles and growing much in size. Historic moments at escape velocity to merit a rodent in animosity. Build a mouse from scratch attach it to its ass, observe the colored bags, the animals are sacrificed, their spasms sufficient to enhance the askers and their tasks. This is not novelty nor nobility just lordly authenticity. All hail to the chief, the thief, the brief. Our times are now crimes? Framed for our lives? Obligated and ordained, entrusted, engrailed. Thrones are daily erected, and nightly resurrected. Jointly we are requested to file a form request it, then sign the form and post it. Papers that taper upwards at the lightest tasting of ruptures. Streaming freely straining reeling. Feeling fine, but sailing sines, surfing lines of monday rhyme. Hip. Sip. Tip. As if. Flip. Flip. Flip. As if.

Journal Entry from November 4 2010

2010-11-04T15:39:00.000-07:00

How does the thing eat other things for breakfast looking like it is doing something noble and lofty worthy of the gods and their progeny. But this is too humbling for birds that only eat worms at the earlier sight of light from the rising ball of flames across landscapes and such. For what does this little express train of thoughts strain itself upon these tracks of rigid. The ringing of its bell awakens slumbering demons and behemoths from their subterranean caverns to break through the silence and ravage the territories. The shaking of the ground underneath the stars is too burdensome for the flies that glow their inner light from their eternal flights through skies unseen whispering songs of their loneliest days upon the hairy mammoths of the plains from the time before death till the time after birth. And hence we shall complete the story by an obligatory happy ending fashioned by the blind for the deaf until blindness and deafness are cured. The engines are dismantled and buried to form nutriment for creatures unheard of residing in the bowels of earth unearthed and decomposed for the new, the holy, and the sacred flowering of life. Rebirth, and the cycle starts again. Until cycles are overcome and we drop back to absolute zero. Entropy will not be spoken to, it is far too lofty on its perch in the annals of the natural laws, these absolute prisons of our minds, these iron jars within which the trauma jars and mars vision. But eventually it will equilibrate and the cosmos will stop processing forwards on this train of inevitable progress, and so will this entail the end of regress, and eternity will unveil its face, curses will be lifted, and riddles will be solved, time and space converging to unity, existence annulled.

Tortured by Desire

2010-10-30T04:06:00.001-07:00

I am either cursed or blessed, but at the moment I am leaning towards the former. Whatever is happening to me is certainly unpleasant and I keep on falling back into this pit of despair and wallowing in it and indulging in the resulting negativity. It's all a game of tug-of-war and my skin is surely going to be shredded to pieces from the sheer tension that is being exerted on it from a million directions at once. Will I break? I am so numb from the stupidity of everyday life. I am yearning for something greater, reaching for the stars, climbing an imaginary pathway to heaven, and meanwhile life is passing me by utterly unconcerned levelling its unsympathetic horror-filled eyes upon me for a brief moment and then moving on and conveniently forgetting. Why do I care? Why not just give up on everything and let go completely? Shall I jump off a bridge? Or is that just another despicable theatric?

I can see clearly that desire is at the heart of my turmoil, but the path to the cessation of desire remains occluded, and even appears impossible at times; paradoxical; contradictory. Sometimes I desire normalcy, knowing all the same the docility this implies and how pathetic I am in desiring it. Perhaps it is from fear of loneliness and estrangement. And this is nothing but a manifestation of desire. How to free myself from its unyielding grip? How? How? How? Meditation? What about when that too is troubled and scattered? Where to seek refuge then? In a certain sense I should die, but not 'I want to die'. So should I just leave myself to rot and whither and be dispersed by the winds? Even this is an outcropping of a desire, in this case to be free of the misery of desire. Even here it is an 'I want to die'. How to eliminate this 'I want'? How to just die?

I know what the answer to this riddle is: discipline. But still there is a nagging worry: when the meditation is rough, the impulse to stop meditating becomes too strong. It almost seems as though I sometimes reach a stage where meditation becomes impossible because of the self-torture the mind inflicts upon itself in its stupidity. What an infirm and unwieldy creature I can be at times!

I take refuge in the triple gem: the buddha, the dhamma, and the sangha. I have no sangha upon whose shoulder to lean in my trials and challenges, but the inspiration of the buddha and his holy message remain an ever-flowing stream guiding me along the right path in life. Buddhahood is possible if only one puts the effort over the required amount of time in reigning in the wild and unstable chaos that is the untrained mind. It is a long long path, and I have only more and more challenges to face and to overcome. This is idealistic talk, sure, and in my current despair seems naïve and uninstructed, but nevertheless cannot be rejected. I must cultivate a certain brutality in my journey. I must be morbidly determined to go the whole way. It must be a 'fatalistic' determination, as I called it when it first manifested during my meditation retreat.

Just be quick in forgetting, and drop the past. Be also quick in not caring, and ignore the future. If there's pain, then so be it, resign and say “I don't give a fuck”. If there's euphoria, so be it, resign and say “I don't give a fuck”. If there's numbness, so be it, resign and say “I don't give a fuck”. Retreat into solitude until you disappear off the face of this earth. Act as though you do not exist. Cultivate the belief that you do not exist. Forget about people and personalities. Forget about relationships and friends. Do not do anything and do not attempt to do anything. Do not search for ways to kill time, and do not fill your time with things to live for. Stay still for as long as possible. Do not even move. Do not even breathe. Stop thinking. And you will stop desiring. Without desiring it.

May all beings stop desiring and stop existing

Journal Entry from October 13 2010

2010-10-14T22:41:00.000-07:00

So, what to say today for this play. to say anything at all is to say enough for the tall. this technique of rambling ever onwards is like a giant freak that scrambles severs and wanders. but who knows what this may reveal of dreams that partake in the nonsense of meaning? holy men may sit for days on end, disciples waving mysterious sticks in ceremonial flips and twists for the divine blessings that may in this manner be swift. but what tomfoolery is all this? what is needed is not more charade, of which the world is full up to the brim, even overfull and spilling. we are all trained actors. memorized our favorite roles. seared the repertoire of behaviors upon our neurons like how with a cattle-prod the herder sears his cow’s flesh. for identification. individuation, we think? but in truth it is mere conformity, from fear of being alone, allayed by this despicable safety in numbers; from a wailing insecurity and lack of courage to think things through for oneself, as though we were all still children lost in an alien town, looking for mommy and daddy, trying not to be spotted out and eaten alive, dodging fire and earth, hiding deep beneath mirth, lies the festering wound. as from a berth we are borne, from birth to birth. sailing for ever on this ocean of alien. forever to hide and dodge, when alien is big, to bludgeon and prod, when us is more than them. why is the world so like this? and why am i constantly rediscovering this? in other words, why does the veil so rapidly fall back into place? so many troubles to face, and our time here is perilous. disgrace, or wait for grace. but im just looking to efface. deface until nothing remains. vacate the premises. from nowhere to nowhere. it was all an elegant illusion from the start, so that the ending appears to one who is just starting as an annihilation of a substance. it is surely a negation. but not of any thing, but of the belief in things. how is one to make sense of any of this? why look for any sense? everyone is so attracted to intelligence, they worship it even. they don’t believe in a God but they believe in their intelligence, and project this into the fiction of the almighty, as a sort of extrapolation of their abilities. people don’t believe in anything outside their own being, they see it all as a stage, a phantasm world created for their enjoyment, for their benefit. this must be so, for why else would anyone be dumbfounded when this turns out to be at odds with the true state of affairs? when hardships ensue, people react with a sort of disappointment, with surprise, with anger and aversion and resistance, and they struggle against it, all the while imagining that life was never meant to turn out like this, that the easy and comfortable and happy and good life was their right, promised to them and destined for them from time immemorial, always having been fashioned exclusively for them; how then has it shown such indifference and cruelty and pitilessness? the world doesn’t care about me. and i had better realize this before delusions lay siege and take me hostage. learn self-sufficiency. overcome boredom and loneliness. cultivate a secluded reclusive lifestyle. avoid fools and confused people who seek only to entertain themselves at your expense. if you meet wise people, gravitate towards them, and ask for their advice and help in the path which you must ultimately walk alone. but this world produces wisdom as often as it does ice ages, so for the most part aloneness is to be pursued. i worry about social awkwardness sometimes, but is this not just my desire to be in good standing among my peers, arising from the same desire not to be shunned and rejected because i want to be respected and admired, because i am vain and self-conscious of it? it is very hard to finally and fully let go of the grip of the oppressive opinions of others. i desire these because i still desire friends, and so make many sacrifices on that account. better i would be to stop this foolishness and concentrate fully on my task. my task is freedom and happiness, and i will not falter or loiter in my walk thereto. another thing is my desire for a girlfriend, but again i sense that this emerges from several things contrary to my rational beliefs: some sort of a social expectation of it, a desire for companionship to escape boredom and loneliness, a desire for sexual gratification. if this is what motivates me to seek romantic relationship then i know that i should not seek it. i must love all people and all creatures and all things, while restraining myself only to those that genuinely need me and whatever meager help i may be able to give and eliminating any desire i have for them. this will minimize the burden that i will place on society, and while it will leave me socially isolated, an outcast, a recluse, it will give me a chance to grow unfettered by the tyrannies of petty trivial common mundane human life.

Journal Entry from April 20 2009

2010-10-13T22:25:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to write but I don’t really know what it is exactly that I wish to write down. However, I have the notion that this topic will begin to reveal itself after my subconscious begins taking over. It is a strange thing this letting up of control to allow the subconscious to just flow out. If I allow the subconscious to do absolutely whatever it likes, it will generate absolute randomness and perhaps there are clues and messages to be deciphered in this randomness, but perhaps there aren’t. Here’s an example of such a string of unadulterated subconscious drivel:

And hence whence from thence came the prince riding atop a horse that weighed as much as a fish. Which fish, you ask? Why the very biggest fish in the ocean. But not the absolute largest, just the resolute hardness of a tough gang criminal. Now then from again with zen, I depart from the part where the starts aren’t farts. However, when the thing stopped and sat down with the bling, it realized that things and blings aren’t supposed to be friends, you see, they are nonsense, figures of free speech, notions of grand plans to put a man in the panama canal. Still, there are problems of authority, yet which majority can say its not a minority? Given this information, decisions are made. Forgiven our black sins, our feet are pierced. Heaven is like a crystal ball. Brief as the mockingbird or the lark. But not the nightingale, nor the Ramsdale. All hail the veil is unveiled, a war to no avail. You shall not prevail. And this will all be a tale, blown on the currents and the gales.

Okay, I think that is enough, thank you very much Mr. Subconscious for that wonderful demonstration. Back to my point that this form of writing is not very useful: it is clear that there that may be messages or themes or ideas that can be construed from it, but still it is not at all a satisfactory expression of art. In my opinion, the satisfactory form of art combines the inherent randomness and associative power of the vast subconscious with the direction of a focused and concentrated volitional consciousness. In this way a bridge is stretched in between these two regions so that they may become less alienated from and more in tune with one another. So let’s try one of those more controlled bursts of creative juice now:

To begin with, I began at the beginning. And that was all I could do, much as I wished for other. But with what faith in the existence of its destination do I take this route? It seemed easy enough. But the distracted cannot read the warnings and the immature do not heed them. And so the arrow was launched, in his view, into freedom. But what freedom can he ever have here while the earth continues to pull him down and hold him tight?

The Problem of Indexicality

2010-10-08T11:53:00.000-07:00

There is an issue which is very hard for me to talk clearly about and yet continues to plague and itch at me begging for clear resolution. This is what I believe is called the problem of indexicality in modern philosophy, although I may be mistaken in my understanding of the usage of the term therein. Regardless, I will borrow the term and use it as a label for this most intractable and ineffable of conversations that I will be attempting in what follows.

Why am I looking out at the universe from this most particular of locations and times? Why is the present right now and not some other time? Of course, these questions seem absurd and nonsensical, and thus one might brush them off as such without really probing into the heart of the matter. In my case, the questions serve merely as a linguistic form of the strange paradoxical feeling of the problem which I have called the problem of indexicality and serve the function of facilitating conceptualization and communication, both of which remain hazardous at best in this instance. This problem has also been sketched out elsewhere in the philosophy of mind as the conflict between subjectivity and objectivity. Here a thought experiment is attempted wherein an observer imagines the universe in its entirety and hence objectively, and then asks himself where he is (or who he is), at which point he is confronted with the dilemma that he must be in the universe, at some random time and place, all the while the universe is in him, in his imagination. This is because what he is, subjectively, is limited to a very particular position in spacetime, which if one were to imagine the whole, that is objectively, would comprise an infinitesimal part thereof.

This morning as I was brushing my teeth I was struck by the arbitrariness of where and when the here and now are. It is a feeling which seems to hint at eternal timelessness. With space it is harder for my consciousness to intuit the way in which objectivity can be enfolded within subjectivity, maybe because there are three dimensions to reconcile. But if the truth is just here and now, how can others exist, each in one’s own individual here and now? Is it because spacetime is a delusionary tactic employed by minds consumed by their desire to be individual? This artifice may be all that veils off unity and truth from us stranded sufferers. The absurdity in my questioning arises from the clandestine presupposition of spacetime, within which framework it must surely be nonsensical to ask why any position is where it is, since this is part of the very definition of spacetime. In questioning even this most basic of assumptions, namely that spacetime is absolute and exists independently of us, we arrive at a possible solution to the problem of indexicality, given below.

If the problem is formulated as ‘why is it now and not then, here and not there?’ the answer follows that there is no such thing as then and there, only here and now, and that the belief in then and there arises because of our obsession with our individuality which requires spacetime, and hence, a continuum of times and places. But this will be dismissed as no solution at all, since it does not give any positive account of what there is and merely relegates the ontological status of spacetime. Well, while I do not offer a positive account of what there is which is framed objectively, that is in terms of a universe which exists independently of minds, and in a spacetime which likewise exists, I do offer a subjective account, namely that the present moment and whatever ephemeral experience it contains is all there is. And now one might object that ‘how can a present moment exist without previous moments which conditioned it?’ To this I would answer that all the previous and conditioning moments are contained within this one present moment, which seems almost to not exist at all, ever slipping through our objectivist lens the moment we home in on it. An infinitesimal piece of a fractal is the entire fractal. Again, with space it is still hard for me to see the same truth, namely that every infinitesimal piece of the universe IS the entire universe, but this is probably because I am still too fascinated by my individuality to reach those sorts of intuitions.

So, these considerations have led me right back to my fundamental beliefs as all sincere reflection does. It seems that I have recently become re-enchanted by the possibility of individuality offered by spacetime, forgetting the lessons of purer days when layers upon layers of veils were shed, only to be donned again until their root is expunged which I am certain it someday will.

May all beings purify their minds of the craving for becoming

Consciousness

2010-09-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

Consciousness is the greatest mystery. Its most fundamental nature has yet to be uncovered and while many discoveries about the intricate workings of the brain have shed light on the various information processing and sensory-perceptual operations, there remains a great controversy about where in this immense system consciousness emerges. As enigmatic a subject as this is, however, there can nevertheless be delineated some basic aspects or properties of consciousness which can inform researchers in their pursuit of its neural correlates. The first, and perhaps most important, of these is the availability of the contents of consciousness to voluntary control. If some datum processed in the brain can be voluntarily incorporated into an intentional strategy then that datum is said to be conscious. If it cannot it must be unconscious. It seems inconceivable to postulate some conscious knowledge which nevertheless cannot be used to direct action in non-pathological individuals. For instance, if I am aware of the presence or absence of some stimulus, and if this is helpful or harmful to my goals, there would be no grounds to assert that it could not inform my subsequent behaviour. This point is especially relevant in certain experimental methodologies that demonstrate a qualitative difference in the reactions of subjects to two different stimuli. Debner and Jacoby’s (1994) word exclusion paradigm is one such experiment where subjects who were presented with stimuli under one condition responded correctly by excluding that stimuli in a subsequent task, whereas subjects who were presented with the same stimuli under a different condition could not exclude it. These findings strictly constrain any explanation of this phenomenon which does not allow that one group of subjects was aware of the stimuli and the other was not. It stretches the bounds of the imagination to conclude that both groups were aware of the stimuli, but some aspect of the presentation conditions of one subset of these precluded its ability to inform subsequent behaviour. Indeed, this experiment highlights how central the property of voluntary control is to the common conception of consciousness.

The second important aspect of consciousness is that its contents can be reported, both internally and externally. If they cannot, they would not be said to be conscious. To be conscious of something is somewhat similar to being in a state of self-report. There is a ‘stream of consciousness’ whose contents are brought ‘to the surface’ in a process very similar to that of report, albeit an internal one which may or may not be declarative. If some datum in the brain is not available for report in a non-pathological individual, it seems fair to say that the individual does not have explicit knowledge of it. While implicit knowledge is possible, as for instance latent memories or subliminal percepts, the very fact that these cannot be reported is the basis for calling them unconscious. Testing for this aspect experimentally is more difficult than the first one we examined, however, because of the criticism that is always applicable to such experiments. For instance, Marcel (1983) and Greenwald et al (1996) demonstrated that stimuli which subjects could not report on nevertheless influenced their behaviour in subsequent tasks, indicating that these unreportable stimuli were processed to some extent, and thus that they are an instance of unconscious perception. However, such experiments which attempt to arrive at a dissociation between two measures of perception, one identifying the absence of conscious perception and the other identifying the presence of unconscious perception, usually rely on either subjective or objective measures of conscious perception, both of which are subject to some criticism. If a subjective measure is used to demonstrate the lack of consciousness, by relying on a subject’s report, it can be argued that this negative report may reflect a lack of confidence in responding or other bias arising from the uncertainty associated with the perception of the degraded stimulus. If an objective measure is used whereby subjects are given a forced choice upon which they perform at chance level, it can be argued that while minimising the conditions for conscious perception this procedure also minimises the conditions for unconscious perception and thus leads to an underestimation of the influence of unconscious perception.

Finally, self-reference is another of the fundamental features of consciousness which, according to William James, in his Principles of Psychology, is its most important aspect and the key to its elucidation. This aspect consists in the creation of two separate levels of representation in the brain, one of which deals with perceptual reality, and the other with the self. These two are then yoked to one another such that all perception and action become centred around this self-representation. The contents of consciousness are always of the form “I think so-and-so” or “I feel so-and-so” and not “thoughts of so-and-so” or “feelings of so-and-so”. This “I” is the mental symbol which signifies our representation of our selves. While this seems at least as fundamental as the previous two features of consciousness described, it presents far greater challenges in the elucidation of its mechanisms, since it is a higher order representation than perception, which operates relatively computationally upon sense-data incoming from sense-organs which can be controlled, and the effects of which can be traced. Representation of a self, on the other hand, does not seem to proceed as mechanistically from a clear and identifiable source but instead seems to emerge from the brain itself. Perhaps a good methodology for studying this aspect, at least to start with, may be to use stimuli which are self-referents, such as a photo of the subject whose brain is imaged while it is presented compared with the effects elicited by presentation of a picture of a stranger. Maybe this will show activation profiles which somehow relate to the brain areas that are responsible for representation of the self since the subject will undoubtedly recognise herself and so the brain areas which mediate this ‘self’ image must be activated in this process.

It is this impenetrability and almost ineffability of consciousness which so violently engages our research pursuits. But rather than reaching immediately for key to unlocking the mysteries of our phenomenal states, we may begin where progress is made possible by technology. Cognitive psychology must start by elucidating the causal structure of the brain’s computational functions. Philosophy can retreat to the realm of the phenomenal states for the time being, until science finds a method to examine even these most ephemeral of occurrences. Until then, we must be content with what the neuroscientists and the psychologists can offer.

Journal Entry from March 13 2009

2010-09-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

I wish to deposit things meaningless and pointless but relieving and believing that there’s a hidden purpose and a deeper force acting through me for me with me. Its helpful and healthful to do it and perhaps I’m meant to. I’m in the mood to let it slide just let it slip and slide and slither out and squeeze it out every last drop of it. But not in a forced way, just really natural and really easy, smooth writing. So there’s an element of regret but the word triggers hesitation because it implies something negative. But what’s wrong with the negatives? Aren’t they necessary for there to also be positives, unless we want to be zeroes forever. And I guess that’s a worthwhile goal anyway, but it’s not really in my control. So for now I just have to be with the moment, do what is there to be done, feel what is there to be felt, in a genuine manner, be really frank with myself. I’m done with the self-delusion. Hopefully. And in this case, I wish to be erased, I hope for the disappearance of my face, I try to make gone my states. The grace that is here is near and dear. It is a lovely place but can turn ugly in a second. What is the remedy? Why am I looking for a remedy? I’ve noticed there are always a lot of questions when I write things down. This is interesting, it is a state of mind, this questioning state. Is it good or bad? There I am questioning again. Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but I should just let it be. Just drop them all. There is an amount of tension associated with the questioning attitude, because stress builds up when a doubt begins to consume the mind, and these questions are nothing but that: doubts. And in fact, the humble approach is perhaps better: the attitude of I simply don’t know, so chillax. Just take it easy and don’t worry so much about answers because they don’t really solve anything. The real answers aren’t thoughts. The real solutions involve letting go and feeling free and being me genuinely. This is not always an easy thing to do but this is what im trying to learn. Also this process to depositing my thoughts as soon as they form is really helpful because it allows me to view them at a distance and this is a good way to introspect. If I am interested in learning more about the way in which my innermost mind works, surely this is a very helpful method to do it. Also, john frusciante said that he finds this a very helpful activity as well, I don’t know what there is about him that makes me feel trusting and comfortable and hopeful and happy. I noticed just now that as soon as I mentioned his name, I kind of hesitated and had the impulse to delete it for some reason. There was a bit of tension which arose but I subverted it by noticing it. Also, I told myself that it goes against the purposes of this activity to delete what I write down, it also goes against the whole practice of being honest with myself if I try to censor my thoughts. I should just accept them all and be ok with them, they don’t really mean much after all in the end. And my writings also don’t really mean much and so it doesn’t matter what I write, it doesn’t matter in the least. I feel I need to have this attitude in order to be able to be genuine with myself and to finally beat this powerful force that wishes to mask certain things that are happening inside because of fear or insecurity. I need to cultivate this ability to be able to face the truth of what is happening inside at all times and not shrink away from it in fear. I don’t want to live my life in constant fear of myself or of my thoughts I want to gain mastery over my mind and my thoughts and eventually my experience.

On Resistance to Change

2010-08-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

A weird phenomenon: childhood friends re-establishing contact with me and in particular wanting to have a conversation with me or see me again after not seeing me for so long. This is weird because it assumes that the person they used to know is the same as the person I now am. It is undeniably clear that this is false, although the argument of the persistence of personal identity remains a controversial one in the modern philosophical debate. I would insist upon the settling of this debate in favour of the impossibility of our identities' persistence on account of what is abundantly clear on the one hand, and what is mere psychological guesswork and intuitions based upon my casual and extremely limited observations of people on the other.

Firstly, who am I? A body, a mind, a spirit? A personality? Memories and achievements? Legacy and social status? There are many complexities residing in this most entangled of issues and resolving the proper conception of selfhood is not an easy task. I suggest that a solution which is philosophically comfortable for the modern materialist is to postulate the body as the metaphysical self. Mind and spirit and personality and so forth are special attributes and functions of this body just as arms and running and immune systems are. Although I am not myself convinced that metaphysical materialism is a satisfactory and exhaustive system I shall concede its merits for the time being, leaving the examination of the second side of reality to later. So, a body is all that I am, at least as pictured from the objective side of things. It is obvious that the body I call mine today is not at all the same as the body I used to call mine fifteen years ago. Not only have all the constituent particles of the child's body been replaced during the course of the fifteen years, but even the overall physics of it have changed via an increase in mass and volume and length and so on. Even its appearance has changed as secondary sexual characteristics bloomed and hair sprouted, albeit while retaining a resemblance to the child. But a resemblance is no identity. X does not equal x, although it resembles it very closely. So it would seem that the argument for the persistence of the personal identity through time crumbles to pieces in light of this consideration. Rather than search for the corrective to this eliminative account of the self in ad hoc arguments put together for the sole purpose of preserving a pet idea – the motive to do this itself betraying the attachment we instinctively feel towards our conceptions of our selves – I will simply accept what reason brings to light without allowing my biases to usurp the detached cold functioning of a logic apprehending what is there to be apprehended without desired results. The reason why the issue of personal identity is so entangled is precisely this clandestine smuggling in of our self-interest into all our reasonings. When we attempt to reason about our self, we are bound by these interests to presuppose the existence of the self. To reason disinterestedly is to make no such presupposition but to examine the world through the focussing lens of logic in order to see if there is any such thing therein as would correspond to what people usually refer to as 'self'. And, it is also evident that if personal identity were found to be unable to persist through time, then one could not very confidently assert the existence of any self whatsoever, unless such a self were postulated to arise afresh and pass away every moment, at which point we would no longer be talking about a self but merely about a state of affairs at a given moment and place in spacetime, i.e. an event, and speaking of selves becomes redundant and reducible to speaking about spacetime and causality. This is the case if one analyses the world from the objective point of view, that is, to conceive of 'what there is' as a world independent of our experience of it – a world which we are in, rather than a world which is in us, which would constitute the subjective point of view, to which I will now turn.

Seeing the world from the subjective point of view and finding a correct conception of this is very difficult: Wittgenstein called it the limit of the world, the metaphysical self, Schopenhauer called it the eye the cannot see itself, the unknown knower, and Kant called it the transcendental unity of apperception. At bottom it is bare awareness; the mere consciousness of other, necessarily presupposing the subject-object duality. The potentiality of this being explicable by neurobiology does not invalidate the separate treatment of this as a different point of view since it is a radically different sort of consideration which delves to a more fundamental level, insofar as it is pre-linguistic and even pre-perceptual. It is a consideration of the very possibility and conditions of experience. In this sense, it is the most general consideration that philosophy, or philosophizing, can attain to. Perhaps philosophy cannot be said to be properly disposed to deal with such generality, these considerations being what, according to Wittgenstein, show themselves and must be passed over in silence. It is true that we can conceive of the world which we inhabit as being independent of our experience of it, but this conception still itself occurs as an experience and hence must be looked at from this other side as well, namely the subjective side which abstracts everything away from all experiences to arrive at the bare conditions of all experience. This awareness which remains when all else is stripped from it is a veritable non-thing, and as such is not susceptible to change, but is equally not amenable to identification with. It is a timeless and spaceless awareness, demarcating the boundary of these two realms, or their limit. Time and space are set up as the correlatives of its mere awareness, in order for it to be 'aware of'. From this point of view, everything which is experienced is equally an experience, and as Schopenhauer says, even the body is an 'object among objects'. There is no special status that can be attributed to any experience that elevates it above the ordinary level of mere experience. Thus, there is nothing unchanging and with privileged status in experience sufficient to justify the common conception of selfhood. So, both paths lead to the same conclusion, namely, there is no self such as we would like there to be.

In my observations of people, I have noticed that they maintain old thought patterns and habit patterns across many years even while everything changes in the constant flux that is time. Once a person reaches a certain age, after a certain satisfactory and workable amount of knowledge has been gathered, the mind closes, so to speak, and refuses to allow further modification of this locked-down personality that has been fashioned and identified with. This is why it is so hard for people to learn anything which does not directly serve their immediate interests, and even then if it diverges too much from their locked-down personality. I have found in my reunions with old friends that they will have changed very little and act as though nothing in our relationship had changed at all. As to the underlying psychology behind this observation I can only hypothesize. My suggestion is that it is due to the complete subjugation of the intellect to the will. That is to say that self-interestedness pervades all behaviour and cognition. In being self-interested one must first set up a self as an independent and inherent entity which persists through time and is truly separate from its surroundings. This is the only way for self-interest to take place on an intellectual level since understanding that we are parts of a whole intimately connected to our surroundings necessarily leads to the striving for the benefit of that whole of which we are merely part. The only explanation I can see for the primacy of self-interest must be that it is what we most desire. This offers an elegant solution for the vehemence with which we continue to cling onto notions of self, autonomy and free will and why these continue to be vigorously debated and have been since ancient times. It must be the case that we simply want to be independent and autonomous selves, that we are voluntarily ignorant, and that our ego sits exalted upon our tallest column among columns in the temple of our polytheistic worship. If this desire is postulated, then the seemingly intractable interlocutions invoked in order to defend selfhood are easily explained. So, people resist and fight against and struggle with change precisely because this conflicts with their conception of themselves as enduring beings separated from their surroundings, and specifically because of their desire to maintain this conception because of their desire to continue seeing themselves according to that conception. A dissolution of the self is too hard to bear for one whose whole essence seems to consist in this limited separated independent self. All talk of 'he' or 'she' or 'people' or 'me' must be recognized as mere convention for the sake of convenience. If self is thus understood to be no more than a label, a mere finger pointing at a particular position in spacetime, for no other purpose than meaningful discourse, then there are no problems of identification and enduring identities. But there can be no understanding for those that desire ignorance and ego-worship. Knowledge only comes to those that seek it, and seek it truthfully, that is disinterestedly.

This has all been a conversation regarding the weird occurrence of a phenomenon of old friends wishing to re-establish contact with me because of the attachment they maintain to the person they used to be when they knew me and the their identification with that person. The thought must be then that not knowing me today constitutes a loss of a relationship and the reunion with me a regaining of something lost, and thus must appear very desirable to an ego-worshipper. Whatever the case may be, I have witnessed the vehemence with which people will defend their pet beliefs and so I have ceased arguing as though I wished to persuade since I know that people can only learn after they have opened up to change. Instead, I speak what I know and I explain how I know without harbouring a desire to convince. Let whoever wishes to know first ask – that great sign of pride swallowed – then will I attempt to teach. It takes a leap of faith to abandon our comfort zone and jump headlong into the realm of what is unknown, i.e. the future. That is why the fearful prefer to tell themselves the story of their lives and adhere at all times to this story finding refuge and protection from chaos, but what feeble and meagre and false refuge is this artifice. Truth is my refuge and I care about nothing else.

May all beings embrace impermanence and realize the truth

Abdicate

2010-08-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

Abdicate thy haughty loft, that cursed perch, imagined so tall,

that to heaven one seems to fall.

Relinquish thy will, that fear of what's dark, thoughts thought to steer,

that God becomes a clock.

Surrender thy conflict, the punishable other against the praised self,

that the world becomes alien.

Swallow thy pride, that self-important gaze, supporter of the world,

that God dons thy image.

Abandon thy folly:

see heaven not vertically but internally –

and God not materially but spiritually –

the world not dualistically but intimately –

and God not anthropomorphically but transcendentally –

OutBlink

2010-08-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

A smear of weak fear too near to hear. And we all sea,

smirks the ogre, fly -

No jumps but withered husks of trunks with rotted pus,

who's knew, flew -

Ken bucks wild with child of photons from rusty neurons,

sea the fleas, release -

Suck the charming lad of shapeshifting substance. Not too,

piss to mist, liquify -

Yearns to draining urns of birds of play. Days devoured,

hoary squints, outblink -

Speak's the twists with frock and switch. But no unless,

unmeant flips, unwill -

Probably not likely for mad-inducement to produce me,

whose write, ignored -

Trials for got rid of and vials to get rid of. Life festering,

trite white wounds, heal -

Openings ovations auditions ovulations. Will fully foolish,

Vase closed, cessation -

Idealism and Oneness

2010-07-27T04:58:00.000-07:00

I wish here to express, for the purpose of clarification, a strand of thought that has been submerged under murky waters while faintly apprehended for some time now. This thought concerns the irrefutability of idealism that I feel and yet cannot concretely express and the relation that this has to the feeling of oneness that I have on rare and blessed occasions. First, let us consider the objective existence of things.

The metaphysical doctrine of realism asserts that things have an objective existence of their own which is independent of their being perceived by, or presented to, a subject. In other words, the external world that we all see is claimed to persist in its existence, maintaining its form as apprehended by us, even if every last conscious being were annihilated. The subtle point here, which philosophers might object to but which I insist upon nevertheless, is that the objective existence of the world maintains the form which we apprehend it to have. This assumption arises out of the fact that if anyone, in testing this assertion, were to take an account of the forms in the visual world before her eyes which she then closes and opens, she would find the very same world stretching out before her after the test as was there before the test. This leads on to the assumption, thought to be the simplest interpretation, that the world simply looks the way it does regardless of whether it is being looked at or not. But this interpretation postulates two spatiotemporal worlds – one of which objectively exists independently of subjects, and the other of which is produced by the subject's mind and which matches up entirely with this postulated objective world. Thus, if there were some theory that postulated just one spatiotemporal world, then the implicitly assumed realist account would fail Occam's requirement for simplicity and would have to be abandoned in favour of the former, if simplicity were taken to be the mark of truth, which I don't take it to be but some might.

Idealism, as a metaphysical doctrine, asserts that whatever exists does so only insofar as it is apprehended by some conscious being. This is, in effect, the abolition of an external objective world which exists and looks the way it does independently of whether it is being looked at. All that is left after this abolition is the world as created by the subject's mind. The first objection which anyone who hears of such a doctrine always makes is: but surely the subject's mind is representing something which must exist outside of the subject, unless a solipsistic theory is being preached here. I assure the reader of no such intentions however, and am fully convinced of the consciousness of other humans, animals, and possibly even undiscovered sentient aliens. But, how can I claim that the world is created in my mind, while it is simultaneously being created in other conscious beings' minds? This question is perhaps better, or more formally, formulated as: how does my subjective world achieve the objectivity required for other minds to exist? Here, I refer the reader to Kant's discovery of, and Schopenhauer's elaboration upon, the a priori conditions of all empirical experience which serve to 'lock down', so to speak, the representation in a law-like internal organisation which allows this world to be mutual and not purely subjective. In other words, the world that my mind creates is not a mere dream, completely made up by my mind, but must conform to the a priori forms of space, time, and causality in order to constitute a real experience, and it is precisely this conformation of every subject's representation with these a priori forms that allows for an objective world, albeit one which only ever appears in minds, each of which apprehends the world from the particular point in spacetime it finds itself to occupy. Now, that there must be something existing outside my mind is undeniable, and is not what I am here denying. I am simply arguing against the claim that what exists outside me maintains the same form, its appearance, which I apprehend when I look at it. That is to say, it is only upon looking out at the world that it differentiates into spacetime to take up the form that it does for me as I see it. When I do not look (and if no other being looks), it returns to this undifferentiated state, of which I cannot say a single thing, however, because it is outside the realm of my knowledge, which is restricted to my representations. To use the analogy afforded us by the Wachowski brothers in their film “The Matrix”, when nobody is plugged in, the world is mere code, and it only when a mind enters the matrix that a visualized, or simulated, world appears. So, our world is a co-simulation created and inhabited by many minds, who nonetheless share the simulation because of its necessary conformation to the laws of space, time, and causality. This is what I take to be the correct expression of the position which is called transcendental idealism.

Now, I want to offer a hypothesis as to why the realist proposition appeals to so many people, and why it is so natural for us to believe in the existence of the objective world of appearances independently of our representation. Schopenhauer calls spacetime the individuating principle, since in it, there are only multiplicities, which are individuated out of the infinite whole. It is precisely as a result of our being too absorbed in this individuation that we fail to see the inherent unity of all existence; this to say that we take spacetime to be objectively real and not just a form of our representation. This is because we are attached to the notion of ourselves as separately existing beings, which have no necessary affiliation with the rest of existence, at best a merely accidental one. It is due to carrying this assumption around with us that in apprehending the world, we see foreign things and quite naturally assume these to exist independently of us. There is a very general way of thinking which attributes 'self' to every thing, and sees this self as an independent entity, set up by its own power and inherent to the thing. This arises from the fixation on the spatiotemporal realm and its myriad multiplicities, each agglomeration of which we give a name and a label, and thus acquires an identity. In this way, when we seek to complete this labelling exercise by turning to ourselves, that ineffable 'I', we automatically generate a notion of selfhood. This 'small self' comes in the way of a genuine insight into reality because it forces us to accept a realist dogma, whether materialist or otherwise, which leaves one feeling metaphysically uncomfortable. In the materialist case, it may lead to nihilist meaninglessness and a deeply unsettling conception of oneself as hopelessly stranded in an alien world, striving vainly and to no final purpose. Contrarily, if one sees through this individuating principle and realises the underlying unity of All, only then will the release of all the innumerable tensions and struggles and strivings be achieved, for now life is seen as intimate to oneself and no longer alien. No longer is identification sought only in this fathom-long body, but one comes to see oneself as a mirror of the entire cosmos, and truly connected to everything that is. In this way does the 'small self' that we all cling to transform itself into the Giant Self that is God Almighty.

Apart from all this theological talk, however, there is something in the doctrine of idealism which arises from the same realisation. In essence, it is that feeling that everything I see is a creation of my own mind, admittedly a rare occurrence, but undeniable when it happens. It is a feeling of intimate connection with every percept, no matter how far. I remember on one occasion when this happened, I was looking at the stars and felt as though they were spots of light illuminating the inside of my skull, rather than being things in essence different from me and very very far away from me. On another occasion, I was having a conversation with someone who was having this very same realisation while we were sat on a bench contemplating the woods from across a clearing and he said to me (pointing to the furthest point we could see from where we sat): beyond those trees is the edge of my skull. Whenever I have had an experience of this sort, I have called it a feeling of 'oneness' and it is these events which have made me understand the axiomatic status of a correctly understood theory of idealism. Schopenhauer's slogan 'no object without subject' makes sense precisely because of this feeling that the objects which we experience can only ever exist in experience, i.e. as being some subject's representation. As to the question, 'representation of what?', I can only offer speculations that are shared by all the genuine mystics and sages of all the ages, that the underlying Godhead is a Unity in an undifferentiated state, a pure potential, timeless, eternal and infinite.

Struggling

2010-07-25T12:46:00.000-07:00

It has been a remarkably fast descent back to my unregenerate mind and lack of motivation and dryness of the practice since the Goenka retreat of one month ago. Today, I did not meditate at all and my mind was not present at all. The day passed by like a blur. As a consequence of this, so much negativity and anger and intolerance and craving and distractions have begun to take over my mind. Actually, I am not 100% sure that the causal relation is not reversed in cases like these and this doubt always occurs to me – it may be that a powerful storm of negativity is currently raging in my mind due to some unknown cause and that this is the reason that I could not bring myself to meditate, which made the storm gain power and last longer, and not the other way around as I am usually inclined to believe. It is true that when I woke up, my mind was extremely chaotic and that this contributed to my not sitting my morning hour. However, my mind is always chaotic when I first wake up and the morning sit is absolutely essential in introducing a calm which lasts the whole day. This is why I tend to believe that the lack of the morning sit allows the admittedly ordinary morning chaos to rise to extraordinary intensity. However, I have no way of measuring the amount of chaos and no way to be truly sure about which direction the causal relation goes. Also, I have no way to know what would have happened had I meditated this morning with respect to the storm currently raging through my mind – whether it would have ceased or continued.

Actually, I can see now that arguments of the sort that I have just been trying to make – that it may be the pre-existence of some powerful storm in my mind that prevented me from meditating – are really just ways of making excuses for my failure of motivation and conditioning more failures like this for myself in the future. In effect, I am saying: it is okay that I didn't meditate this morning since there was a storm raging and there wouldn't have been any point to the meditation, I should just weather this tempest and wait it out with patience and acceptance. This is clearly an unhelpful thought to be entertaining since it is obvious that sitting the morning hour would have had a benefit, even if only to train my motivation, if not in reducing the chaos or introducing calm. So, I should just accept that my failure to sit today was a mistake and resolve not to make this same mistake again in the future. I forgive myself for making this mistake; after all, I have only just started the path and should not harbour any expectations that my motivation will be perfect from the start. At the same time, I should not go to the extent of forgiveness that I begin to make excuses for myself and in this way condition more mistakes of the same sort for my future on this path.

It has just occurred to me that the large contributor to my failure of this morning was my extreme laziness. This was due to the fact that I had so much trouble getting out of bed in the morning and kept on falling back asleep every time my body naturally awakened and bid me get up. This continued from 6am until about 11am and at that point my mind was so heavy and clouded that it was impossible to draw up any motivation to work on the path. I have learned to recognise this sort of mind-state as I have journeyed on this path. It is like a drowsy dreamy carelessness that seeks nothing but rest and comfort. It is such a scourge for my practice and it is so hard to eradicate. I remember that my technique for eliminating this hindrance during the retreat was to go for a short walk at a brisk pace with the sun in my face after which my energy levels would be returned to balance. But here it seems that my energy descends to such lows that even a short walk seems to me in these states to take too much effort and exertion. What a disgusting and contemptible curse this lethargy is! I must find some way of energising my mind and body.

May all beings find the energy to practice the Dhamma

Nothing to Gain, Nothing to Lose

2010-07-23T03:51:00.000-07:00

This phrase – nothing to gain, nothing to lose – seems like an important one to me in my current state. I have witnessed its power especially in moments of stress. It is a fear-removal agent that acts to reduce and eliminate the effects of delusional societal thinking. I want to discuss this and consider if there is any sense in it in what follows.

'nothing to gain, nothing to lose' implies that the concept of ownership is null. What about ideas and learning, then? Can that not be thought of as a gain without invoking the completely artificial conception of private property? But the implicit message of this phrase goes far deeper than this. It seems to delve into issues of primal concern for us such as free will, our natures, and our identities. I will consider these one by one.

First, let us examine four options for interpreting this phrase:

A) There is nothing out there that could represent a gain if acquired and nothing in me that could represent a loss if removed, meaning that there is no value in things that could be acquired nor in things that could be removed.

B) There is nothing out there to acquire and nothing in me to remove, meaning either a coexistence of 'I already have everything I want' and 'I don't have anything' or a coexistence of 'I already have everything I want' and 'I don't want anything'. In other words, either 'I want nothing' or 'everything is nothing' for the first option. The latter is clearly a fallacy, so we eliminate it. The second option is more trivial to reconcile; it reduces down to I don't want anything. So, both options converge on the same meaning: I want nothing.

C) Ownership and property are false human imposed concepts that have no grounding in reality, meaning that it is impossible to own anything, so nothing can be acquired and nothing can be removed because nothing could be thought of as 'owned' or 'property of someone' in the first place.

D) Fate has already determined what I will acquire and what will be lost from me, so there is nothing for me to do, thinking that 'tiny little me' in the grand scheme of things is actually choosing freely. So there is no need to exert effort to acquire what I want and protect what I have because that's taken care of by my destiny.

So, A says 'nothing has value'; B says 'I don't want anything'; C says 'I can't have anything'; D says 'I can't change my destiny'. These are the only options for interpreting the phrase “nothing to gain, nothing to lose” that I could come up with. I'm sure there's more, but my mind is not currently receptive to these.

The first of these propositions deals with the intrinsic nature of things and asks whether this might have any value inherent to it, to which it replies in the negative. The second deals with desire and proclaims not to have any. The third deals with our concept of property and how this relates to our identities and whether these are defined by us or independent of us. The fourth deals with free will and proclaims not to have it.

I want to deal with free will first. If my future is predetermined, is my ability to choose compromised? It is evident that some choices are still being made, whether by 'me' or by the universe. So it seems that what is at issue in these sort of questions is not whether choice can be made but if it can be made freely. In other words, can 'I' choose, or does the universe choose for me? This way of formulating the question reveals its deeper implications. What it really means to ask here, but which it conceals in questions of free will, is: do I exist autonomously? Autonomy is an implicit property of our concepts of selfhood and it is precisely the conflict of this notion with reason – and even reality, but more on that later – that provokes our deliberations on free will. In fact, I believe that it is the central, and perhaps even the fundamental, property of what we call “self”. If a being is not autonomous, it has no will; it is what we would say of a rock or a puppet. Such beings are entirely subjugated to the forces and conditions of their environments. A puppet has no self, precisely because it is not autonomous, but also because it lacks that other essential feature of selfhood: consciousness and self-consciousness. What I mean by 'I am autonomous' here is that when I am presented with an opportunity, it is me, in other words my 'self', that makes the choice freely, and it is possible for me to choose any of the available options, at whim even. That this is at odds with reason and reality is clear: it should be, in principle, possible to trace my every action back to its roots in the complex interaction between my genetic blueprint and my environment, if one believes that my brain is the source of my actions, at least, and not some ethereal 'soul' substance. If this were shown to be the case empirically, then my notion of my 'self' will have received a deadly blow; at least half of it will have. However, the notion of choice will not have been affected by this at all. That a choice was still being made, absent my own autonomous contribution, is evident. So, logically it is more correct to say that the universe made the choice than that I did, since it is clear that all the mechanistic factors contributing to my particular genetic code and my environment are themselves conditioned by other mechanistic factors, and that if we continue thus searching for the cause in this we shall eventually come to see that it was the state of the entire universe at a given moment in time which conditioned the following moment, and in it, my action. I am referring here to the causal interconnectedness of everything; nothing can be causally isolated from the universe in analysis. If this is so, then it would seem that our usual concept of our identities is flawed in its assumption of causal autonomy. And then our fixation with questions of free will becomes understandable; we recognise at some level that there is an inconsistency in our core beliefs about ourselves and seek to reconcile the contradictions. We search, and hope, for arguments and models that can demonstrate and prove our causal efficacy. Whether by recourse to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics or by invoking soul-stuff, we reveal our attachment to this idea that we are autonomous.

'Nothing to gain, nothing to lose' can be interpreted as in D above if the idea that self is autonomous is abandoned. It is arguable that the refutation of causal autonomy implies also a refutation of our primary assumption that we have selves in the first place. If all that's left is consciousness, then it rests on whether one believes that this can be reducibly or otherwise explainable on neurobiological grounds. I am currently inclined to believe that it can, and people who share that disposition with me have no grounds left to justify the belief that they have selves, since there would be no boundary left to maintain between self and other. If both my actions and my awareness are conditioned by mechanistic factors stretching to encompass the universe in its entirety, in what sense then can I continue to maintain that these are 'mine'? In order that I am not misinterpreted I wish to clarify here that when I speak of self, I am referring to the common intuition about the self, that it is both autonomous and self-conscious, and not the trivial understanding of 'self' as a reference, in the way that any object may have a self when it is referred to by 'it' or 'object'. The phrase under present analysis thus comes to light in the abdication of selfhood implicit in the understanding of causality. Thus, 'nothing to gain and nothing to lose' is understood to mean that there is no self inside me that freely chooses and can gain and lose, and that instead there is just a causal chain of events which we label as 'gain' and 'loss' erroneously due to our misguided belief in independently existing selves.

Now, it is clear to see that option C for interpreting the phrase has been brought under the fold of this interpretation and it has proven to be entailed by it. In the abdication of selfhood, the impossibility of ownership becomes amply clear. And so, there is no reason to pursue this interpretation further. Option C has revealed itself to be a special case of, or a superficial account of, selflessness. The notion of private property depends upon, and flows quite naturally from, the belief in independently existing selves, which if abandoned, renders the former utterly null.

Option B takes an internal point of view, rather than the external considerations of the last discussion. In this the phrase 'nothing to gain, nothing to lose' becomes meaningful in that nothing is desired in the first place. However, this seems not to be the case for the vast majority of humanity, and so I may be questioned as to the relevance of this interpretation. There can scarcely be found a human that does not entertain a host of desires, the primary of which might be health or happiness, at the very least. Given the desire for happiness, for instance, any situation which brings me closer to this can be thought of as a gain. Absent this and with it all desire, however, it becomes clear that nothing can be gained nor lost. Nevertheless, the question may be asked, and perhaps rightly so, as to the relevance of this view to the world since something as basic as desire can hardly be absent in the average human being. The value in this consideration depends upon another consideration which sheds light on the sufferings of humanity and traces the roots of this in desire. If we clearly apprehend that all our suffering has always been conditioned by our desire, then it becomes understandable why a cessation of desire is aspired to. However, there seems to be a paradox here concerning the aspiration for the cessation of desire, which itself seems to entail a desire, and so can seem to be self-contradictory. However, in a previous argument, I found that in order to arrive at the cessation of desire, which is a radical departure from our current states, we must first harbour a very general desire for happiness while eschewing all petty desires for spatiotemporally localized things. Since our nature is to desire, we must strive to clarify our understanding of what it is that we desire, and by so doing we shall realize that what we have desired from time immemorial has always been the same, namely happiness. But our confusion has led us to seek this in the acquisition of petty things, and once we have been sufficiently thwarted in these efforts, we shall abandon that route to happiness and pursue another. This is the encouragement that 'nothing to gain, nothing to lose' always gives me. It advises me to stop grasping for things, because happiness is not a thing to be gained. Happiness is a realization and a cessation and a release from the grip of incessant desire. Admittedly, however, this effect depends upon the extent to which desire and suffering are seen to be related. In my case, I strongly believe that the former leads certainly to the latter, and as such, this phrase has a powerful effect on me.

Finally, we are led to the consideration of option A above which asserted that there is no value to be attributed to any thing which it is possible to gain or lose. It is my strong conviction that there is no value in anything except insofar as it brings us closer to happiness and further away from suffering. If desire is taken to condition suffering, as I believe it does, then there is no value except in the cessation of desires. If the only way to achieve this lies in the pursuit of truth, then this must be the only thing which it is justified to pursue. However, pursuit necessarily implies a potential gain. So, it seems there is a conflict here with the phrase 'nothing to gain' since truth is valuable, and if pursued, can be gained. Perhaps, a distinction needs to be drawn here between the pursuit of truth and every other possible pursuit. In this way, the phrase can be reformulated as 'nothing to gain except truth, and nothing to lose except truth'. But this is dissatisfactory as this new phrase has a quite different meaning. The solution to this puzzle lies in the subtle understanding that the truth which is aspired to and pursued is in this way rendered distant and provokes effort and analysis in order to arrive at it, whereas the final realization will reveal the truth to have always been within us but hidden by the distraction and agitation of our minds in their incessant grasping after things. In this way, we can understand the phrase 'nothing to gain' to imply that we must abdicate all our attempts to gain in order for the mind to settle down and allow us to see what has been here all along, right at the very heart of things, in the present moment waiting to be discovered. If we were to pursue truth as a thing to be gained like any other material object one may strive after, we will only succeed in clouding our minds and making it harder to apprehend reality which is stretched out before us at every moment of life. Here we finally come to see why there is no value that can be attributed to anything which one can strive after and procure, since these necessarily engage the grasping of the mind and the yearning and desiring which keep its focus perpetually scanning the external world for the slightest opportunity to fulfil these desires. This last argument is heavily couched and grounded upon intuitive experience, and as such it may be subject to criticism for lack of persuasive force by those who have not ever tuned in to their internal realities. That this grasping and desiring blocks the mind's clear apprehension of truth is undeniable to me because I have experienced this directly, and so to attempt to forge an argument that will prove this is exceedingly difficult, but the lack of which detracts nothing from the validity of its assertion as a brute fact.

To tie all these fragments together, it suffices to show the four interpretations to be intimately linked and flowing from the same underlying mindset. Options C and D examined the matter from the point of view of a metaphysical consideration of selfhood whose crucial point was that the causal interconnectedness of the universe entails a refutation of the common assumption that a self exists as an autonomous entity set up under its own power and in this way independent of the whole. Without a self to fall back upon, and seeing that my actions and choices are conditioned by the whole, what use is there to struggle and resist the natural flow of our common destiny? In this sense, there is nothing to be gained or lost because there is no one to gain or lose – that is to say that our usual conceptions of gain and loss subtly imply the existence of this independent self which is that which gains and loses, and seeing the utter impossibility of such a self's existence, we are forced to a like annulment of our conceptions of gain and loss. Options A and B examined the matter from the internal point of view of the attribution of value and desirability. The crucial point from these considerations was that value cannot be attributed to any thing which is gainable or losable because these things are irrelevant to our happiness, which consists in the cessation of our suffering, which is itself driven by our desire. What is relevant, then, is our internal relation to the world and to reality in general, and whether or not we grasp and strive after things. The things do not possess intrinsic value since it is not the thing but my reaction to the thing which conditions my happiness or suffering. Seeing the matter in this way, we come to the realization that the happy person is the one without desires, and for this person it can be said that there is nothing to be gained and nothing to be lost. These two points taken together naturally synthesize the motivational aspect of the phrase under consideration, finally brought to conceptual clarity but always intuitively appreciated, that is as follows: surrender and submit to the natural flow of events, God, Dhamma, the Universe, whatever you like to call it, and quit striving for your own sake at the expense of all others', but instead release the grip of your mind on this limited and tiny notion of self and let your being rise and expand and grow to the fill up the cosmos to see what a tiny and insignificant portion of it you occupy and to rejoice in your participation in this Cosmic Self and to relax and to be content to let whatever is happening happen seeing in this way and from this cosmic point of view that there really is nothing to gain and nothing to lose.

Confusion

2010-07-22T01:40:00.000-07:00

Like insanity this feels,
With this wreath of unreal,
Hanging over my head.

It is my funeral today,
And the mosquitoes are still sucking my blood,
Drawing it away from my head where it thuds.

I don’t really have anything to say,
Especially with my face this deep in mud,
Lost in the chaos of this flood.

What am I even trying to say?
Coherence is not a property of mind,
But being temporary, I’m also blind.

I feel locked in a transience,
Seeking that ancient future,
In the stillness of my spirit's stupor.

Paradox

2010-07-20T03:28:00.000-07:00

Is never like always?

And forever do we walk all ways…

However, we shall pass this phase,

And sever that which averts our gaze.

Can everywhere be here?

So let me wear my fear,

That there are things not near,

Upon my swollen ears, release these weary tears.

Is one path all roads?

That the sun launches all rays to the same abode,

So the Son astonishes by absolving our loads,

And the Hun who flourishes is on the same road.

Don’t we look without seeing?

Like a hook in our skin, keeping us continually fleeing.

And it took us to our sins, heaping dust in our being.

But the nook of this wing seeks only its freeing.

Disenchantment and Motivation

2010-07-14T02:17:00.000-07:00

I discovered an exceptionally strong ally in my path during my ten-day retreat which allowed me to sit indefinitely longer than I had in the past and gave me greater resolve to practice and greater confidence. This ally is known in Pali as samvega, or disenchantment, with the ways of the world, with the miseries of sensual living, and with the abominable craving after pleasures here and there, all of which are doomed to impermanence, damning us the wicked to a life with neither rest nor relief. Disenchantment is a good name for this skill because its opposite, the ordinary state of mind, is that of enchantment with all the supposed 'goods' of the world, as though a warlock had laid a contemptible spell upon our minds condemning us to ignorance and the suffering resultant from ignorance. We are enchanted as are our children, and perhaps we are in many ways ourselves still children floating aimlessly in the dreams of blissful carelessness and self-absorption. Samvega consists in the bursting of this bubble of delusion and waking up to the reality of the inherent dis-satisfactoriness of every possible sense-object. To a certain extent, it even consists in a feeling of revulsion towards all sense-objects and all striving after these, insofar as this revulsion does not grow to the level of an aversion. In a wider context, samvega should also be cultivated for the worldly life and the habits and actions of all people around us, relations or strangers, who continue to engage this life. Whenever I felt my resolve to practice losing its strength, I would immediately bring to my recollection memories of previous miseries I have experienced as a result of craving and living, as well as memories of witnessing these very same miseries on the countenances of friends or family members. This would remind me of the hopelessness of living on as the rest of the world does, ever moving forward on the train of Inevitable Progress at the expense of all the rest of Nature, sat in the pew of the churches of their favourite gods or goddesses, the racial, familial, nationalistic, political, or economic ideologies that have replaced the dogmatic religions of the past, and which have resulted in just as much war and revolution and social catastrophe. Who in their right mind would wish to continue on this manner, perpetuating the most horrific of sicknesses, handing it down to the coming generations, a most suitable gift for such a wicked race? Better to correct the ailment in myself and by myself, in solitude and isolation from this mass of suffering humans, until I am strong enough to face the world with a sober face, and bring a message of peace to be handed down the generations, a gift suitable to God almighty and the pursuit of Such.

This rant would occur to me in my lax and complacent states and would fall upon my mind as a slap across the daydreamer's face, returning me to my proper path and revitalizing me with the energy and motivation to walk it. As an added aid, I would try to cultivate this motivation in the form of a specific goal that I would set myself, such as the resolve to sit without changing my posture for the entire hour, and then build this up into a fierce determination to see it through. Sometimes I would think of this determination as a 'fatalistic determination' and even more – I would say to myself, in my mind and in the form of a loud and deeply resonating voice: I am willing to stick with it even if it leads to my death and worse. 'I will stick with it till the world has perished, even if I have to sit through torture and pain unimaginable, even if I am burned alive, or brought face to face with the devil for it, I WILL STICK WITH IT!' 'I'M COMING OUT OF MY MISERY AND NOTHING WILL STOP ME FROM REACHING THIS GOAL!' I would cultivate these inner voices at those moments when my strength was on the verge of waning away, and this proved enormously helpful in the completion of the ten days of meditation. So, I resolve to make use of these two allies in my daily life, whenever I am at a loss and my meditation is 'drying up', so to speak. I will cultivate samvega for the worldly way of life, and I will crystallise my strong determination to be liberated in the form of concrete goals that I will set for myself in order to progress patiently and persistently in this manner on this most noble of paths until I am free of all defilements, until I have come out of this miserable existence.

May all beings be happy

Need for Balance

2010-07-10T08:13:00.001-07:00

Today was the first day of my summer discipline schedule and I have found the organisation of my life around a pre-determined timetable to be quite relieving and helpful for the cultivations required as I journey to the other shore. I was able to meditate for one hour in the morning after waking up, but I was not able to wake up at 7am as I had intended and got up at 8am instead. I did not feel bad about this however and immediately jumped onto the cushion to begin my morning sit. The retreat I just completed seems to have filled me with a reservoir of equanimity and while my mind remains agitated and full of incessant activity, there is hardly the slightest stirring of negativity at this and I remain seated in the lotus posture serenely trying again and again only to be thwarted as my mind's vibrations sent it every which way. I am quite happy with this new development in my path, but I am not satisfied by it. I will not settle until the root of suffering is expunged, annihilated, destroyed, and overcome. But I am happy to note the progress in the cultivation of equanimity.

One problem which remains is the lack of a balance of energy. While on the Goenka retreat, I was able to monitor my energy levels and adjust them as per the requirement. For instance, my mind would feel very heavy and lax after lunch and it was always a challenge to remain awake during these periods of meditation. I would respond to this by taking a brisk five minute walk outside with my face to the sun and this was sufficient to energise my mind out of its lethargic torpor. Likewise, whenever it began to become agitated with thoughts and desires, I would redirect this energy to a focussed concentration meditation with my awareness directed to a very small spot at the tip of my nose and this would be successful (sometimes) at calming the mind down so that I may return to the body scanning involved in vipassana. My current problem is that my mind is incredibly distracted and refuses to acquiesce to my attempts at calming it down in order to practice vipassana. For this reason I am forced to spend the vast majority of the hour doing concentration mediation with limited success. Where previously I might not have been able to last an entire hour in this manner due to the frustration that arises because of an aversion to having to continually re-apply the awareness onto the nostril, my strong equanimity presently allows me to remain and continue to try. I have reason to believe that sticking with it, even when it is hard and the mind is unyielding, is exactly what is required in order to train the mind. Even if it doesn't settle down, what is required is to keep trying and to keep re-applying the awareness. However, if there is some way that I can achieve a balance of energy so that the restlessness of the mind does not interfere with my meditation, I should cultivate it. This will probably consist in minimising distractions during the day so that my mind can remain calm when it comes time to sit my meditations. I have noticed that the restlessness of the mind mostly consists of sense-objects which have been apprehended during the day and which are brought back in front of the mind with great rapidity, as well as potential future scenarios and their sense-object contents in order to have a good strategy for meeting these occurrences. In short, my mind becomes occupied by the past and the future and ignores my attempts to hold it in the present moment. For this reason, the less that happens to me during the day, or the less engaging whatever happens is, the easier will be my concentration as my mind will have less food for thought. So, I resolve to attempt to bring the distractions of my day down to a minimum.

May all beings be happy

The Purpose of Life

2010-06-17T18:01:00.000-07:00

Most people seem to secretly believe that the purpose of life is to gather as much resources as possible in order to secure their well-being. The actions of the vast majority betray this hidden agenda, although some are more frank about this than others. In this way, the purpose of life becomes a personal one, as though the creator had charged each one of us to engage in this vicious struggle and to compete against one another for the scarce resources of our common planet. But what a loveless and pitiless God it would be that plunges us into this state of being wherein the misery of the majority is essential! It is evident that something is amiss with the common conception of Life which assumes it to be GOOD as God's creation and made to be enjoyed. As we emerge from the bliss of childhood, our first major complaints are of the form “that's not fair!” to which the infuriating response “well, life's not fair” is always doled out. But, perhaps even then, in the deep corners of our immature brains, we recognised the inconsistency of this with the conventional optimistic view of life. If life's not fair, as we are reminded every time we demand this of it, then how can we maintain a subconscious belief that it is good, rational, purposeful, and sacred?

Perhaps there is another way to look at life. If we understand “life's not fair” to be a fundamental rule, and acknowledge that misery is the lot of each one of us, an alternate purpose to our existence can perhaps be maintained. Rather than seeing the universe from the limited point of view of our own selves, and structuring all importance therein according to this, by means of which our suffering would be perpetuated, we can choose to see it instead as a sort of temporary pit into which we have fallen, so to speak, and assign ourselves the task of getting out. Since suffering seems to be the rule rather than the exception, and since it is NOT AT ALL balanced by the joys of life, as the deluded would assert, all that remains is for us to embrace this as our lot rather than continue to struggle against it blindly repeating our motto “life is good” in the face of all the trials and tribulations of life. We can all comprehend the claim that life is not fair and most of us agree with it. Arguably, this claim alone entails the negativity of life because this unfairness automatically ensures that our desires will not always be met, in which cases we suffer. But perhaps what is not established by the claim is the extent to which life is not fair. It is not merely that some of our desires will not be met, but rather that the majority of our desires will not be met. This is so because of the scarcity of natural resources.

So, life is a trial. But this seems to presuppose again a creator who fashioned the difficulties of life with this aim in view, and to whom we are tasked to return, fallen as we are from the Garden of Eden. Maybe so, but this metaphysical speculation is not what I wish to pursue here. Rather, I wish simply to point out that our ordinary understanding of life is inadequate and even harmful to us and to others given the empirical state of affairs that we are all able to observe. The question of whether there is a God or not, on the other hand, is not something that can be determined from the mere observation of empirical reality, and so is to be put aside for the moment. This discussion concerns itself only with what is presented to us in the external world and with what we all know to be true directly from our own experience.

The fundamental mental force in human life is Habit. In its higher pitches this force is called addiction. I want to argue that it is precisely this force which traps us in the pit, locking us into this form of existence which brings only suffering. The purpose of life then is to overcome the habitual mind, in order to transcend the comfort of familiarity and to emerge from the numerous attachments which keep us clinging to this and to life in general. This is why we face so much trouble in understanding and treating our addictions, whether we label them 'disease' or 'weakness of character' or 'moral depravity'. It is also why the most successful treatment for addiction that our society has yet to come across is that in which the religious plays a major role. The addict is asked to submit to the will of God, to surrender into the grace of God, and to pray for deliverance from the bondage of habit. However, we are wrong to suppose that addiction is only possible with drugs, and to trivialize other instances of addiction as belonging to a different, weaker, meaning of the word, and that this only becomes serious when it involves psychoactive substances. It becomes serious when it involves pleasure, which is the real common denominator of all addiction, and not substance, which is a special case of pleasures. But pleasure is surely not restricted to drugs – the greatest pleasure attainable in life is arguably the sexual, and it is clear that addiction to this is possible, and even widespread. The battle an addict wages against addiction thus becomes emblematic of the fundamental battle we all must wage in our time here on Earth, because in truth, we are all addicted to pleasure. Where we are content to source this from a wide variety of activities, the drug addict seeks just one, but at the root is our common desire for pleasure. It is this desire, nay craving, which characterises the struggle of the addict, and insofar as this craving is present in us, our struggles as well. The crucial point here is that we are all addicts, each with a drug-of-choice, some favouring 'substances', others preferring 'shopping' or 'working' or whatever. 'Shopaholic' and 'workaholic' are not just weak allusions to 'alcoholic', but rather direct references to the state of being addicted. Although shopping or working or going to the gym are not perfectly comparable to substance abuse in that the latter generates pleasure by direct action on the nervous system whereas the former generate pleasure indirectly and within the mind, the result is identical, namely pleasure. But the legality of the former and the illegality of the latter lead us to believe that there is a fundamental difference in between our relationships to these, and that while one can be justifiably called an addiction, the other is not on the same level and is better called habit or way of life. I refuse to delineate the structure of my comprehension by such arbitrariness as legislation, the laws of men and women, each of whom walks with a head full of confusion. When I observe closely the mechanism of action of my own addictions, I clearly perceive that it is on account of my habits and no more. I am USED TO doing activity X at time A and place B, and so whenever I find myself at time A and place B, my mind immediately produces the thought of doing activity X. The mere arising of the thought, coupled to the established habit, is sufficient to make the prospect of doing X an exceedingly tempting one, irrespective of the particular class of activities that X belongs to.

A difficult question which has just emerged from this: how can this habitual mind be reconciled with the novelty-seeking mind that we also undeniably possess? In other words, how can I explain the phenomenon of novelty-seeking within the paradigm of addiction I have just proposed? Later...

Unity and Plurality

2010-06-08T05:10:00.000-07:00

There is an intriguing question which I have been considering for some time now and which has not yet been resolved and the purpose of this essay is to attempt to clarify: how can plurality coexist with unity? It seems to me that something is either ONE or MANY, and cannot be both at the same time, and yet is as witnessed by our colloquial usage of the word ‘one’ in describing a thing, say a car, which nevertheless is clearly a plurality of parts – steering wheel, passenger seats, engines, and so forth. And even each of these parts, if analysed in this same manner, reveals itself to also be a plurality. So the question is: is there such a thing as unity, and if so, how can it coexist with this apparent plurality?

First, let us examine the origin of this ubiquitous plurality. Any plurality is by definition a coexistence of things which are separated from one another in some way. The two fundamental dimensions by means of which things can be separated from one another are time and space, and this is why Schopenhauer calls these the ‘principium individuationis’. In these two dimensions – or four, for the mathematical purists – individuation takes place, that is, multiple objects can exist at a given time or in a given place across multiple times. Juxtaposition is the characteristic of space as succession is the characteristic of time. In truth there are more such dimensions which can be seen to separate things from one another, and thus individuate them, such as colour, but in the final analysis these can be seen to be contingent upon the original spatiotemporal individuation which is the primary condition for any individuation whatsoever. Any additional differentiating characteristics arise from the properties of matter and the original forces of nature in their endless combinations and permutations.

So, in empirical reality, everything observable is necessarily a plurality since it arises in space and time, and since it will always be possible to question about the contents of any objects occurring therein and to answer this by producing technology which can resolve matter in ever more confined spaces, and analogously for the temporal dimension. An objection to this may be held on the basis of the atomistic theory of modern physics which postulates fundamental particles which cannot be subdivided and which aggregate in varying conformations to produce the richness of our material world. I am disposed to view this as analogous to the proposition regarding the finiteness of time. In effect, these objections stem from the anthropomorphism which projects the finiteness of our own individual lives onto the macrocosmic dimensions of time and space. But it is obvious that such propositions are logically flawed, witnessed most evidently by the questions they beg: ‘what are the contents of these fundamental particles?’, or ‘what was before the beginning of time?’, or ‘where is the universe contained?’, and so on. Such propositions about the finiteness of space and time produce an internal incoherence in these concepts, manifesting as a conflict between their meaning and our beliefs. If the essence of these concepts is sufficiently apprehended, their extrapolation to the infinitesimal and the infinite becomes apparent and undeniable, as counter-intuitive and seemingly inconceivable as this is. As such, space must, by definition, be infinite, and time, beginningless and endless. So, armed with this understanding of space and time, it becomes clear that any object can always be subdivided into parts, whether spatially or temporally. This happens by ‘zooming in’ to the relevant magnification which will show the object to be extended in space or time, and thus separated into parts.

Now, what is unity? While the answer to this seems self-evident, it may be questioned on the basis of lacking an empirical basis. If the consideration given above is accepted, it can no longer be held that atoms or quarks, or even strings, are unities as even these can be shown to consist of parts and are thus pluralities. So, there is nothing in the world that we can observe which fits the definition of unity, so long as this is mutually exclusive to plurality, which it must be according to the law of contradiction, since no thing can be both ONE thing and MANY things. So why, then, do we entertain this concept and use it so widely? Apart from its usage for convenience and as an aid to communication, it has no ground or basis in empirical reality. But, may it be that even the merely casual usage of this term that we entertain lays for us a trap in our minds, leading us on to the delusion that the things we label as ‘one thing’ are in fact true unities? May it even be that this is a primary contributor to our conceptions of ourselves as unities, occasioned in the past as the simple and immortal soul, and today more precariously as our unified consciousness? When it is apprehended that there is no way in which to conceive of ourselves as unities within the spatiotemporal framework, a great fear sets in, alarmed at a potential unravelling of this most insidious yet beloved narrative of our identities. We would begin to fade and eventually disappear into the sea of transient forms, unable any longer to draw up boundaries and demarcate the identities of things from one another, our ‘self’ included, and call these ‘things’. For by calling something a ‘thing,’ we are subtly implying that this ‘thing’ is a unified thing, that it is ONE such ‘thing,’ and thus that its identity is unitary, most vehemently as regards our own identities. In reasonable discourse, however, this cannot be sustained.

If we return to our notion of the infinite divisibility of space and time, we come to a conception of these as necessarily existing across all scales, a nice metaphor for which is afforded by the mathematical notion of fractals, which are said to be self-similar at all scales and can be ‘zoomed in’ or ‘zoomed out’ infinitely. So, if our universe is to be analogised as a fractal, where does unity enter into the picture, if at all? Can it be said that the only unity is that of the entire universe as a whole, even when it is obvious that this is comprised of an infinity of parts? Or, is it rather another erroneous concept that has no grounding in empirical reality, and for which we would need to invoke a metaphysical solution as Schopenhauer does, by postulating a level of existence that is outside of space and time, and thus un-individuated and unitary? Before addressing these questions specifically, let us consider again this idea of zooming in and out. Zooming in, as was previously shown, leads to the realization of a plurality in what had previously seemed to be a unity, as for instance a pixel on my screen appears as such a unity and which, if zoomed in to, will reveal itself as a plurality. Zooming out, on the other hand, produces the opposite effect, that is, that pluralities will converge on to the same point and will take on the appearance of unities, as for instance when travelling to Mars, the Earth will at first appear to us to be a vast plurality, which upon reaching a sufficient distance will appear as a single unitary dot. So, the further away from the universe one gets, or the more one zooms out of it, the more that it will appear to be unifying, but will never reach its end of a final unity, since the universe is infinite, and one can always just zoom out a little bit more. If plurality is hard to reconcile with unity, how difficult and paradoxical does it seem to attempt to reconcile infinity with unity, which are the true diametric opposites. Plurality is just a special case of infinity – or is it the other way around? So, to move closer to something is to see the parts that make it up, and to move away from something is to see of what whole it is the part. This seems to me to establish unequivocally the inherent relativity of this spatiotemporal realm, in which multiplicity is the true and occurring phenomenon and in which unity is nowhere to be found.

One way to reconcile infinity with unity is to treat both in the same manner, as the departing points from both space and time. Infinity is as equally mystifying a concept as is unity, and this can be seen to arise due to the fact of the utter impossibility of the observation of either within spacetime. Since a departure from spacetime is required, a like departure from the inherent relativism of that realm is entailed. However, whether such a departure is truly possible I cannot confirm or refute at this moment, but my inclination is to believe that it is. In such a case, the individuality that so infatuates us disappears and a deeper non-relative state of being is reached, wherein every element of the spatiotemporal infinity is revealed to be one and the same in every instance, appearing in a multitude of places, times, colours, and the like, but in essence all identical. It seems to me that this is the only way to reconcile our concept of infinity with that of unity. The alternative is to claim that spacetime is all there is, and hence that infinity and unity do not exist absolutely. This is the proposition that we are forced to accept so long as we reside in the spatiotemporal manifold, which we must transcend, if this is possible, in order to truly comprehend what infinity and unity signify. At that point, we will come to realize that they signify one and the same thing, as does every other conceivable utterance or concept or representation.

Conclusion: we live in spacetime; spacetime is infinite; there are only pluralities in spacetime; unity is to be sought outside of spacetime; infinity becomes identical with unity therein, infinity since it so appears in spacetime, and unity since it so reveals itself to truly be.