Unnamed Entity

"Man is an island" - Discuss the statement, either supporting or opposing the argument, or present both sides.

As a seventh grader, all I was thinking about when I read this topic for the essay competition I was taking part in, was what would look good on paper and win me a prize, not what I actually thought about the matter in question, which wasn't much anyway. An assembly-line response followed, mostly revolving around society, and how every man must work so that society can prosper, so how can he be an island blah blah.

Let us reassess. An objectivist approach would support the argument. Heroes often stoop to aid the commonfolk, but in essence they stand alone. Man is an end in himself. You live in order to be the best you can, to achieve success and individual happiness. If all men lived like this, what would happen? Is the best in everyone good enough to create a utopian world? Even assuming perfection from all, would it work?

The trouble is, we depend on the bad to make the good look better. (The Relativity issue seems to have re-emerged unintentionally) The police, the armed forces, security, lawyers, laws, rehab coaches, psychiatrists, the list goes on... they all depend on people screwing up. Every country praises its army and lauds its soldiers. Their bravery deserves accolades, but to sing praise for murder? Macabre to say the least!

Turns out that in the real world, selfishness is what governs the day-to-day working of society. Humans are inherently selfish, fighting to survive, and defending their interests, whether love, patriotism, or means of living. These justified sins are what work the cogs of mankind.

On the one hand, selfish motives do give the impression of a lonely existence, but we seemed to have developed a symbiotic relationship with those who have much greater or much lesser means than us. Symbiosis by definition is 'everyone gains'. Put 'em together and what do you get? ---> Do your thing and everyone's happy. Both sides is the argument.

Simply put? Man is an island. Mankind is an archipelago.

On a more personal level though, things seem to change and yet represent the same idea. Existentially speaking, nothing you do is going to augment your point-of-view, your deepest level of self awareness. The external relationships you indulge in or tolerate will only serve as food for thought or simply occupy the passage of time. The subtlest of your selves remains untouched.

But if we are to speak of man's nature, it would be folly to dig that deep. Some aspects cannot be shrugged off by even the most compelling of introspections. We have needs that we are born with, and while we seem to define them as primal side-effects of evolution, they have a role to play that perhaps an individual's mind cannot comprehend. 

It is inevitable that one must allow the denial and rejection of one's own nature to play itself out. But what I have found in my own journey is, that these primal aspects have their own place. A subtle self that depends on only its own immediate body / mind / intellect to experience itself is pushing away the entirety of creation with this self-indulgence. The multiplicity of the world, the apparent separation, holds mysteries that are far from insignificant towards the biggest of pictures.

We are beings, and let us not pompously parade our self awareness, nor hide it deep inside while functioning mindlessly. How about we allow this dissonance between what is apparently separate, and what we guard almost viciously, to disappear for a moment. Allow the virtual boundaries between your inner angels and demons and the manifestations of them in the real world to fade away, leaving behind nothing but a beautiful feeling of resonance with one's existence.

You'll find that you are on the same trip that everyone else is on, only the languages which we communicate it with, or the flavours and fragrances that accompany it, give us the feeling that we are incompatible. We find a few individuals who we empathize with more than others, and cling to them, rejecting all others. Like reclaimed land, these ties will break away. Exclusivity is attractive at first and weakens with every subsequent glance.

Don't hold your fellow men to standards that are too high to judge. Instead, welcome the world into your own version of it, and hold on to nothing.

We're all islands that are meant to be together. We're all unique in the same way.

The Science

If you had a complex enough system, could you re-create the human brain?

Let's assume you are not limited by numbers. Let's say you are able to reverse-engineer the state space of the human cortex, idealizing each neuron to be active, 1, or inactive, 0. (That's 2 raised to 10 raised to the 10th power - a hyper-astronomical number vastly vastly exceeding the 10 to the 80th particles in the known universe) [Source: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/03/the_hard_problem_conscousness.html]

Even the most advanced quantum physics fumbles with an explanation for the "manifestation" of Consciousness within this brain. The question is - how does the brain become the mind? And why oh why do we even need Consciousness? And let's not even get started on the question of questions, the hardest problem, what is Consciousness?

One must not confuse self-awareness with Consciousness. A monkey may identify with its image in a mirror, but does it question its own existence? Who knows, but it definitely cannot communicate its need to do so - something we do so effortlessly. (I may just be wrong with the last point too - I've even heard of gorillas being able to communicate their own impending deaths!)

We know one thing though - whatever it is, we have it. What do we do with it? Is its only use a sort of sado-masochist awareness of our own ignorance?

Introspection suggests otherwise. At the risk of sounding like a cheap hypnotist, what does your Consciousness feel like? Do you feel like your mind, body and Consciousness are one? Or do they feel like connected entities? Explore these "feelings". See where these lines blur. Feel the evaporation of your senses and the slow/scary dissolution of the separate "I", the ego.

Ask yourself a few questions. [Adapted from: http://faculty.virginia.edu/consciousness/]
1. When you walk, do you instruct your legs to move or does that just happen?
2. When you make a mistake, think back to the key moment of its occurrence. Was it something you consciously did, or did it just happen? (A burst of short temper perhaps?)
3. When you think, do you control every thought or do they flow as helplessly as time?

In asking these questions, do you visualize several identities that are grouped within your "I" concept? If so, ask yourself if that is possible. Could that possibly be true?

All this is either alien to your intellect or resonates within your being. Either way, you live.

Beyond (behind?) the Science

So, why are we here? We shoo this question away because it is too deep to waste one's time with. The irony is that we seldom realize that we do not need time to do away with time.

The answer lies in this very moment, in which we will watch as the question burns itself out. It is not a pearl to be gained in a learning from the past, or a goal to be sought in an event in the future. It is found with an intensity that looks inward and then outward and sees that they are both One. That there is no subject-object relationship, but rather a manifestation within something that is best conceptualized as Oneness.

What was/is/will be there before/during/after all objects? What was there through all the years of your objective life? What was common to each and every one of those psychosomatic experiences? It was the sense of being - the I Am-ness as so many people call it. It does not require you to be. You - the manifestation of you - is appearing in it.

You know this feeling. It has different flavors. Some feel an emptiness, a bottomless black hole behind their mind, that imperceptibly absorbs it all. Some experience a sense of pure awareness - the simple realization that they are not the thinker, the doer or the feeler, but the one who announces the arrival of thought and claims it as its own.

You are not the human being interacting with this temporal reality, or the mind contained in it that analyzes everything from nanotechnology to premier league football. In truth, you are that in which all this appears. Every single thing. However, you've grown so attached to your point-of-view, that you've identified with it and tied yourself to its needs. Which is why, any spiritual quest usually ends in either an abandonment of every thing material and an adoption of complete inaction, or a disappointed return to normal run-of-the-mill life with its ups and downs, pleasures and pains, successes and failures and other expressions of the illusion of duality.

Now... you will inevitably ask - Why? Why do I appear in it?

Your mind cannot figure this one out, can it? Well, it's not supposed to - because just like you can only toss a coin that has two sides, you can't think without duality. You need there to be more than one to experience One. The Absolute creates relativity as a test of realization, you can say. Whatever you say, it will not be it, but it may point to it.

And yet, you can say, it is not this. It is not duality. It is non-duality. It is the absence of separation. It is the presence of Presence. Simply the feeling, "I am." Does that sink in? Do you realize that you have access to something that your identity has little meaning in?

A simple way of experiencing this if you haven't already, is to seek the source of your thoughts. I wonder if any image of a sequence of thoughts will be far different from a cloud of noise that appears within apparent infinity. Even time seems to be forced, and conceptual, here. You will find that any idea or thought you may have of yourself is also being watched by pure awareness. You can say the words, "I am a happy-go-lucky person.", but actually, you are able to say this only because you have a "third person perspective" of yourself within yourself but from something that has no sense of identity. A pure mirror that reflects everything, even the little that you have tied yourself to.

There is a certain deep fascination (satchidananda?) in rediscovering your true nature. It is the quantum mystery - being still and moving at the same time. But the stillness is the fundamental entity if you want to call it that. The rocking cradle.

The ocean is water. The wave is water. But the wave that identifies with itself knows that perhaps it might have come from the ocean but it is now a wave. And when it crashes against rock and merges with its source, would you say a being died or would you say a concept died? Individuality is a concept. Ego is a concept. A POWERFUL one at that, but it is that. Nothing dies because nothing really lives.

What was there before you were born? Before you parents were born? --> I Am-ness. It is the unchanging, untouchable noumenon of simply being. It is pointed to by the feeling you get when you think of the concept "Existence". It was there before the Big Bang and it will be there after the Universe expands into nothingness or collapses into somethingness.

What causes suffering? Identification with the manifestation rather than the I Am-ness. You think when you die, nothing changes or little changes or the change itself is cosmically irrelevant - and therefore your life is insignificant. And you therefore suffer the tragedy of clinging to this temporal existence as if it were a gift that will be taken away. Realize instead that this is a gift you are giving yourself, and taking away yourself - it is still yours and was never yours.

So be one with your natural state, that knows only that you are, and that everything else you believed was just that - a belief or a disbelief. Feel them all getting thrown out and revisit everything. From this place all is beautiful and all is unattached. No outcome is important. There is no battle to fight. Everything is perfect just as it is.

How reassuring is that!

But the funny thing is, you go there, and yet you are here. However you are now witnessing this being rather than being this being. There is pain and yet no suffering. There is emotion and yet no identification with it. There is no fight and yet you fight. There is no tree being cut and yet you hug it. No ecology to be saved and yet you save it. Everything is amplified by and yet simplified into that one statement - "I Am."

See that no state needs to be achieved. And yet it will be. It will play out as it will, and you will do as you will. You are not the doer and yet you must do. If you find that laughable, why do you take your 3 year old to the park? Why do you pick up a ball and whack it into holes? Why do you peg your happiness against numbers on a billboard?

Because it is all a ride. For fun. See who it is that is riding this ride. See. And be. And yet do without doing.

You must sleep to know what awake means. You must dream to know that you were dreaming. That is the rediscovery. The re-realization. Re-recognition. The coming and going. Seeing an old friend and going "HAH! I knew you!"

And THAT is why we are here.

Or, you know, 42.

Another ancient blog post I'm resurrecting. Far from perfect, so feedback is welcome.

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We have all experienced a certain thought train, the rationalization of which determines a lot about how our attitude towards life eventually turns out. The pivotal point of the process is the rather morbid realization that life, as we know it (or will ever know it) ENDS. This fact is self-explanatory and does not in itself merit much contemplation. The ramifications of it, however, are quite significant. Which is why it seems to me that a lot of what we peg to individuality, personality and the other blah-blah's of separation, all boil down to a simple set of choices we make under assumption of the significance of the interim between birth and death.

We have the unfortunate habit of applauding that which is obtained with much ado, a quirk probably sourced at our most primal perception of mortality - that our lives are filled with suffering and we do what we can to get through. Tireless dedication towards borrowed ambitions is hailed as a noble pursuit; the hard working man surviving what the world throws at him with astounding will power and dedication, and coming out either successful or not.

This contradicts what I have found in my own thought trains. I feel that life should eventually become effortless. Yes, the baby must be potty trained, the toddler must be taught manners, the teenager must have rules and the young adult must (apparently) have ambition. But eventually, after you get through each stage, after your thirsts both gross and subtle are satisfied, is it not astonishingly apparent that you are happiest when things are effortless? Why then do we often choose to gauge the authenticity of our life's experiences with the bigoted scale of hard knocks and tough lessons?

Even if you choose to be affected by outcomes, both successful and failed endeavors provide the same insight - that the parts that were effortless, that were done without strain, were, simply put - fun. Even hard labour may well be effortless if one is not attached to the outcome. We are quick to define a state of existence we wish to achieve, and peg our happiness on whether it is achieved or not. The fruits of labour tend to fool us with the randomness that might have been the true cause of the outcome we are so proud of achieving anyway.

I don't mean to advise inaction or hedonism. Rather, I feel like a person would see at some point that one may well play the system without the stress associated with what-if's and I-need-this-to-work. You then "do" without trepidation and hope and the other noble feelings I am trying to downplay.

Perhaps stepping back and acknowledging the so-called impending doom of external death will convince us to look deeper than we currently do.

NOTE: This is something I wrote several years ago, but still feel strangely connected to. I thought it would make a nice first entry in this blog I hope to start updating.

Everyone loves new stationery. The 'clean sheet' metaphor has always been one close to my heart. I love the start of a new semester, a new year. I can spend hours day-dreaming about overhauling different aspects of my life, and it always begins with throwing out everything that's already there.

Metaphors are dangerous. I think what makes us human is our inability to visualise a life without relativity. We have the word 'absolute' in our vocabularies, but lack the ability to ever achieve an absolute definition of anything, considering all we know is what we've told eachother. Relativity in science. Relativity in love. Relativity in Relativity. It never ends does it?

When Neil Armstrong stood on the moon, this is what went through his mind:

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small."

When I read this, a thought occured to me: "If I was ever on the moon, I wouldn't look at earth. I'd look the other way and feel closer to the absolute." But wouldn't that be relative to where the earth is? Does it ever end? It does. But not with this absolute enlightenment we speak of. Simply with the death of relativity. And into another man-made pearl of wisdom --> zero. Nothing.

How limited we are by language.

Give yourself a clean sheet everyday. The moment you feel less than content, hit the refresh button. Be obsessive. Do things your way. Simplify your complicated life.

And if all else fails, make a blog and start preaching.