22nd December 2017

December 22, 2017 at 4:53 PM (Uncategorized)

The last two months have been a bit of a downtime.  The unexplained marginally high BP necessitated medicines.  And this is when the study of pharmacology starts to rule your life!  The first medicine to lower it caused headaches.  The second caused fluid retention and weight increase and discomfort.  The third caused extreme tiredness.  The medicines were causing more trouble than the BP.  In-between there was a bothersome infected tooth.  This necessitated a failed root canal, a filling and subsequent tooth removal.  Good Lord!  Yikes!  That was tough.   As though this was not enough, a trip during a walk caused bruises on the right side of the body.

I think we have now settled on a medicine that seems to work.   Started walking and feeling good.  In between we made a hurried trip to Chennai for my mom’s 6th year ceremonies.  Always great to be in Chennai.  Family, friends, beaches, movies, food, familiarity all adds up!

Lots to look forward to.  Ashwin is here and we are enjoying his company.  Working on some interesting content around getFreshAir with great folks!  This is a real privilege.    Upcoming holidays and a much anticipated visit end of jan from a friend from Boston.  We have a couple of travels planned for a music festival and to Orissa.  And of course planning for Ashwin’s graduation in May.  Sounds like a lot, and will remember to take it a day at a time and do what is allowed by the universe!  Amita and Nisha are doing well.  Nisha seems to venturing into teaching in the US.  I feel she will be an amazing influence on kids.  Her native intelligence and life experiences will connect her to kids easily.    Amita is busy as hell and helping people around the world sort out their problems and find their own formula’s for life.

My continued emergence into the world is a constant waxing and waning of being the infinite and feeling sadn.  There are times when the whole creation is seen as an imagination.  The extra-ordinariness of it all emerges and it is stunningly beautiful. And then identification with the body/naresh happens. And sadness sometimes takes over.  Sadness from the memory of a vibrant body!

Sharings – Things are not the same as they seem!!

It is incredible how interesting life is.  As someone beautifully put it; Watching this movie that i call my life, I have started to think about the series of events, not as A leads to B, leads to C, leads to D, but the other way round.  For D to happen, C had to happen, for C to happen, B had to happen….

Watching life closely has its upsides.  I am alive to the nuances that universe brings to me.  The entire life under the ocean is seen.  A whole sequence of events conspired to make the following sharing happen. The sharing is unravelling a mirage. I hope some of you enjoy it as much as I did.  The cooking of this was so much fun.  The lessons from disparate masters and disciplines boggle the mind and soars the soul.

Simply put, it is starkly evident that things are not the same as it seems!   There are five evidences the universe presented to me about the deeply entrenched understanding of the illusion – called the world.  What wonder and merriment for the magician and the audience.

FIRST

I am reading Steven Pinker’s “Stuff of Thought”.  Quite a remarkable book from a pre-eminent linguist of the modern era.  It uses language as a window into Human Nature.  Enclosed are some excerpts that introduce the book.

The mind categorizes matter into discrete things (like a sausage) and continuous stuff (like meat), and it automatically categorizes time into discrete events (like to cross a street) and continuous events (like to stroll).  The cognitive zoom lens allows to zoom-in and zoom-out.  It zooms-in and sees the materials making up an object (I spilt coffee all over my shirt) or in time, when we say – “she was crossing the street”.  It allows us to see a collection of objects as aggregate (as a difference between pebble and gravel), and a collection of events in time (as in the difference between hit the nail and pound the nail).  Language also crosses between space and time – when we say we cut off the end of a string, or I am going to give the end of the lecture now. 

Language is saturated with metaphors.  Meetings get moved from 3PM to 4PM; something that never happened just moved!  A traffic light can go from green to red, And economy from bad to worse; an inanimate object just changed colors and states.  Events become objects and Time become Space.

 Metaphors are so widespread that it is hard to find an abstract idea that is not metaphorical. What does correctness for language say about human thought? Does it imply that even our wispiest concepts are represented in mind as hunks of matter that can be moved around on a mental stage?  Does stem cell research destroy a ball of cells or an incipient human? Is the military incursion into Iraq a case of invading a country or of liberating a country?  Does abortion consist of ending a pregnancy or killing a child?  Are high tax rates a way to re-distribute wealth or to confiscate earnings? Is socialized medicine a way to protect citizen’s health or expand government’s power?  Prominent linguists have advised the Republican Party to reframe the political debate – taxes as membership fees and activist judges as freedom judges!!! Does it say that rival claims about the world can never be true or false but can only be alternate metaphors that frame a situation in different ways?   

 

Things certainly not the way it seems!

 

SECOND

I finished a reading of a fantastic Buddhist book by Lama Zopa Rinpoche “How Things Exist – Teaching on Emptiness”.   It builds on a personal experience I had blogged earlier on discovering on “seeing” a chair in meditation.

 

Lama Rinpoche uses an example of a table.   He says “What makes a person decide to give the name “table” to this particular object and not to the steps or the chair that surround it.  The reason is the person sees a material object performs the function of supporting things, or of allowing things to be put on top of it.  This makes the person decide, among numerous labels that are at his disposal, on this particular label – table.   We decide on it because we see the aggregates and superimpose it on a collective—conditioned-understanding (CCU).  In this example, the legs, a plank of wood put together in a certain way triggers CCU and we call it a “Table”.  Other arrangements of the same aggregates, triggers the CCU and might result in us calling it a “Chair” or “debris”.

             

The table, according to Buddhism, it is not the concrete thing that we normally think of – it is extremely subtle.  It is also not just a mental construct but has real existence.  It exists because we can make the table, break the table, use the table, move the table etc… Lama and Buddhism do not negate the table (like Hinduism) but say it exists, but emptiness is its existence (small quibble!).  That is the Buddhist concept of emptiness. The physical structure exists in mere name, imputed by the mind. 

 

You can replace the table with “I” and reveal the emptiness of I.  Things certainly not the way it seems!

THIRD

My rigorous diet of Avaitic philosophy re-surfaced when I re-chanced on Atma Bodh, the pinnacle of the treatise on Maya by Shankaracharya.  Growing up, I learnt to inquire “What is reality?, when a rope is confused, in darkness, for a snake and this illusion is subsequently  destroyed when the rope is perceived in light.  Shankaracharya radiates the ultimate when he roars metaphorically – leaping from sun to clouds to gold to rice to husk to bran to the moon.

 

9. All the manifested world of things and beings are projected by imagination upon the substratum whose nature is Existence-Intelligence; just as the different ornaments are all made out of the same gold.

 

16. Through discriminative self-analysis and logical thinking one should separate the Pure self (from the apparent world) as one separates the rice from the husk, bran, etc., that are covering it.

 

19. The moon appears to be running when the clouds move in the sky. Likewise the Atman appears to be moving when observed through the sense organs.

 

http://www.shankaracharya.org/atmabodha.php

 

Things certainly not the way it seems!

 

FOURTH

I revisited one my favourite books by a modern master – Robert Irwin – called “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees”.  An incredible maverick contemporary artist from Los Angeles. In his early days, feeling that his work was getting “contaminated”, he decided to go to Ibiza/spain and did a vipassana – stripped himself of all crutches (phones, magazines, language, social contacts. And he writes

I was pulling out all plugs one by one; books, language, social contacts. And what happens when you get to the last plug, it is the Zen thing of having no ego; it becomes scary; it is like you are going to lose yourself.  But when you get all of them pulled out, a little period goes by, and it is absolutely serene, it is terrific. …. Finally I thought about less and less. Finally, I just thought about thinking.  I longer calibrated my thoughts in terms of a social reality, in terms of how I would have to square them up to the realities of the world.  There was a purification of thinking.  I arrived at pure ideas, stripped of worldly ambitions or motives.  When all layers peel away, it becomes very clear and very simple to what the ideas are; what they are what they do.  Later, when you bring back motives and aspirations and rationales, you can really see how they begin to alter ideas.

FIFTH

Finally, I also chanced on a reading from David Joseph Bohm  (December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992) who was an American scientist and described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century.  He contributed to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.  His words were so striking and sounded like echoes from Shankaracharya.

Ultimately, the entire universe (with all its particles, including those constituting human beings , their laboratories, observing instrument etc..) has to be understood as a single undivided whole in which analysis into separately and independent existing parts has no fundamental status.

” Some might say: fragmentation of cities, religions, political systems, conflict in the form of wars, general violence, fracticide, etc., are the Reality. Wholeness is only an ideal, toward which we should perhaps strive. But this is not what’s being said here. Rather, what should be said is that wholeness is what is real, and that fragmentation is the response of this whole to man’s action, guided by illusory perception, which is shaped by fragmentary thought”

Things certainly not the way it seems!

 

These guys deserve a huge cheer and our deepest Pranams!  The ramification of living life under this truth is nothing less than a complete transformation of the self and the world.  Not believing ones thoughts and inquiring into the corollaries of thoughts – ideas,beliefs, opinions, and prejudices – transforms a world riddled with conflict into one of understanding.  Nothing will be viewed in isolation – which is conflict.  Love emerges without purpose or reason when the whole is seen.  It simply is the end of suffering.