Making sense of my Reality

When I sleep -- Senses are sleeping, body functions are running but something is awake. Breath comes in and goes out at its command.

Eyes are sleeping but “It” sees, ears are sleeping, but “It” listens. Body is sleeping but “It feels” touches, feels pain and pleasure.  Tongue and nose are sleeping but it tastes and smells. The experience is as close to the one when these are awake.

Then it creates and realizes that I am the creator of “This”,  location is my creation, matter is my creation, feelings are my creation, actions are my creation. I take so many shapes and I now realize that there is no one but “Me”. There is no one but “Me”.  I create, I multiple and I play with my creation as if it is different. I go through pleasure and pain in this play by measurement to “I”.
 
When I am awake -- “It” still creates “This” but bases some (not all)  of “Its” creations on the images from “That”.  

I know not what is “That” I live in,  “This”  that is my creation, I only get shadow of that from my five gates, I mix it with my memory of past and my imagination and still create “This” and live in that as if it is “That”. 

There are beings who also live in “This” of there own creation.   My “This” and Their “This”  is all there to this human world.

Who knows what is “That”,  who can know what is “That” ,  it is beyond known and beyond unknown. I only live in “This” and my boundaries end here.

Investigation into nature of truth and human experience of reality

In summary, what we think as reality is merely a thought. Consciousness is a thought, ego is a thought, urge is a thought,  fear is a thought,  desire is a thought or whatever human beings think as reality is merely a thought that may (seldom does) or may not match up with the reality out there.  For simplicity I have called primary thought as consciousness and all the others as the network of secondary thoughts.

External interfaces to thought are two, namely, first, the Experience created by senses  and the second, Memory.

The primary purpose of consciousness thought, the first and basic thought, is to create a high fidelity images/shadow/recreation of actual reality out there so that human body could survive. The tools that consciousness uses are 5 senses to create this high fidelity shadow of what is out there and recall of previous experiences related to experienced objects to make sense based on history (Past).

When the child is born, s/he has no memory apart from some hard wired memory of crying on physical discomfort.   Through a process of cross validation of cause and effect of sensory experiences, gradually first building blocks of memory get created.

When the child starts to move around, cross validation of spatial experience creates secondary spatial memory elements. To give you an example,  I experience glass kept on table as a thought, I can go touch it by moving in space and it validates that my thought is the truth.

Human internally created experience of external physical, spatial and material reality is so near perfect that it validates every single time and gradually human consciousness starts taking recall of past experience as the truth out there. When in fact, the human’s only have access to the internal recreated experience or the “Thought” of external reality based on previously stored cross validated thoughts of reality.

The trouble of humanity starts when human consciousness starts using this belief that every thought as the truth out there, even to things that are beyond the space and matter.  

As the belief of “My thought is truth” is now so strongly embedded in primary thought,  that now a human starts attributing other thoughts as truth, for example, god exists merely because a thought thinks so,  a person is good, bad etc.. merely because a thought thinks so,   dooms day would come merely because a thought thinks so.

To live in the truth, one needs to see through is dichotomy of physical and non-physical world and re-start the cross validation process to enquire about the truth of thoughts beyond the matter.

In other words, keeping up with the truth requires a consciousness that constantly questions and seeks validations before blindly believing in recalled thoughts or imagined thoughts as the truth.

What is "Meaning"?

While searching for meaning of life, I stumbled upon this questions during meditation and understanding has been quite enriching.

When humans say something has some "Meaning" they merely mean they have found an association of Experience in Their Mind" with something else that Mind already has experienced or has stored

There is vast experience that goes unnoticed by human mind merely because there is nothing to associate that experience with. In other words our mind is only capable for detecting meaning with reference to something else. If there is no reference there is no meaning to human mind.

Human mind also has capability to store short term occurrences for a limited times span that also gives us ability to use sequence of events or images or experiences as "One Experience" and see meaning of that sequence as a whole.

Want an example? Here is it?

What is the meaning of "UWVHMTDBR"?

Not think what is the meaning of "DOG"

Get the point? Second one has meaning to common mind purely because there is a stored association in mind. In reality the first one is as meaningful as the second one.

- The explorer

What is Reality? Why do I act the way I do?

A little bit of clarity on following questions after a while with minimal set of variables

What is reality for me? How does it affect my actions? What is reality for others?

Reality for me is a mind experience created by six factors
1. Inputs received at that moment on my five senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell
2. My memory - A collective of my stored experiences, my attitudes and beliefs of what is right/wrong, good / bad (in line with survival and out of line of survival needs) for me.

Together these seven creates an emotional & dynamic experience for me every moment of life.

This also means, in the same environment (sensory inputs), two individuals can experience radically different experietial reality as the sixth factor is uniquely individual and developed over the life time of an individual.

Why I do what I do every moment of my life, every day, week & year?

There are two factors that determine my actions all the time
1. The momentum! -
The momentum is the biggest single factor that dictates what I do most of the time. Momentum is simply the way I have lived my life or I do things or I have decided to do things earlier in time).

I keep doing things that I do or I have decided to do earlier unless there is a force (Experiential reality) that makes me change the direction of the ongoing momentum.

2. My experiential reality (discussed above) is a moderating factor to momentum and helps me take minor decision or deviations in line with survival needs. A drastic change in experiential reality than what was expected can also make me change the direction that momentum dictates at most the times.

Example - I go to office every day at almost a decided time, dictated by the momentum. But an experiential reality of my child being sick can change the momentum a little bit or if the experiential reality is that child is very sick and needs to be hospitalised can drastically change the momentum or create a different short term/long term momentum of actions.

Q2 - How does collective reality and momentum shape the world?

1. The collective momentum is order of magnitude larger force than individual momentum that shape the destiny of the world most of times. It generally needs order of magnitude bigger shocks or changes to change these ongoing momentums.

2. Individual experiential realities most of the time can only create blips on the long term momentum waves and at times if there is a large collective experiential wave, it can also change the collective social momentum.

- The explorer

The Expectation Reality Mismatch and the Effect

In earlier post, I discussed our layers of existence. A little more addition on the workings of mind, thought & action, specifically on the "Action" & causes of it

1. There is no Action without a preceding thought

2. There is no thought without preceding stimuli (Environment, retrieved experience or even output of intellect)

3. The existence part of the ego retrieves and creates survival thoughts

4. The positional part of the ego (the stand of how the world should be), creates thoughts about how the world should be

5. The difference between "Positions" & "Reality induced Thoughts" create discomfort in mind scape. Example, say thought retrieved by Stimuli ( #2), lets call it reality induced thoughts, and the Ego generated wish of "How the world should be" (#3, #4) according to construction of human being, are different, ego creates discomfort in mind scape that takes the shape of emotions.

6. Stronger the difference between positions and reality, stronger is the discomfort or emotions

7. This discomfort is the seed of ALL Actions and Utterances of human beings at ALL time.

8. #7 is a radical statement and I have realized that my whole life has been nothing but a slavery of continuous attempt of my ego to get the world to the order it deems appropriate.

- Explorer

Sensation and Thought

During recent meditation somehow I stumbled into observing the sensation on and around the head. I was trying to find out how the senses affect the head at a physiological level i.e. does the input from the senses cause any activity in the head which can be felt at the level of senses.  Since I had closed the eyes the most active sense at that moment was hearing. I came up with some interesting observations.  First of all I didn’t notice uniform activity around the head. I didn’t notice much activity on my right side though the sound source was closer to the right ear. I observed sensation on front, top, left  and back side.  The area adjoining the back to top and left side seemed more active. The most interesting observation was the activity towards the back of the head and it seemed it was in response to prior activity in the other part of head.  The outcome of this activity on the back seemed to be resulting in psychological thought. Interestingly observing this sensation would cause the resulting thought to dilute or die in the middle or not happen at all. Later continuing this process would cause very little thought and only sensation. This was startling since this would seem to be a definite way to silence the mind.
I continued with my observation for few days and came up with the theory that these sensations can be divided in two parts: Sensation on the back of the head and sensation everywhere else. It seems the sensation everywhere else act as an input to the back of the head. The resulting response (thought) from the back causes the sensation on the back or head (Now I don’t know which one occurs first the thought or sensation).  So it occurred to me that mind is nothing but a complex request response mechanism. There are multiple stimulant and it has a way of coming up with the response.  Now knowing the myriad inputs and power of senses it would seem impossible to stop our senses and hence our mind. Now senses are meant to serve important roles in our life. But for the mind it would seem difficult to understand that it does not need to generate response for every sensory input that it gets. May be this is the reason for continuous stream of thoughts.

I kept observing this phenomenon for few days and these observations lead me to realize that there is a very important part of our body which acts as a link to our head. That is back side of the neck. All the input and output to our mind from the bottom part of our body would have to travel through our neck and it seems this part plays very important part in this. I would feel some discomfort in this part whenever I have any thoughts. Just adjusting this so that the discomfort is gone or observing this would reduce or completely eliminate the thought. I tried this in my meditation and observed that my mind would be alive with no thoughts if I don’t have any discomfort in this area.  This seemed like a sure shot way of reaching silence in meditation or anytime else.  It’s not just this part but the back, shoulders, hands and everything else plays a very important part in the way the sensation is perceived in this part. And somehow if this part is relaxed it seemed the mind was lot quieter. It would seem this part is an important link in transmitting the sensory input to the mind.

My observations explained the response of the input from the bottom part of our body but what about the upper part? It would seem if I could find one or several places which were similar it could explain the way to quite the mind completely.  I am not sure if there is only one point in the head. But it seems easier to observe the sensation on the head. Normally there are only a few areas.  In one or two places, I could feel very subtle pain. Observing those areas seemed to help a lot in reaching a quiet mind. I have to continue investigation the top part for more concrete observations.

There are two important conclusions I drew from these:
1.    We are nothing but puppets of our senses. It’s like a computer, given an input it comes up with the output. The input is coming all the time and so does the output.
2.    There is some entity in the system which has the ability to see all this play.  It seems it is not thought, it’s a silent observer. It can see this play going on.  Somehow this observer is very concrete in the meditation.

So maybe the key to understanding ourselves is through our senses, through the various sensations in our body and mind.  Buddha said this long time ago, maybe I am discovering the truth in it.

Beyond Matter & Energy Driven Existence

Whole human experience, consciousness is about either matter or energy (inter convertible e=mc2).

Not only our experiences & sense, all the instruments, that detect existence, as well depend on existence or change in energy to even recognize the presence of material and not material world.

If there was an existence that was independent of matter-energy dimensions, humans and all of our scientific apparatus would be unable to detect or experience that reality.

If there were to be a dimension of existence that transcends this life time & space, that would belong to such a dimension and it would require a leap in human discovery to detect that dimension of existence.

No evidence of it so far. Dark matter & dark energy science may lead us some day to answers & a bridge between two parallel existences of universe.

- Explorer