morning sun
bathed in the smell
of newly mown grass
This haiku came to me in a beautiful morning without thinking but just from my direct experience with nature at that moment. It was triggered by a flash of memory from my childhood spent in the beautiful mountains of Bukovina.
This is the simplest and the most sophisticated form of literature in the world. It is as if it were a work not of art but of nature.
- Alan Watts
Haiku is awakening the anticipation but it's left unfinished. The reader has the same amount of contribution to the poem as the writer. The art is knowing when to stop, when enough have been said.
Everything that is formulated it is as intensity decayed. Emil Cioran
Haiku poems are characterized by simplicity, lack of unessential and directness. It involves no symbolism, the point being more obvious. The thing that we are all looking for is just in front our eyes but we cannot see it because we look in other obscure places.
An important factor in designing a good AI or game matching algorithms is the balance of power. The system should not kill the player but it must be able to tune it so that the player should feel that it can lose all the time but in the end he will win against all odds. This makes the game more challenging and more dramatic.
But when you win, you might realize that this it's a dreadful hoax and you feel no different than you were before. The happiness quickly wares off and you would want something else. So there has to be loses in order to feel the winnings but the balance has to incline slightly towards winning to keep the player interested.
The evil has to have one third of the time and the good side two thirds. You will see that the good games are designed like this.
If you have the good and evil equally balanced, the game is boring, nothing happens, it's stalemate. The irresistible force meets the immovable object.
On the other hand if it's all good and it's hardly any evil, it's also get boring. Just in the same way for example: suppose that you knew the future and can control it perfectly. What would you do ? You would say: "Let's shuffle the deck and have another deal". Because, for another example when great chess players sit down for a match and suddenly it becomes apparent for both of them that white is going to mate in 16 moves and nothing can be done about it, they abandon the game and begin another. They don't want to know, it wouldn't be any hide in the game, any element of surprise if they did know the outcome.
So a game with the good and evil isn't a good game, a game with positive or good forces clearly triumphant isn't an interesting game. What we want is a game when it seems that the good side is about to loose and really serious danger loosing but manages always to sneak out.
So then what's necessary is a system in which the good side is always winning but never is the winner and the evil side always loosing but never is the looser. That's a very practical arrangement for a successful game that will keep everyone interested. - Alan Watts
Of course Alan Watts was referring to reality and not to video games. But video games are like the tip of the spear of the reproduction myth that it all started with paintings, photography, television and eventually computers. What are we really trying to simulate (and we find this extremely hard to do) is what we call real life. But the reality is much worse just because we know it's for real so we just want to fantasize.
From Revolver (2005) the movie, we get some interesting insights on the game of life where our perceptions are very much controlled by our ego.
In every game and con, there is always an opponent and there is always a victim. The more control the victim thinks he has... the less control he actually has. Gradually, he will hang himself. I as the opponent, just help him along.
Rule one of any game or con... You can only get smarter by playing a smarter opponent. (Fundamentals of Chess 1883)
Rule number two... the more sophisticated the game, the more sophisticated the opponent. If the opponent is very good, he will place his victim inside an environment he can control. The bigger the environment, the easier the control.
So the opponent simply distracts their victim by getting them consumed with their own consumption.
Eventually, when the opponent is challenged or questioned... it means the victim's investment, and thus his intelligence, is questioned. No one can accept that... not even to themselves.
The art is for me is to feed pieces for you and make you believe that you took those pieces cause you're smarter and I'm dumber.
There is an eternal struggle that is happening within ourselves. At the end of the movie, Mr. Green succeeds getting rid of his ego and he is enlightened.
Wake up, Mr. Green !
I will end with some quotes from the movie.
Dr. Yoav Datillo,
"The ego is the worst confidence trickster we could ever figure, we could ever imagine. 'Cause you don't see it."
Dr. Steven C. Hayes
"And the single biggest con is... "I am you."
Dr. Peter Fonagy
The problem is that the ego hides in the last place that you'd ever look... within itself. In creating this imaginary external enemy, it usually made a real enemy for ourselves, and that becomes a real danger to the ego, but that's also the ego's creation. In that sense, you could say that 100 percent of our external enemies are of our own creation.
Leonard Jacobson
It disguises its thoughts as your thoughts, its feelings as your feelings, You think it's you. People have no clue that they're imprisoned. They don't know that there is an ego. They don't know the distinction.
Andrew Samuels
Peoples' need to protect their own egos knows no bounds. They will lie, cheat, steal, kill, do whatever it takes, to maintain what we call ego boundaries.
David Hawkings
At first it's difficult for the mind to accept that there's some... something beyond itself, that there's something of greater value and greater capacity for discerning truth than itself.
Deepak Chopra
In religion, the ego manifests as the devil. And of course, no one realizes how smart the ego is because it created the devil so you could blame someone else.
There is no such thing as an external enemy, no matter what that voice in your head is telling you. All perception of an enemy is a projection of the ego as the enemy.
The greatest enemy will hide in the last place you would ever look. Julius Caesar 75 B.C.
Your friends are close but your enemy is closer.
Dr. Obadiah Harris
Your greatest enemy... is your own inner perception, is your own ignorance, is your own ego.
We have been cultivated with beliefs in our culture that shape our entire civilization. We bought our belief in the Darwinian Theory that says that we got here through random mutations and genetic accidents. There is no purpose for us of begin here on this planet because we are an accident. We are in an eternal struggle for survival, competition of being the fittest. So we have to compete against each other in order to get our piece of life out of this. So this is where we are right now, when we destroy ourselves through wars, famine and even when we destroy our environment.
Another harmful thing that we are doing to ourselves is when we are under stress. There are three side effects when stress hormones are released and they are related to the blood flow.
the blood is concentrated more for the protection system and the immune systems is shut down
growth and regeneration systems are shut down because they are less important than dealing with the stress source
the blood vessels from the frontal lobes, that are responsible for thinking, or reasoning, are constricted and the blood is directed to the back of the head where instinctual behavior resides.
This is not saying that stress is not good. It's good when we have to deal with immediate threat like being chased by a tiger. Nowadays we are dealing more with other kind of stress. For example, when we are under stress at work, we have to work more, better and faster in order to get that thing done. People who loose their jobs and are in debt because they cannot longer pay the loan, their stress can even push them towards suicide. But this stress is superficial by it's nature. It's a stress that we are creating in our minds, but it has the same effects like the real one. This is the biology of perception and it's explained by PhD. Bruce Lipton.
We live in a world with 360 degree of stress and the only way to deal with it is just to step outside of it, don't engage to it and be disconnected. It's the way eastern thought of non-engagement to what we call "real world" but for them is Maya or the illusion. When one realize that the world is just an illusion your stress hormones that were supposed to protect are not triggered anymore in artificial situations.
Cells are like people. They have all the systems that we have: respiratory, digestive, reproduction, endocrine and even immune system. Cells are a community, they have jobs, cells get paid for their jobs, there is an economy, there is a politics and they leave in harmony. The answer lies within. We live in a fractal universe where patterns repeat themselves in a similar fashion at every level.
Genetic control is what we have been programmed, which literally means that we are controlled by genes that we inherited. This concept basically makes us somehow are a victim impotent of changing our biology, it's like sitting in a back sit of a car, where the car is our body and genes are the driver.
In epi-genetics, the body is not controlled by the genes, but is something else that is controlling the genes (that where the "epi" comes from, something external). And that something is nothing else except our mind. The genes control nothing, the genes are only the blueprint for our body. The DNA represents the blueprint and the nervous system is the contractor that constantly modifies the blueprint according to the environment in order to keep the body alive.
So with the new view from epi-genetics, the mind controls the biology of the body. If we are able to control our minds we would be able to control our body too. This idea relates to the "Law of Attraction" that says that whatever you are thinking you are attracting that thing if you truly believe in it. But this is like when you would have an endless supply of desire in you, and whatever happens you are not put down by any event until you will actually going to achieve or have that thing.
Buddha said that desire is the source of all sufferings in the world. So Buddhist monks went out and cut desire, eliminated desire from all of their being, thrown desire, killed all desire within them. After all this effort they went back to Buddha and but the Buddha said "No, now you desire not to desire". So it's like a vicious circle. There is nothing you can do about it.
But how can one be able to control his mind ? What does he must do in order to improve his mind so to be in control of it, when he is using as a tool his own mind ? The mind cannot be the subject and the object of the improvement at the same time. This is like biting your own teeth or feeling the tip of your finger with the tip of your finger. You simply cannot do it. Then you realize that you cannot do anything about it. There is only though meditation one can become aware of this and experience the world just like it is, with good and bad, accepting them as they come.
