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.
"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" Paug Gaugin
One of the fundamental question that one has to answer for himself is the question about his origin. And for this, man has created theories about it. Of course the truth is that no one can come with an infallible theory because it's very hard to prove.
Until Darwin, the prevailed myth that answered the question of man's origin was the "Ceramic model of the Universe" provided by the church. Darwin was maybe the first to oppose this widespread idea when he introduced the "Theory of Evolution" which is based on a Newtonian model of the Universe.
Now it seems that this theory is starting to shake as many scientists argue that this century old theory has many flaws in it, many that couldn't have been predicted by Darwin. The debate started from the mid 1980's from a book entitled "Evolution: A Theory in Crisis" by Michael Denton.
The "Intelligent design" theory is based upon the principle of "irreducible complexity". An irreducibly complex system is one composed of multiple parts, all of which are necessary for the system to function. If even one part is missing, the entire system will fail to function. Every individual part is integral. So there has to be an intelligent design for all these parts to have been set up in the correct place. The probability of this to happen by mere chance is so small that is almost impossible.
This principle is not found only in the biology but even in astrophysics. The distance to our Sun is tremendously important for the life to exist as we know it. If we were a little closer to the Sun or further from it, the water, our essential vital substance, wouldn't be in the liquid form and we couldn't live. In Physics, we have what we call "Universal constants". If these constants were other than what we know today, the Universe wouldn't be like the way it's know, or it could have been destroyed.
We can conceive even a theory of evolution for the Universe, or Multiverse, in a higher dimensional plane in which all possible universes are created from the beginning (whatever that is) and maybe the laws of physics would differ and the universe with a wrong mixture of universal constants and laws could destroy itself. That's natural selection on a universal scale.
The Darwinians reply that given a considerable amount of time, and try every combination, without repeating it through natural selection, the nature can find it's way to evolve towards complexity.
In a recent 2008 documentary movie "Expelled: No intelligence allowed" we can see how this idea of "natural selection" can turn into a dangerous idea. It has feed Nazi's racist efforts to create the "Aryan race" throughout exterminating "inferior races".
On the other side, creationists argue that science is a form or religion of itself. No one know how the life started. How did all happen, how the first protein was conceived. The fairy story "that a lightning stroke the primordial soup" the life appeared it's a gimmick. Laboratory experiments showed this could never happened.
Today we live with the disastrous results of the ego, which, according to nineteenth century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature and that if it does not fight nature it will not be able to maintain its status as an intelligent fluke. Therefore the geneticists and many others are now saying that man must take the course of his evolution into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, unintelligible processes of nature to develop him any further; he must intercede with his own intelligence and through genetic alterations breed the kind of people who will be viable for future human societies. This, I submit, is a ghastly error, because human intelligence has a very serious limitation. It is a scanning system of conscious attention that is linear, and it examines the world in lines [...] However, the universe does not come at us in lines. Instead, it comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening altogether everywhere at once, and it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or other information, however fast it may be scanned. That is our limitation, so far as the intellectual and scientific life is concerned. The computer may greatly speed up linear scanning, but it is still linear scanning. - Alan Watts
So, man is tackling these fundamental problems but it has thousand year old weapons that never changed.
Using these tools, we designed what we call "intelligent robots" but these robots don't even have the intelligence of a drunken cockroach. For example, there is no definitive algorithm that can distinguish cats from dogs from a set of images. A tentacle-robot makes an impressive amount of computations for moving it's hand from one point to another using inverse kinematics, while most three year-old can do it in an instant. Efforts have being made in this area of research, on understanding how the brain work and Jeff Hawkings came up with an interesting approach called memory-prediction model. More on this subject in his ted talk or his book "On Intelligence".
With this approach, we could come to the realization that our complex intelligence can be reproduced by a machine that can safely pass the Turing test. Then what ? The philosophical implications of this is that life, like the matter, is not intelligent and it's just mechanical. That would be a great disappointment for mankind, for it's ego. An intelligent design would just lay out the matrix for all things and we are just a product of it. If we are going to find that design it won't be that intelligent for us when we'll think of it. Maybe we don't know what this concept of intelligence really means.
But there is another way to put it. Life it's not a fluke. The matter is just as intelligent as the human brain is or the cell. There is no need then for any intelligent design but there is no reason that it could not be at the same time. The matter itself is intelligent as it basic core. Alan Watts explains this principle in the following video.
All in all, the entry can be summed up into the following table. For me, the last two theories are correct and even if they contradict each other. They are saying the same thing, that the nature of life, is not separated from the nature of matter. So the matter is one with life, despite on what we call intelligent or not.
The metaphysical revolution of the paradigm shift has began. The foundations of the society in which we live is shaking and cannot sustain itself at the current pace and the results we are seeing today are disturbing.
Famine is the greatest killer in a world right now despite the fact that we have the technology of feeding over 7 billions of people, but we don't just because they don't have money. Also AIDS which is a curable disease makes millions of deaths in Africa because they are poor and they don't afford treatments like people in developed countries. Ghandi said "The deadliest form of violence is poverty".
1% of the population owns more than 40% of the planet wealth, 20% of the worlds population consumes 80% of its resources, more than 50% of the population is working under 2$ per day and more statistics can be depicted in the beautiful referential movie Home (which I invite to see if you didn't until now). So this gap between the rich and the poor is becoming increasingly larger with what it seems to be an exponential change.
One alternative to our society is expressed in the philosophy of the Jacque Fresco's Venus project, which for some is merely an utopia.
One argued on a blog:
I agree whole-heartily with it, but one question I've always had about the Venus Project is how it proposes to handle fair distribution of goods and services. One can't expect everyone to be all 'selfless' all of a sudden and if everything is free, there would be those who took unfair advantage. Controls would need to be put in place and then the whole cycle of crime starts again.
I feel that the problems we face now are not with political, economic and social systems, but with us, individually. We need a radical revolution (or evolution) of mind and spirit on a massive scale from which truly just systems will arise. I've also heard it said that once 10%-20% of humans wake up it would be enough of a shift to initiate real change, primarily by allowing awakened leaders (corporate and political) to emerge.
The change should also be along with one in consciousness in which one should not desire more than what it needs. This "waking up" that everyone is talking about, this paradigm shift is starting to emerge from within all fields, biology, neuroscience, astro-physics, philosophy... and will converge to what we are talking right now, to the revolution of the mind. This is going to be our revolution. And what we expect now? A leader, because no one has the guts to do it on his own. Some of us did it, but the change was small (like Christopher McCandless or Ghandi). In order this to work it must be at a global scale.
The Internet will play a big role and the best example is the recently Egyptian revolution (25 January). The upper elite knows that the power is at the people but they try to keep us as separated as possible. The roman method of "divide and conquer" is working even now. But we must remember that we are the pyramid and the upper elite will fall if the pyramid will crumble.
The revolution of consciousness is referring to the elimination of the ego (or the self) that has been fed with false concepts about the reality, about what our needs are and that is decaying in a general anxiety. This metaphysical revolution will basically create the ground of acceptance of the new radical ideas expressed in the Venus Project. Until then, these ideas will be regarded as a return of Marxism or Communism and they will be criticized and blamed of repeating the history.
Thomas Kuhn said that there are some phases that lead to a change of paradigm.
1. The existing paradigm encounters an anomaly
2. Initially the anomaly is ignored or rejected
3. People try to explain the anomaly with the existing paradigms
4. A new paradigm is proposed in which the anomaly is resolved
5. The solution is rejected often ridiculed (the creator and followers are seen as heretics)
6. The solution finally gains acceptance.
The social anomalies of this society paradigm are wars, famine, destroying mother nature, wasting resources, money... People lived in ignorance or they were eliminated because of their radical ideas (like Ghandi). We are in the phase 4-5 of the revolution or change of the current paradigm of consciousness. There is no one better than Peter Russel to explain this in his great talk, "The Primacy of Consciousness".
We have the power to change but the change must be with their own weapons first. The radical solution would be to try to be independent of money. But first of all, think at what you buy and how you can change the world. This may be the first non-violent step to take as expressed in the movie Home.
"Your reverence", asked Huai-jang, "what is the objective of sitting meditation?"
"The objective," answered Ma-tsu, "is to become a Buddha."
Thereupon Huai-jang picked up a floor-tile and began to polish it on a rock.
"What are you doing, master?" asked Ma-tsu.
"I'm polishing it for a mirror", said Huai-jang.
"How could polishing a tile make a mirror?"
"How could sitting in meditation make a Buddha?"
"The perfect Way [Tao] is without difficulty,
Save that it avoids picking and choosing.
Only when you stop liking and disliking
Will all be clearly understood.
A split hair's difference,
And heaven and earth are set apart!
It you want to get the plain truth,
Be not concerned with right and wrong.
The conflict between right and wrong
Is the sickness of the mind." Seng-ts'an
"When everyone recognizes beauty as beautiful,
there is already ugliness;
When everyone recognizes goodness as good,
there is already evil.
"To be" and "not to be" arise mutually;
Difficult and easy are mutually realized;
Long and short are mutually contrasted;
High and low are mutually posited;
Before and after are mutually sequence."
The illusion of significant improvement arises in moments of contrast, as when one turns from the left to right on a hard bed. The position is better so long as the contrast remains, but before long the second position begins to feel like the first. The vacuum arises because the sensation of comfort can be maintained only in relation to the relation of discomfort, just as an image is visible to the eye only by reason of a contrasting the background. The good and evil, the pleasant and the painful are so inseparable, so identical in their difference-like the two sides of a coin. [...]
Zen has no goal. A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only "getting somewhere" as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to. For points of arrival are too abstract, too Euclidean to be enjoyed, and it is as very much like eating the precise ends of a banana without getting what lies in between. [...]
In swordsmanship one must not first decide upon a certain thrust and then attempt to make it since by that time it will be too late. Decision and action must be simultaneous. [...]
In archery, the releasing of the bowstring had to be done "unintentionally", then the arrow would shoot itself." Alan Watts in "The way of zen"
Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
"How can one prevent a drop of water from ever drying up ?
By throwing it into the sea." Samsara (2001)
A lot of change happened recently that stopped me of having enough time to blog something about anything. You must remember, that one of the fundamental point of Buddhism is the idea that the world is in a permanent flux of change. The sense of frustration arises from a person failure to accept this basic characteristic of life: the lack of permanent self and perpetual change of everything.
Everything in our universe is in constant change since the beginning, the Big Bang. From galaxies to simple sub-atomic particles, all things are in a constant flux. Also it's difficult to pin down anything because of this change. In quantum physics the uncertainty principle states that one cannot assign exact simultaneous values to the position and momentum of a physical system. These quantities can be measured only with uncertainty.
Moreover, for each particle physicists have assigned a wave making them inseparable. The duality of particle-wave is the result of the basic rule that governs our universe. But how something so palpable and solid as matter particles can easily be associated with a wiggly wave of energy, an ethereal moving substance ?
I believe the force of gravity is the driver of this constant change. From the beginning the gravity formed everything by organizing chaos. This is how atoms were formed, then planets and life itself. I cannot imagine this universe without gravity. The Secret shows that the Gravity works not only at the physical level. Gravity is the only force in the Universe that hadn't been united completely in the Theory of Everything due to it's strange nature despite the other four forces (electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces).
Only exotic theories like the string theory or E8 theory tried to unite these forces. Both of them are difficult to prove because they require the existence of higher dimensions in this universe and even parallel universes from which gravity can leak in our universe.
A rather new simple Theory of Everything states that atoms are mini black holes where protons are attracted to each other by gravitation rather than a mysterious strong force.
Also, there is the resistance to change. If there is no resistance to it, everything will go from beginning to the end in an instant. So there must be always some resistance to change for the wonderful manifestation of form to exist. This may be a good definition of time, as being this resistance to change.
The degree you are going with the stream, you are not resisting change, time will not affect you as much as it does to others. If you learn how to completely let go, you will experience nirvana but you must realize this without purpose, without intention.
The laws of Thermodynamics are the physical laws that governs the entire universe, from smallest known subatomic particle to galaxy clusters. They describe the transport of heat and work during thermodynamic processes.
The fundamental law of thermodynamics states that: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms.
This impossibility of creating or destroying of the energy is the basic reason of our existence in this infinite cycle of life and death which we call life. Life is changing energy. So if we had the capability of tapping the energy of the entire universe and use it, what could we do with it ? We can only use it to transform it into another form... nothing more.
This laws refers only to closed systems. In nature there are no "closed systems". Until recent years, it was thought that only the universe can be an enclosed system and the laws of thermodynamics can be applied to it as a whole. But with recent discoveries this also cannot be true taking into account "Multiverse" theories as explained by Dr. Michio Kaku in this video.
The question remains how many times this recursion of parallel universes, one on top of the other may exist ?
We live within a fractal universe, where the smallest part resembles to the whole. The atomic level can be associated at some level with the planetary system, the Mother Earth (sphere) with Father Light (as depicted in christian philosophy) can be associated with the male spermatozoon and the female egg. At every level we find the same principles. Now scientists discover that animals have feelings and can think and can even communicate with humans in some way.
Interesting cooperation and fairness within animal world... not so frequently adopted by humans.
The second law of thermodynamics states that: The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
Entropy can be thought as a measure of disorder within an isolated system.
If we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world we'll increase our state of disorder, and as a fractal enter in the realm of chaos. Thus, we have to find ways of lowering our entropy and we can do so only when we are in full contact with nature, where we dissolve the boundaries and be one with the entire universe.
This can be achieved only when the mind is in the higher planes of consciousness and realizes that it has to let go... and merge with the rest which is a part of itself.
A more fun way of connecting to nature than meditation is through practicing sports that require outside work, for example: jogging, swimming, mounting, riding bikes, etc.
In conclusion we see that all systems tend to achieve equilibrium, which is the state of energy balance, the middle way of the Tao.
If one's mind can comprehend the notion of Infinite, for example in Mathematics, then it's mind has to have this property also. Fractals are a way of mapping something infinite in something that looks finite.
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of human life is to grasp as much as we can out of the infinitude. Alfred North Whitehead
On the other hand, in eastern philosophy the concept of the mind is different.
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing; it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep. Taoist sage
Alan Watts depicted this eastern principle of "Buddha mind" that the "true mind is no mind" (wu-hsin) and he is basically sustaining the principle of Tao that does not "know" how it produces the Universe just as we do not "know" how we construct our brains. We do not think to breathe we just do it. The Tao's principle is Spontaneity also known as wu-wei (non-doing, non-striving).
Chuang-tzu noticed the true state of consciousness in the Tao is in somehow similar to one's being drunk.
A drunken man who falls out of a cart, though he may suffer, does not die. His bones are the same as other people's; but he meets the accident in a different way. His spirit is in a condition of security. He is not conscious of riding in the cart; neither is he conscious of falling out of it. Ideas of life, death, fear, etc., cannot penetrate his breast; and so he does not suffer from contact with objective existences. And if such security is to be got from whine, how much more is to be got from Spontaneity ?
Though the main process of the mind is thinking it must have a counter process also which is driven from unconscious processes. Alan Watts said: "A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think except thoughts. So he looses his touch of reality and lives in a world of illusion"...
The human body energy centers or Chakra's are the base in Raja Yoga (or the Royal Yoga). Raja Yoga is a powerful, more spiritual approach to achieve enlightenment. The awakening of these energy centers is found in martial arts too when practitioners perform meditation (zen) or Tai Chi exercises. The following video series is a beautiful introduction in this ancient knowledge:
From "Nothing" everything come into being. Matter, space, time and energy, all came out from the Ocean of Pure Consciousness. Eventually life emerged from this apparently dead Universe. Time passed and the life evolved and became conscious of it self.
We as humans have the opportunity to get back to our true home, to our Father, to the Creator if we are awaken. Man should seek enlightenment during his life not material possessions because matter is not the true nature of human beings.
This returning to the Creator is imminent. God said in the bible "I'm the Alfa and Omega, the Beginning and the End" meaning that He created us and He would rejoin with all of us at the End of Times.
Another path to reach the state of wakefulness is the practice of a Martial Art. Along training your body you are training your mind how to conquer fear and how to act without intention.
Aikidois a Japanese martial art developed by Morihei Ueshiba (1883 - 1969) and it's title is often translated as "the way of unifying (with) the universal energy". The first goal in Aikido is the spiritual development of the aikidoka (aikido practitioner) however one seeks to control an aggressor without causing harm.
"The primary purpose of Aikido is spiritual development." O Sensei
So basically the practice of Aikido is a path to spirituality through daily practice. O' Sensei was heavily influenced by Zen Buddhism and so its philosophy on Aikido is based mainly on compassion.
To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.
O Sensei
The philosophy of Aikido goes even further when O Sensei said:
"Attackers confront us continually, but in reality there is no attacker there".
This is an expression of the core idea in Zen Buddhism that one should not make any distinction between the subject and the object.
"The thinker of thoughts is just a thought, the feeler of feelings is just one of the feelings and the experiencer of an experience is part of the experience itself."
Alan Watts
I find the quote from "The Zen Mind" (an Empty Mind film) powerful:
"The search for self realization is powered by our anxiety and our fears which feed our ego causing frustration in our daily life, selfishness, jealousy, anger and hate which unconsciously serve to protect us, and in doing so, set us in opposition to everyone and everything."
So when one awakens to the realization of the illusion of the ego, the dissolution of the self happens spontaneously and thus one is able to reflect any attack as he will be one with the attacker. In fact there will be no attack at all because there will be no attacker and no one attacked.
All that we know exist in contrast with it's respective opposite. So people are tented to split the world in black and white, wright and wrong, beautiful and ugly, etc. and then expect of life only the good part. But we see that if there was only white in this world you couldn't see nothing except white and the Universe will be very boring. There must be some black to see the white.
On the other hand, astrophysicists found that the Universe is filled more with Dark Matter than with Matter and it couldn't have been created without the existence of Dark Matter.
So all negative things-events coexist with the positive and you could not have one without the other. Now let Alan Watts explain more on this:
Nothing is more fertile than emptiness. Alan Watts
We saw that through meditation we are making a conscious attempt to stop thinking, but most of the time we think. We have to control our daily thinking as much as we advance in our non-thinking training.
In eastern philosophy we have Karma Yoga and it basically means Action. In Karma Yoga everything that is happening to you it's your own doing and not just because "We are one", we are literally attract the future events with our thinking. Stopping thinking enables us to enter in a timeless space. Watch "The Secret" movie and see what laws exist at consciousness level.
For Alan Watts making philosophy it is a way of living. He once joked in an open talk:
A philosopher nowadays is a practical fellow that comes with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five. He does philosophy during the day which is discussing whether sentences have meaning and if so what, and then he would come to work in a white coat if he could get away with it.
When he talks about eastern philosophy he does it from a neutral point of view and that's it's clearly stated in "The Way of Zen" where he writes:
On the one hand, it is necessary to be sympathetic and to experiment personally with the way of life to the limit of one's possibilities. On the other hand, one must resist every temptation to "join the organization", to become involved with its institutional commitments. In this friendly neutral position one is apt to be disowned by both sides.
In the previous video you saw that time is relative. We three-dimensional beings see the 4th dimension in a distorted way. Time/space is relative to the observer point of view and thus: if there is no observer is no time nor space. Let's see now the scientific explanation of the shape of the time.
Conclusions:
All events are really one event.
Time is pair-shaped and relative to the observer.
We cannot observe the present we are only seeing the past.
So it's very hard to define the PRESENT, because it's changing, the PAST, because our memory is selective, and the FUTURE which is an expectation.
"No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention, Let it settle itself"
from the "Six Percepts" of Tilopa
Another metaphor for the blue mountain and the white cloud is the phenomenon "moon-in-the-water". When there is no water, there is no moon. But when the moon rises the water does not wait to receive its image, and when even the tiniest drop of water is poured out the moon does not wait to cast its reflection. They exist dependent yet independent of each other.
"The search for self-realization is powered by our anxiety and our fear which feed our ego causing frustration in our daily life selfishness, jealousy, anger and hate which unconscious serve to protect us and in doing so set us into opposition to everyone and everything. To awaken to this realization is the practice of Zen."
This is a great excerpt from the EmptyMindFilms's "The Zen Mind" movie and it basically point out the cause of the violence we find it today and give the solutions to it.
Alan Watts gives a better explanation to the Way of Zen.
Yoga consists of methods of meditation to get our minds clear of thoughts, to enter in the frame of mind when we are complete aware of WHAT IS. Let's now hear Alan Watts which has a throughout introduction to Yoga.
"The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology. Covering both the natural and spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual and a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description. If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism." - 1945, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side", edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmanm Princeton University Press
We live in a world of illusion. We think about matter as something very solid but in fact matter is not solid at all. It consists of atoms surrounded by a cloud of electrons. The solidity results from the repulsing electrical interaction between the atoms. Quantum physics had shown that if we go deeper and deeper in structure of atoms we enter in a world of pure abstraction and pure potential. This is thought to be the information field governed by consciousness and thus our minds can alter the Universe.
Max Planck was talking about God, the consciousness being that expresses itself through all living beings, through all matter and all the Universe. He is not separated from us. It's like the Universe is a very complex fractal. Because in a fractal the part resembles the whole, if we have consciousness then matter has it too and this might bee the only substance there is.
"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness." Max Planck - The Observer (January 25th, 1931)
"The circle has an inside and an outside which are different (separate) and cannot exist without the other. To a donut the inside and the outside is the same." So we see that when we think in a higher dimensions things seem to be one. We think to ourselves separate from everything else because we perceive world through our senses and project these holograms outside ourselves. But the reality is that we are all one and thus this feeling of separateness is the matrix of life.
That's why LOVE is the most powerfull force of the Universe. Because it disolves the feeling of being alone and binds people. Jesus knew this from the Beginning and we all knew this, we only have to remember.
Because it's rather confusing to us to imagine higher dimensions, we must let Carl Sagan explains how a multidimensional being interacts with a lower dimensional being like ourselves to figure this out.
This also can explain angels sightings or extraterrestrial entities which can morph their appearance or other "out of this world" phenomenons. In the Book of Revelations GOD is "Alpha and Omega" and it means that He knows the Beginning and the End of Time and thus He is at least in the 4th dimension. I presume that GOD is the ultimate multidimensional being and exist in the 10th dimension. Now, let Rob Bryanton explain why 10 is the last possible dimension.
An beautiful super-symmetric 8 dimensional subatomic particle model could predict the new particles that LHC could produce. There is no doubt that our universe (or just our mathematical thinking) is symmetric or have a recurrence pattern just like a fractal object. Garret Lisi's "Theory of Everything" states that this 8D object constitutes the elementary super-particle from the time-space grid and with the different rotations applied to it we can generate all the elementary particles like electrons, protons or neutrinos.
