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Saw Avataar. Loved it. But what I kept thinking about as I left the hall was the enthusiasm with which the audience were clapping as the human race were marched back to go to their dying planet. Throughout the movie the crowd was clapping for the aliens, and not humans. Empathy. It's amazing people empathized more with an alien race's defence than own race's aggression which was however due to the desperate need to survive. Did human empathy have such universe wide limits?? I never knew! Am amazed at the possible implications..

Deluding Solids

The ice were waters that were too scared to flow. Cohesing to themselves.

No water ever cracked down the middle like an Ice does.

BEING, back.

Presence. Contentment in that presence.. haven't felt that in quite some time.. So when it slid in from the left part of my being, can't believe how different this thursday is from the past. Shukran Allah is playing in the background.. Jared Diamond's story of humans through guns, germs and steel, lies next to me, the murderous ceiling fan has been counselled back to normalcy, tomorrow seems a wonderful adventure, yesterday gleams perfect sans the usual crazy glitches that I usually usher in in such instances, can still taste the Cadbury, can smell the wheatgerm cream, have set the song again to play.. Try as I may, cant somehow go beyond descriptions.. words must arise out of churning. When it's all still, when I am calm and content to trust my body to float, logically, why at all should I meed the frantic strokes and life jackets called words..

Randoms

verbs are closer to the truth than nouns. world is not one of entities. it is one of processes. enduring, is not what reality is. fluid it is.

Randoms

The people who resist spirituality the most are the ones who are the most moral, the most religious. For that entails a harder dissolution process...

The preoccupation continues

Mind.. This mind of mine.. Is it a subject or object in the process of perception of world? Vedanta deems it as an object. As the real subject who perceives is the Atman.. But without getting into contemplation on how laws of perception at such higher levels, what I plan to get into is the dynamics of perception of the lower order.. where the mind is the subject and the world is the object perceived..
Providence had brought me across people and books that lured me into the terrain and I thought its time I consolidated it all..
Hegel, an idealist, like all other idealists believed that the 'object' world that we perceive is the creation of the 'subject' mind. Outer world as we see, know, realise it is but a projection of mind..

Mill and Baine would argue, they being the realists. According to them, the world outside exists as a objective reality, be there a mind that perceives it or not. The object world for them is independent of the subject mind.

Vedanta's treatises on Perception brings about a dialectic of the two contradicting theses. Sometimes i really think all truth is at the mid point of a dialectic. Be it a physical truth or philosophical truth. Anyways, before I let myself digress- Vedanta holds that world as we perceive is so perceived because of the creative function of mind and the existing nature of the objects perceived.

For example, imagine there is a pebble. The pebble has certain inherent qualities. And the mind had a conception of a pebble. It's when the mind's conception of pebble and the pebble's existence of being a pebble, converge that perception take place.

In that sense, what we perceive is the overlapping area of what we know and what exists out there..
And as what we know expands, the things we perceive also expand.. I remember.. just an year ago, I'll see a bird and it'd be just a bird, a flower would just be a flower, a colour would just be a colour.. Now it's different. When I see a bird, if it's the crow, I see something in it that I also peceive in lead.. when I see yellow.. i see in it something that I perceive in an elephant.. Something intangible.. Something till now unperceived.. but now as my conception of an object has changed, expanded, there is more of an overlap of what it is and what i know, and i perceive it different..

The enlightened seers say, while a quality of a particular object is it's structure, there is an an underlying Absolute Reality which is the substratum..
Like wise, while the discrimating nature is the mind's function it too has an underlying substratum which is the underlying Absolute Reality..
Parthasarathy has beautifully simplified it into an equation.
A flower = The Qualities of flower + Absolute Reality
Mind that sees it = Constructs of flower+ Absolute Reality
But since we have not identified or touched that Absolute Reality in us, we cannot perceive the Absolute Reality that underlies the flower. We just see in the flower what the mind has learned to discriminate.
No wonder, they say, when a person becomes truly enlightened, the world for her/him truly dissolves away..
I guess then it'd be just the Absolute reality perceiving the absolute reality.. or rather, seeing it's own self extended..
Sweet! :-)

Rasas in the Onam Sadhya

My love for festivals are on a perpetual wax and wane cycle. This year, its waxing. Onam has been quietly, meaningfully beatuiful. Actually, this time, thanks to Tim, I unjaded myself as I looked at the sadhya leaf and found a whole lot of sense in the array of curries colourlfully arranged on the plantain leaf. He posed the question, why that particular order? And surely there must be some significance in the signature tastes predominating each course of the mea l...
Really set me thinking..

Human body is said to be made of 5 elements. Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Ether. The 5 elements combine among themselves to form the 3 doshas.
Earth + Water = Kapha
Fire - Pitta
Air+ Ether = Vata

Kapha is the anabolic force. Builds the body. Nourishes the body.
Pitta manifests as sight, intelligence, memory, the blood and digestive fluids
Vata is the movement. It is the power behind all actions of mind and body. Kapha and Pitta needs Vata for their action.

And the balance of the three is the health of an individual. Food is the primary link we have to our earth. And just like our own selves, each entity in this earth has it's own characteristic composition of the tridoshas. And by consuming them, we intake the tridoshas.

Now a perfect food would be one that balances the doshas.
Now coming to food, a food has three qualities - rasa (initial taste), virya (thermal potency) and vipaka (post digestive impact). And these have a direct impact on our well being. There are 6 tastes. Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, astingent, pungent. Each of these tastes has a specific impact on our doshic balance because of the basic elements and the qualities it possess.

Now applying this to the sumptuous sadhya,
Rice and parippu and ghee are one of the first things to come. Sweet and salt are the predominant tastes. Sweet= Earth+Water , Salt = Water+ Fire. Both are basicaly Kapha, Oily and heavy. Nourishes the body.
Then comes Sambar. Pungent. Sweet. Salty. Kapha dosha , but this time, along with considerable Pitta and vata too. For, Pungent = Air+Fire.
Then comes agian Sweet in the form of Paayasam.
Which is then followed again by Pungent, Sour and Astringent in the form of Rasam, Moru, Puliseery.
Here, Sour= Earth+Fire and Astringent = Air+Earth. While the former is digestive and carminative, the latter is absorbant and purifying.

Ofcourse other than the main dishes, all the side dishes kept along also has their own role. Though I really am not able to break them down to basic tastes... Injikkary (ginger curry) is definitely there, kept first for it's post digestive effect (vipaka). It is both sweet and pungent. Hot in potency(Virya). It will rev up the digestive juice secretion so that proper digestion is in place as one keeps eating..

I know this is just a naive musing. And that there is more to it.. But had to put it down or I would even forget, I had such a concern..

Ishi Mom

Ishi gave birth to a baby boy.

He is as big as those two new bipin chandra books i bought yesterday, put together.

She carried him for 10 months! It took one hour for her to push him out. They slit her with a blade and then stitched her back.

She sits, cooing to her baby, joking at how she feels ticklish when he sucks her nipples.

Ishi, my funny funky friend who made the college of the Maharja bearable. She is all Mom now. There were not many instances where we didnt see eye to eye. It's just not that I dont understand her now.

Its just this new person that has walked out of the skin shedded. The skin that burst first where her son poked his head out, the crack then travelling up her belly, her breasts then upto her head. The skin falls off and Voila! there is a Mom to the world.

I know there must be a being like that in me too. But moulting, I reiterate, is not for the fishy ones. We are happy to swim around in our slippery first skins all life long. And nurturing though we might be, narcissism doesn't peak enough to wish the object of nurturance holds one's own gene map.

But Gosh, Ishi, respect I do. so much...chakkare.

Kinds; Of loving

Neruda was right.
There are two types of love.
One in which you love like certain dark things are to be loved. To see the other as the plant that doesn't bloom but carries within itself the light of those flowers.
One in which you love like certain simple integral things are to be loved. The other, the evening breeze which doesn't hide anything but plays on your hair all that it is.

On souls that flee

I learnt about a practice of Shamans today. Tim told me of it. His dad is a minister in a church and his mom is a Shaman. Am so fascinated by her.. Apparently, she got hit by a lightning and was hospitalised and it's after that she sought out shamanism.. He tells me, that she does soul retrieval for people.. everytime something traumatic happens to us, a part of our soul flees.. and she tries to find them for people.. along with helping peoples' soul journey ahead after their death..
Tim says she did one for him too. Tim had a difficult childhood, seperated from his mom. She wasn't part of his childhood. And she found a piece of his being that fleed back then during some epsode with his dad. And the solution she sound for Tim to get it back was a question. A question, which by it's frequent 'posing' would help him find that part and bring it back. "What can I do to be, remain, curious?"

I dunno what to think of it. My faith revolves around energies. And nature, as animism sees it, revolves around that very concept of energy flow itself. But I dunno whether we really keep losing parts of our souls like that. Thats what Mary Gaitskill too said. Is it really possible?? I dunno. But the idea that -a question that you will ask yourself, is all that you need to rediscover that lost part touched me so much..

Closure

Pragnanz. Closure. That forms the basis of human perception of experience. We have an inherent tendency to try group entities around us as closed packets of experiences, the simpler the better. Closure is so important to us. That is why that ambiguous text is so frustrating to us. That is why it's so difficult to let ourselves hang out there, in a relationship waiting for someone to respond. That is why we spend more time looking at and pondering about ambiguous pitures, than clear stark ones.. which must be why abstract art is so popular.

To be home alone is to be dancing

After a long time, could dance today. Up and down the stairs in and arond the living, on bed and the couch.. everywhere that the music took me. There was no one at home and I felt like an unbound spring.

Dancing is like meditation. The one that works the best for me. Its the one thing that makes me belong just to the moment. I really have no idea how I dance when I dance for myself.. I just close my eyes and pretend existence seeks its validity in the sway of my hips. lol. vain. but who cares!

I like to tie my hair tight in a bun and swirl so fast that the rhythm that slowly creeps up my spine can tumble it down. I tell myself, that's when I will stop dancing..

I really wish I were a street dancer. And my whole life would just be about resonance. No need to really emit anything.. the music will by itself elicit what is it in me that it wants.

Music and movement. Rhythm and Resonance.

I wish I had that.

And I wish I will be cremated, and not buried when I die. I dunno why it suddenly popped up. But yea, I guess this is as serious a wish to let it's presence felt now.

You are heeded to, too cremation wish. Though the possibility of that happening is as remote as me dancing to the tune of Djembe in the streets for a living.

But heed I do..

Tesla in a dream

Dozed off while reading this book on physical geography. And ended up dreaming what? Of Nikola Tesla.. Of all people , Mr Moody genius, Tesla. I know it's him, coz everytime he spoke, a pigeon would miraculously appear from his sleeves and flutter around.. and click on a bulb on his shoulder... And he kept trying to say something, but it sounded like static current.. And funny, I felt like I understood everything and was taking notes..
Tesla was indeed a great great man. So great that he bordered the alien. Alien, as he is, as I see it, is the most flattering state of being. I just can't begin to understand how he ended up finding all the things he did.. though he never got the recognition and the world never came to know of it all.. He even modelled and started building a tower that would produce and transmit electricity with no cost , wireless, across the world... But forces that were, would not let that happen.. But what has captivated me a lot is his relationship with pigeon. Apparently he had one whom he considered like a soul mate.. talked to it.. and he says it even came to visit him, when he thought of it.. And when it died finally, Tesla did not hesistate to follow.
I remember how strange i felt the first time I read about him and his pigeon.. And today from nowhere there he was.
Maybe its coz of a variation of what they say as the negative after image.. u see someting yellow for a long time, u close ur eyes and you see blue, it's complementary colour. Because the neurons try to find an equilibrium.. Physical geography is so stabilised. 'Matter'ous. ''Definit'ous. Maybe that's what evoked the Electric, Fluid Tesla and his pigeon. 'Energ'ous. Ambiguous.
Who knows! But am so so honoured, Mr Tesla.

Lunatic; not just an idiot.

There is something crazy about the way humans are made.

He came last week. Was so funny to see him at the airport. He looked so outta place. A huge back pack hunching him.
But when he opened that back pack and took out a piece of petrified wood and a white pebble from Atlantic, i knew the stranger was indeed the very dear friend who knew me so well. A stone from deep down the earth, in which each little being of wood was replaced by each little being of mineral.... A smooth white pebble, chiselled over ages to form the cool, calming feeling in my palm..
No one has ever understood me so well..
Fun by the beach, badminton matches with all the dookli rules made, long theorisations on delusions, elaborations on Ramachandran's work on mirror neurons.. painting the world map red and blue and green and yellow.. cooking crepes, teaching Simba tricks, listening to Bob Marley, reading books on the evening porch, looking at all those wonderful animals around and trying to be Shamans, learning to ride cycle hands free.. teaching to make a kathakali face..pillow fighting, dancing, and simply so wonderfully talking..

Tim, the Thimman now, matches me grain by grain.. but why not can there be the petrified wood.. where is the whole that is larger, different, than the sum of all parts..
Why are we partial; at our own disadvantage??

Tim, the one person my age I respect so much. The one who has taught me things, so many.. wonderful ways of seeing the world. A few days ago, he introduced Mary Gaitskill to me.. his greatest gift to me so far. Read out a story of hers and it made me feel so overwhelmed.. her brilliance, her precision. It was titled Mirror Ball. Of souls unintentionally given and taken. I still vividly remember those lines. Brain is not higher in moral or celestial than others. Brain, Heart,viscera, genitals.. none is better than the other.. it's just a matter of where the soul chooses to cling..
The girl in the story, believed her soul clung to her brain; as I believe mine does too; and she says such a connection can give the soul a kind of shocking electricity that will make it stay up talking its head off for nights on end.. It was such a soul of hers that was unknowingly taken by him. And that soul of hers was incessantly talking to him.
The story was so intricate, yet so simple in it's philosophy.. I looked at Tim, and I couldn't understand... Told him to read on..
He read other stories.. And finally the one titled Description. About a Joseph and Kevin, out on a trek. Two people for whom world, and it's people had different laws. And in the world of different laws, Kevin was the lucky one.
I asked Tim, which character he'd rather be.. He chose Joseph. Said he'd rather be the one who felt all that pain and grew than the one who won through and never got really touched by life.

That one statement, coming after that story, and that story having had come after all those questions to myself, struck me so deep...

Indeed there is something crazy. About the ways we humans are made. We are not simply idiots who can't say the difference between right and wrong and so does the wrong. We are lunatics who knows what is right and wrong and still does the wrong..
Where do I start to make things right??

Which Mr L to choose????

Locke said, Tabula Rasa it is. A blank piece of marble ready to be engraved by Environment. Words worth said, yep, it is marble indeed , to retain. But to mould, it's like wax.

Leibniz, my dearest Leibniz didn't change words too much. Just added an adjective and turned the metaphor on its head He said , all right marble it is, but am telling you, the marble is veined.

Nativism, fills all the missing blanks , for me. But then how much infallibility should i ascribe to it. Especially when to be so deterministic could mean to accept inequality.

The peephole effect

What an interesting experiment!!

There is this property of human perception. Perceptual Constancy, it is called. You see a red paper in a dim light or a bright light, you see it as red only. You see an elephant from a far off distance and a mice that is close by. The retinal image of the elephant is much smaller than that created by the mice, yet we succesully use depth and distance cues and assess the shapes accurately. When we look at a rectangle, say from a side and not straight on, the image created on our retina is that of a trapezoid, and not a rectangle. Still it remains the same rectangle. A door remains a door itself even as it swings to and fro , changing the sensory experience. Perceptual experience, however in all the cases is a constant.

Now, the experiment is so. Take an opaque black screen. Put a small peeping hole and keep a black shirt on the other side and look through the peeping hole. The shirt actually looks white!! As the only information the eye receieves is from the light reflected from shirt, and it has few info to compare it with, it sees the black as white! Relativity and context in perception.

makes me think. it can be extrapolated to so many real life phenomenon. I mean narrower the person's experience, the faultier the perception. yea, its common sense knowledge. but now thre is science to prove it.

does that mean the frog in the well was the one who saw a better sky than the kite?

On higher planes

A bird, a bird, flaps. Perception turn on its head.

A bird, a bird flies. Perception ends.

Alien, in a 'spit' second

Saliva tastes so comforting, so vapid.. so neutral. You spit it out into a glass and you try drinking it, it suddenly tastes so conspicuous. Alien. Does that mean our senses perceive things that come from outside quite different from the way they perceives the ones inside, even when both are the same?

Circle of learning

Our first step to intellectual engagement with the world begin with our discriminations. We seperate this from that and start making perceptions out of sensations. Then from all the distinctions and discriminations, we integrate and form generalisations.. general laws and principles that enable us to bring order into the perceptual chaos. And I think the ultimate learning is to understand that all the distinctions and all the genralisations and causal laws are one undifferentiated unity. We begin from perceiving undifferentiated unity ( because of ignorance) and the successful end is to travel the full circle back to the same undifferentiated unity (because of knowledge).

On conditioned conversations

Associations, perceived between entities. Facilitated by proximity in time and space.. they are the building blocks to our tendencies to anticipate, act, avoid. Psychologists are funny people. They have gone to great lengths to prove and disprove this. They went around collecting cocroaches. Found good comfortable boxes to keep them in. Painstakingly made arrangements to give them electric shocks every time light was let into the box. :-) the cockroaches were kind. They rewarded the psychs with obedient learning. Every time they saw light they ran away. Apparently they had associated light with the electric shock soo to follow..

Us, a number of classes, families genera and species apart from the bugs, are the same.. You flex your hand a little up when you hear a name. Then you try pressing it down when you hear someone else's. Apparently the name you heard when ur hands were flexed up will seem more appealing the next time you hear the names .. Why? Because the mind , readily follows an association between the pleasure of stretching muscles with the sound of the name.A simple association..

Magnified, Integrated, can you imagine how powerful such small associations are in determine our attitudes and behavior?

Lately I have realised that I have conditioned to talk more when there is silence.

Usually how is it? You talk. Some one talks back. You talk again. That's the rule of conventional conversation.

Strange circumstances made me talk on and on when there was silence from the other side.. Conversation to fill in the other's silence became the habit. Soliloquy became the conditioned response.

Months later, I see the same dynamic operating in my soliloqy with the silent other. I find the silence makes me talk more than his words ever does. Is it conditioning that is at play here or is it just because silence offers a more fertile ground for interpretations of the other, there by making us talk in all the way to respond to all the 'interpreted' comments of the other?

:-) I better not befuddle myself too much thinking about this while am sitting next to my new text book to be read.. would end up associating it with befuddlement too.

Truth= f(time)

It's a cycle. All of it. Cycle's pedals, civilisation's evolution, markets' behavior, people's moods, fashion's prescriptions.. everything that is on and above and below are circuituous. Maybe thats why some great man (was it the one who invented atom bomb?) once remarked, real truths are those which are both true and false at the same time.

Everything has a crest and trough. A crest and trough spread cross the dimension of time.

Time.. it's so omnipresent and omnipotent.. Yet so undetected is it's omnipresence. Ofcourse, we do feel the ticking of the clocks, the movements of sun across the sky. But do we really understand how everything we deem as to be something, is that something , only against that particular dimension of time?

For instance. Take the simplest of, one of the most automatic of body movements- an eye blink. Now divide the blink into a constituent parts. In the first 1/10 of a second it's just a partial lowering of the eye lid, and in the last 9/10th second it is an uplift of eye. An aggregation of such movements- half of them in the reverse direction and nature to the other half becomes a unity called eye blink only when the time of reference changes from 1/10 seconds to say a second.. Do we really understand the implication of this? I mean as long as there is a flowing time, there can never be any absolute truth... How do we ensure that what we see of a phenomenon (whatever may the phenomenon be) is the phenomenon and not just a constituent part of a larger unity? As our "time of reference" extends, what may be perceived as an event will seem like just a atom of that event..

Always know this, so. Everything you think you are, everthing that you think the world is, is just a function of time. f(x). As x changes value of f(x) undergoes changes.. A fool one would be to judge such functions/flows to be absolute.... alle?