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?