Bus rides, the mind, rationality and sustainability

Here is a thread about sustainability from an email conversation.
Although some of it is a re-write of earlier posts, in retrospect, I find it to be a good summary.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 3:04 AM, Aalhad Saraf wrote:
Dear G. san,

Here are some thoughts on the sustainability thread -

Words are vehicles. So is rationality. So is thought. It is possible to never see the map but just keep going from one place to another. It is possible to never know where to board and where to get off. Skill is needed. (just what this skill means is another big discussion)

A few years ago - when I first hit upon the concept of un-sustainability while trying to define wealth http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/05/story-of-one-rupee-coin-true-cost-and.html I happened to meet a 90 year old ayurvedacarya from the varkari sampradaaya http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varkari, in a RSS meeting that I was invited to - and we were discussing careers that kids should' pursue. I talked about the story of the one rupee coin then ... and the 90 year old was infuriated at my casual view of 'economics' - (which did not surprise me, I have often found RSS people to have an unusual fondness for picking fights and being angered by things.) However, his last remark stayed with me for some time - he said 'You are clever, and you have interesting ideas ... I quite like them ... however, almost everything you know, you will discover ... is wrong.'

The next year showed me just how far the vehicle of thought and rationality and words can take us ... and the magnitude to which I was mistaken when I was thinking about sustainability, wealth and the world in general. Think cosmic makeover :)

Most of what we can comprehend / see using the senses/rationality cannot be really verified 'objectively'. (we are a bit like sprites in Doom II not being able to get the architecture of processor or the OS.)

The earth as we see it, 'is not'. It is a principle. sookshma. what we see is a sthoola roopa.

I remember the RSS ayurvedacarya saying - 'You overestimate human role without understanding the architecture of what is'. I have since gradually come to comprehend what that might mean. Another thing he said was 'What do you know of the power of mother earth, beyond what your books have taught you ... and you know not where they come from ... or from what your senses tell you ... She has the power to nurture you infinitely, no matter what you do ... 'you' - if such a thing is there, are inconsequential, yet this you cannot comprehend. If you 'think' you are 'hurting' her, you are 'hurting' your'self' ... and make no mistake, you will cause pain ... but please do not talk confidently about what you do not understand.'

God as we 'know' or 'talk' or write about ... even in the sacred scriptures 'is not'. The Yoga Vasishtha (which is perhaps the last book I studied seriously before I hit the end of 'words') also has an incident where Vasistha tells Rama ... 'What are the Gods that you talk about but a mental construct ... ' (I highly recommend this to you if you haven't read it yet - you will even come across discussions about the non-linearity of time) This is one version I found on amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Concise-Yoga-Vasistha-Swami-Venkatesananda/dp/087395954X

My model of the mind was radically altered in the months that followed.
I am perhaps like a ripple in a field. Without any individual existence. (many scriptures mention this - but I had no experience, nor any concrete context) Like a node of a massively parallel machine (that is how you and I can see the same things in the same room) or perhaps even just the bits of code running on the node (DNA, other less 'sustainable' memes...) or perhaps not even that.

This is a snippet from a mail I sent to aai, dada and some close friends ...

I have seen the Mind.
Imagine an ocean ... massive, without end, on a dark night with a full moon.

The wind still. The silence perfect.
Now see the entire ocean turning up, vertical, into a massive wall ...
like a tsunami ...
you are surfing a foot away from this wall, and the wall stretches out up to infinity.
dark roaring water. massive.
And this is only an approximation of what it feels like.
It is this force that creates everything you see around you now.

The sun. The moon. Your Gods.

The very screen you are now reading this on.

If I die soon, I will have died after seeing the greatest spectacle possible on earth. The mind. There is nothing else left for me to see ... even if I climb on top of Mount Everest, I will be unstirred. Everything ordinary around me IS the freakin miracle.

Okay ... now, again, about sustainability ... it is one of those dual-memes. http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/12/dual-meme-transcendence.html

Everything has a time-stamp. A yogi can see it - and perhaps alter it.
(A good engineer is a yogi to some extent that he creates some memes that sustain for a certain amount of time.)

Some provocations - why do you want things to be sustainable? Isn't unsustainability a natural phenomenon? Everything perishes, right? So, just why did our race become enamored with this particular dual-meme? Why not enjoy the unsustainability? (it is easy to see beyond these questions) What is the DESIRE that drives the NECESSITY of sustainability? and where the hell does that DESIRE come from?

Dual-memes are interesting ... all religions are based upon strong dual memes. Right-wrong, pure-impure ... and so on. religion = thing that holds together. A study of the principles of religion-creation is very relevant to having a deep understanding of sustainability. For sustainability is a side-effect of religion.
http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/06/you-may-think-that-im-im-religious.html

Deep exploration of any meme associated closely with religion is likely to yield significant insights into sustainability. Take desire for instance. In 2004 or so, I found myself asking myself - what is the point in studying electronics or math ... some other fancy models of reality ... if one were to study Desire Engineering ... learn to focus desire to a laser sharp point in oneself and later in others, it would be possible to achieve ANYTHING (or even otherwise, that it is much more 'important' than physics or algo analysis ... I noticed this once again in 2006 during a thought-session, when I was given the responsibility for maintaining the 'technical vitality' of a group of people in IBM, i.e. ensuring that they maintain a state where they file patents and write papers ... and again in 2007 when I saw that everything visible... every single thing is a manifestation
of a desire. There is nothing necessary. NOTHING IS NECESSARY. Necessity is ALWAYS predicated upon desire. (I tried some experiments with minimal living in 2004 to try and figure out just what is the minimum 'necessity' for existence - independent of desire. outcome - existence itself is based on desire, the desire to exist. (who has that desire, or where it comes from - is next step in the architecture series :-D but that is not very easily expressible in words or thought - for these tools are then useless.)


Now - dual-memes are necessary for motion, or for anything to happen at all. (+ -)

Un-sustainability is one side of a dual-meme.
To create sustainability - one must transcend this dual-meme.
People who are bothered by sustainability (rajas-tamas?) or are ignorant of it (tamas) will perhaps not be able to effect such/much change.(even if they want to/is 'necessary')

(This brings to mind something I read somewhere - an advert. for a class on yoga by an Indian teacher in the US - had a picture of a jaTaa-dhaari orange-clad hermit standing in a one-legged pose on a surfboard in the sea. The caption read - we can't stop the waves, but we can sure teach you to surf!)

This is where yoga comes in - and the reason why I urged you to read the Sutras. (Even the Yoga-sutras, their outermost form being clad in words, have their limits, but the words are where I had to begin.)

PaanDitya or the pursuit of knowledge has a limit, easily reached.It is not very effective. It seems easier for a yogi to do something about sustainability than a pandit.

Standard disclaimer applies:
Caveat Lector. All Words are Lies to some extent of the other on the
Index of Reality.
:-D

Mail reply from G. san,
Interesting what happens when you cross the boundaries of reason and logic and get into the domain of faith?? Are our senses limiting us in the number of dimensions we can perceive around us? Is the method of reason and logic self limiting? Interesting proposition by Aalhad...is going to take time, if ever to sift through...
The eternal conundrum.... Great job...
I am sure Laurie the acerbic lawyer has a lot to say on this...
That the method of reason and logic limits many a mind from going beyond .. Or is it the argument of those who cannot cast their thoughts in the logical framework.. The eternal conundrum...

Cheers G.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Aalhad Saraf wrote:
Dear G. san,
thanks for the reply.

no no ... no faith required ;)
is reason and logic self-limiting ... :-P the moment you 'define' something, you have laid down the limits to what it is 'not'.

see ... words are perhaps fairly useless (or useful (same thing!) - i.e. they may be used towards achieving an end - given an end). they may be used to do anything you want - like a tool. but they are inefficient at modeling reality. (the mind has tried in other parts to create other languages like math - but that again is a model.) A model has limits. Because it is 'defined'.

What I have experienced is that 'argument' is a fairly inefficient method for the discovery of reality or truth. (what those methods are ... is another long story :) )

Words are like a fairly utilitarian tool. Great for altering mental data structures - but even then deeper levels of language exist -
http://kanjinotes.blogspot.com/2009/01/words-leaves-of-thought.html

Do not blindly have FAITH in the methods of reason or the church of Words, test them. ;) but you cannot test them - for your methods for testing them are defined by the beliefs and systems themselves. Modeling reality - rather modeling reality completely is a wicked problem to crack.

The logical framework (THE logical framework?) (the language guys... the pandits ... 'philosophy'... the upanishads...) is a vehicle. A tool. A yogi will have the skill to know where to get on and get off each vehicle - for otherwise - the 'conundrum' is eternal - hell, you have designed it to be so. The 'Why' has no final answer - it's a language feature very well suited for showing you the limits of the tool :-D
http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/07/unanswerable-why-and-mistaking.html

A body of thought that talks about 'knowability' must also perhaps define these entry and exit points - without which you are being taken for a ride - without knowing where to, for an unknown fee ;) And maybe you could pick a quarrel or get into all kinds of trouble for insisting that your ticket IS not a ticket, not the map, but the design document for this world. ;)

So would the 'conundrum' between logic-faith seem to be a 'conundrum' only to the people who are confusing their tickets for the design documents of the World(TM).

Philosophy as expressed through words has easily visible limits - axioms, and the methods for defining those axioms. I mean, come on - if you define the limits of what is knowable and how you add to your 'body of knowledge' ... there is 'limit' written all over the place :)

So even if modelng reality is a wicked problem - meanwhile, we humble humans have several utilitarian models and modeling strategies and vehicles ... the entry and exit points if known, one may skilfully travel towards addressing and then transcending a given dual-meme (rich-poor, terrorism-peace, sustainable-unsustainable). IMHO ... yoga is the most pragmatic vehicle I have seen so far. Wherever I see sustainability, I also see a yogi. (no faith required.)
:-D

you may think that I'm religious ...

... but what do you think religion is ?

Religion is a set of metastable answers to important, difficult problems ... that help hold things together. (re+ligare: ligare = to bind together, also the root of 'ligament' etc.) The THINGS that these answers hold together may be the body, the mind, family, society, hell - even a company, a team within a company or a software architecture for that matter. Religion is a metastable supported version of an OS ... to ensure sustainability. This is a word bog though - but that is as close as I can come right now.

I have not accepted any ready-made answers at face value. Some of my most pressing concerns aren't addressed by religion - our scriptures come very close (the newest release being done by Gautama Buddha perhaps.) But words have limits. It was my intent to take a sabbatical from IBM last year, to try and discover the nature of sustainability by studying the ancient Indian scriptures - for this has been a thoroughly researched concept - and apply the essence to modern, current problem sets.

This was just before unsustainability hit unexpecting me - at all possible levels.
More on unsustainability and my findings in a later post.

Adding the comments to the main post - since they are really a part of the post and don't show up by default.

Transcending Reality said...

A belief system which can prove to be a binding factor. A means for peaceful co-existence. Its not an answer, rather means to find an answer. Its good as long as its followed in moderation. I guess its something which you do when in solitary. It has to be truly personal. Seeing the turns, religions take in today's world, I am better off without it. I find it redundant anyway. Causes more problems than it should solve. Whats worth a try would be to stuff like what the 'secular' Turkish government had done..ban sporting hijab in public. haha Ask me the same question a decade later and the answer would be: "I would regard it as a disease born out of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." - Russell - Lucretius ~chetan

July 06, 2008 12:34 PM

mojibake - previously kilocoder said...

actually not a system of beliefs. But a set of principles responsible for binding. Peaceful or not. Like a set of principles that govern a system. If your body exists right now, it is because the system obeys certain principles. If your university exists as an entity - that is because there is an implicit framework that is responsible for it's existence. Religion is almost a synonym for existence - sustainability of any meme complex is necessary for existence to continue. What we see in the world is a massive dissociation between words and what they originally meant - this is exactly what I was talking about in the post where I said I lost my belief in words. You have a religion whether you believe it or not. You may not know what it is. The fact that you exist still - is proof enough of the fact that there is something holding you together. By the time Lucretius and Co. decided to see it as a disease - they had already gone far far away from what religion means. The religion I have in mind is not a set of imperatives to be followed by people. Yoga is personal. Although, yes - it is admittedly easy for a yogi to 'get' the 'cepts of sustainability. (Everything in this world has a timestamp.) Not to be confused with Dharma - 'iti dhaaraytee sa dharmaha'. Dharma is pervasive. Where anything is held together - dharma is responsible. And the principles that govern it are not personal. Where dharma is not - there will automatically be dissolution. Be it a body, a company, a family ... If you can abstract out the essence of sustainability - then you may begin to consciously apply it. (It is of course possible to do it without understanding and being conscious of it - just as great artists don't know WHY they are great artists) Now - the application of the principles of sustainability cannot be done by force, by edicts, by rules. We all know how that fails - bad managers, dictators ... To be able to manipulate the data structures in the human mind - requires a great deal more juice and subtlety than that. To establish a 'dharma' is no mean feat - if you ever see - in a small company - a person - perhaps the owner - with a great deal of 'juice' ... you will see a person who can and is in the process of establishing the dharma of his company. This is admittedly easy in a small group. When the company grows - it is not too much of a wonder when the values of the company can't be passed on the the last guy in the chain by the CEO. It just ends up being some files somewhere - or a mission statement on a desk - easy and boiler-plate enough to be forgotten. To transmit dharma - is almost like transmitting heat or light - through a physical medium. It does not happen through symbols alone, although they help.

July 06, 2008 4:11 PM