Prime mover memes. Principles.

Yesterday night, I asked my father some questions -

• Why has 'God' (even evolution - if that happens to be your God. Social evolution(?)) created both, forces like fundamentalist terrorists, as well as Mahatma Gandhi ? 
• Is it possible to act truly as an instrument of a God meme? I will not now act of my own will. I dare the creator of this space time dimension-space I find myself in, to enter 'me' and act directly; a stubborn child, I refuse to now act on 'my' own.
• How does one differentiate between 'Gods' will and one's individual will?
• What are the biggest gears, the prime movers that lie at the root of this space-time complex? 

Possible answers that struck me while I was sleeping. In reverse order:
We must first define the framework for what we are trying to understand.

The prime movers - the big gears that drive this space-time complex

This power to effect change is proportional to the extent of alignment one has with the memes that lie at the root of this space-time complex. To summarize my understanding (backed by intuition and experimental verification to varying degrees, of the Yogasutras of Patanjali - beginning with my reading of a photocopy of a study of the sutras by IK Taimini, sometime during my student days during engineering school and my stay in Alandi.)

To summarize:

Meme a: Satya - Truth
What alignment confers: realization, materialization of one's intent
Extreme alignment: utterance or thought that is out of sync with this space-time complex or reality is impossible. What one speaks, thinks, conceives -must- come true, for not only is that being incapable of thinking or conceiving or dreaming of a falsehood, it is verily truth itself that continually speaks, acts and sees through him.

Meme b: Asteya or abstention from theft
What alignment confers: freedom from a sense of lack of anything. Wealth flows.
Extreme alignment: Nature cannot let such a being experience a 'lack' of anything. The whole universe is at ones disposal.

Meme c: Aparigraha or non-possesion and abstention from greed
What alignment confers: Freedom from ties in this space-time complex - things, ideas, thought, belief... knowledge and action is possible across larger and larger expanses of time and space.
Extreme alignment:  Knowledge of the past, present and future, of the seeds of desire that flower into manifestation through threads of matter woven across time. Patanjali posits that one may gain knowledge of the past, present and future lives of one's self. (I guess, self as a function of (x, time, space) for larger and larger and larger values of x, time and space as the self of sense expands.)

Meme d: Ahimsa - non violence
What alignment confers: There is no obstruction. Action will progress without hindrance from any force/any one.
Extreme alignment: The being starts creating an atmosphere around self, (self(x,space,time) for larger and larger values of x,space,time) where violence and enmity must cease to exist. All beings, even animals are sensitive to such an atmosphere - as many trainers would testify - the animals 'know' they won't be hurt.

Meme e: Brahmacharya - continence. Of speech, thought, action, being and also of the most refined, the most seminal representation of our essence, the ability to create and procreate.
What alignment confers: creative force is available at one's disposal.
Extreme alignment: Tremendous creative force - to create anything in this spacetime fabric. create(x, space, time, matter, thought) for larger and larger values of x, space, time, matter and thought. At the very extreme, create new 'seed meme complexes' like this one.

See and create, unhindered, across unlimited expanses of time and space, using every or anything - in this space-time complex, with a guarantee of materialization of intent. This may perhaps be a good definition for 'God' hood.


Some side-notes on the prime-movers:

These memes are vehicles.
One starts by aligning oneself with them, by 'boarding' these meme vehicles.
Once this direction is fixed, one witnesses the beginning of a 'transcendence engine'. 


One must know where to get on and get off and when to press the accelerator, when to stop, rest or just enjoy the view.

And either discover newer, more fundamental meme-vehicles, or create them.

This is where 'the middle path' is important. As you start nearing the destination, and hit a point where you need to get off (transcend?), the duality of the vehicle becomes apparent. Mahatma Gandhiji rode the vehicle of non-violence to a point where his very existence was the highest form of violence for people who believed in violence as a vehicle of change. Summary: The middle path is safe. Skill is needed. Your mileage may vary. 

The vehicle becomes the driver. The driver becomes the vehicle.
After a point, no conscious driving is necessary. The vehicles or principal memes take charge, embed themselves further and start driving the person. One need not try to, or 'speak' the truth. One becomes truth. Truth starts using the person as a vehicle for expression. 

 
 God's will, individual will

These large forces drive smaller forces,
all lying within them,
and they in turn have smaller still,
and so on ad infinitum

All these memes have dual kinds,
For consciousness they dance,
Riding vehicles of matter, Desires in their arms.

The strongest memes are what we call God
This massive dance is Mind
(But -why- the heck all this goes on,
I am yet to find.)

These meme-dancers will go out of Time,
without non-dual love to bind 'em,
their matter-vehicles will sink into primeval slime,
with no consciousness to find 'em.

(adapted the Siphonaptera for the first verse.)

By this definition everybody is God(x), to an extent. And these memes and their duals(for it is a matter of degree - not of quality - like in the last statement in this post.) may be considered as 'God's' will. This might be the basis of a statement often heard in India  'सब ईश्वर की इच्छा है'.

Fanatic fundamentalists - follow what they see as truth strictly, believe strongly in a code of ethics and are thus 'driven' and have varying degrees of power.  Sometimes they ride the dual-meme-opposite of non-violence and thus are bound to face varying degrees of opposition and are limited in the amount of change they can effect. Only if terrorists would -experiment- with riding the vehicle of non-violence, I wonder what could be possible. But then when that happens, when the + and the - start seeming, becoming alike, we would perhaps be close to the beginning of a new space-time complex, a new set of prime-mover-gears-meme-set.


Further questions:

• What is it that makes these prime-mover-constructs so powerful and seminal?
• How is a sustainable, emergent value system and a desire system engineered?
• How does one engineer such a system, a new set of prime-mover-gears, like the yamas outlined by Patanjali are for -this- space time complex.

i.e. How does one play God(x,self) for sufficiently large values of x and self.
 (a very small value of self - would be for instance, expanding ones self when starting a new family.)

:-D

Usual Caveat Lector applies.

Optimal learning

After a long break, I have come back to using words.
:-)
 If one masters the ability to enter a state of single pointed focus, the ability to focus ones desire to a laser sharp point and the ability to see what needs to be done i.e. vision - I used to believe that the purpose of formal education has been served.


Learning is an interesting and fascinating phenomenon.


One of the questions I had was - how does one achieve this one pointed focus at will?

The Patanjali yogasutras offer hints as to how this process occurs.

shraddhaa veerya smriti samaadhi pradnyaa poorvak itareshaam.
Patanjali's yogasutras (1-20).

Shraddhaa - loosely translated as faith. It begins with belief - with faith. Faith in the teacher, in the subject, in the process of learning. Faith provides the "wetness" necessary for union. (between teacher and student, between student and subject) In a teacher-student situation, without faith, there is dryness - resulting in "dry dis-course" that is a painful boring 'one-way' process. 


Veerya - this can also be translated as utsaah or enthusiasm. Faith leads to enthusiasm - (enthusiasm comes from en+theos from Greek - literal meaning - to be filled with God) and the being of the student is ready for union with the subject, for learning.

Smriti - Enthusiasm leads to past experience and knowledge being brought up into the memory cache, ready to be recalled at will, thus providing a firm foundation for learning to occur.

Next is samaadhi - or union with the subject of study, a state where one pointed focus is achieved. Nothing else except the subject exists.

This leads to the awakening of pradnya - a state where after the subject is assimilated into ones being, the blossoming of wisdom results.



( 'poorvak itaresham' - this sutra is referring to most normal people, and not those who have been talked about in the earlier sutras - those who have already achieved the ability to enter 'samaadhi' at will.)

shraddhaa->veerya->smriti is one of the pre-conditions for achieving one pointed focus. Hmm.

Wherever there are gaps in this chain, sub-optimal union with the subject at hand and thus learning might occur.

Consumption - Production game, who's who?

Thinking about true cost and the story of a one rupee coin - had gotten me thinking about the dual meme nature of production and consumption.
Trying to get down to the essence of this dual meme led me to this -

The desire to desire is the consumer.

That which believes it exists is the consumed. 



To clarify - that which believes it exists is - basically everything that 'is'. I use the word 'belief' for want of a closer word - for example, if you believe 'you' exist, you are binding this concept of self with space and time, and will thus be subject to the consumption process - if by nothing else then by time (which is to say - desire operates in time-space co-ordinates - and desire being the urge for something other than what is, what is - must be consumed.) Yoga enables 'one' to free 'oneself' perhaps, by neatly transcending this dual-meme.  
What this implies in space-time terms, may be understood by trying to practice the Yogasutras.

(from somewhere in early 2008)

Dual-meme transcendence - II: Beyond Good and Evil and Beyond THAT.

Continued from the previous post ...

If you're trying to be good, very good at what you do, or if you love someone with all your heart, or if you want to learn something with all your heart ... you are witnessing the start up of a transcendence engine.
It is automatic. And seems universal.

This brings to mind the 'Beyond Good and Evil' of Nietzsche -

Where he suggests that the strongest people are marked by a cruelty to themselves, according to which they mercilessly expose their every prejudice and assumption in order to dig further into themselves.
"Free spirits are investigators to the point of cruelty, with rash fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for the most indigestible".

(A few years ago - before I read Nietzsche, I used to wonder - why is it that we as a species enjoy cutting off the reproductive paraphernalia (flowers) of another species (plants and trees) ... even for purposes like 'offering' them to constructs like 'Gods'. (and people still thought that I was religious, while I was trying to understand the -nature- of religion.) This would perhaps make Nietzsche put me in the 'free spirit' category.)

Now the question is - is being a free spirit cruel to ones self? and what does cruel mean anyway? and what is this 'self' other than code passed on from media (friends, books, school ... ), DNA from parents... this 'self' to which a free spirit is cruel?

What I feel: Like all dual-memes, cruel/kind dual-meme ends up being transcended as well, it has no easy resolution.

(consider this - every time you breathe, you 'kill' millions of micro-beings as you suck them into your lungs. Every time you eat, some form, some being, some structure has 'sacrificed' itself, for another structure to be created. You are massively violent at a micro scale. Scale, not quality.) How 'kind or cruel' can you be?

Following the yamas ... Truth, and why science can't understand the architecture of the world.

Let's begin with Satya or truth.
I look at the moon. I say out loud, 'I am looking at the moon.'
I have just lied. Not only have I lied, but I have lied -without- being aware of it, which is all the more dangerous, for it comes with the belief that I am speaking the truth. And that very thing, will prevent me from seeing anything more fundamental.

How? I have no real proof of existence of the moon other than the report of my senses and the result of a carefully constructed series of mental constructs called rationality (which is really a solved problem.)

Yet I say, the moon exists. Like a guy running around in Doom II saying that the sprites that represent the demons exist.

First step towards transcending reality, is to never lie, for that will consolidate the seeming reality of the very virtual constructs whose architecture we're trying to understand.

So following the yama of Truth ... requires me to not speak at all! For the nature of everything spoken - if seen closely enough is untruth! It is possible to mince around, playing with semantics ... and that would perhaps be the job of professional philosophers.

But empirically, it was easy for me to see this once I saw why actions speak louder than words ... actually, certain kinds of silence speak much louder than actions, and give the person who is silent a tremendous power to effect change.

At this point, it was easy for me to turn agnostic (if I am a sprite in Doom II then, I CANNOT figure out the architecture of the OS or the processor ... but that again, makes certain assumptions about what knowledge is and what is knowable), nihilist ... well I could go any number of ways really, but then I wouldn't be any closer to the state of the art ;)
I resolutely refused to conform, yet continued the quest to observe the mind.

(from mid-2007)

the (near) end of my reading habit ...

A couple of years ago ... a question occurred to me ... is any of my thoughts an entirely original thought, or is it primarily a result of everything that I have read from childhood ? Is anything I think my own ? Can it ever be ? If the human mind is a system that is programmed by what the senses are exposed to i.e. DATA, and that in turn plays a major role not only in determining the limits of perception in the future, but also what actions are undertaken by the human body - i.e. if DATA is interpreted as CODE ... then what degree of security do we have. And should one allow oneself to be programmed by -any- book (or experience!) at all, even the Bhagvad Geeta or the Patanjali Yoga Sutras for that matter! If 'buddhi' is also programmed or colored if you will, by sensory input then we are not just full of buffers waiting to be overflowed but we are a system with a completely exposed code area that anyone can write to. (I have since discovered that it IS possible to find a mechanism that is not affected by I/O ... but that is another story)

Seemed scary.

This led me to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of information, and the human mind.

When I hit the limits of language as we know it - I needed to work then at another level and saw that I had nothing more to read!

Why I lost my belief in words ... and how I (almost) ended my reading habit

God. When I talk with you and use the word 'God' - I have many different memes associated with that word in my mind. And -- you -- probably have a set of other, different memes in your mind. And both of us probably are not in sync with what we 'think' is 'real'. Forget what 'IS' real. Why God - even plain words like, say -- 'western culture', when used by enough people, result in a large amount of what can best be called verbal delusion or 'vikalpa' (shabda-dnyaanaanupaati vastushoonyo vikalpahaa - Patanjali yoga sutras, Samadhi paada.)

Examine any language closely, and you will slowly realize that all words are mere pointers to reality. No wonder that ancient sanskrit grammarians recognized and studied languages and grammars -- nay, not just that but whole levels or media of communication more powerful than written and spoken language. For instance - 'paraa', 'pashyanti', 'madhyamaa' ...

Examine any language you know closely, and you will also see laws analogous to Newtons laws of motion or the laws of thermodynamics ... hell, meaning seems subject to entropy as well.

When I realized this, the first thing that struck me was, it is impossible to follow the 'yama' or rule of 'satya' or truth; if I speak or use 'common' language, so to speak. If the very nature of the language I know is untruth, how can I ever claim to be truthful!

All words are lies (and so are these! ... see the loop... beautiful, but a limitation in a tool that attempts to describe reality accurately.) So words seem to me now like シャボン玉　－soap bubbles blown by children. Beautiful, ethereal, temporal ... but not very good as tools for accurately describing reality - a use case most often attributed to languages.

So ... the end of language as I knew it.
This is from my notebook - from about a year ago.