A Koan called “The Black Swan”

I remember watching the movie “The black swan”. I remember coming out of the theater, sitting in the car and driving away, And for days I remember remembering the face of Natalie Portman in the end when she declares “Nothing is wrong, Everything is just perfect” as she collapses.

When you read a koan, typically you don’t understand what you don’t understand. Somewhere there is a hidden paradox, that, like a snake eating its own tail, makes any further analytical processing impossible. The moment you see the paradox, you find peace.

That’s why the movie “The black swan” qualifies as a koan. At the core of the movie there is a paradox, which I knew, but just recently I was able to verbalize it.

In the movie, there is a perfectionist ballet dancer selected to portray a fictional character that has two shades of personality. A white side, a positive benevolent side and a black one, a dark unsupressed side. She can identify herself with the white side, but struggles expressing the dark side of the character, Because her motivation to portray the dark side is commanded by her own white side, the perfectionist, goal oriented side of her personality.

This is the paradox. She is portraying an uncontrolled nature by trying her best to control her ability of portraying. So in short, she is trying to control something that is by definition uncontrollable.

Ultimately she figures out the paradox.

That’s why I find the movie enlightening. Because behind every mental struggle, there is an ungrasped paradox.

My Brain In Meditation

A few days back, I was doing meditation. And I had one very interesting experience.

My eyes closed. My mind still busy, but slowing down. Random images were flowing, morphing in front of my eyes. A dance inside  my brain.

And then I could just feel something. I could feel activity in two parts of my brain. Two distinct parts, which were playing equal role in creating the internal experience. One part was busy creating the images, other part was busy sensing the images. For a very brief period time, there was sensation of two distinct activities and my mind rapidly switching between them.

As soon as I realized the dual mode of my mind, there was that characteristic zap. Suddenly both parts went silent and my brain felt more peaceful. I could feel the drop in brain activity.

This made me think of the whole nature of experience. Is it always like that? Every time there is an experience, there is an “experiencer” and “experiencee” in my brain?

If every experience has such dual neural activity nature, then why did I feel the zap and why after the zap I felt just one single unified peaceful experience? Is the dual neural activity only limited to internal experience? Is this something what neurologists call REM (Rapid Eye Movement) intrusion?

On the philosophical level, is this how my ego works? Just a virtual center of neural activity of all the experiencer parts of my brain? Interesting, because this reminds me of a quote by Alan Watts (not exact words, but mostly right).

” The statement ‘I think, therefore I am’, gave rise to perhaps biggest folly in Western Philosophy, to assign ownership of experience to the ego, which in fact, just another experience. The ‘I’, the very notion of thinker, is nothing but a just thought.”

More questions, but ironically, more peace.

photo credit: AlicePopkorn via photopin cc

Jacintha Saldhana Suicide – We Are All Guilty

The social media buzz about the story of suicide of Jacintha Saldanha is rapidly diminishing. It’s how it happens. But if you see the pattern of coverage, it reveals an interesting trend.

First the prank call, then some coverage the first day, then less coverage the next day, then even lesser over the next couple days. Then comes the nurses’ suicide, then a media firestorm that just seems to be getting stronger and stronger. It seems it will not lose power till the blood of two radio hosts is shed on the street.

Would the hoax call been “not so bad” if the nurse hadn’t committed suicide?

This is far too typical. Two incidences, one foolish and one tragic, linked to each other. So the ethicality of the foolish incident is being determined by the pain caused by the tragic incident. Something in this chain of incidents appeals very much to the judgmental voice in our head. Seems like we can let out the anger inside us with clear conscience. Seems like an ideal opportunity to reinforce our self-image as torch bearers of the truth, protectors of the weak.

This is exactly the problem. Here is why.

I think the prank was tasteless and the two DJs are dumb. I have never heard their programs, and after this incident I don’t think I ever will. However they are not the illness, they are just the symptoms. And they are not the only ones. People like these are abound. Howard Stern, Kardashians, and the whole reality TV industry is the shining examples.

As a society, we have created an environment where these people thrive. We are in dire need of validation. We choose to get the validation from not healthy sources like nurturing relationships. Instead we turn to the sensational incidents, and the judgmental voices in our head, to make us feel good quickly, make us feel validated without any significant efforts.

This exactly creates a culture where the sensationalism, and all these people who provide it, thrive. This culture creates opportunities for more people like these DJs. The voice in social psyche that is asking for these DJ’s blood today is exactly the same voice that made them, and thousands like them, rich and famous. This is the same voice that assured big incentive for sensational pranks.

The point of this article is neither to launch defense of two Australian DJs, nor to make the tragic death of a dedicated nurse sound less tragic. The point is to invite the larger society to introspect on this tendency to latch on to something sensational and get carried away. As long as that remains in place, the same story will be repeated again, just with different actors.

If we ever to stop the witch-hunt, we would realize, we are all witches. We are all guilty.

The Forgotten Struggles!

Before a few days my father told me an interesting story about my grandfather.

My grandfather worked in a printing press. This was in 1940s and 50s. The job was hard. Whole day he and his colleagues stood on their feet and assembled the printing blocks by assembling letters one by one. In hot and humid weather of Mumbai, the fatigue used to set in by mid day or end of the day. But there were not much of labor unions. The men called supervisors used to be the king of the floor. Needless to say, break and rest was rarer than water in the desert.

Guess what trick these people did? They used to drop the letters on the floor purposely. An excuse to search for the letter would let you sit down for a minute or so. That’s all would be your rest and break.

I found this very touching. I knew my grandfather only as someone who bought me gifts and told me stories and took me to the garden. But I never knew how his shadow is in the background of my successes.

I know this because my father told me. There are many things he hasn’t. And there are many thing grandfather hasn’t told my father. The whole thing of writing diaries and keeping records is just not that ingrained in Indian society. Even the photographs are very rare because photography was only for elites till 1950s. So we Indians don’t have a link to our past like Americans or Europeans do. When I see the neatly preserved records from diaries, letters and official documents from World wars or even further back, Civil wars and Revolutionary war in USA, I envy these societies for having that connection. We Indians have a history that dates far back. We have caves, palaces and forts that are thousands of years old. And we are even proud of them. But we just don’t have that connection.

Today’s middle class Indians live pretty decent lifestyle, almost entirely unaware that their prosperity stands on the shoulders of these forgotten struggles. I know a friend whose grandfather walked 12 miles roundtrip to his job as a priest in a small temple, in rain or shine. The job barely paid enough. But that’s what he had to do. And I know of another grandmother who once made food items like papad and achar at home, packed them in a bag and sold door to door to raise her four kids by herself. I know of another old man who worked as a porter on a railway station in early mornings and then worked second job as a shop helper for the whole day.

We have taken the blood and sweat of  these people for granted. Like the phrase “also ran”, we have marked them as “also lived” and turned on the next page of our life which is full of shiny things like cell phones and TVs. Had they been in USA or Europe, their memories would be preserved as important part of history, important part of making of a nation. Did we think that their struggles are ordinary because they were fairly common? Does something need to be not common in order to be extraordinary? What is the value of strength of character that these people showed? Is the value diminished by them not being able to produce a significant visible accomplishment?

So it’s my request to fellow Indians. Talk to your father and grandfather as much as you can. And write down their stories. For the sake of future generations. It is more important to leave those generations the reminders of these struggles than to leave them the fruits of the struggle, the wealth. Because unless they are aware of the struggles, they would fail to appreciate the wealth at all.

And if you have some interesting story, post that as a comment to this blog post.

(image: Courtsey Vayam Facebook Group. Vayam is a fabulous non profit organization working on political change at grassroot level in India)

There is No Devil!

The more I think and see, the more I experience this world. This is what it is leading me to believe. There is no devil. But there are angels gone wild. A disproportionate number of pain and grief in the world is tied to the actions or choices rooted in good intentions. And there is a fraction of pain that is caused by course of nature, unavoidable and unpredictable.

I have tried to read both sides of stories for several conflicts in the world, current and past. Most violence seems to come from the idealistic visions of harmony. Most wars are just clash between just two difference ideas of peace. Most hate is just love blinded by fear.

Most pain seems to come from ethical debt and the collateral damage that results from it.

And there is no such thing as unethical behavior. There is only ethical debt. At times we don’t understand the consequences of our choices. At other times we do understand we are doing something wrong. We just have a justification.

Often a man plans an ambitious conquest with the desire of more power and in process ends up making a series of unethical choices. The justification in his own mind that “Once I have extra power, I will do more good and more than repay this ethical debt.” But power corrupts. Minds, ideas, opinions drift from what they were before becoming powerful. This ethical debt is forgotten. But it lingers in the minds of who suffered the damage.

Or else, imagine a mother wanting to protect her child. She understands that her child can get Malaria from a mosquito bite. Thus she decides to go on rampage and kill all the mosquitoes in the world. In the process, she disturbs the cycle of nature so much that ultimately her child is ends up suffering more. We are all like this mother when it comes to our family, our religion, our country. We go to extreme in some cases just to be protective, and the harm that comes from the collateral damage we inflict often outweighs the protection offered by the action.

Thus I am coming to believe, there are no devils. There is only forgotten ethical debt and collateral damage that came out of it. And then there is conscience blinded by the love of self image. We like ourselves when we are killing the devil. We like ourselves when we are fixing the world.

So we just badly want a devil, and make one up from the circumstances at hand.

Advaita Vedanta

Often times I have come across some text or some person trying to explain Advaita Vedanta and had a sense that what they are explaining is not really Advaita. The literal translation of the Sanskrit word Advaita is non-duality. One enthusiastic Yoga teacher once explained to me “Non duality means you and I are connected on some level. We are all the same.” While that may be the logical development of Advaita principle, it is not the principle itself.

The simplest explanation of Advaita Principle, the way I understand it, is as below. This is my understanding after reading “Geeta Rahasya”  (Secrets of Geeta) by Lokmanya Tilak.

Normal logic -> one + one = two

Advaita logic-> one + sense of being two = two

Advaita abstracts the duality. It does not necessarily negate the duality. From the Advaita standpoint, it’s the same super being that imagines itself as divided into multiple beings. So the division, or the fragmentation is imaginary. And when that imagination, or that dream, ends, it ends in the realization of being one again. This is how Advaita reconciles the subjective experience of life we all have with the general experience in the material world that almost always what we perceive as multiple entities are just different forms or expressions of the single primal entity.

“So does it mean that we all are nothing but God/super being having multiple personality disorder according to Advaita philosophy?” you will ask.

The answer is yes, and unlike human multiple personality disorder, all these multiple personalities can be present at the same time. But we call something disorder when it interferes with what we consider living normal life. In case of the supreme being experiencing multiple personalities, it is not disorder because it does not interfere with life. In fact it constructs the interactive life, and the interactive world as we know.

Near Life Experience

Back to blogging after a long time. Several things have happened in this much time that have given me a new perspective on life.

I just want to share one of the experiences I had recently. Kind of spiritual.

It was one quiet moment at an airport. I was waiting for flight. I had to wait for a while. It was getting late night. The flight traffic was winding down as well.

I had nothing to do. So I just sat there. Mindfully. Trying not to think of something in the past of future. Just taking in and savoring the present moment. Not judging, not sorting, not analyzing. Just experiencing.

Sometimes I can do it. Sometimes I can’t. When I can do it, it kind of feels like the boat with the engine turned off. Your mind still goes ahead with activity for a while, but then it starts winding down slowly.

This time it happened rather fast. And zap. Something just happened in my brain and it dawned to  me. The whole life that was passing by by me was temporal. I had heard Alan Watts talking about it in his seminars. But right now it just hit me. Everything around me was going up and down, left and right, fluctuating on its own frequency. A big portion of what I was experiencing in the moment was this superimposed temporal waves of sensations. Like a Fourier series in mathematics can express a any  straight line (or any curve for that matter) in a given span as a sum of temporal fluctuating curves, this whole life is temporal. There is no point in trying to fix it, modify it, control it, direct it, in order to keep only part of that tempo that we like. There will always be the other side, the correction, the coming back to root. It’s just built in.

And if you read this, and are proceeding without pausing, you understood it, but it has not hit you. If you want this to hit you, to be unseparable part of your worldview, you need to something like visualize up and down of some particular temporal event hundreds of times. Till your mind is bored and realizes that in good events of today, lie the seeds of disasters tomorrow and the catastrophes of tomorrow, open up the possibilities of most joyful events day after tomorrow.

A leaf of a tree will be scared of autumn only if it wants to hang on to being the same exact leaf. If it is willing to change the way nature wants it to change, autumn and spring are just two sides of the same coin. There is no reason to love spring more than autumn.

We all struggle with this. We all are so fixed on being we, and remaining “we”, we resist this tempo. A large amount of our suffering is born out of this resistance, stopping nature from taking its course, being overly fixated on our identity. Because we believe that this struggle is what will bring us lasting peace. However, ironically our identity remains a tempo as well.

There is an experience beyond being me, beyond looking at this world as an entity to be manipulated so that I can survive. That new experience is a very simple and peaceful sensation, and additionally perhaps a mild sense of curiosity and wonder.

May be that’s real life. Not the everyday struggle.

So it was my real life experience.