Center of the world

 Hi

One of the most important things I want to clear up for you and for myself is how we are the center of the world. I mean you are. I know i am.

Fig. 1: euclidian tiling of a plane

Fig. 2: a non-euclidian tiling of a plane

Take a look at these two pictures. It's showing two different ways of tiling. Pictures are taken from here:

https://plus.maths.org/content/non-euclidean-geometry-and-indras-pearls

Thank you David Wright for making these beautiful visualizations because I needed them to tell you how I feel about our position in life. 

In Fig. 1 you are the middle hexagon and the other hexagons are the other people in your life. The size of the hexagons are showing how much you care about them. 

I was looking at life exactly like this before. I thought I have to care about every person in my life and I have to make sure everyone is experiencing peace and calmness and they are doing fine and they look good to other people. I would get upset and take it hard on myself when I would see someone living in a poor area in a documentary. I wouldn't eat as much and I wouldn't enjoy life. If we were in a group and you did a mistake, I would feel bad and nervous. I thought this was sympathy and it was a good thing to do.

It seems alright, but it is not. The goal of the documentary is not to bring the standards of our life lower for someone who is living in a very poor area. This will not solve the problem which that person is having and also it will not really help us in any way. Now I think the goal of such media should be to inform us about the unfortunate situation some people are facing. With that mindset, we can be more grateful for what we are having, and also we will be more responsible for what we are doing. Maybe someone finds their life goal to become powerful enough to help the ones who can be helped. 

The other thing is usually changing people means you have not understood that you are the center and everything there is, is your reflection. So bring yourself up and be thankful for the negativity that is shown to you so you know better.

Fig. 2 shows a better view of the world we are living in. The reality is the circle of closest people to you should matter the most. It is like looking at a distance, two towers may seem smaller than a finger. Everything looks perfect from far away, and the more you look at the distance, the less you are looking at yourself. 

The world I see now is I should not split my energy and love equally for everyone. My view should not be to change the life of 7B people on earth to make myself feel better. The reality is my world is limited to the people who are present in my life. I have to think of them more and understand them and their characters and find my interface and chemistry with them. That will be the best look at myself and gives me the most information I need to know myself and my life. If I get to the point of understanding how everything in my life is because I need to see it, then things can be fixed and the first hexagons will be the closest ones to me and from their perspective, they are each center of their own world and they will cascade the positivity to the rest.

It may seem inefficient but it is more of finding a way around perfection. It would be great to fix everything at once, great and boring, but this is a more manageable and implementable look at the world through a limited existence.

Safe enviroment

Hi

I am thinking of what is the most precious thing one can achieve in life. Something you cannot buy with money.  I think it is a cliche to say friendship and love are the most valuable things you can find in life. Maybe they are some of the right answers but they are so vague and broad that everyone has a different understanding of them. Maybe that is why they are so valuable. Because they are two things that can be understood in different depths and it takes experience and time to go deep into them. 

You probably have a similar experience that when you were a kid, kids in the next grade looked so superior to you. They looked like titans as someone said. But now, if you are over 20, when you look back at people who are younger than 16-17 you do not feel like that about them. You have gone through a lot of emotional experiences that make you think they have to spend a lot of time to understand life. The same thing happens when someone goes through emotional turmoil at any point in life. 

I think this kind of understanding happens in understanding the depth of darkness in human emotions. People get a lot more life experience in dark experiences like a breakup or a mental breakdown than in happy experiences like partying. 

So the depth is what matters. That is because the purest form of effort which is suffering is spent on it. One thing you value the most is what you have gone through. You can compare yourself with someone else based on their judgment about a certain situation based on their opinions. When someone gives naive or shallow opinions about a point, you can understand the wrongness about them. Someone in this position gives me a feeling of an adult-child relationship. You cannot right their wrong because they do not have enough experience and one of the hard parts of being an adult is to tolerate the naivety of the child. Of course, this is a relative relationship and you can be an adult in front of someone and a child in front of someone else. So if you do not like tolerating childishness, be a good kid in front of an adult. It is hard to say the type of relationship when you have the lower hand so my practice is just accepting everyone as my teachers until they bring themselves down to a child.

It is hard to be a teacher. A teacher must be able to open up a channel with the kid to teach what needs to be taught. The hard part of it is being able to gain the trust of the other person. Some people need to see calmness, some people need to see the power, some people want to see the beauty, some people want to see wisdom, etc. One of the qualifications of a teacher is to be able to satisfy the mental need of the student naturally. A student may challenge the teacher to find out their depth and if the teacher does not have deep roots in the subject, the test will be failed, and either their role will swap or they both have to find a better person. That is why I try to stay on the student side till another role is asked of me. It is a peaceful approach: To not try to prove anything to anyone until they ask for it.

Time will shuffle the cards and everyone will find their role. Some games are challenging and different people have different levels of power. Some can hurt you seriously and that adds to your depth of experience in the darkness. I see a win in losing a battle or getting seriously injured. It is a mental game and the only thing which can happen is to understand more and more. In all cases pain is real and real pain hurts. The question is will you accept to be hurt. 

From far away

 Hi,

I have been thinking of trying to go far away with myself. The idea was to go somewhere remote in a cabin for a week. But the thing is right now I am far from the time I am planning to do it and I just needed to get away from home for a bit. So yesterday I broke the perfect idea into doable pieces to have a stepping stone towards my goal. In google maps, I zoomed out and zoomed in a bit and found the city of Petawawa, 150km from my place, far enough. I found a motel called Time Travellers motel, sci-fi enough, and I booked a room in it. I put some necessities in my bag and I jumped into the car and left the house. On my way, I thought of a friend who I know is planning to do nothing for the night and I called him, I said I am going there do you want to come. He was shocked but he got ready in 10 mins. It felt like the fan episode of Rick and Morty in bush world. Rick pulls over the house and wants to go to Bendigo.

It was very educational in the sense that perspective matters in analyzing a subject. To look at something you have to go out of it. When you are in it you are a part of it and you cannot have a good judgment.

I think it is important to correct the trajectory once in a while.

This has happened before with my personal relationships and now in my career. 

The next day, today, we did not have enough time to explore everything. Both the motel owner and the pizza lady told us to visit Barren Canyon which was 45mins-1hour from there. We had to be back in Ottawa at 12 so we just had time for a quick visit to the beach.

At the beach, I had time to appreciate the beauty of grains of sand. They look like snowflakes in the sense that they look different from each other and they have different shapes. Beautiful to see and very nice to feel it on the skin. The warmth and dryness of the upper layers of sand and the cold and dampness of the deeper layers. The way it is not the softest thing on the skin but feels pleasant to move the hands through it. Some darker, some lighter, some shiny, and some transparent.

And I have to appreciate how lucky I am to have a company with me on this trip.

I have to appreciate more having people who are righteous in what they are doing. As time goes on I see how self-interest makes people pull foul moves. Any moment that is good must be appreciated and what happens is a reaction to our actions.

Today is the anniversary of one of my greatest life lessons.

What I ask from the universe is to put me on the path of having no debt to anyone and having the freedom of choice to not give service to anyone who does not deserve my love. It hurts to open the heart to the ones who are immature and closed-minded because they don't know how their tongue can hurt other people. It's sharp and it cuts. 

Today was the father's day and one thing I have to say about fathers is only they know how many times their kids have broken their hearts without knowing what they are doing and they kept on being their fathers. It is such a selfless act to be a father. It is about engaging with another entity in a losing game. It is about letting the kid learn by beating you, by trying their tools, regardless of the pain which comes with it. Being a true father must be the hardest thing the creator has ever asked men to do. To keep the mask up even when your heart is bleeding. To stitch your wounded heart yourself in your loneliness. 

I would like to invite you to the song Such Great Heights 

If you are sad listen to the Such Great Heights by Iron and Wine 

If you are elevated, listen to the Such Great Heights by Postal Service

Relaxed pretending

 Hi

To act by pretending is very easy, if you want to write, just open a blank page and sit in the position of a writer. If you want to paint take a brush and go for it. If you want to get better with people, break out of your comfort zone and show up in front of someone.

It seems easy to start but what blocks your progress and the quality of the act you are performing is self-doubt and self-judgment.

A not-so-experienced mind is not able to make an atmosphere for the little piece of creation which is going to be born through the hands of the artist. It is one thing to conceive an idea and another thing to keep it alive and help it grow. In a harsh judgemental environment, the little bud comes out of the dead soil of nothingness but does not grow to become a fully grown plant. It needs love and care to live. 

A toxic trick that the mind plays and keeps the artwork from progressing is looking back to the piece which is being created and trying to understand it before it gets completed. It takes the focus from the current stroke of the brush to looking at the big picture. Since the big picture is not completed and the mind is looking for perfections, what matters the most, which is what is happening now, gets out of focus, and judging the incomplete piece comes to the foreground.

This judgment takes away the relaxation of the hand and it will become harder and harder to go forward. To become a master in a certain act is to understand the relaxation while tension builds up.

What sums everything up is to understand that nothing is in our control and in the practice of relaxed pretending we get as much as we invested in the act. Mistakes are a way of learning and it is similar to jazz improvisation or as Al Pacino in the famous movie The scent of a Woman says:

"No mistakes in the tango, not like life. It’s simple. That’s what makes the tango so great. If you make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on".

pretend it till you make it

 Hi

It is common to hear motivational quotes or famous sayings which have a kinda of a life advice in them.

Things like fake it till you make it. 

You hear it and you are like: "that's the key to my problem"

or maybe not. You think one of those sentences that people say because it seems cool and has no root in reality. Just something to say.

I don't know what you think but what I think is

My life is not planned. I am pretending to live. I am pretending to think. I say to myself I have to think about something and it thinks. I never do the act of thinking myself. I don't know where does it come from. 

My job in life is to go for what I feel i have to pretend to.

It's not up to me.

What I see is pretending things will just make you pretend better. That is why faking it may make you better. 

The reason I am using pretending instead of faking is just to add a flavor of self-awareness to the story. It's important to know you are not the character you are pretending to be. Pretending and getting good at something can be super addictive. It shouldn't take over your life. 

Pretending means actively dedicating a part of your freedom to a certain act and being able to move out of it at some point. And the reason to move out of a certain act is not to completely forget it, it can be like a reptile shedding a skin, (ouu he is a reptilian) or layers of an onion (no he is just an ogre)

And at the end, finding out the pinnacle of the acts is to be able to have no act and be only an artist waiting for the right observer to look.

story of life

 Hi

Have you ever thought there might be a consistent story to life? 

Whoever is writing it talks to the characters with their inner voices. Guides them in the direction which helps them meet certain people and learn from them. And to get the best impression out of them often misguides them into thinking they are going to do something but they end up doing something else.

 That makes it real.

When you have something in mind and you get surprised by a situation that is unexpected and you have to think at the moment. There is so much you can think of when you are thinking critically and that makes your reactions real. 

Normal people who do not do acting professionally may have a hard time overthinking something if they are planning to do it at a critical moment. I don't know, maybe those who do it as their job also overthink it but they are good at acting naturally. That is why it is even better for the character to not know what they are getting into. 

The reason it is better is thinking patterns happen spiraling the emotions we are experiencing. If you are supposed to act in front of another person with an unknown response and tension, you cannot think beforehand about what is gonna happen. You may come up with many different scenarios in your head but even if you get a few lines right, the reality diverges from your prediction because of its chaotic nature.

a bit of difference in the initial point leads to two different behavior patterns in a chaotic system

My old roommate had a poster of a John Lennon quote on his wall saying

life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

It kinda points to the same thing here. What happens through your eyes and mind is very different from what is seen from the outside. Especially when you are more of yourself and not pretending or not doing anything for anyone. To do that first you must establish roots and know your place. You do not want suffering to teach you you are taking too much space. Be but be thoughtful of how you are.

Loud thoughts

 Hi,

To me, it is funny that I get to experience parallel realities in my dreams. Realities in which the same characters who are already in my life, appear as similar but different people.

I think it is fair to have infinite realities with infinite storylines which lead to the same story happening over and over again but in totally different implementations. The movie Cloud Atlas is almost based on this way of thinking. 

The thing that bugs my mind is why the reality I am currently living in, always seems very grounded compared to the dream world. I am looking for a reason and I might not get to the answer because it is usually incomprehensible to the human mind but I can approach it to convince myself.

Let me tell you how I picture the dream world in my mind. I think here on earth, the same way we have different levels of the biosphere and then atmosphere, we have different levels of being. What I am currently living in is attached to my material body and that is why it has to follow the rules of physics of this universe like collision with other objects and gravity. My thoughts flow in my head but they have to be highly involved with what I am experiencing here and now. 

To branch off a little, some people live more in their minds and some people are more involved with reality. It is fine to be both and balance but sometimes over-imagination leads to unrealistic ways of thinking which are incompatible with the real world and it makes it hard for the person to move through life and figure it out. It is like a puzzle that the person who wants to solve it, is not paying attention to it and it takes them a long time to find out how to resolve the problems in it,

Back to the point, in the thought-sphere of being, we do not have to be bounded to the laws of this reality. It is not like anything is possible. There is still a certain order behind it the same way atmosphere of the earth is free to flow but certain patterns like clouds, rains, tornados, and wind happen in it. It is more flowing and less bounded but still has its own rules.

A way of looking at this universe is an eye and a mirror. The eye is in our head and everything around us is the mirror. Everything reflects back to the eye what is happening in its formless mind. In the same way, you never get to see your facial expressions. You can only see the reactions of it in the other people or in the mirror. Dreaming while sleeping gives the mind a chance to look at a less constrained mirror of itself. That is why in Terence Mckenna's talks you hear the word mercurial to describe the dream. Like the mercury element, the dream world is flowing and reflective. 

Looking at itself in a dream world can open up a window for it to explore what is unavailable for it to explore in the real world. Being is a process of learning and one way or another it must go through what it needs to go through.

Such a mind-bending thing.

Becoming the villian

 Hi

A part of my ongoing path of self-actualization is getting closer to understanding the people I did not like in my life. Before, I thought I do not like them because they are not people to be liked. They are bad and their behavior is not right. There are many other things they can do but they are too selfish and distracted to do the right things.

These were the words that my mind was telling to myself, watching and judging. Watching and judging somebody else's act while I did not even have an act to present. Being a movie critic is not that difficult. You just have to pay attention and think. The toxic part of it is because you may understand a certain thing, you think you are better than the actor. Finding a 1% flaw in a 99%  correct act is not that difficult. But doing the 99% is something not many can go through and it takes years for a character to do what it is doing consistently. 

Now I am understanding the reason I did not like certain characters was because I was comparing them with the ideal in my mind and my ideal was too perfect for them. I think it comes from a lack of empathy and understanding. Now that I am going through life I see them as mentors and I try to not repeat their mistakes. Slowly understanding my imperfections of myself is helping me to empathize with darker and darker people. 

Because the reality is whatever is in our life is a part of a greater than description system which is working. What we see wrong in parts of it are pointing to a need for optimization but it also means the architects of the reality we are living in, are great minds who did as much as they could for us to have a way of figuring the life out. Now if we are able, we can redesign the reality into a better place for living. It is and always has been a reflection of our inner self and the more we purify it, in every interaction with people we transfer our way of thinking to the minds and if they are worth living in the culture, they will continue living and if they are not good enough, natural selection of memes takes over them.

Trying

 Hi,

My lowest points in life were the points where I was trying to make something look more than what it is. The point is not trying as Charles Bukowski lived it. 

It goes back to the realization of the human perspective of life. For any project ever done by human beings, regardless of how grand the project was, it was done through the units of human beings looking through a pair of eyes and manipulating the matter with their hands. It is the understanding of if anything is going to happen it should happen through you, doing a certain sequence of jobs in the right way.

The plan and the way the process is designed and the skill set to have to do what is needed are what is important. 

It is questioning whether you, consisting of an observer in your head and what is in front of you can work together at the moment or not. And if you can, what quality of work you can deliver. Can you take over the piece of work that has been given to you and do it from start to beginning or your mind will be busy with different things resulting in distractions and mistakes in the work.

With the understanding of how fractal time works, good luck understanding it, I mean partially understanding it, we can understand how if you want anything to happen clean, you have to finish what is on your plate now clean. You have to understand your days and weeks and years break into patterns of self-replicating sequences of work that are reflecting each other. To make it all work, each one, even insignificant and hidden ones must be done properly. All of these lead to having discipline in what you are doing. 

The thing is even pretending to have discipline is fundamentally wrong, in my opinion. Pretending to have discipline comes from an idealistic mindset in which you want to force your inner animal to behave a certain way even though it does not want to. It results in diet-like habits which die over time and causes self-hate. It is okay if it is for proving something to yourself with care and attention but even after proving it, you have to live towards getting to the point of having discipline. It is the process of training the animal to like to have discipline. 

When it likes to live it this way, there will be no trying to convince yourself to do something which you think is good for you. Your self will do it because you understand the importance of it. It is about growing the child into a responsive and responsible adult.

You body keeps the score

 Hi

I have been struggling with myself to wake up early in the morning and be motivated. Ottawa has hard winter and that makes it impossible to get out of the bed and not want to get back under warm blankets immediately. But the summertime is here and it does not rip your skin off if you go outside in the morning. Having something to do in the morning, like writing this blog helps a lot with staying motivated.

The reality is I know how a day that starts with proper exercise and a good shower can be a great day. I will have a sense of happiness from the first hour of the morning. Looks like adulthood is just keeping it up and playing with others. Whoever is in a certain mood will be given certain cards and whoever has it together, will be given higher cards. Our subconscious plays a huge game of comparison inside itself without even letting us know. The choices we make, make it compare itself with the others and if it calculates a better stance, the chances are higher to play with more confidence. 

I used to do a lot of sacrifices for others, keeping them happy by not really wanting more than is necessary. And I thought it is good to not want anything for myself. The reality is whoever has this mindset becomes mentally weaker than someone else who is doing what they want. I do not see any kind of power in self-sacrifice. What I see is letting go of it and leaving it for someone else. Maybe to keep the waters calm, maybe because of priorities, maybe a wrong mindset and wrong expectations.

The reality is the game of selves playing with each other. There is time to work on the stats of the character you play and it changes over time. To learn, there is a need to dive into the darkness, and to keep yourself happy and powerful there is a need to have pleasure. The point of equilibrium can be destabilized if you are not careful with the steps and your energy is limited. Exerting more power leads to having less energy to move forward. Strategy is one of the main keys and there needs to be time, out of the game to think about it. And thinking without playing does not mean anything.

It is not really up to you what reality brings to you. The human mind can only think so far and the nature of reality is non-linear and chaotic. What the mind can work on is making the right choices and being present in the moment. Every moment is a reflection of all the moments in time in a self-replicating fractal form. So having distractions when you are eating, affects your job and what you do during the week with your job affects your weekend with your friends. Everything is interconnected.

Diving into the darkness

Hi to you

I hope you like what you are reading here. I think the reason the universe has brought you here is you are also seeking something greater than yourself. A seeker, maybe a traveler who is moving within themselves to find the hidden diamond inside of them. A multidimensional shining crystal with sharp edges. A heart. A compass maybe, or a blade. It is not an ordinary object that can be fully described by ordinary words. It is the Alchemical gold. It is not anything you can think of. It is neti neti, not this, not that.

I think the best way to get to understand it is by understanding different states of mind. It is an understanding of how different states of consciousness are like clouds and the human mind moves through them. Each cloud has its own properties. Eating ice cream has a pleasant feeling. The lips and tounges feel the ice cream and the taste buds get triggered by the sweetness of it. Also, the cold feeling of it makes a question in mind about how cold it wants to feel. It hurts after a certain point. It is on the spectrum of love-hate struggle. 

The ice cream example shows an engagement between two entities for a limited time to experience feelings. 

If you remember from one of the old posts, the flame of a candle has a similar property but in a different way. In the ice cream example, we are seeking pleasure and controlling how it is not going to hurt us and in the example of the flame, we are seeking pain and we are controlling how it is not going to hurt us. Not that you are into burning yourself with the flame but the act of engagement with these two entities brings pleasure and pain feelings.

The flame of Alchemy is what seekers are looking for. To purify their soul by experiencing suffering. There is an undefined line between safe self-care and looking for growth and self-destructive behavior. One must understand themselves and find out the balance point and equilibrium. Then they can safely dive into the darkness and suffering and learn and come back to recover. 

The reason the seeker is looking for this fire is to refine the self. They are looking for self-growth and by doing nothing but self-indulgence, the self grows but it does not evolve. It gets bigger and it may bring up an unhealthy amount of selfishness. The self looks at other people from a certain angle. The bigger the self is the more up-down look it has and naturally, it can assert more pressure on the people around. An unrefined self will take too many resources and space from others without giving back as much as it has taken. In the absence of someone to compete, it grows bigger and bigger till the time allows. The kind of trends like this happened a lot with kingdoms which were given to the ones who have not gone through suffering in life and had a weak sense of understanding of how to navigate their ship in the ocean of chaos. These stories have all ended with mother earth and the wheel of time, swallowing back them to where they came from.

Seekers are looking for intuition and wisdom. To make better moves in the important decisions.

The presence of a master can facilitate the movement of the seeker through the path faster by channeling the suffering through the judgment of the master. A master reflects themselves to the student and by looking at the student and helping them grow, fixes themselves. The student accepts this power relation and opens their heart to the master and becomes a better mirror. If the student is truly someone who is looking for self-growth, they will reflect back to the master by becoming the best reflection of the master. The hard part of this process is to accept an imperfect being to be your master. Like anything else in life, nothing comes for free and that is the price to pay to get the lessons faster. Engaging with a master is like the example of the candle flame. In the similar way they find their own safe distance from the candle flame, the student identifies how they feel about certain boundaries. Maybe they like to play a little to feel and not to. The question is what is the optimum gameplay. 

Elevation

 Hi 

I wanted to go biking today to get ready for our biking event next weekend. It's going to be a 20-30km biking path with coworkers. I wanted to but it looks like it is a rainy day. Just checked, all day.

I feel like these days light and dark deeply affect me and my good days and cloudy days are deeper than what it was before. I think it's because I am trying to make myself more sensitive to the flow of what is happening around me. Good days are enjoyable and darker days are for learning. I want to maximize learning without sacrificing enjoyment in this lifetime. Because a depressed wise man was not probably wise enough to fix his depression.

There are many levels of depression. And there are many levels of not being depressed. Let's call it elevation. 

When someone is elevated, they can wake up and get out of bed. They will have self-love for their inner child, meaning if the child is being a bit uneasy to deal with, they know how to fix it. They will spend time on themselves, on their looks, on the type of food they make or choose for themselves. The more elevated they are the more expressive they become, maybe they enjoy themselves in a group of friends or coworkers. Maybe they start working on personal projects and investments for their future. Arts, writing, reading, or just learning something new. New people, new ways of doing things, etc.

A person who has not had much time in their lifetime in the state of elevation does not know their uniqueness and does not know their potential. Which means they are hidden from themselves to be found. And to discover the self takes a long time even if someone hits the state of elevation. It's like being awake for the first time does not mean you know everything from the outer world. It is a journey of a lifetime to figure it out. It just means now you are given the choice of to be or not. The more elevated you are the easier it is to choose to be. But still, you have to make the choice.

After waking up one of the first questions is: is it even worth it to go through this.

If the goal of life is to make an art out of life*, Maybe even a seed with a lot of potential that never got to grow and get its head out of the dead soil is also beautiful. It will be a tragic story and not get the chance to flourish.

It is beautiful in the sense of carrying an emotional load but the artist soon realizes that time is still flowing and life has not ended. Maybe spending a few days\months\years choosing not to be is not that eventful for someone who is awake and is looking for adventure.

The other way around is choosing to be. Every day, after waking up, responding to the question of whether to be or go back to nothingness with to be! and then the artist realizes even with this choice they have not gotten into the paradise of their mind. It is like a process that has just started. It's like the little plant of life has broken the soil and exposed itself to the outside. 

And now it has to spend time and see days and nights, cold and warm, dry and rainy days to get to its final form. Carrying a burden from its past life and having weak roots its journey has just begun. To let go of the past, drop by drop, and to move forward. To get rooted in a new land and hope for the universe around it to take care of it. 

Whatever is outside is infinite times bigger than it and the seed cannot wait for the perfect time to grow. It is always imperfect and it has to find the path for its roots through hard land and deal with the weather around it. It will be the understanding of being in the moment and doing the best possible because no one really knows the equations of chaos. Anything can happen at any time but there is an order behind everything. To be is to trust the order. To be is to trust the creator of the painting to make the best stroke possible out of you, one color in his paint pallet.

Of course, no one likes to be the stroke of the brush which is not good enough and gets covered by something else and no one likes to be a part of the painting which gets thrown in the closet and never gets a value. It is the scary part of being. To take the chance of not being good enough in return for a touch from the brush of the creator. To trust the One who created you. To be touched by the brush of the time which is drawing every scene from thicker lines to the finest details. From the beginning to the end. This understanding helps a lot with selfishness to understand that you are not the only one that matters, the painting is made by intertwined lines and layers of colors on top of each other. To see winning and losing is something in your game and in the bigger game, everything is happening for a bigger purpose. 

I like to invite you to listen to Yanni - "A Love for Life" to see a piece of art made by the flow of small segments of music into each other seamlessly. Going up and down and slow and fast and making tension and release so beautifully.

* Lana Del Ray - Ride

To be

Hi,

What does it mean to Be?

In the form that I am living, to be is to be in the form of the Human and to go through life with its limitations and options.

This type of being consists of waking up, deciding to be awake, experiencing feelings from internal organs like the stomach and bladder, having something to do, and doing it, becoming tired, and going back to sleep.

A major part of to be as a human is to express what's in your mind. Thoughts are formed in the mind and they can be thoughts about memories of the past, something that is happening now, and things to be done in the future.

You can see how the experience of time is almost critical to the human experience. Things happen along the axis of time and things loop and repeat over time.

The other major experience which comes with time is the experience of the moment. In the moment, gears of being, make contact with the surrounding world. This movement gives directions to the human body and mind to be in a certain way. To play a role in a certain act.

The act of writing is struggling to find words to express what the eye of the mind is looking at. It's a complete work in the future and every moment is about making a piece of the puzzle. One of the fundamental qualities of the act is to show patterns. Patterns like evolution, repeat, growth, and self-replication. That's why complete perfection is unachievable in reality. There can be moments of build-up towards a  moment of perfection but total perfection means there is not going to be any growth and evolution anymore. It will be equal to the death of the actor.

The act of reading is to get engaged with an unknown mind through the flow of many words into the mind. The words carry meaning and meanings build emotions like moments of understanding and clarity. To read is to go on an adventure to the journey of exploration of another. To see the difference and to feel the alienation.

There are many acts out there but there is a common thing among them all. There is only one way of doing an act perfectly and it's built into the nature of the Human Form. To be is to polish the self by many experiments and trials on a certain act and to become closer to the perfection of the act. Life in this definition turns into waking up and trying and trying to evolve the self and at each phase of evolution, experience growth, move forward, and play a part in the act of imperfection in front of other eyes to be judged and to replicate what is understood. 

In a profession, that can be called to be a professional. Someone who can do the act in front of many observers and get it right under most conditions. Each pair of eyes adds an observer effect to the act and for the actor to do it the right way, they must go through time and practice to consolidate their act.

A master can provide the right set of eyes for the student to grow. A master is also incomplete but compared to the student, is more perfect. The passage of time doing the act has put sediments upon their mind and made more layers to their thinking. That's why they can understand the student and give them directions with their judging eyes.

To be judged is never pleasant but it is a part of the movement towards perfection. A right set of eyes can calibrate the direction of growth to a better compass.

I think to be is to decide to and to do

 

Isolation Tank: Thinking about father and life

 Hello,

Today I had the chance to go to an isolation tank spa in downtown Ottawa. It's been two years or more since the first time I heard about these tanks in the Joe Rogan podcast. He seemed to be really into it and he even has an isolation tank in the basement of his house. It took me a bit of time to be given the chance to try one of these tanks.

If you have never heard of it, it's a big bathtub with a lid and there is a flow of warm circulating salt water in it. The lid gets closed and you can turn the lights off and float on the salty water for a while.

I don't know what will happen to you. What happened to me was, that I was more present in my mind. It was like my bodily feelings got less priority than usual and I had time to think about things I needed to think about for a long time. Of course, what happened was it wasn't as perfect as I described, in the middle, I had to move a floating noodle they put in the tub under my neck and back. Floating wasn't the easiest position for my neck to be and it hurt. I didn't feel any pain afterward. I was a bit worried it's gonna put pressure on the discs between the bones of my neck. 

You will try it and you will feel how you will feel. I want to share with you a bit of my thoughts.

1. I have identified some processes in my life that repeat themselves a lot. The nature of these processes is layer by layer. I find something about myself that I think it's more harmful than positive, I understand it and I wait for the seed of understanding to grow into my everyday life. It usually takes days and interaction with people to fully unravel the life lesson, then after a while I find out that the habit or mindset is still there but before it was in a lower layer of my thinking and now that the layer above it is gone, is showing itself. 

I never like the theory but without it we cannot understand what is going on. At least it has to have pictures. unacceptable.

One of these processes that came to me in my floating meditation is I am always trying to prove myself to a father figure. I don't know where this perfectionist mindset is coming from and I am not seeking love from a father figure. What I usually feel is I have to carry the heavy burdon which the father figure is carrying and I have to replace it. That's becuase I have such high expectations that I don't feel safe letting that person to be the father. 

This has a deep root in my childhood. My father was traveling for work most of the time. Eventhough he was doing this for the best of the family which proved itself to be, it was always giving me a feeling of insecurity and only feeling his presence from a long distance and also in the danger of flight. He was a pioneer in his family and I could see how the level of security he was striving for us was unachievable by the other family members if he was ever gone.

That's maybe why I feel the fragility of life on the father side and I want to have enough power to fill that void for myself. I will keep it void and I won't let anyone else fill it because I know how it is. Relying on a wall that can fall anytime makes me not even think of leaning to the wall.

Maybe that's why I need to prove me to myself.

I don't want to get into control theory and I may not be able to describe what I want to say precisely. But let's do a little bit. In control theory to make a system behave in a certain way we need a feedback from one or more outputs and we need one or more references to compare with the outputs and decide what to do with the system to make the outputs move towards a certain reference signal. 

I think if a father figure is present for someone, it's like their reference signal is coming from outside and it is determined by another system which knows what to do and is tuned by life through time. This makes it relatively easy to know the limits and also know the expectations. If a refrence signal is moving very fast compared to what system can follow, there will be a constant or increasing error between reference and the output. This can happen the for kids who have a very successful father. This can make the controller of the system to push the system more and more to try to keep up with the reference. For a real life system the input of the system can go only so high. 

In the absense of a father figure this referene can be anything. Someone may not have any expectations for themselves and stay where they are forever and 10 years get past behind them and no one tells them when to run and they miss the starting gun*. For some, it might get into a loop that they never feel self sufficient and that makes them stress themselves too much. 

I have to go deeper into the masculine force of creation in humans later. This is good for now

2. what I really want from work and life. Another repeating process that I am slowly begining to understand is almost in the continuation of the previous point. It is more about understanding of how long does it take for a character to be built. My strategy in life is living everyday like it is the last day. It doesn't mean I am always the edge but I try to not keep anything in me for a long time and find a way of getting it out so I won't regret it. There are things that I thought by doing them life will be over and they were supersized magnified in my mind. Without exception, none of them were the end of the line and life continues. It takes thousands of tries to form the character and I am slowly understanding how life is like a marathon. I have to conserve my energy because no one really cares if I spend too much energy on one thing and don't get to do the rest of my work. It's important to learn to have dicipline becuase life is long. It's long enough.

For me, this process is learning to do my engineering work with dicipline and being able to shape the flow of the decisions and events to converge them into a productive piece of work. 

I hope these introspective thoughts have been interesting or even sparking ideas in your mind. 

*Pink Floyd - Time

Striving to understand comedy pt.2

 Hi.

I woke up today and didn't want to go back to sleep. One step to choosing to be. Listening to the Rite of passage by Yanni.

In the previous post, Striving to understand comedy I went from the beginning of the joker movie from the introduction of the character to his arc when he transforms into his real character.

Here the movie gets closer to the most abstract meaning of what a joke is. Because Arthur has such a limited range of expression, his perception of the world leads him to plan to make a joke on himself by literally shooting himself in the head with a gun.

couch scene

But let's pull back a bit from this extreme and examine what a joke is. Killing the self can be watered down to killing the ego. It means a joke can be made by questioning someone's ego. Ego, in the meaning of a set of attributes defining who someone is to themselves. In this case, Arthur took the extreme and is planning to make a joke by questioning his whole existence in front of the camera.

Let's move around this point one more time and make it more clear. I think it's a brave thing for someone to go in front of an audience and make a joke about themselves. A normal person has their own insecurities and simply wants to present a good version of themselves to the outside world. This usually happens by amplifying the positive attributes and hiding the lower value attributes of the personality. Now, on the other hand, some comedians take the opposite path. Louis Ck talks about his divorce and jokes about himself and his choices. Norm Mcdonald holds his genius mind back pretending to be just an old piece of coal and wisely putting jokes in his words. 

In these types of comedy, the comedian looks to be doing the opposite of what seems to come intuitively. Instead of feeling the power through empowering the ego, they make other people see how harsh they can be about themselves and making tension by doing what is unnatural. "He must be brave to make such a joke about himself" also they get a laugh from the audience which gives them a feeling of acceptance. They become good as they are. Life becomes comedy instead of tragedy.

So maybe Arthur wanted to prove how powerful he is by killing himself in front of millions. I think this could strongly make his point clear but he slowly realizes he wants to see himself after it. Because if he dies, how can he enjoy his era of empowerment? 

He kills himself in his head and transforms into the real joker. He dances and loses himself.

Now it's time to make his first joke. To question someone who deserves it in front of an audience. When his two coworkers come for a visit he puts one of them who bullied him under the question mark.

Randal scene

And the pinnacle of the movie, when he is sitting with Murray in the live show,

Interview with Murray

The beauty of this scene is both of them are symbols and clowns and gods of the city at this point. This scene is the power play of the two main characters of the movie together. Murray makes fun of Arthur and humiliates him by showing the video of his bad presentation and bad jokes. 

Murray with his charismatic face, shows himself on the side of order and policemen, expecting Arthur to have reasons for what he is doing, questioning him for what he did

Arthur speaking from his position of powerlessness and how he expects other people to empathize with each other, maybe at the root of it, sees himself not being able to feel how powerful people feel and expecting them to bring themselves down to his level. Questioning their authority and why they must be the ones who set the rules when they don't know what people out there are going through. Questioning the atmosphere of society can make anyone go crazy and look for the reason for it in the decisions of the powerful people.

They both don't understand each other and that brings both of them to the verge of losing control. Murray, not being as likable as he always is because he had to put a serious face on. For the audience, maybe like a child seeing their teachers outside of their class mask talking seriously with another adult. And Arthur shaking and confronting how he is losing the game even though he has a point. Losing the game because he doesn't have power like always. But this time he has a higher card in his deck. He pulls out the gun and shoots a bullet into Murray's head. That's the joke. Now he has the power, for a few seconds. He presents his subjective comedy which he learned throughout his life. Humiliating someone by taking their life away from them when they don't have the power to stop it from happening. The same which happened to him. Being asked for something he could never provide and be judged for it. 

They both kill each other and themselves. In Arthur's mind, he could be funny and artistic but presenting himself and experiencing his true emotions in front of the camera and feeling nervous and shaking was his way of shooting himself in the head. That was his joke to himself. Seeing the imperfection of himself and how it is far from what was planned in his mind was his humiliation of the self. 

Tension

 Hi,

I think I finally have a good excuse for sitting in the Starbucks and working with my laptop. I don't know, I feel like I have to have reason to do anything I do in my life and that makes me move slowly in some areas. I think it is worth it. Making slow moves but calibrated moves that make wiser steps is probably a good idea. One thing that amazes me about reality is there are not many choices I make during the day. Most of it is me, flowing through what comes towards me. My way of living is I shouldn't use power to get to what I want unless what flows towards me asks me to use power. I can feel it in the scene I am in. Most of the time it's calm and I am an observer. My mind is running and analyzing everything but I am quiet. And there are moments where reality shifts itself towards me and asks me for a reaction. I feel like it's like a martial arts fight. The more you have your discipline right, the better your moves are. I think in reality, in conversations, every word and sentence must be a thoughtful action and the funny thing is the only time I don't think, is when I am having the conversation. It's like all the thinking is for outside of the scene and feeling is what happens when you are in it. 

It's such an amazing thing that the whole reality bends downward toward the moment and everything disappears and there is only you and the other person. I mean I like it this way but sometimes there are other spectators of the show watching. That's fine too. 

You ask what is the show about. It's about showing the reactions, showing the chemistry. Everything, every thought merges into the forms of the human body and language and shows itself in the conversation.

If I have to choose one thing that I am afraid of, that is being incompetent in a conversation. To look bad for the eye of the creator. I feel the burden of existence on myself in this way. I feel like I must polish myself, polish my interface, to have the best reaction for the observer. You may call it overthinking but I call it thinking. In my mind, there must be a healthy dose of thinking all the time to move the little hammer of the sculpture of life, the Creator, to form me. Otherwise, I will stay what I am at the moment and I won't change. I think one of the points of the creation is morphing the dead soil into the best resemblance of the Creator.

I feel like the face of the creator is hidden under the little details of body language, the hidden meanings and layers of audible and written language, and the symbolism and beauty of graphical art.

For me, a rich conversation is a conversation that has a combination of some of these points.

For the parties to be filled with the meaning and beauty of the Creator, they have to have the capacity to reflect the properties of Him and that requires them to be able to tolerate the tension of the moment.

There is a long discussion about duality and unity and I won't get into it now but just for what we need here, if we look at our world, everything is made dual. You can see it in anything that is differentiable for the human mind. A tree is a tree because it is separated from the outer world. It can feel the outer world by becoming a separate entity and feel the change of what is outside of it on its skin. In wintertime, it can feel the cold and absence of sunlight and in springtime, it can feel the warmth and life. It can feel the wind by its leaves and it can feel the earth with its roots. 

A major quality that comes with the nature of duality is the tension that arises when an entity gets close to its opposite pole. You can try an easy tension by moving your hands close to the flame of a candle. What you feel there is light and warmth from a distance. When you move your finger closer, you can slowly feel the rise in the temperature. Maybe a pleasant feeling. Moving the finger closer and closer makes the feeling stronger and stronger. There comes a time that the feeling becomes hard to tolerate and you have to move your finger away. This is a good example of tension and how it makes rules on how it enforces our behavior in reality. 

The goal of the creation of a dual universe was to create moments of feeling.

My coffee is over.

Striving for understanding comedy

 Hi to you,

I was really trying to make sense of the joker movie. As you all know, spoilers ahead, it's the story of someone in the clowning business who seem very fargile and not competent with the harsh society he lives in.

It's his job. He has to go to a shitty office with other clowns and spend time looking at mirror and fixing his makeup for the next clown show he may get. 

He is clearly incompetent with the other people of the place he lives in and putting a clown mask on makes it even harder for him. Just without any masks, cards are hidden, people may think eventhough you're skinny, you may be in some kind of cross fit marshal arts or something. What I want to say is there is always that risk of being hurt which may protect you against anyone who may want to attack you. But putting on a clown custom just takes all of it away. 

He get's bullied and kicked and kicked in the balls on the street.

It's like as it litterally is a clown job. What we are supposed to see in him is even though he is into making shows for other people, he has to have that ugly mascarra on his face to be qualified to be given a show. Otherwise his hysteria wouldn't let him to have a mask with his normal face. 

I sometimes think of were does nervous laugh comes from. Freud and friends connected hysteric laughter to a mis-connection between the thoughts and the root of our purest of purest feelings. To my understanding nervous laugh comes from feeling insecure in a certain condition. That's probably why F-words and swearing is bread and butter of many comedians. It's like for many people that's not a topic of their corporate conversations or the type of things they talk with their kids or whatever. Their normal like is pure and and they won't talk about the nights of impurity. Among their closest friends they might be a bit bad but they keep a good mask on becuase that's good.

Back to our clown friend, it looks like he is just destroying himself. putting a bad mask on and presenting himself to the world.

Maybe he can change it.

in the comedy club

In another seen, we see his attempt to go on stage in a comedy club to test his jokes. In the begining we see how his laughter is out of control. That's one thing a standup comedian has to do. They are a mask that keep their laugh to themselves. That moves the tension to the audience and they will laugh. If they laugh they will just make everyone uncomfortable. In his mind he makes a version of reality that his jokes were good enough but god knows what a mess he made.

subway scene

But one night on the train, he sees what happened to him, happening to another person. Someone is picking on someone else and that makes him really uncomfortable. He starts laughing, laughing out of control. The guy comes to him to bully him again but he brought a gun with himself. Maybe he couldn't use his tounge to move his point from his mind to another mind and gun is something he can use to enforce the point he wants to make. That night for the first time he kills someone. He was able to use power, one thing he never had in his life. 

That's a very bold use of power. It has a spectrum but his broken mind wasn't able to use the lighter shades to draw his painting. He may have tried but they didn't work. The place he lives in pushes him down and takes the power from him and he can't communicate softly with someone who is coming for pushing him down one more time. He was gonna be humiliated again and kicked and had to be submissive like always but this time he changes his strategy and shoots the bully. 

transormation dance

With the gun his hand he feels the power of being. It's like a whole new perspective of life shines upon him and he goes to solitude and does his famous transformation dance.

Maybe it's his own Tai-Chi, maybe his white swan is turning to black swan.

I think everyone has their own version of reality in their mind. His version of reality was very much disconnected in his clown world. He being unsatisfied with whatever he was doing didn't help much with this seperation. But now, he humiliated someone. For the first time in forever!

It's like his version of reality has landed on the collective reality and this is a moment that there is no disconnection. Whatever it is happening in the outer world is what he is feeling inside! 

He made a JOKE!

okay I have to take shower and go to work. I will write the rest of it later.