Showing posts with label Insight. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Insight. Show all posts

Sunday, June 15, 2008

The Search

So Prophecy,

Everyone searches for what is popularly known as a "soul mate." There are two realities to this Truth:

First Reality: The one we are searching for is none other but our Self.
The quality we intuitively search for - well, how do we even become aware of this quality?
We become aware of it because it exists within us as our own true highest potential.
So it is amusing how many of us go about demanding from the Universe what indeed is what we ought to bring out from within.
With a grown consciousness, we may become aware that what we require of our world is actually what our world requires of us.

So my search for courage has ultimately led me within. It had told me that for seeing courage in the world, I must display it. As I did what I was younger and more intuitive. To have felt this courage re-awakened with is to have experienced a great liberation!


Second Reality: And then, indeed, we may be able to find another like our Self.
It is a matter of this world, isn't it? We look for someone who completes or complements us.
I have been advised that I need a "rational" man in my life.

I do not seek rationality! I seek what the world would define as irrational: to complement a soul like mine, I seek a man of courage.
A man of irreverence for glorified structures and systems; a man who does not just have an opinion, but the courage to manifest his belief. A man who can take death's blow on the chest. That is the sort of man I seek - not a rational, self-protecting shadow of a person.

I seek someone who is no longer deluded by duality. Who does not see poor and rich; evil and good; far and close; separation and unity; love and hate - who, in Rumi's words, I can meet in the field beyond the fields of right and wrong.

My beliefs are ancient in many ways. I believe in some fundamental values that make men, men and women, women and make humans, humans. Courage is for all humans - it manifests differently in men and women, of course.

I am just fascinated with the idea of a man who can lift his arm to weild the metaphorical sword: who can fight, with bravery and with fearlessness, for what he believes in. Who has absolute equanimity under adversity. And who does not desert his ground like a coward.

Above all, I detest cowardice in any person.
Cowardice is different from not showing one's full potential of courage, as having courage is the culmination of a process of maturation.

So when I seek courage, within or without, I seek a maturation, without which courage is not possible.

The Highest Concern
My teacher teaches that courage is the highest human concern - and yet it is not a matter of age.
I believe this, for I understood courage better as a child than as an adult who grew into a world of compromises and where all looked to each other for setting the rules, ignoring the Principles of Being.

I think human societies have been raising children to be cowards for too long - especially men, who grow up with a sense of entitlement. In the face of reality which eventually arrives in all lives then, this weakness begins to reveal itself in the form of a search of happiness, of security, of avoidance of pain, of a permanency.

Such people can never take courageous decisions, can never walk alone.

I walk alone, Prophecy, I have always walked alone. And on my journey, whoever comes to walk with me has to have the courage to walk alone and on their own feet also.
I seek this strength in my close relations, in my friends. And to a greater degree - to an absolutely fascinating-me degree - I seek that also in a man.

Beyond the mystical veil before which we believe there is no soul mate, I believe there is such a thing. If it is indeed intended for us to have a match in this world, I believe that in every moment, there is a soul in the world that completely relates to our own. I seek that soul with belief.
~.~.~.~.~.~.~

So there. I have made an intent. I have blown a wish into the wide chasm of the Universe.
So be it.

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

To Not to Stress

Think of a pleasant warm shower that gives one relaxation. Think back to how its warmth is powered.

The water is warmed by a boiler, at the heart of which sits a tiny furnace, at the core of which is FIRE. Powerful, raw fire. This is what fire is: an energy that exudes power.

Should one decide to tear down a shower, expose the pipes, trace them to the boiler, piece it apart, reach to its core, and put their hands on the fire - THEY. WILL. BURN.

That does not imply that the fire is "harmful" or the boiler is "bad." They are what they are. The issue is that they are engaged by an external entity at the level to which the boiler ought not to have been engaged.

Our fire is meant to power us - no more, no less. How it's used in the world out there is based upon our intention, it's not the "fault" of the nature of the fire. We stand between our energy and the world, and that's where the transaction with the outer world takes place.

Don't be tempted to blame the fire within; it powers you. Don't prevent your fire from being channeled either - it creates pleasure, relaxation, and joy by transforming the energy of water into a warm shower.

You are you.

Transform a situation in which you are being pieced apart. And know that this tearing or this transformation is a process that takes only ONE: you.


This occurred to me during a meditation last night. 'The question that came into my mind was: how does stress 'peel us down to the animal level?' Why do we feel rage? Must the animal within be reigned in, or must it be liberated?"

This question arose in a conversation earlier.

The answer has helped me understand the stress situation I had been examining in my self (and my dear Karachi world) for the past couple of weeks - a situation that inevitably leads to moments where the whole world seems hostile and we react in a snap.



Friday, July 28, 2006

Spicy & Sweety: Revealed

The answer to the Sense-itivity quiz is here. For the sane amongst us - a friendly version is in the diagram. Study it, be happy, sleep well. For the mad, the following:


The epiphany occurred, as it usually does with me, during a conversation. Ahad A. and I were talking about where is knowledge found when I drew up the shapes of Spicy & Sweety and quizzed him. Actually, I gave him the more mathematically correct but less glamorous version: which of the two is Spicy, and the other Mildy?

The answer came after I drew up the shapes. I found a brand new angle on the old quiz: Why would we call Kiki, Kiki? Why not call it Booba?

If you have no idea what I am talking about and think I just delivered the latest in high street insults your way, you will be de-mystified shortly. But I am not talking about curses; I am talking about a famous test on synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia – or the synthesis of senses – is a fascinating subject. You will usually hear of it in eccentric tales of “colors of music” and experience it closer at home when you decide the taste of food just by its smell. Those very smart with audio-visual effects will also know instinctively that synaesthesia also occurs when music is represented by the exotic visualizations of most modern audio players such as Windows Media Player.

Syn+aesthesia. A synergy of aesthetic senses. How, when senses combine, they create a whole larger than the sum of the parts.

I have been researching, experimenting on, and theorizing on a unified theory of senses for some time.

Separately, I came across the Azeemi (Indian Sub-continental Sufi silsila) concept of “wavelength” meanwhile while learning about spirituality and understanding how God’s design works. Yet the Azeemis are only marginally educated in the fields of physics, mathematics, and art – and they have not explained the concept in terms other than purely spiritual/ esoteric.

The Azeemi elders suggest that there is a “wavelength” and a “light” going around in and sustaining the Universe. They suggest that everything has a “wavelength,” but stop just short of explaining it more sophisticatedly.

While I drew those shapes Spicy & Sweety for Ahad, I was drawing a variant of the Kiki & Booba test.

Then suddenly, the dots connected.

Wavelengths. Graphs, that I had just been thinking about. Mathematics.

I remembered asking myself those very days why I could not separate the math of the graph from the shape of it, and the shape of it from reality of a traveling particle? Why oh why is the sharper shape Spicy? Why is the more toned shape Sweety/ Mildy?

Funny how things come together. Synthesis!

Allow me to use the more correct term Mildy to explain the answer.


These shapes in the quiz are two different graphs. We know that the taste of spice is caused by molecules of certain chemicals (Vitamin C, potassium, etc.) when they come in contact with our taste buds.

The more taste buds a person has, the better their sense of taste. A taste bud is like a catching mattress. The larger the mattress, the bigger can be a falling object to catch on the mattress. The more taste buds one has, the more molecules of a chemical they catch. But suppose a limited number of taste buds, says 10,000 on a tongue. Then take a bit of a sauce with 1,000,000 molecules of potassium. That’s 100 molecules per taste bud.

Take a bit of a sauce with 30,000 molecules of potassium. That’s 3 m/tb. It will taste "Mildy” and perhaps even “Sweety” if taken after the first.

If you plot a graph for the first, it’s sharper, like A. If you plot one for the second, it is closer to the baseline, like B. (B gets its curves from continuous tasting, but that’s irrelevant.)

These graphs are also wavelengths in shape!

So. Think about it. Even taste has a “wavelength.” That wavelength has a shape. Somewhere in our minds, we can associate that shape with the taste. Spicy is sharper looking. Sweety or Mildy has gentler, smaller slopes.

As I said earlier, we have been seeing music represented with wavelengths all our lives. For a sense of touch, we can quickly develop a Thorny/ Grainy/ Smoothy test.

Does this mean that our minds have a de-coder where all senses get processed based on the very unfunny shapes of wavelengths? And do these wavelengths lead us to a theory of universal aesthetic?

(And does an overload of waves lead to certain psychologocial disorders?)

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