I am Shiva

By the Adi Shankaracharya

Om. I am neither the mind,
Intelligence, ego nor chitta.
Neither the ears, the tongue,
Nor the senses of smell and sight.
Neither ether nor air.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I am neither the prana,
Nor the five vital breaths.
Neither the seven elements of the body,
Nor its five sheaths,
Nor hands, nor feet, nor tongue,
Nor other organ of action.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Neither fear, greed, delusion,
Loathing, nor liking have I.
Nothing of pride, or ego,
Or dharma or liberation.
Neither desire of the mind,
Nor object of its desiring.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Nothing of pleasure or pain,
Or virtue or vice, do I know.
Of manta, of sacred place,
Of Vedas or sacrifice.
Neither I am the eater,
The food or the act of eating.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Fear or death, I have none,
Nor any distincton of caste.
Neither father nor mother,
Not even a birth, have I.
Neither friend, nor comrade.
Neither disciple, nor Guru.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

I have no form or fancy.
The All-pervading am I.
Everywhere I exist,
Yet I am beyond the senses.
Neither salvation am I,
Nor anything to be known.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!

Waah!!Waah!!

I just came across this couplet by the urdu shayar Zauk and cant help writing it. This is as relevant as they come.

Hamne maana dakkan mein hain , bahut se kadr-e-sukhan,
par kaun jaye ae zauk, ye dilli ki galiyan chhodkar

On the Tao Of Physics#6

And Mr. Sankara replies:

Hi kislay

Have read ur entire mail. Ur arguments about UNIX processes is quite interesting to read. Nice one, I must say.
As far as bomb case is concerned, u have got me wrong, I was quoting it to substantiate my arguments regarding not being receptive about a particular thing and not as an example for instinct.

Yes, we are talking about a hard gained skill. What Capra is trying to say probably is that the efforts needed for getting that "hard gained skill" is very similar to what an eastern mystic goes through. That's why he made a comparison.

Also I talked to Gaurav Singh ( COE guy, jo bahut lamba hai and b-ball team captain)about ur post. He also said something very similar about instinct being the result of subconscious mind. In fact that's what they are trying to model in their idea for a paper on automatic essay evaluation. So I think we do have a convergence of views there.

I am not arguing about that UNIX process thing as I don know anything about neural networks or that feyman's theories. So I reserve my comments. If at all I do get something to read on that and if I don agree with u, I shall raise those points.

Also, I think I am understanding objectivism now. For more I read about hindu philosophy ( once again the vedantic philosophy which considers vedas as the defining text on hinduism), I feel there is some sort of convergence between the vedic philosophy and objectivism. I plan to read some books on hindu philosophy, notably works of vivekananda and some commentaries of adi shankara on various upanishads etc.

Once I read that, I think I wud have a decent understanding of hinduism and will be able to better comment on the following question.

"Has Ayn Rand, been inspired by certain ideas of our philosophy?"

Also, I suggest u try reading few of those and more importantly try to get the true meaning of it by transcending the obvious ones.

How is the work pressure there? Did u finally understood your role in the organization?

Now that CAT notification is out, I am back to square one as far as clarity of my career path is concerned.

Regards
shankar

On the Tao Of Physics#5

This is the mail I wote after having gone through Sankara's replies. It is mostly concerned with instinct and the origins of Epiphany.

Hi,

How you doing man. Project fine?STM still not bankrupt eh???

>>>>
I feel everybody is born with it. Everybody can perceive things which cannot be justified by reasons of logic, but just we feel it.

If u remember Alchemist, we have something similar saying that nature always gives us signals. We need to listen to them. If we regularly overlook it, we feel the signals have stopped comin...... Along these lines.
What I feel is we stop being receptive about it.
>>>>

Really can't say anything about what Paulio Coelho has written. I think it is a critical case of words and phrases being inappropriate/insufficient to convey what he meant when he wrote "Maqtub" in that book.

What I understand is this-Instinct is the knowledge which comes before conceptualization of the problem. Imagine someone punches you and you see the punch coming fro the corner of your eyes. You duck (hopefully) and what makes you do it is instinct.

>>>>
Why lay man does not get that instinct.
1. lay man does not even know the objective of the experiments. Even if he gets a result he cant make sense of itfor the raeson that he is not aware
that such a problem exists.
Say if i pull out the wire and give u a bomb, u wud realize what it is and run away. But if u never knew that such a thing like bomb existed, how wud u identify it. For u it is nothing more than a round ball.

2.he does not actually set out to look for it. Its like it, u know a signal is coming on a particular channel. All these years u were not tuned to it. So u never realize the transmission. The research, training etc that is being talked about is for the correct tuning.
>>>>

Understanding the objective of the problemis outside the domain of instinct. I think the problem here is that we are confusing extremely hard gained skill with instinct.
Consider a golie in football.In penalties, he can be said to be jum,ping left or right on 'instinct' but is it really so? Would you then say that the players at the highest level of the game have greater instinct or greater skill. You or I would have absolutely no clue of what to do.

As for the bomb-you said it yourself. My 'throwing it away' does not constitute instinct at all.It is a conscious decision taken so fast that even I cant consciously follow the chain of decisions.

So in my opinion, A layman having not getting those epiphanies but a scientist getting them has nothing to do with instinct.

Another point that I would like to raise in this regard is that of the subconscious mind. It is well known fact that even when we have banished some thought from our mind it persists in the subconscious.e.g. we are trying to remember a name but cannot recall it.Then several hours later we suddenly remember it.

I like to think of our mind as one huge UNIX machine which is extremely likely to create orphan processes. Even when you have killed the active process, the neural circuits still bear the computation as it is not possible to them all due to the highly decentralized structure of a neural network.This 'orphan' process may ,later on, come up with a solution, which the mystics/philosophers/godmen claim to have as a godsend or instinct.

Your point about no reaction without knowledge is exactly the one I am trying to make. The 'instinct'of the scientist is his subconscious mind come up with a solution.

>>>>
And for the last question,capra has himself given a very good account of it. They were not able to get that brainwave earlier because they were looking
in other direction. The moment physicists started looking for it( as an eastern mystic does)they were able to get it.
>>>>

By all accounts, the eastern mystic does not look in any direction at all. He is sitting there trying to calm down all his 'orphan' processes to extract 'maximum' performance from them.

Just consider this:
Consider some huge problem like 'who made this universe?' or some such. If you know of swarm intelligence, you will know that in them we consider ALL POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS (kinda like FEYNMAN'S SUM OVER HISTORIES) and gradually converge to the best solution. But the problem with our mind is that in our mind we are carrying so many deeply ingrained filters regarding what is possible and what is not. So the result thrown by the orphan processes I just mentioned are being actively filtered out when we try to intellectualize the problem. And that cant lead us to a solution as the solution demands that all possible alternatives be considered.

Here states like meditating or sleeping come to limelight. From a technical/scientific point of view, these states are a SUSPENSION OF DIBELIEF-a state where our filters are suspnded so that our neural circuit can realize the full potential of that swarm intelligence process running in the background.

Hence Kekule's six snakes dream. I belive it was not a dream about snakes at all. It was one of the possible solutions given by his mind. He subsequently described it as snakes as a sort of verbal approximation. Or his mind, represented its result in the form the imagery it found to be closest to what the result actually was.

>>>>
Just to give an example, do u remember how Kekule came up with the structure of benzene. For us, it wud have been a bad dream about snakes but for him that was an insight, a hint by nature, which his instinct interpreted correctly. It came just by chance, he did not try to get that dream
>>>>

They say you can not find it if you look for it. I think the hypothesis of the 'orphan process' and the mental filters explains this koan beautifully.

On the Tao Of Physics#4

Hi
Now the third question.

I am not fully convinced by the arguments of Capra. To tell the truth, I don have an opinion on this. However, the fact that a physicist says so makes
them somewhat credible.Had this been said by a mystic, I wud have outrightly rejected it as case of my area being superior.

Regarding instinct,

I feel everybody is born with it. Everybody can perceive things which can not be justified by reasons of logic, but just we feel it.

If u remember Alchemist, we have something similar saying that nature always gives us signals. We need to listen to them. If we regularly overlook it, we
feel the signals have stopped comin...... Along these lines. What I feel is we stop being receptive about it.

And for the last question,capra has himself given a very good account of it. They were not able to get that brainwave earlier because they were looking
in other direction. The moment physicists started looking for it( as an eastern mystic does)they were able to get it.

Why lay man does not get that instinct:
1. lay man does not even know the objective of the experiments. Even if he gets a result he cant make sense of it for the raeson that he is not aware
that such a problem exists. Say if i pull out the wire and give u a bomb, u wud realize what it is and run away. But if u never knew that such a thing like bomb existed, how wud u identify it. For u it is nothing more than a round ball.

2.he does not actually set out to look for it. Its like it, u know a signal is coming on a particular channel. All these years u were not tuned to it. So u never realize the transmission. The research, training etc that is being talked about is for the correct tuning.

Just to give an example, do u remember how Kekule came up with the structure of benzene. For us, it wud have been a bad dream about snakes but for him that was an insight, a hint by nature, which his instinct interpreted correctly. It came just by chance, he did not try to get that dream

I hope it clears a bit.

Regards
shankar

On the Tao Of Physics#3

Hi
This is my reply to Q2.

Mysticism (from the Greek ??st???? (mystikos) "an initiate" (of the
Eleusinian Mysteries, ??st???a (mysteria) meaning "initiation"[1])) is the
pursuit of achieving communion or identity with, or conscious awareness of,
ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct
experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is
one's destiny, purpose, or an important source of knowledge, understanding,
and wisdom. Traditions may include a belief in the literal existence of
dimensional realities beyond empirical perception, or a belief that a true
human perception of the world transcends logical reasoning or intellectual
comprehension. A person delving in these areas may be called a Mystic.

This is from wikipedia.
But what I believe is as follows.

Western philosophies do not have a very close relationship btween religion
and philosophy. They are quite distinct identities. While one encourages
reason and logic while the considers them as satanic. However eastern
philosphies, in particular hindu philosophy( the philosophy propounded by
Adi Shankara, for there are many differences btween the philosophies)
considers philosophy and religion as two sides of the same coin.
We make extensive use of religion to convey the philosophical thoughts.

So mysticism, I feel is a term coined by westerners so as to handle this
unique amalgamation of religion and philosophy.

On the Tao Of Physics#2

This and the next 2 posts are Shankar's replies to my e-mail.

Hi,

I did not read the entire book. However, I will try answering the questions
according to my chota dimag.

1.Religion is a kind of user interface to the philosophical thoughts. See,
many of the philosophical thoughts are quite abstract and people use
religion as an approximation to comprehend the abstract teachings.

The aim of philosophy, I feel, is self realization i.e a better a
understanding of your life and the surroundings which affect directly or
indirectly ur life. Only by self realization, ie by knowing who am i? whats
my role in the world, can we try to attempt the more difficult question of
why I am here, and what next.

The path of self realization is very tough and I feel religion is a
companion/ friend/ guide/ vehicle that eases our journey. Lets take a simple
example of meditation. U try medidating with blank thoughts ie the state of
void, No thoughts entering ur mind and its perfectly peaceful. This is the
ideal state, that we shud strive.


But meditation by no thoughts is very difficult. So what they suggest is to
medidate ny focussing on one thought, ie thoughts about God, which is
definiltely easier than the previous one.

Thus we see religion has made our journey somewhat less tedious.

That's what I feel is the role of religion.

To further substantiate, I have read translations of 3 different shlokas in
one of the orkut communities. One on shiva, one on krishna(gita) and one on
shakti (lalita sahasranama). All three are exactly similar extolling the
opulence of respective deities.so what does it signify?

The simplified view is that there are inherent contradictions in the
scriptures themselves. But is it so? How I understand it is not one of
contradiction but one of convergence.

There is something called the Supreme Being ( what Adishankara called
brahman)and the religion has given us different instances of the same thing.
For some, he is krishna, for others rudra and for some she is shakti. That's
the role religion set out to fulfill but now people are missing the woods
for the trees.

I will mail u those three translations when I reach home.

I hope, I am coherent. If not tell me I will mail u in the weekends.

Other questions I will answer later

Regards
shankar

On the Tao OF Physics#1

What follows is a series of e-mail conversations between myself and Mr.R.Sankara Narayanan (copyright protected etc. etc.) sparked off by the book "The Tao of Physics" by Fritzof Kapra. They include the tossing back and forth of our own meager ideas about what constitutes the difference between skill and knowledge and the playoff(???) between mysticism and the world-view modern physics is beginning to uncover. That, of course, is also the principal theme of the book.

This post contains the text of my first mail in this regard and the subsequent posts contain the replies and counter-replies.

Hi,

I was busy with a training program for the past 2 days so not much time for the TAO.But the internal conflict has started from Chapter-2 itself.It'll be great if you can answer these questions for me,considering that you have already read the book:

1. What is the difference between religion and philosophy?
2. What is mysticism, as distinct from religioug and philosophical movements?
3. Do you agree that mathematical symbols are not talking about reality just because we can not perceive the reality they describe as such?
4. What is instinct?
5. If instinct is something fundamental to all humans, then why can a layman not find the answers to quantum physics problems instinctively?If this insight/intuition is enabled in a scientist due to the years he has spent in research and study, can this form of epiphany/brainwave/sudden insight be called intuituion at all?

I am going to have a good time reading this one I'm sure.

More question when I have read more chapters.

Take care,
Kislay Verma

A footnote to this series of posts-if you are interested in science and/or philosophy, don't miss this book.

Shibboleth+lisp

Sitting here in the training room Nalanda at my ofiice, with the steady hum of the trainers voices lulling my mind and making my thoughts drift arbit-ward, I just had this amazing thought. The thought came thus: I lisp( or maybe I should say lifp). And I suddenly realized that this trainer babbling about something or the other, is a shibboleth( speaks 's' in place of 'sh').

Now anyone can tell you that 's' is not a lispist's favourite consonant. So I thought, what would it be like for a guy(or girl,whatever) to be both a shibboleth and lisp at the same time. How terrible mangled the English language sound, when left in the care of such an individual. And how terrible( or funny, depending on your taste) would it be for the listener.

Consider the following sentence:Shashank should have shown him the chateau....It is hard to figure out exactly how this would sound in the tongue of the aforementioned fated person, but after repeated trials i have come to the conclusion that it would be something like: Fafank fud have fon him the fatoo.

Not pleasant, considering that I myself am halfway there.

Apart from thinking up stuff like this occasionally, I remain firmly on sanity's terra firma, enjoying a hyderabadi sun come out after almost 1 week.The company gave me 2 days off to "recover from the strenous training before you are assigned to your respective teams and real projects".

Couldn't have been better for me. After sleeping my a** for almost 1 month in training sessions on arcane topics, I get 2 days off to "recover' from it
Might get a lil boring though.

Oxymoron Profile

This is from the orkut profile of one of my school friends. I always figured him as quite a bit of a retard and this has finally confirmed my suspicions.

This is the dude's about me:

smart sexy hot down to earth n simply coooooooolllllllllllll.

Note the down to earth in beween all the other self-endowed accomplishments...nothing could be further away from earth.

Now this is one of his testmonials. Can't blame him totally forhaving that in his profile as someone else must have written it but you always have the option of deleting one of your testimonials.That this person hasn't exercised this option speaks volumes.It goes:

VEL I HAV NEVR MET VITH GAGAN BUT STILL I VOULD LIKE 2 WRITE SUMTHING DAT HE IS SUCH A CHARMING PERSON I HAV EVER MET IN MY LIFE.HE IS A VERI JOLLY NATURE N FUN LUVING GUY.HE LIVES 4 OTHERS.HIS MAIN MOTTO IN LIFE HOW 2 MAKE OTHERS HAPI.I M GLAD DAT I GOT A SWEET PERSON LIKE HIM IN MY LIFE .THANX ALOT

We will pretend not to notice the rigour with which grammar rules have been followed. Notice I have never met with gagan and then in the same sentence notice Ihave ever met in my life.

Ek hi profile mein do aise kamaal ke paap heere...kya baat hai!