Friday, July 24, 2015

Conversations between two Avatars of Reality

Krishna: I know, or rather I have known this for quite sometime now, that I am the same personality who was known as Krishna in the ancient times (right now Kalki). You've written about these kinds of stuff, so I thought maybe someone to talk to. I don't really fit in this kind of world, and I now find myself on earth, end times probably. My partner, is also somewhere here on earth, and I am looking for her. We're both inherently not doing well, I can tell from my heart. I don't know where or how to look, but I only have a feeling where she is. And don't take me to be a happy cheerful person, I am more like a lone walker, right now.

Cristo: Your e-mail raises a lot of root questions.   In what sense are we avatars of mythical entities who personify in some sense the existential quest of all beings. Not least - what is the relationship between consciousness and the arrow of time? Do we have soul mate? Do we have a destiny in the universe?

For a considerable period of my life I have considered myself as an avatar too - that there is an archetypal level to reality where consciousness lives out themes expressed in the lives of mythical heros like Shiva and Krishna and Kali and so on. At other times I wonder if this is consistent with nature and evolution as we know it. I don't have the final answer on this except to say that the heroic quest is an archetype of our incarnation and to try to make the best use of it without falling into literalism. It's a metaphorical truth.

I also know from my own personal experience that at times of 'coincidence' there seems to be an anticipatory aspect to existential consciousness - e.g. in precognitive dreaming, which has an innate sense of the immanent future, whose reality shatters our illusions of causality. And that this is maybe what consciousness is for. Now the trouble with all this is that it is all hidden in the quantum entanglement. It has a status that we can neither confirm nor deny. Indeed if we could confirm it, it would very likely violate the probability laws at the foundation of quantum reality and the entanglement from which it comes.

This means that the best option we have is to live in the universe with a kind of predilection for a subterranean opening, living for it as a kind of investment those in the stock market know requires 'stomach' - i.e. not being disheartened when it all goes to custard for an epoch. This is what the notorious shaman impostor Carlos Casteneda called "having to believe" as opposed to the affirmative forced belief religions push on their followers. We can go through the world having no belief at all but maybe that's wasting an innate talent which is that consciousness is here to anticipate a future we can sense subliminally and unless we invest in it with 'stomach' we won't have the advantages it brings to survivors in a living universe.

Now as to whether there is a destined soul mate is another question to do with the evolutionary psychology of falling in love. Sexual beings are mortal and incomplete. It is this very incompleteness which drives the desire for a complement - for another to curl up with in fulfillment and it is this kind of fulfillment the combination of the sexual act and the emotions of falling in love bring about. This is a superbly good bonus that evolution has thrown in the path of the human species because it sums up our existential predicament in a real consolation prize.

The ultimate trouble from my point of view is that I have experienced a bunch of soul mates, some of whom I have loved for years and had children with and others of which were a one night stand or an all too brief affair. My romantic notion of love is meeting a stranger from a strange land who has journeyed as tortuous paths through life as I have and in the co-mingling we each bring together to one another the experience of many lifetimes in knowing as we stare into one another's eyes the ultimate meaning of existence.  My original wife with whom I still keep up affectionate contact was an ultimate soul mate but she was destined to be a great love of many men. My current partner and namesake, despite just starting out as a fling on the side, has proved to be the most resilient person in my life and an almost eternally fecund lover. Having had a lot of relationships, I can see that relationship building is as important as the notion of soul mate.

Krishna: You will find answers to a lot of your questions relating to consciousness, if you seek out Vishnu, i.e., you have to know how to sacrifice (a method in consciousness). (Other religions too mention sacrifice, but how to practice it is not known right now). It is also known as Yajna. I didn't read books, etc., I have in my nature, and I know how to do these things. I am now just learning to put words to these stuff.

I know who I am, but being reborn as a human, means I also have too look & find and put stuff into my mind, according to the times and the age. Feeling is what matters, the words attributed to the feelings change with ages and times. What was devotion before, is now called as love. What was duty before is now called as doing what you like, or be yourself. So words are actually irrelevant, "feelings" are relevant. Logic/mind helps in discerning these feelings out. The mind is for this life only, but your soul or "heart" continues. You can feel your destiny via your heart, you can known stuff about yourself, via your heart. That is accurate information of the self, feel yourself. Whats you like, what feels good, and you genuinely feel ok with, therein lies the truth about yourself.

Ok now, just throwing some light in a unordered fashion, don't take it very rigidly, instead try to "feel" it. Vishnu or Krishna conceptually, is a personal attribute of the Universe, is the setter of faith, whatever one, and is also the giver of satisfaction, when sacrifices have been made. He is coupled with Lakshmi (or genuine love for those who are good). Faith & Love, together continues existence and takes it higher and higher. Basic premise. The divine coupling.
* What is the relationship between consciousness and the arrow of time?

Faith is time. As long as faith continues, time does. What the mind tries to grasp time, the mind is just doing something, there's no ultimate grasping such concepts using the mind.
* Do we have soul mate?

Yes for beings, not disconnected from goodness, there is. You can feel them within your heart, where I feel, you will become genuinely your Self. Go for what your heart genuinely desires and likes.* Do we have a destiny in the universe?

You know it. You can feel it in your heart. Do you want to take credit for your own destiny, or do you want to give credit to a higher power? Basically, see it like this, The Supreme Absolute, is surrendered to her beings, like a mother to her child, whatever the child desires, her mother sets her faith in that direction, and encourages in that direction.
* In what sense are we avatars of mythical entities who personify in some sense the existential quest of all beings.

Yea, so you would have to perform sacrifices to grasp the essence of intuition, faith, and goodness, and satisfaction. I find it hard to explain these in words, but you will get a sense of events, feelings, intuition and happenings with the progress of time. You will see the entire picture as one happening, together. Think of reality in terms of consisting only of beings. There is no quest, you're god, doing whatever you want, enjoying whatever you want.

I for myself, know that I don't fit here on earth. I feel so less love here, that I feel it as a dull realm. So I've always imagined stuff, which now I know, relates to my previous connections, with whom I feel disconnected right now. My desire is to go back, my work is to feel good.

The old structures are decaying in some way, but they are not gone. Most beings that descend here are self-sacrificing, they raise the intensity of this realm. But now sacrifices are getting stopped, so the intensity is dying. I don't know what I'll be doing, but I'm feel that most of civilization will be wiped out, by the will of Time, if she so desires.

Sex conceptually is a sacrifice. One being sacrifices her body to the other being for genuine love, the other being (the lover) enjoys being loved and glorifies the sacrifice, body. Nowadays, say porn sites, have man exploiting woman's body, woman exploiting man's body, etc. Sacrifice is being destroyed, not glorified. Beings sacrifice willingly for love, and other good beings feel love for it automatically, they don't desire to sacrifice. Todays world is the same as an Aztec king sacrificing 80000 humans for his own benefit. There isn't a civilization, or something that is good.


Cristo: When I am in Varanasi I am Krishna and Shiva in one, paying my respects to Kali as the root manifestation of all women, from Radha to Parvarti, Kal  the changing yuga out of which time emerges. When in Israel I am the Christ. In the Amazon I am the shaman psychopharmacologist. At home, I am the leaves spinning in the afternoon gales blowing past my window. I am the atman. I am the abyss. I am the void. What do I mean by this? So do I take you literally or metaphorically?

I know Vishnu is the sustainer who dreams the universe from his navel, but faith is a double edged sword which can suck us into the underworld. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex, faith is the nemesis of truth. It is the point where everything turns diabolical. The Gita is no exception. Faith to battle is one thing when it is holding no quarter with illusion but when it turns practical it becomes jihad and the internecine Kaurava genocide of the Gita. You have to have faith or you can't understand God. But this is like saying one has to believe or else for religion or God to be real. That's a vicious circle. Its a hocus pocus scam, to believe in faith in itself. We need to take a peek at reality and make the acid test of the experiencer. Not take it on faith.

Heart is the centre and love is supreme. But faith is a translation from the real to the illusory. Heart and love are evolutionary manifestations of who we are as organisms, along with fear, anger, jealousy, envy, compassion, disgust and so on all of which make the complex emotional landscape of relationship in life. None of these are more sacred, or more profane, because all are part of the prisoners' dilemma of existence. If there is a higher calling it surely must come from the fact that emotions in all their complexity evolved biologically on earth and with it existential consciousness which may both anticipate what is about to become and through intentional will alter the entire history of the universe. Therein lies the mystery we are both trying to understand.

The question is - where do these archetypes lead us? Are they a liberation or our prison? What is the universe actually doing to incarnate each of us in the way it has? Does this imply there is a deity lurking behind the cosmic curtain pulling the coat strings of the cosmological theory of everything so that it all has to be? And what has to be? How much is preordained and how much is left up to us or to the vagaries of fate?

I think we are all the thousand eyed manifestation of Vishnu and Lakshmi coming to witness ourselves in the incarnate as we live the mortal coil. But there is a deeper secret. What are we actually doing in and to the universe in the flesh? What do we do here and leave behind us? Offspring and enlightenment? Or more genocide of life? What role does our incarnation play in the deepening manifestation of reflective consciousness and of biological splendour?

The archetypes and the avatars speak of an ancient conformity to an idea, to a cosmology that predates everything we have discovered about nature, which has turned our view of the universe upside down and inside out. Maybe in the quantum entanglement is a wholly new kind of reality we are only scratching the surface of. Maybe we need to enter it with no preconditions, no assumptions, least of all the assumptions of the avatar and the assumptions of a God. So I take my lessons from the abyss, from the insects. From no assumptions at all. I wear the clothes of the avatar because that is the existential predicament, but the inscrutable journey is hurtling by us as day turns into night!

Krishna: Yea, don't go by the words, or religions. The Universe is beyond it, and God is beyond any conception. Modern religions are crap, they worship someone important other than themselves. The thing is to worship your self. Right now its the Dark ages, so humans act as if the Mother is to be feared. The name Vishnu is just a pointer. The real thing is experienced. There are no books, no Wikipedia to help in that. Vishnu is the ultimate destination for those who know how to sacrifice. To give more hints:

* Imagine a warrior walking alone through enemy territory without fear, completely focused on whatever he is doing. He is then worshipping Vishnu.

* Imagine an explorer, who loves the unknown, and dares every mountain, and desert that he comes by, he love for exploration never stops. He is then worshipping Vishnu.

* imagine a scientist, tucking away in a dark room for days, his line of thought attacking a single problem from every angle. He is then worshipping Vishnu.

The focus is not on God, the focus is on what you like to do, and enjoying it. Thereby you also love yourself.

Writing is a symptom of the dark ages. When the hearts are too weak to remember. Writing gives rise to multitude of thoughts and relative importance. Questions with God come w.r.t. to control, and w.r.t. to giving or taking credit. This is rooted in fear. Whenever questioning these topics, discard fear effortlessly, even if it doesn't look like fear.

Instead of that, see it this way, just like a mother desires to birth her child, the universe gives birth to beings. Just desire. Imagine yourself as the Universal mother, to understand the position. The beings are free, but the Mother guides if asked for. Again imagine that if you were the puppeteer of the Universe, where all the beings are puppets, would that give your heart any satisfaction? That would be boring. God separates into multitude of beings just to experience love, and play.
The connection is always love. If God were all alone, if you were all alone, just being God, what would be? Imagine pure goodness and imagine pure love and you will go in that direction.

And beings enjoy reality, they enjoy their God-hood, because they themselves are God. They do whatever they want. But then they become weak and unable to enjoy further, that's where religion comes in. When beings become too weak in their hearts, they start questioning. They feel suffering. The thing is realizing your true extreme self, that is your true self. Your self, that keeps you satisfied, fulfills all your desires and leads you to having bliss in the Universe itself, while being the Universe itself at play.

For me personally, I really don't like to "think" these that much, as opposed to experiencing reality live. Thinking doesn't lead anywhere close to God. True enquiry within yourself is a different thing. I am more inclined to approach from the pov of feelings and intuitions, something that is not concrete, something that you're not trying to hold on to.  Your feelings/intuitions are a direct connection to yourself, not thinking or words. How much truth you will grasp depends on how honest you are with yourself. :)

* Imagine a warrior walking alone through enemy territory without fear, completely focused on whatever he is doing. He is then worshipping Vishnu.

Cristo:  This is what I call the invincible abundance of life that makes it all worthwhile even if the Earth blows to pieces and we all eventually become extinct, but its also what makes an IS suicide bomber blow fifty young innocent people to pieces in Turkey, so we have to be careful.

* Instead of that, see it this way, just like a mother desires to birth her child, the universe gives birth to beings. Just desire.
Cristo:  Yes I get the sentiment and it is very easy to empathize with, especially you saying to follow your desires and your heart which I completely agree with because we humans are actually good at heart - original virtue if we let it live, despite all the negative emotions as well.

But now here we get into the emotional analogy of transcendence. What IS desire? How does desire make life and consciousness? Isn't desire an emotional feature of biological conscious life?  A lot of my criticism of gods and religion is that it is all one big analogy for all-too-human emotions and jealousy in particular. Yahweh is jealous of the unfaithful wife Israel. "For I am a jealous God". Muslims claim al-Llah is "merciful and compassionate" but all his actions are violent and homicidal retribution for any form of infidel(ity). Rama condemns Sati to suttee even though she was always his faithful wife. So what is the Ramayana teaching us about respecting women any more than the Gita does about securing the peace? Even the Veda is full of Indra's worldly pretensions. That leaves the Upanishads as our only hope. This is where Buddha got it right and then got it wrong claiming the only reality is escaping the wheel of birth and death which is the very life process itself. What a nihilistic conclusion! A suicidal escape from life itself into the void that is no void. That's not an answer - its just a surrender.

So the question becomes another one. Is the universe in the archetype of human emotions? Or to put it another way - are human emotions in the archetype of the Elohim who created the world? But there are very good reasons for coming to the conclusion that human emotions are mammalian emotions that evolved in mammals so they could socialize in ways which transcend strict genetic altruism and thus form cooperative groups. Emotions thus gain cosmic status by transcending the confines of earlier organisms. That is itself very cool and opens another question. Is evolution opening out an epoch of enlightenment like a lotus blossom opening?

What is the source of this phenomenon? Is it just math or is it Vishnu-Lakshmi? But what is a human analogy getting into the centre of the cyclone for? Why is God an organism or a couple of organisms desiring stuff? What about their ecosystem? What about their laws of nature that made them desire? Where does it all start? It seems we have just pushed the problem onto Vishnu-Lakshmis doorstep for them to solve.

Our experience tells us of two complementary natures - conscious and physical - mind and body complementary like wave and particle, female and male, yin and yang, Shakti and Shiva if you like, or even Vishnu and Lakshmi if you 'desire'. There is no evidence for a cosmic threesome in this equation. God, or the creator, or the Mother is superfluous to the abundance of the creative process. Even Vishnu dreaming the universe - a great myth of awesome explanatory power - fails to solve the complementary dilemma.

And we know dreams have different qualities from waking life so to say the universe is a dream of God is to confuse the two. I just dreamed a snake had killed our cat. I dreamed  was in France and had lost my car. We can fly in dreams but we can't look at our watch and tell the time correctly. The differences are palpable.

Vishnu dreaming the universe doesn't explain to us the complementarity of consciousness and the physical world - it just finesses it into the dream of the God all powerful making the whole thing - galaxies, dark matter, black holes and all. But the universe has more properties than our dreams alone and our dreams are built on their biological foundation. The Judeo-Christian god is even more dysfunctional because he creates the universe like a clockwork toy, when we know you can't create a brain by imposing conditions from outside like we can a mechanism like a computer - embryogenesis is a generative interactive inside-out process, as is evolution, so is the universe as well.

You are right about the other point of view i.e. seeing it from 'her' the Mother's cosmic perspective. I see individual consciousness as a constrained form of cosmic consciousness like the bundle of life - a tied up form in incarnate bondage, which if we untie it a little in visions, merges with the cosmic self, better able to see itself. But this is yet another analogy.

We know dreaming and visionary experiences because we have biological brains that evolved sentient consciousness. From every practical scientific point of view it is rooted in the physical and emerges in the conscious only when we have chaotically sensitive quantum brains to generate the entanglement.

We can't just say it's all a creative dream of God or the Mother because where are their neurons or the equivalent to support their dreams? In a black cloud? On planet nine? In the center of stars or the galactic core? Outside the inside out standing in a continuum beyond all towns and countries? Then it all becomes a cypher. An answer begging to exist because the question is so huge and incomprehensible.

Now to sex and pornography. If you look at the temples of Khajuraho - the Jaggernath I think in particular - you will see both high sexual rites - Maithuna - and on the lower strata, every form of 'perversion', from bestiality to sodomy. It's all in the transgressive merry go round that sex is. Fertility and pollution are other sides of the same coin. I'm a great believer in worshiping the woman respectfully, and in reproductive sex - that is the greatest fuck is to get the soul mate pregnant with new life - our life. Vastly better than voyeuristic lust, sucking off, rear entry, or anything with another species, or one's own kith and kin. Its the pure path of sexual true love speaking. Its the glory and the life fulfillment. The Song of Songs is a great poem to sexual fertility even though it is unrequited. But still sex is naughty and transgressive. You can't decry pornography when your own religious tradition has Kali stomping on Shankar, and all those freezes admitting everything goes with consenting adults.

Krishna: Another interesting thing I want to point out is, judgements. Many questions are intrinsically judgmental. Judgements are rooted in fear, and they lead to more judgements and holding fear in your hearts. Freedom from judgement means not trying to build a dam to direct where the river flows. It is whatever it is right now, due to the multitude of desires of multitudes of beings for thousands of years. It's just nature. Death, being a fact of life, violence is a point of query for those who are bound by fear. On the other hand, if people were just fearless, they would immediately put a stop to whatever is happening in front of them. Because right now evil is effortlessly violent and making all the rules, while those who are good are weak, nice, polite and bound by rules and internal conflicts of what is right and wrong. If you upgrade yourself to God-hood, imagine upgrading yourself to a vampire, w.r.t. modern day humans. It isn't condescending, but rather being good as well as strong, and free.

It's overwhelming for me in this time and age, and to me, my identity is irrelevant. I like to think of myself as normal, because people are nowadays infatuated with becoming important. I also hope you understand, I don't follow any religious traditions, I just know. The world is full of doubts, and not everyone is intellectual, they are more driven by their desires when asking questions, and I am not the fulfiller of desires. It's not a customer satisfaction survey.


Cristo:  I realized I was the Christ one stormy night on the land on the visionary sacraments and lived it out twenty years later by going to Jerusalem and performing rites of passage to throw open the Gates of Compassion, reflower the Tree of Life and celebrate the Sacred Reunion, so I know all about this kind of feeling too. And it's real in a sense, and the key to what incarnate consciousness is about, but the avatar has a responsibility to bring about an epoch of long-term future goodness in the real world. We all do but the bigger the realization the more inscrutable the responsibility.

Krishna: You're approaching correctly, but your views are still intellectually rigid.

Cristo:  Not rigid but inquisitive. We are conversing so I am playing devil's advocate with you about the importance of understanding nature as complementing the visionary. My source experience doesn't come from intellect but from contemplation. I became involved in the visionary sacraments because they are a path to illumination that has no mantras or doctrines. Moreover they are a natural biospheric complement and completion of the existential consciousness of the human mind. Without the sacraments I would never have known the inner secrets. For me it is always a deep meditation to enter the contemplative trance simply by listening to the sounds and patterns as they come together into a conscious void into which I melt and disappear into the visions. If I try to apply intellect or even try too hard to keep a line of observation it will keep me from descending into the reverie that harbour experiences impossible in the waking world and altogether different from the equally extraordinary experiences of dreaming. Intellect is just a summing up of the innate experience.

Krishna: Imagine a tree growing, imagine flowers appearing and then flowers becoming fruits. It natural. As a part of the natural process you will see the world grow old and then change. I am part of this natural process and so is everyone. There's no planning things for me, by the mind. Don't approach truth or knowledge related to God, via your mind. You cannot write it down. Give up your desires and fears, and you'll find truth. Giving up your desires and or fears is sacrificing. With that, everyone can interpret a written religion their own way according to what they desire (subconsciously

Cristo:  Yes letting go into the universe is a key part of this.

Krishna: Everything will happen as normal, is happening as normal, has always been, everybody is doing it. I have no plans of building a religion, I want to be alone, and carry on with my life as normal. But decisions have been made, and you will see change appearing in the hearts of people as time progresses.

Cristo:  That's what I meant about the avatar, or messiah, having a responsibility to actually bring about a real improvement in the world. That's one difficult agenda to follow through with in real terms.

Krishna: I am not decrying pornography, I'm saying people don't know how to have sex. Do you love fucking, or would you want to become a woman yourself? How much do you love a woman? Fucking is not love. And the world is centered today around sex, sex is irrelevant. Love is relevant.
Cristo:  Sex is essential. It's the foundation. We all get here through sex or we wouldn't exist as conscious beings. Sexual recombination gives us all the diversity of beings on the planet. Without this, complex conscious life would never have emerged. It is what makes the lover our true complement as Shakti is to Shankar. Sex is a mystery of the very foundations of physics - as wave is to particle, so egg is to sperm. Love is the apotheosis of sex - the god and goddess within sex. We can love our parents and kin and we can love our children but the love for the lover is limitless overflowing love for an alien being.

And we can love nature, humanity and the entire universe selflessly. But the love of the lover is the holy grail of love incarnate. Sex and love are entwined and they are brought together into dynamical meaning through lust - the desire to merge with, to fertilize and be fertilized, by the complement, so that life will flourish and the passage of the generations will be fulfilled. Love and lust light up highly overlapping areas of the brain showing they are aspects of a unified process for the benefit of life.

This is one of our highest callings because it is the generator of life. Never secondary. We also have a calling as mortal sentient beings to leave the universe a better place than we arrived or otherwise our whole incarnation is wasted. Intrinsic to this is the third calling, the discovery process we each engage to become avatars of the transcendent within us.

Krishna: Give up your own desires and you'll find truth. There's no clarifying it via words.

Cristo:  Maybe it is better to harness our desires as Arjuna would harness his chariot and gird his arrows. Desires are there to lead to fulfillment. Foolish desires are a hindrance. Noble desires are our path of integrity.

Krishna: I have no plans of building a religion, I want to be alone, and carry on with my life as normal. But decisions have been made, and you will see change appearing in the hearts of people as time progresses.

Cristo:  Now here you are raising another deep question - this time about the quantum entanglement. This one is - can consciousness - in particular the enlightened consciousness of a living being alter the flow of 'karma' in the universe and in the world around us possibly for the good of an awakening world - flowering as you put it? You mentioned this of the Mother. Or is this just another illusion of Queen Maya?

Krishna: As a part of the natural process you will see the world grow old and then change. I am part of this natural process and so is everyone.Cristo:  This is one of those potentially undecidable questions. What is the source of coincidence, or of the vagaries of fate? What is it that causes a disaster to strike one place and a windfall to fall on another? Why did I get sick? Yes it was an infectious disease, but why did it strike me just when it did and why not you? In terms of physics this seems to come down to quantum uncertainty because the source of all randomness in the universe ultimately comes down to this, possibly amplified by chaotic instability.

Now when people try to examine this more closely they discover quantum entanglement. In its simplest form an atom emits two photons which have to have complementary polarization because the spin of the two orbits in the atom's transition were both zero, so the two photons have to have complimentary spin. When we sample one it turns out the other instantaneously has the complementary spin whatever orientation we pick. But the information of each on its own is random. This shows us that hidden behind the randomness can be 'spooky' connections in the entanglement that span both space and time.

But when we repeat any kind of quantum process, the distributions of the particles always settle down to the probability generated by the wave functions. We never find the laws of quantum probability violated long term. Just within the uncertainty window. This means we have no way of knowing if there are subtle mental influences on 'karma' but we do know that such influences can't become established causally or they would violate the probabilities.

Now intriguingly the brain may be using quantum entanglement to generate consciousness because the way brain wave processing is done looks very similar to quantum wave interference and making a decision looks like collapsing the wave function. Moreover, quantum hand-shaking seems to span space-time in a way which links past and future. The Wheeler delayed choice experiment shows us that changing the arrangement after a wave-particle has traversed the universe can alter the path it must have taken.

The deepest question about consciousness is whether it can anticipate the future and whether it can change the physical outcome through an act of free will. We all depend on the notion of personal conscious autonomy to do the simplest of tasks. To suggest we are just automata of our brain function is in fundamental conflict not just with our sense of personal autonomy but with accountability and the law.

So I'm just asking you to ponder what kind of universe you think we are living in. Do you think that simply by existing in a state of knowing that one can change the flow of 'karma' and the emerging history of the universe?

Krishna: This question is related to control, and doing something important. Assume everything is normal, nothing more important than the other.

Cristo:  It's not about control but accountability. With control you set the terms. With accountability the world around you does and you have a responsibility to address it. Unless we make a reality check on this we may be just adopting transcendence without it being real.

Krishna: This again, attaches importance to specific events, situations. Do not attach importance to specific events, or situations.

Cristo:  But every event is idiosyncratic. Any event can be devastating. Why does one happen to you and another to me? Are we just going to say it's all random? Then we need to understand the entanglement. Every shamanistic path asks this question. Why did it happen to me? Sometimes they conclude it's witchcraft and go to kill the perpetrator. This is a homicidal error. Sometimes they say its karma e.g. of past lives. This is a corruption of biology. Living organisms are not moral manifestations of human waywardness.

This is a very real issue of survival for everyone. Modern science ignores it and says opportunities, disease and accidents exist - get real. But the universe does one particular thing each time like the one quantum uncertainty and we don't know why or how. Does it have anything to do with consciousness, or are we just victims of fate?

Krishna: Everything is normal, that will be seeing clearly.

Cristo:  There is a Sufi saying: We are waves whose stillness is non-being. We are alive because of this, that we have no rest. Abu-Talib Kali Life is not normality. It is emergence at the edge of chaos. Everything about life is negentropic, leading to idiosyncratic diversity, including the whole biosphere capturing solar energy and ramifying to produce the diversity of all living beings over time through evolution, which is itself adventitious as well as selective. This is the very flowering of which you speak.

Krishna: Science has the implicit desire to predict and control. The knower whats to control what it already knows and has already expressed by virtue of his own potency.

Cristo:  The pursuit of knowledge is not the desire for control. Religions and commercial cultures control, science discovers. The knowledge that comes from learning about nature can be used to control, but the learning is fundamental discovery which challenges and overthrows our preconceived notions. Neither is prediction control. Prediction is not controlling the process, just following it into the future accurately as it evolves. Many processes such as chaos and quantum uncertainty remain unpredictable. Many of the most fundamental discoveries of science, especially in cosmology, are completely beyond our control, but fundamental discovery remans the key to the scientific quest.

Krishna: Ok, fine, but it's also stupid, a sign of ignorance. Giving up thinking while keeping your eyes open, that is real science.Cristo:  Yes it is really important to experience intuitively and directly and appreciate the conscious moment in being here now. This is something humans have engaged since the dawn of time and is the key to shamanism across the planet. Our oldest culture, the Bushmen of the Kalahari have pursued this in the trance dance for millennia, probably the last 150,000 years. It's part of the human condition that can be masked by modern life's mechanistic and materialistic demands and delusions.

Krishna: Knowing means grasping the events, sequences, happenings, around you, and noticing that you're the one doing it. When I say, "to know", I mean it in a much broader. Float on what you know, feel your life, do not "think and relate", just try to grasp it by your intuition.  Feel it, only notice how the universe happening! Feelings and intuitions are something apart from thinking. Do not join the dots. They will join by themselves.Cristo:  Yes that's a very good insight. That's why I say I am the wind blowing by the window.

Krishna: But you will not be able to do this, if your mind is distracted and is directed by your desires.

Cristo:  I agree that a lot of people are lost in their worldly obsessions and can't appreciate the inner meaning of existence, but intuition is a natural human faculty which we use all the time if we aren't being completely mechanistic in our outlook.

Krishna: You changing the universe, means you're considering yourself separate from the universe. That is not, hence, the question again has a sense of trying to control.

Cristo:  Our personal experience says that we have conscious volition, we can consciously decide what to do. When we do, it has a demonstrable affect on the world around us - we catch the bus, we go to the movies, as incarnate biological beings, not just conscious observers. How does this happen? What's it all about? What does it tell us about cosmology? This is critically important because some scientists would have us believe that we are just brain function and there is no real conscious volition at all.

Entanglement is beyond our control. There is no way to establish causal interactions in the entanglement. Entanglement is participatory because there are other components caught together in the wave, so the notion of control is fruitless. Local Einsteinian causality fails the test of Bell's theorem in all experiments.

Any explanation of how consciousness can have a meaningful role in an organism revolves around anticipating crises and acting to avoid fatal consequences. To do this consciousness may have to do something quite magical by anticipating circumstances about to happen completely intuitively in a way which goes way beyond causality, prediction and computation per se. Indeed the only way consciousness could have evolved is because it has survival utility over a non conscious but perfectly computational brain network.

Krishna: The main thing you need to change in your point of view is not to consider yourself separate from the universe. The moment you experience separation, as YOU AND THE UNIVERSE, you will have innumerable questions. That's the main thing. If you really trying to figure experience that. Otherwise its just intellectual conversation over a cup of tea, which is OK for science but not for religion, and you would know that too given the many experiences you had. Make your mind stop. And then you start seeing.

Cristo:  These are deep deep issues no one, religious or scientific, yet understands and I'm sure they are pivotal to understanding our own conscious dilemma. And yes all e-mail correspondence is a conversation over a cup of chai!

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

CA2D 4 Mac: Version 1.1.9 released - A Feast for the Eye and Brian


Download my latest version CA2D Mac application v1.1.9 Jul 2015 with XCode source files, documentation and examples. For updates and downloads see: http://dhushara.com/CA/

CA2D is designed as a Mac application to provide a research tool to explore as rich and diverse a variety of 1D and 2D cellular automata as possible, while at the same time providing a fast high-resolution artistically appealing easy to use interface, which is ideal for exploring the surprising graphical features of these processes. It comes with source code, so you can reprogram it easily using XCode for new ideas, but also has input rules for a vast array of interesting known CAs spanning most key types, including complex games representing quantum wave functions, the prisoners' dilemma, evolutionary rock-paper-scissors, and the reaction-diffusion automata on mollusc shells which are not available in other applications. It also has some of the nicest visual and scientific demonstrations of the versatility of CAs.