Enlightened ... There are no special effects.

I was lying down staring at the ceiling fan. The fan had a circular metal piece at the center and it had the radii with ridges.  When the fan is on, I can't see the ridges, but all of us a sudden I felt I'm able to see the ridges for a fraction of a second.  I realized I could see the ridges when I was blinking my eyes.  I wasn't sure whether the vision of ridges precedes the act of blinking or the other way around. The theory behind the persistence of vision is still being debated or debunked.  Instead of banking on a theory, I have my own explanation. As the fan center rotates at more than 24 cycles a second, the ridges are not visible.  We can compare this to the movie watching experience where 72 or more still images are produced per second to create an illusion of motion.  When I blink, as the last image captured by the eye is processed by the brain, it doesn't have a succeeding image to perceive a rotating circle.  So, the last image is exper...

"Is there a thing that doesn't exist?" was the question my son Krishna asked me last night. It has been his habit to listen to my ramblings before he goes to sleep. His point is - my voice gives him good sleep. And I see the reason on why I didn't become a teacher. Coming back to his question - it made me happy, for he asked a difficult question. It made me happier as I can answer this one to my satisfaction. So, I started. "The answer in a single word is No. But let me explain. We perceive everything through our minds. Thousands of inputs from the sensory organs and a memory help our mind make sense out of what the eyes see, ears hear etc. So, to perceive something, the mind must be present. That is the basic premise. To answer your question, we must first define what that "thing" is (that doesn't exist). You can define that thing as something not in your memory. For example, a creature with three legs, four arms, eight eyes and three ...

This is an often repeated topic by the Nityanandas, Jaggi Vasudevs and JKs. Still, there is nothing wrong in I, being a common man like you, repeat it. The context of this topic came up during a once-a-year meeting I have with my brother. The meetings usually span about three days when we cover topics ranging from music (his favorite subject) to films and literature. He being a fan of www.itwofs.com , had problems in appreciating music that he knows is copied. To him, good music is one that is original (as far as his knowledge goes). I see this as two different activities - one is the listener's experience of the song, two being the problem of plagiarism. By knowing that a certain music is copied shouldn't come in the way of experiencing the music. Rahman's rendering of "What are you waiting for (Album: Vandemataram)" and "போறாளே பொன்னுத்தாயீ" (Album: Karuththamma), were expressive of the respective moods. I happen to hear a fast paced party song ...

Friend Nag responded to my earlier blog on being free . His comments were: 1. Brain will never give up its superiority (functioning) until it cease to exist or the functioning is stopped. Let us assume, the brain evolves to attain freedom, by then it would've realised to stop procreation to ensure freedom. I'm unable to foresee such a evolution process. Well, if it turns out to be true, that will be the end of man kind, as procreation will stop. As for any creature, expanding itself, is so primal, I really doubt that can happen. If it were to happen, then freedom comes with human extinction. 2. The way I see freedom is, when everything becomes an abstract and you don't see the cause and relationship and not affected by what is happening around. That could be the state of bliss. This state of bliss, could be attained by a few percentage of the human race and not by all. Still freedom will be achieved by all, in their own definition and not in a common parlance. Nag has g...

On India's Independence day, here is my attempt write about real freedom and to demystify the philosophy on Maya, self etc. Imagine the brain as a computer (crude, but simple to explain) with all its CPU and buses; the sensory organs being the peripherals. One important difference is, there is an experiencer - that is you. When inputs come from the senses, the brain processes the inputs and there is an experience. Now add the complexity of memory. Memory evolved with humans and it has been a pretty useful one, just like the computer's memory. It is able to remember more, information gathered over generations is stored better resulting in more complex ideas and innovations. With its evolution, the memory managed to get a higher priority over the inputs from the senses. In computer terminology, we can say that the bus between the memory and the CPU has higher capacity than the other buses. The experiencer explained in the first paragraph is more and more dependent on the memory. ...

I asked my 11 year old son on where he lost his geography notebook. He was clueless. It wasn't new for him to lose things and look lost in front of me. Last month it was geography book, another day it was another book and so on. In the first year of school, he used to lose pencils and erasers so frequently that we always bought boxes of them. Like most dumb parents I too tried telling him on how I used to take care of my possessions. It just struck me that I didn't have too many things to care for. Until 3rd grade, all I need to carry was one notebook for Mathematics, 3 or 4 books and a slate. That's all. The number increased gradually, but some kind of laziness prevented me from carrying more than 10 items to school until the 12th grade. And now, I stumbled upon the 50 year old psychology theory on the limited capacity of memory. And how did I arrive at this information to blog about? I was reading on a technology blog, that talked about interviews, linked to M...

Yesterday I watched the movie 'Taare Zameen Par'. A good movie, very different from the 95% run-of-the-mill movies churned out by ?ollywood. A good attempt to bring to light some of the ignorance on learning. So, it would be unfair to focus details on where are the storyline slumped. I have observed a lot of kids go through the state of lack of fine motor skill at various points in time. Adults also go through this problem temporarily due to lack of sleep or some medication. I have seen a cousin, a very smart kid, often misspelling words when she was about 7-8 years old. Her parents and teachers were intelligent enough to see the actual problem and didn't fret over the "silly mistakes". Over a period of time, she was fine. My son wasn't comfortable buttoning his shirt or tying the shoe-lace until he was about 9 years old. I tried teaching him to button his shirt when he was five and both left the training frustrated. He would always prefer shirts w...

I have always tried to get as much as 8. hours of sleep for I know the subtle side effects of sleep deprivation. These subtle effects cause huge damages. Sleep deprivation is the reason behind most accidents between midnight and 4 AM. For those with less awareness and didn't know about this, here are some symptoms of sleep deprivation. 1. Lack of coordination between the brain and the organs. This manifests as biting of tongue when eating, tripping while walking etc. 2. Increased frequency of déjà vu . Déjà vu is nothing more than minor malfunction of the brain. With sleep deprivation the frequency of déjà vu experience increases. If you felt like a psychic, get over it. It is just an effect of less sleep. 3. Black outs. As an event happens, the brain switches off for a fraction of a second to process inputs from sensory organs. This results in an experience like watching a movie from a scratched DVD. 4. Signs of OCD - obsessive compulsive disorders like doubting if you ...