Enlightened ... There are no special effects.

"Where do you want to go, uncle?", asked my three year old nephew. "M G Road", I said.  His tricycle was the make believe auto-rickshaw.  He took me around in Bangalore and even to Mysore. He had created an environment and I agreed to stay in that environment.  To us, the blue tricycle was the black auto-rickshaw and the car park was all of Bangalore. [Small digression: When I narrated this to my son, he corrected me.  It is not the environment we shared, but the experience or a dream.  So, is the title.] On a larger, real life scale, we have agreed on everything, I mean everything.  Without that agreement, one won't make sense to the other. Fire is fire for all of us, the experiences are visions of light, sensation of heat etc.  Before  man tamed fire, the agreed interpretation of fire could be that of a dreadful monster that burns. There are millions of things that we have unconsciously agreed upon to live as a society. ...

My recent interaction with colleagues and relations of my age pointed at a popular view of their worlds.  My personal experience and a recent interview by writer Jayamohan pointed to another less popular view of the world.  This article is a summary of my observations.  It may not be humanly possible to switch from one view to another.  The view is probably hard-wired in everyone's brain.  I hope that just being aware of the other view might help in relationships. Three of my recent long conversations were with people in corporate world.  They viewed their role as a fighter in a war.  They strategised, analyzed their own strengths and weaknesses, analyzed their opponents strength and weaknesses.  A victory is well defined for them - "If I have my way, I win; otherwise I lose.". This view is applied in every relationship - between vendor and customer, employer-employee, boss-subordinate, interviewer-interviewee etc.  I don't know e...

It all started with my nephew's post of an extract from Fountainhead on Facebook.  I found it hardly impressive. For the records I'm over 40 now and want to claim that I am worldly wiser.  But the same text was so appealing when I was in college and during my early career.  Though I didn't imagine myself to be Howard, I was arrogant about what I wanted to do.  I came out of a TCS interview that I will never do COBOL, walked out of my first job because of differences with my boss.  Even now I won't do COBOL, but when I walked out of the interview, I had no job, no good grades and had nothing to support my ego.  (Even now, I have a secret fear that I may be forced  to work for India's big "so called" technology companies.  Thank God, it is only a fear.) It is obvious that my perception changed with age.  And I find it normal for a younger person to align with Ayn Rand just as it is normal for me to value collective work and greater good....

Part I Part II I would attribute the thoughts that we  broadcast as the source of power for all these smaller matrices.  As long as we process, amplify, invert and broadcast the thoughts, matrices will live.  Their energy comes from your energy, transmitted as your thoughts with energy. What if you stop transmitting your thoughts?  What if you stop responding to the thoughts that come to you?  It weakens, and might even die.  You can't get thoughts about UFO in the busy streets of Chennai, even if you get to see and hear about them on news channels.  You do not respond as an individual and you do not respond as a society.  The thought doesn't get enough power to live.  But why would you respond?  The core of a thought is fear.  I'd like to leave it to the readers and get to the core of the thought to validate or invalidate my statement. Fear is the carrier wave.  The type of fear is a wrapper around this carrier.  Th...

Read the first part here . I guess this will be just the second part of a longer series.  Before I continue, here are the disclaimers and acknowledgements. Disclaimer 1: I can not claim ownership for the views I've presented.  They are derived from a number of sources.  The number is too hard to list, I'll try to acknowledge some of them.  I won't be able to quote like an academic journal, but if there are inconsistencies, I am responsible for them and will try to fix them. Disclaimer 2:  The above is not the only disclaimer, more to come. Acknowledgement: Thanks to my masters, Sri Bhgavan (Oneness University), J Krishnamurthy, creators of Matrix, the movie, computer scientists, whose insights into the functioning of the human brain that created modern computers and their software. I was supposed to write about the lifetime of a thought, but I think history is more important.  Let me narrate the history of the Matrix. It all started as a simple n...

The movie has been an all-time favorite of my family.  Trying to comprehend the science behind was interesting one to many.  To me, it is more about drawing parallel's to the mind and its working. It all started when the question popped up in my mind - "Why do I get a thought, any thought and where does it go?" A thought is usually triggered by a sensory event. For example, we see a red sign, an association happens in the brain between red and danger.  Then thoughts take over - is it the Sensex/NASDAQ/Nikki dipping sign? is the market down today? What happened to my savings? With these questions, the thoughts would linger for a few minutes.  To summarize, a thought is triggered by a sensory event, but is allowed to run given the set of facts that our brain has stored as association.  Thought survives on the past facts and is about the future.  For some strange reason, the thought doesn't survive the present.  Let's equate a thought to an execution ...

"Appa, I think there is a ghost in the house.", said my five year old son.  He didn't appear scared, but said it as a matter-of-fact. The year was 2002, we had just returned from the US and were staying with my parents' at Trichy.  My son, had too much of new things to see - trucks with hair (lorries with hay-stacks), all kinds of animals on streets, pampering grandmas, grand uncles with mustache like the monopoly man, aunts who would ask him to sing in Tamil.  I knew it was a lot for a 5 year old to handle and wanted to give a patient hearing. I asked, "Why do you think so?" "Because I go to bed in one room and wake up in another.  Some ghost must be carrying me and dropping me in the other room." It was amusing.  At my parent's place, the maid servant used to come early in the morning.  In order not to wake up my son so early, one of us would carry him and let him sleep in another cleaned room.  I explained it to my son.  He w...