Technology of Self - Nature of Reality

 A dilemma

In boxing you should not punch above your weight. In  blog writing you should never write above your level of experience. It is easy for a discerning reader to spot the lack of authenticity immediately.  Even if the the blog is about cooking  tips or recipes and such other topics  of frivolous nature, it befits a serious blog writer only if he writes from a Knowledge of Experience, not merely with a Knowledge of Description. Knowledge of Description is merely writing by collecting facts from secondary sources and interpreting it, some of which even somebody else  could have already done. The mere replacement of words of another person does not make blog writing original. Knowledge of Experience, on the other hand, is a deeper well-spring. 

When the thirst starts, it shows as a thirst for Knowledge of Description-- of  intellectually understanding concepts and their working.

Experience is the fruition of this knowledge, in a way. Experience is seldom direct and follows mostly after Knowledge of Description is acquired and internalised.  In matters metaphysical , how to know when Experience starts when it is a two-way street between Knowledge and Experience. 

That is the dilemma while writing “Technology of Self”  posts. So the readers are better forewarned of this before they read these posts.

Investigating Reality

As per theory of knowledge, aka epistemology, Reality must be Absolute Truth and therefore investigating Reality must lead to Absolute Truth. Truth that is partial, relative and temporary cannot be Reality. Mind   is primarily a tool for self-preservation and it is trained from birth to think in terms of securing ways and means of self-preservation or preserving the separate ‘I’. When you train for long enough, you develop neurological pathways in the brain, a kind of scar tissue, which are set patterns of thinking leading to set patterns of behaviour. Rituals are born thus and with the demonstration effect , much like celebrating mid-night count down for new year, becomes the 'Culture'.   These become Vasanas leading us more and more into conditioned thinking and predictable responses to phenomena. Besides, the  Vasanas are also reinforced by Karma, a cyclical pattern of thoughts to behaviour and vice versa, resulting in the endless cycle of Samsara.  the mind , lead by thev five senses, seeks expression only as thoughts, perceptions, feelings or emotions by attaching to . Emotions and feelings are the reactions of body to the thought appearing in the mind. 

If we investigate ‘thought, whatever the thought is about, we see that it has certain objective qualities. In fact, our mind has ability to handle thoughts only if they have objective qualities. The nature of thought , whether it is of Chinese tyrant XI  or a holy rishi in the Himalayas is the same. We are not talking about the ‘content’ , but the objective qualities of ’thoughts’. Thoughts are phenomena. They are observable, finite, temporary and limited. They say an average human being gets about 66,000 thoughts per day during his waking state of consciousness. In deep sleep he gets none, though consciousness remains. When self-preserving thoughts dominate, the ‘I’ aka ego gets the boost and forms the basis of societal mores, culture and civilisation. But this is not a discussion on ‘I’--we have digressed.

We were on track to arrive at  the uselessness of mind to understand ‘Reality’ or ‘Absolute Truth’. As thoughts are about observable phenomena and all observable phenomena is single and individuated , they are only relative or just part of the whole not the whole. That is why in our scriptures, they define ‘Reality’ though Nyet, Nyet ( Not this , Not this) technique. In fact, as all phenomena is just a part of the whole and therefore relative, the whole is a kaleidoscope of multiple realities, just like colour ‘White’ which is not separate colour. If you recall the 9th standard science experiment, when a disc with individual colours in multiple sectors is spun fast, the colours merge to create a white appearance. 

When all relative phenomena collide, like plus and minus cancel out to zero, like north & south, east & west cancel out and all paths in the universe converge into a circle, there is nothing but Shunya at the core. That this ’Nothing’ at the core is a field of enormous potential as the modern day physicists have come to conclude and it is beyond mind to grasp. As the Quantum Physicists say, all matter in the world is made of atoms and atoms are made of particles, but are not particles but waves as their position which should be determinable ( if we treat them as particles)  cannot be determined except within margins of probability. The current theory is that the act of observing the particle determines its position.  Hence we cannot exclude the observer from the observed and  the building blocks of the observed world is not a  deterministic reality at all!—they do not exist independent of the consciousness witnessing it.!!

The building blocks of the material , observable world is made up of Quantum Field of Pure Potential. Everything in this Universe with all its galaxies is made up of this building block but it is not observable at all. We are able to work with it though , for practical purposes, much like the value of pi which is but an imaginary number—as the ratio of a diameter to the circumference of a circle, it extends into infinity. Even maths fails here as there is no such thing as a perfect circle. The errors are infinistmal as the digits of pi  beyond the decimal place extend into infinity.

While the sub-atomic world is fascinating and has reached a dead end, so as to say, the cosmic world of the Universe is much even more mysterious,beyond grasp and ever expanding.

Here is given below the findings of the Hubble Telescope, the optical telescope launched by NASA and European Space Agency ( ESA) in 1990 as quoted in the website dedicated, to the Hubble telescope - https://hubblesite.org.

Galaxies may seem lonely, floating alone in the vast, inky blackness of the sparsely populated cosmos — but looks can be deceiving. This image of NGC 1706, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is a good example of this. NGC 1706 is a spiral galaxy, about 230 million light-years away, in the constellation of Dorado (the Swordfish).
NGC 1706 is known to belong to something known as a galaxy group, which is just as the name suggests — a group of up to 50 galaxies which are gravitationally bound and hence relatively close to each other. Around half of the galaxies we know of in the universe belong to some kind of group, making them incredibly common cosmic structures. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, belongs to the Local Group, which also contains the Andromeda galaxy, the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, and the Triangulum galaxy.
Groups are the smallest of galactic gatherings; others are clusters, which can comprise hundreds of thousands of galaxies bound loosely together by gravity, and subsequent superclusters, which bring together numerous clusters into a single entity.

Again at the edge of the known universe some 13.4 billion light years away, 

Using Hubble, astronomers found what could be the farthest galaxy ever seen to date. Dubbed GN-z11, the infant galaxy appears as it was about 13.4 billion years in the past, when the universe was only about three percent of its current age. GN- z11 is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and possesses just one percent of our galaxy’s mass in stars. However, the fledgling galaxy is growing fast, forming stars about 20 times faster than our galaxy does today. Up close, the galaxy would appear to be ablaze with bright, young, blue stars, but it looks red because its light has been stretched to longer (redder) wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.
Astronomers had previously estimated GN-z11’s distance based on its color in images from Hubble and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Follow-up spectroscopic observations with Hubble, however, provided a more precise measurement for the distance and revealed that the galaxy was even farther away than originally thought. It is the first time astronomers have made such a measurement for a galaxy so far away. GN-z11 is at the limit of what Hubble can observe, and its discoverers think the galaxy is likely to hold on to the distance record until NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope launches and begins to use its infrared cameras to peer even deeper into the universe.

When we wait with bated breath to see the results of the James Webb Space Telescope to peer deeper into the Universe which is yet unfolding , by what stretch of imagination can we understand the mysteries of ‘Reality’.  Just like Vishnu could not scour the end of skies to locate Shiva’ head while Brahma delved deep and could not find the feet of Shiva, our cosmologist and particle physicists are not able to see the limits of the Universe and pierce the veil of quantum field of the sub-atomic world, which is a Shunya of infinite potential.

As our scriptures have concluded, It is not possible, so long as the self or our individual consciousness is focussed on the external objects. As Ramana Maharishi says, our mind is ike a caterpillar grasping at a leaf while leaving the one it is feasting on, the mind is ever occupied with the machinations of the separate self, the ‘I’. If the self is made to look inwards , it fails to grasp at anything as taking a step back towards oneself is absurd and not possible.  The ensuing silence is pure awareness as the individual consicousness becomes self-aware. There is absence of trhought in that deep silence. This is pure meditation, though some spiritual teachers ask you to focus on a personal god, or Ishvara or at least focus on your breath. Those forms of mediation as basically concessions to the idea of separate ‘I’, as focus on as subtle an object as breath is better than being engrossed on gross objects. However, it is still taking the mind outwards . The seer and what is being seen merge, the subject and object of all thoughts, perceptions, feelings and emotions merge. The end of separate ‘I’. The pure consciousness within ourselves unconstrained by any vicissitude of the mind is the same stuff that permeates all objects in the Universe as the infinite consciousness and infinite self-organising intelligence. I am that, you are that. Tat tvam Asi.
Thus spake the authors of Upanishads, themselves citing what their masters had heard from masters who in turn had learnt from their own masters, in a of lineage spanning a few thousand years.