Anuraag.xyz

Tag: nonduality

  • Being what is

    “Appearances do not exist in themselves but only relatively to the subject in which, so far as it has senses, they inhere.”

    – Immanual Kant

    I first heard of Joscha Bach when YouTube suggested that I watch his discussion with Lex Fridman. I thought I’m in for a deep discussion on just AGI, but the talk was nothing short of spiritual for me. There were a lot of amazing things that Joscha said on the podcast, and I’ll probably write a detailed post on that someday. For this post, one specific thing that he mentioned is relevant. This was in context of what is the ‘true’ nature of reality vs what we perceive it to be. Joscha in his trademark calm demeanor quips that “there is no color or sound in the Real world”.

    We of course know this, but it’s easily forgotten in our daily experience. Kant discussed this quite eloquently in his classic work, ‘Critique of pure reason’ where he differentiated between Phenomenal and Noumenal ‘things’. Color perceptions are entirely phenomenal. It’s a conscious experience that would not exist in itself if there were no conscious mind to have those experiences in the first place. In addition, the same ‘color’ (i.e., wavelength of light that is reflected vs absorbed) is perceived differently by different people, though they all might agree to call the different perceptions by the same name (for example, there is a lot of strong evidence that color perception varies across gender).

    In contrast, Kant defined Noumenal as something whose existence does not depend upon being perceived by some mind. These ‘things’ exist independently of us and our sensibilities. (Joscha calls this the ‘quantum graph’ in the podcast)

    In his notion of ‘transcendental idealism’, Kant went on to propose that:

    it is possible to demonstrate the empirical reality of space and time, that is to say, the objective validity of all spatial and temporal properties in mathematics and physics, but this empirical reality involves transcendental ideality. Space and time are forms of human intuition, and they can only be proved valid for things as they appear to us and not for things as they are in themselves.

    In general, Kant’s investigations in the ‘Transcendental Logic’ lead him to conclude that:

    understanding and reason can only legitimately be applied to things as they appear phenomenally to us in experience. What things are in themselves as being noumenal, independent of our cognition, remains limited by what is known through phenomenal experience.

    This brings us to the title of this post. To begin to talk about ‘Being what is’, we need to first clearly define ‘Being’ and ‘What is’ to the best of our ability. I give the Kantian context above because I think that it’s a clear way of wrapping one’s mind around ‘what-is’:

    ‘What-is’ is Kant’s ultimate Noumena.

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    “Whereever you look, you see what you are looking for.”

    – RamDass

    Trying to observe what-is is a key initial teaching for anyone exploring meditation. A lot of guided meditations start with the instruction of bringing awareness to the breath. Every thought and sensation is allowed to appear as it is. The only other instruction is to observe what is happening without trying to change or engage with it in any other way.

    The challenge of course is that the very act of observation (Phenomenal) changes what-is (Noumena) and mixes it up with our mind’s what-ought-to-be. Our conditioning will always color the way we observe and interpret the information from our senses, and this sensory information is itself a model of the Noumenal Reality. The simple act of noticing the sensations arising in consciousness carries with it a ‘concept’ map of the body in which it is apparently located. The apparent act of observation also creates the observer (the ‘me’) who is seemingly acting on objects.

    So how can one really observe what-is if the act of observation will change it? Well, you cannot. The only possibility is being what is.

    ****

    This subject-object perception is a by-product of our brain’s basic nature of information processing and discrimination (most of this happens in the neocortex).

    The emergent mind manufactures various preferences, likes, goals, desires, needs and wants that fracture what-is into multitude of opposites: Good-bad, right-wrong, pain-pleasure, happy-sad, true-false. Fear is a key underpinning knob of this system, and the dial is adjusted via an interplay of a variety of conditioned patterns. Some of these patterns go back thousands of years in our evolutionary history and they manifest as instinctive fight or flight responses.

    For most of us now, our basic survival is not under threat on most occasions, and we don’t know what to ‘do’ with this default evolutionary survival toolkit that we ship with. Since it doesn’t really need to be used to ensure survival against a harsh environment, we use it in our everyday life. This large hammer of survival instincts creates an existential nail out of every life situation. A work situation makes our anxiety and stress go up to the same degree as if we are going to be attacked by a wild animal. A small financial setback floods our body with cortisol, as if our food security is under threat.

    Instead of letting this toolkit run our day to day life, we should try to transcend it. It is simply not required in most life situations. And in an unforeseen situation that poses an actual threat to your survival, trust that your default toolkit will come to your aid automatically.

    This transcendence of the toolkit requires you to practice abandoning the use of your mind when it is not really needed. Just like your tongue is not actively trying to taste when there is nothing in your mouth, we should learn how to switch off our discriminating minds when there is no real problem to solve.

    Meditation is the practice of switching off your mind’s default activity – trying to solve so-called problems by discriminating what-is into what-ought-to-be. The resulting state of such a meditation is called ‘Being’ – a state of complete non-discrimination.

    Being is a state of complete acceptance and surrender by your mind, where there is a momentary cessation of its entire activity. And in this state of complete non-discrimination, there is an opportunity to be what-is, not by observation, but by complete dissolution of any subject and object.

    It’s impossible to describe this state in words. The various pointers that sages have left us over the years can cause this collapse of the mind to happen, but there are no rules to this. It’s a causeless happening. The beingness is not due to or dependent upon any sort of intellectual understanding. It is our essential nature that cannot ever be recognized by the mind ; the empty set that contains everything.

    Any attempt by the mind to cause this will necessarily lead to illusions that can get quite tricky to see through. An extremely common one is the fact that once your mind understands the above intellectually, it tries to objectify its non-discriminating state itself. 1

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    One practical ‘method’ that I’m trying out to get around this trickery is the ‘fractal object collapse’ meditation. In a nutshell, it’s a state of recursive observation that collapses the process of observation completely.

    Start by doing the only thing you can ‘do’ – observe your mind’s discrimination process by the automatic stream of thoughts that come up to the surface. When you initially begin, the act of such an observation will become an object in itself. Instead of resting your mind here, continue to follow the process of observing-objectification ad infinitum. As you continue to observe recursively, you will feel a sense of going deeper and deeper into a bottomless pool of pure awareness. The effort can feel excruciatingly frustrating since there will be a sense of the process always being one step ahead of your ability to catch it via observation. Observation -> Objectification -> Observation….

    Eventually, there would be a complete cessation of this observation process and hence any objectification. No one can say how ‘long’ this will last, but you’ll notice a complete rest and relaxation of the observing-objectification loop. The energy being spent on this process will subside and along with it your mind will come to a sudden pause; a glimpse of the great silence and peace of the void that lies at the core of your being.

    And That is pure ‘being what is’.

    Root:

    1 – In some sense calling it a state causes this to happen. It should be called ‘state-less’ state to begin with.

    [This post originally appeared on my substack]

  • Empty Set

    A root ‘why’ question that you can infinitely regress to is ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’

    One of the most widely accepted ‘answer’ to this question is the Anthropic principle , which in simple terms can be stated as: There is something rather than nothing because only when there is something this question can be asked in the first place. This something has given rise to an intelligence in the universe that can pose such a question. Another way to put this is: we see this something and the so called ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe because life as we know it could not have evolved in any other set of circumstances.

    A lot of philosophers and physicists balk at this answer, since it eradicates any need for further inquiry into the question. Nonduality is also assumed to be, by the mind, a similar ‘cop out’ on trying to really answer the question. I have personally witnessed a lot of people frown when the conversation reaches a point where someone utters:

    ‘Things just are.’

    ‘I am’.

    ‘It all is just a happening.’

    In this post, I’ll try and use a logical structure to basically say the same thing, but hopefully present a more ‘satisfying’ answer to the mind.

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    First up, let’s understand a term called ‘primitive notion’ that is key to the whole body of mathematics. Here is how Wikipedia defines the term:

    A primitive notion is a concept that is not defined in terms of previously-defined concepts. It is often motivated informally, usually by an appeal to intuition and everyday experience.

    For example, in contemporary geometry, point, line, and contains are some primitive notions. Instead of attempting to define them, their interplay is ruled (in Hilbert’s axiom system) by axioms like “For every two points there exists a line that contains them both.

    And here are two key examples of primitive notion that are relevant to the analogy that I’ll be building below:

    Set theory: The concept of the set is an example of a primitive notion. As Mary Tiles writes: [The] ‘definition’ of ‘set’ is less a definition than an attempt at explication of something which is being given the status of a primitive, undefined, term. As evidence, she quotes Felix Hausdorff: “A set is formed by the grouping together of single objects into a whole. A set is a plurality thought of as a unit.”

    Naive set theory: The empty set is a primitive notion. To assert that it exists would be an implicit axiom.

    Now let’s consider a set S of all possible Objects, Processes and Concepts defined as follows:

    S ε  {O, P, C}

    where:

    Objects: Whatever your mind labels as it perceives via the sensory apparatus of the five senses and thought. O ε {sights, sounds, smells, touches, tastes, thoughts and the infinite combination of these internal and external perceptions}

    Processes: State changes that appear to be an event in time. P ε  {Bodily and mental functions, aging, sunrise, …}

    Concepts: Laws, theories, explanations, definitions, language, logic. C ε {Laws of thermodynamics and energy conversation, general relativity, evolution, natural selection, Choice, Desire, set and number theory, axioms, primitive notions….}

    Note the inter-relatedness of these three elements of S. Some Concepts are set of Processes that talk about Objects. Some Processes are set of Objects that change and are explained via a Concept. And since both Concepts and Processes have names, and are perceived, labelled and categorised by your mind, they are all Objects as well.

    This inter-relatedness makes the differentiation almost trivial , but the point of defining such a set is to point you to this subtle fact: Your whole experience of consciousness is basically S ε {O,P,C}, whereas consciousness itself  is the raw awareness that contains these. 

    Symbolically, consciousness is the brackets { } that contain everything that can be talked or thought about. These curly brackets of Awareness contain and enable everything that we perceive.

    This empty set of pure Awareness is a primitive notion of everything that is. To assert that it just is, is an implicit axiom of reality.

    Primitive notions are bedrock to all rational and scientific thought. If you believe in mathematics and if you have ‘faith’ in the truth of its primitive notions, how can the primitive notion of consciousness be treated differently?

    ****

    When the bomb of nonduality was first detonated in my mind around a decade ago, the fallout was wide. It look a long time to pick up the pieces and try and see the whole. One of the natural questions that the mind throws up in this journey is:

    “So what should I ‘do’ with this deep realization?”

    Imagine for a moment that ‘you’ have a choice between picking being identified with S ε {O,P, C} OR the the empty set {}. What would you choose?

    The Concept of choice and an individual who is making the choice is of course contained in ‘C’ itself to begin with, so what we are really asking is : Can an element of set ever become aware of the set in which it is contained? To be even more precise – Can a part ever realise the whole that contains it?

    This question is behind the entire enterprise of illusory spiritual seeking that has goals such as enlightenment. The thing that is doing the seeking (the person/mind) is necessarily going to be caught in this act forever.  To be what the seeking is trying to be, it needs to paradoxically stop seeking in the first place.

    Osho talks about the same things from the perspective of effort. He says that in the initial stages of spiritual seeking, a lot of effort will be put by an individual, and it is very much required. Think of it as laying the ground work and foundation for the eventual giving up of all effort. A point will come when no more effort will be required, because the empty set will make itself known when all effort drops away. (We all are this empty set every night during deep sleep, but there is no memory of it for our minds to refer to. Remember, memory is also something that is within the set ‘P’ of Processes).

    So how can one ‘choose’ to be the empty set? By dropping all effort and seeking. Let the entire process of cosmic evolution that is burning like a fire within you reveal itself to your Awareness as an undeniable evidence of your true nature – a cosmic process that is happening on its own.

    Our minds have made us deeply believe that choosing {O,P,C} is the ‘right’ or natural way of being. Of course the mind will choose something that ensures its own survival. It is after all a product of arguably the most complex natural selection process know to itself.

    Falling back to the source, this Great nothingness, is our eventual destiny anyway. The second law of thermodynamics guarantees this state of high disorder and randomness where complex ordered life form will have to expend an energy that is greater than all the available energy to continue existing. That is when the process of evolution comes to a definite end. If you do not like this line of argument, just look at your own life. You will die one day and your body-mind implementation will come to an end. You return to the nothingness and become the empty set. So why not touch it time to time while you are within the set?

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    [This post originally appeared on my substack]