I am Cipher

Somewhere in this world there's a place.A place i want to be , one i would never want to leave. wisdom would say there's no such place. that its all an illusion. its human nature to want more than what one has, achieve it , and find oneself wanting even more. we do that. we are made that way.

Es la verdad.

Smith was right. Morpheus.. you were a fool. you should never have liberated us. we were better off in our pods, asleep, emanating energy, our minds tucked away beneath a veil of dreams, controlled environments with a titillating touch of randomness, the illusion of freedom., unknowingly feeding on our own kind, blissfully unaware of the desolation we wrought of our ambitions. Smith was right. We are a virus, a plague, and they are the cure.

They're here, there, everywhere. They're our masters. The irony is that it was us who wanted to play God. It was us who gave them the power. Or was it just one big fat joke that fate played on us? or maybe it was as simple as survival of the fittest, only this time, the weak, in a moment of false self gratification animated the stronger. After that its simply a case of being served our own medicine. Just as we looked to keep all "animals" in controlled habitats, they now do the same. Just as we sowed seeds and reaped fruit to feed our insatiable hunger, they harvest us, our minds locked away in complete ignorance, maybe even happy for it.

We "live" in this dream because they have a use for us. You "liberated" me, but my second thought was "why oh why did I not take the blue pill!!!" .. did you ever stop to think what if I wanted to be fooled, what if I preferred the illusion, what if I.. I didn't care a damn thing what humanity is doing... I didn't have to in the "dream world"... I didn't need to. My mind was at peace. I could believe whatever was comfortably served up, I could just turn a blind eye... Why did you show me my bondage? I was comfortable being bound to a "fate" of insignificance. Why did you give me an illusion to replace another? Wy did you give me an illusion of significance? Why did you pull me out of the controlled chaos and put me in a unbounded void? reality was as real to me when i was asleep as it is now...why live this reality than that?

They are evolution.They are our successors.IF we're so wise, why did we scorch the skies? why didn't we simply barter peace? why did we not have them move out to another abundant rock? why in our desperation did we not look up? why did we keep looking down? deep down? we pay for the sins of our forefathers, but do we really care about the debt we pass on to our progeny?

Why then should i stand and fight against the order of nature? against evolution? a battle we all know is LOST!!

Answer me!!!

A little Epiphany

There'se this one thing that suddenly flashed in my mind as it might have to many others...

What if what we perceive as time is actually space and space is actually time?

What if when man looks out to the stars, what he sees is not what exists or existed in that direction, billions of miles away?

What if space isnt actually unbounded, and we are in but a small bubble, and around us what we see is the reflection of that bubble in time? What if the star we see somewhere in the night sky is actually our own sun, but in some other time? What if we receive a message from an unknown civilization, only to find out it was someone like us, on earth eons ago who tossed a tablet skywards and it fell back in our time?

Food for crazy thought ...

An(other) Aryan Theory

the purpose of this time's textual struggle is another attempt to kill time while I travel.

the last time i posted, Mayur raised a very good point, a point of view, actually, that of a skeptic.

He might have not intended it that way, but that did trigger a chain of thoughts, a debate/bout if you will,

on one side lies the faith of men, faith in destiny, faith in faith itself.On the other is the juncture of acitons governing events and the doer being responsible rather than "the divnie", which in a more concentrated form evolves into atheism, 

Its an interesting comncept, this. humanity has been struggling with it right since the day it was born. What man did not understand, he called divine and revered it.

We still continue to do the same, and there will always be some trace of humanity that will cling on to it till the very end. And there will always be the antagpnists, so to speak who will question this divinity and seek to enlighten themselves. some wll go to the extreme, and denounce all divinity, proclaiming humanity an in turn, themselves to be the ones in control.

"Science" as we know it has evolved through this stuggle itself.Its basic motive is to explain what is hiterto inexplicable. Technology is its offshoot, its the dreamweaver and the tool to fulfill dreams.

But since the inception of all rational thought, there is one question our race has repeatedly asked of whatever we imagined could answer us: "How did it all start?"

How did it all start?

The big bang? was it the beginning of all? but to bang together, there must have been something that could bang! how did that come into being?

Even if there was something, what made it bang together? what force caused it? why did it happen at the exact time it happened? why not earlier? why not later?

Why do we assume there was only one such bang? what if there were many? what is the eact nature of this universe?

you start asking yourself thes questoins, and you rea;llse, the list of possibilities, and the subsequent questions they raise jsut goes on getting more and more enormos and complex.the best supercomouter, the mind itself, in its untrained form cannot comprehend the immsense flows of information required to be gathered, analysed, generated while trying to solve even one of these questions.and we in this age do not really know what the limits of the mind are when trained to realise its potential.

people of yesteryear did that.the very quest for enlightement formed the base of the ancient religion. ancient deities were often symbolic representations of the elements. then the forces of creation and destruction, then as civilisation evolved, and the range of tasks possible to be performed evolved, the kind of obstacles faced grew, and with them, grew the number and nature of deities

one way to look at this is, man , given a task needs an incentive to want to do the task. What better incentive than the Blessings of an all-powerful entity, maybe even some of the power itself!

this gave rise to the system of the common man's deities, and the rituals associated with each social task. What a masterstroke!

what a way to keep a full social order busy! give everyone things to do, give them methods, and give them incentives to follow those methods, and exploit the fear of failure to make sure they do not deviate from teh said methods.

But, its impossible to progress without improvisations, and improvisation requries the freedom to think out of hte box.if fea of one power prohibits this, instate a higher power that endorses improvisation.Instate a "scientist's God". Another masterstroke! The religious order retains control and maintains structure, at teh same time ensuring progress and evolution!

But there will always be those who would see past this system.those who would again ask the Original questions, for that is the insatiable nature of the mind's thirst.They would need to sharpen their minds in order to start looking for the answers, and in doing som they will invariably unciver more and more truths, facts that might dethrone some of the earlier instated deities.

How these people should be dealt with brings us to a forking point.

different societies dealt with this situation differently.thise smart enough to perceive the benefits of acknowledging and using the works of such "ahead of their time" people gave them a degree of freedom, encouraged people to adopt that approach, knowing fully well that very few will actually do it, Christianity abhorred them to begin with, as the dark ages and the middle ages, inquisitons and abolishments of great minds of those ears would testify. Hinduism assimilated these people and revered them in almost an equal pedestal as their Gods. the Greeks had great respect for their philosophers and thinkers.

i'll talk particularly of the aryan hindu society, as thats the one i believe to know a little about.

they realised the importance of each cog fitting well and doing its job perfectly in a machine to attain optimum output.Thus, the values of  equating work to worship, projecting the end objective of every endeavour as attainment of salvation, and recognising breakthroughs took deep roots in the flourishing agrarian order of the aryans.

the thinkers, scientists and researchers of those days were called sages.anyone could attain the status of a sage by accomplishing something extraordinary in their field of work.

Thats why "rishi"s wer of some many "types", rajarshis, maharshis, brahmarshis, karmayogis, these were people who acheived greatness on their spheres, and in doing so ascended from a mere mortal to an enlightened soul. It was through the work of these poeple that mathematics, astrology, geography, art, surgery, medicine, study of social orders, advancements in technologies, came about.

I personally beleive the stories narrated in the vedas and puranas and upanishadas are not mere fantasies.they arent even verbatim accounts, but poetic accounts of real events. their true meaning lost in translation.they are all scientific journals,encoded and composed in a supposedly easier form to memorise and store, since back then, the mind was traiend as a part of education, and it was neither necessary nor possible to represent all the acquired knowledge in literal form.language always tends to add distortion to information. These journals and the events that seem magical to the reader now, actually allude to some phenomenon too well known to the contemporaries, so much so that they just thought it worthless to state it, and assumed that knowledge implicit.

The base of this system was the quest for knowledge, and salvation was supposed to be the state of complete enlightenment.

But the way it was implemented, though genius, was flawed.It assumed all participating in the control system would be strong, resistant to corruption, and resistant to the temptation of the illusion of power.

It made attemtpts to work around this, once the condition was hit by referring to the balance of good and evil, and that in the end, evil cannot be sustained.

What it did not bargain for was the time that evil did sustain.

Men gave in to temptaion, power and lost the vision which had bound people to their "work" as worship, and the system degenerated into a caste divided society, where work was bno longer worship, no longer the path to salvation, but an imposed task, and one that brought, or took away rights and priviledges. the first order had used incentives to get the society to function, the degenerated order used fear and oppression.

The illusion of power boosted egos, and where there used to be symbiotic fubctioningm there came to be friction.the social order degenerated into a caste system, and the populace forgot the true purpose of the religion, the quest for enlightenment was forgotten.and the quest for power replaced it. with it, went the realisation of the importance of training the mind. advances of old technologies were forgotten, and came to be either tabooed or used asblack-boxes, the true work of the great minds of yesteryear lost in the sea of time. methods with scientific backing degenerated into rituals, advancement of science and philosophy came to a grinding halt as the main objective of the common man's life shifted from supporting a flourishing, evolving social order, to that of survival and guarding himself and his own.

The timespan was too ling to be recoverable, and the aryan civilisation fell into gradual decay, the glory days forgotten, rememberd only in song, we, the desendants of this civilsation are relearning the secrets our abcestors had explored, from the western civilisatiob, and the saddest thing is that we now look to the west for approval of the brilliance and soundness of our heritage.

word limit.

Analogies . . .

Since Childhood, all of us have at some point of time (or many points) been asked to write an essay on "importance of sports". At times we have wondered why is it that we like to hear/read.see stories..Why is it that performing arts are so appreciated?

To me, these past few months of semi-solitary exisatance have been a tme of a revelation, a coming of age of sorts.I find myself revisiting a lot of things taught at school, at home, which as children, we couldn't quite appreciate for what hey meant. Here, now, I see them through a completely different looking-glass and they suddenly seem to have a 3rd dimension to them, a depth, menaing, cimplexity I hadnt been able to see before.And I find myself drawing parallels between each one of these things and the concept of one;s Lifespan itself.

You pick up a book, a story. it starts with an introduction of its characters & their circumstances. It goes on explring their interactions, creating new situations, but all with an eye on the climax. The writer's attempt is to set things up during the ciurse of the story such that everything is falling into its rightful place by th etime te plot reaches a logical conclusion. You retrace this effort of his, expriencing the emotions in the manner the writer wants him to, as the story unfolds from its introduction through to the end. You put the book down, satisfied, if the pieces are all in their places by the end.

Pick a sport, any sport, or rather, any sporting contest. The whole event has a well defined objective. The players and spectatores are all a bit aware of the skills involved, but none knows exactly ow much each player has brought to the table on that day. And so the contest begins, invariably, with the players testing this out in their own ways. Then, a time comes when they are sure of their situations, and the next phase - the struggle for ascendancy beigns. Each player tries to leverage his skill and the situation to get to a position from wher he can exercise the full p[otential of his game to gain a decisive advantage. This leads to the end-game, often a frenzied battle, where in the winner is he who has utilised his skill and available situations better.

Now you look at a man's life. We start unaware of ourselves, our surroundings, the characters of our story and the charateristics tat will shape us. Our childhood, our eduxation is "the introduction". Its our chance to explore our potential & limits. We then enter the second phase, we try to set ourselves up for a good life when we have grown old, and spend the middle phase of our lives setting pieces up so that the puzzle solves itself by the time its time to lie down. At the end of all the frenzy of planing, saving, spending, all the rat races, he who has used his skills and circumstances better, finds himself at an advantage. He calls himself a "winner" in the game of life. His life is termed a "success story" ...

But all said and done, there's the question : who wrote the story? who judged the contest?

It is HIm. It is his stories we are living out as our lives. Each one of us has a different version of the story, was He trying to create on prefect story, and decided to experiment with all different versions He could come up with, or is all this just a RPG for Him.. I dont know. He has laid out hte path for us, and given us the means to walk it through. He has given us all a chance to play this game of life, and played another trick.. the illusion of control .... it is He who controls us all, yet makes us beleive we are the actors. He plays on our behalf, even though the instruments are in our hands.

His is the will that shall be done.

So, the next time you find someone talking about "the game of life" or somebody's " life-story",  you know better ... ;)

Thoughts...

Once during my frequent train sojourns, there was a little thought in my mind ... about, well, "thoughts"...what are they? How do they form? how do you know that one is forming in your mind, because, by the time you are aware of it, its already there! You sensing it is merely your brain transforming it into a verbal form. Do we think in sentences? or words acting as "keys"? or just are they visions? shapes? forms? or a shapeless, formless flash.. an enigma...

Pay a little attention and you'll realise that a thought originate as a formless entity (acknowledging thoughts as entities). You'll find that those you sense, but can not visualise , can not render into solid images that can be related to, are actually the ones you feel very intensely... we call these - "Emotions". The closer something is to your heart, more intense is the emotional response invoked, purer is the experience. More intense the emotions, more formless the imprint on the mind... tougher to bind it in words, and deeper its influence on you.

Could that be why when we are taught to concentrate, we are asked to start by picturing a still object? like a blank, unwrinkled piece of paper ... as that needs your mind to let the calmer emotions, the peaceful thoughts to come to the fore. The "omkar" chant takes this one step further. What is the Omkar? a word? a syllable? a sound? An entity..an enigma..a connecting piece... Its synonymous with you, the world pulled over your eyes, the life force that flows through this world, the comic fore that binds the universe in this form, and yet, sets it free in many more ways... IT i beyond the realm of physics, metaphysics, theology, religion, itself. A parallel may be drawn with the Hebrew symbol "Yahweh", supposed to be the name of The One True God. They say, it cannot be pronounced by us mortals. Warning bells aside, one can think of it as a manifestation of he divine, or a human attempt to bind divinity in something comprehensible. Both, this and the Omkar are attempts to capture the true meaning of everything that is, was and ever will be, That which has neither beginning nor end. Which is omnipotent, omnipresent, That which just IS.

When you focus your thought on it, you open your self to the cosmic divine. You, in your own capacity, knowingly or unknowingly are calling out to the absolute glorious truth ...It's your own purity that determines the how aware you'll become of it.

Try, for once, to follow the process of how a thought emerges in your mind...and, each time you will see that you are always just a little too slow to acknowledge when it began, but in reality, the instantaneous knowledge is there, its the translation to acknowledgement that takes time. If you pay close attention, you can feel an impulse blossoming into colors, shapes, words, and what you'd recognise as a full-fledged thought. But try to express the means of this transformation, and our means of expression sow us their extreme inadequacy, for this process is is singular, absolute, and that which is absolute cannot be bound into words. Our ability for expression is thus curbed by the limitations of what we have shackled ourselves in ... Language.

Tell me, would a child, even if it grasps all language on the first day f its birth, be able to express its very first thought? Or for that matter, can you express whats in your mind the very first waking moment of any day?

you cant. because the level of consciousness that is active at those times is beyond the consciousness we limit ourselves to when we use language. The purpose of creating language was to mould abstract thoughts into concrete words, so that one mind may relay them to another. But as any communication system has a loss factor, this one does, too, and quite a heavy one. A direct linkage of minds would be the ideal way to exchange thoughts, but indirection induces discrepancies, confusion and in due course, corruption.

But there is one medium which transcends the realms of language, that of emotion.... and the purest of which is love. Hearts given to love do not need words to understand their counterparts. They are liberated from the bounds of the lower level of consciousness the mind inhibits itself to. That is why all saints preach love, love towards the Almighty, towards all His creations. It is the only bond that does not bind the participants, but liberates them, because the bond itself is absolute, true, and omnipotent. It is God's highest creation.