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A theory of the world

Making sense of the universe seems to be quite a tall order.  There is too much diversity in the world, is it possible that behind all this diversity there is just a simple universal explanation. Thousands of years ago, Kapila who was perhaps the first known philosopher founded a school of thought called Samkhya, It has been almost forgotten, now but it influenced all philosophies of India that followed it, Vedanta, Yoga, Jainism, Buddhism. There is also a chapter in Geeta dedicated to Samkhya. Samkhya provides a very insightful theory of how the world works. The beauty of this theory is that it can be empirically verified by any human being by observing themselves, unlike scientific theories which take multiple years of study to understand and cannot be verified unless you have very expensive instruments. Here is that theory: There are two things in the universe 1. Attention and 2. Objects (Physical and Subtle) Physical objects are what appear to...

A new way of looking

We look at the world in this manner, that I am a person and there are other persons, some of these persons are  good  and some are bad. There are things in the world which are good and which are bad, and so on and so try to  stay  with the good persons and away from the bad ones, and get good things while trying to avoid the bad things. The right way look at it is that I am not a person and in fact there are no persons, there is attention and there are  objects of attention.  Attention in itself is eternal, there is no life or death for it. For a brief period of time attention  is experiencing this show of objects created by nature. Every moment of this show is wondrous and amazing, but we forget that we are eternal attention, and there is only a brief show that I am enjoying. I start to give importance to things, have goals worry about the future. All the while  forgetting that life is just a brief show of objects that natu...

Thoughts

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Thoughts are   subtle objects . As with any other subtle object, when you attach to thought you go off center and lose the clarity of unattached attention. However, thought is required to do any work, it is required to communicate, it is even required to know that you are attention. It is very easy to fall in the trap of either or, i.e.   a normal person attaches to subtle objects and an enlightened person does not ever attach to subtle objects, It is not so black and white. For a normal person attention attaches 24/7 to subtle objects and never rests without attachment in its own clarity. For someone like the Buddha, it does not attach 24/7 to subtle objects, but only when necessary for example to communicate or to do certain work. In fact it might be like 1 hour total out of 24 hours. The practice of meditation leads attention to progressively increase the time it rests in itself. Initially it might be very small as the attachment channe...

Subtle things

Almost all of our life is spent chasing or avoiding subtle things. What are these subtle things. These are things that you experience yourself and cannot be seen by others. For example Joy, Pain, Happiness, Pleasure, Excitement, Enjoyment, Satisfaction, Love, belonginess, Security. How about other things such as money, relationships etc, in essence they boil down to the pursuit of subtle things. Who is the one that knows subtle objects, it is you as   attention . Why do we pursue subtle things? We want to get pleasure and avoid pain.   This is because we are missing the knowledge that we are attention, and do not know the clarity and peace of the state wherein we do not attend to subtle things. For almost all of us, life is a game of aversion to certain subtle things and attraction or pursuit of other subtle things, in either case whether we have an aversion or attraction to a subtle thing, attention is grabbed by it. Since I am attention, anothe...

Attention and its flow

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Attention's    (or Consciousness's) natural home is in the heart and through nerve channels it can flow to various parts of the body. Why do I think so, well if a nerve is severed or otherwise numbed by medicine (e.g. painkillers), consciousness cannot reach that part of the body. So it is reasonable to assume nerves are the channel through which consciousness (or attention) flows throughout the body. Further these channels are deepened as consciousness flows through them again and again, thus if you give importance to certain pain (or sensation) in the body, the channel will deepen, and so next time consciousness will flow there again. Similarly if you give importance to certain thoughts, the channel to the head will deepen and next time consciousness will flow there again.  In general giving attention to thoughts causes consciousness to go to the head. In fact the head is the seat of thoughts and different parts are responsible for various thoughts...

I am attention

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If you look at yourself there are two aspects 1. Things you can attend to this includes the world, body and mind  2. Attention, i.e. which thing do I focus on. What does it mean to be conscious, it means the capacity to pay attention to something.   When you are  unconscious attention is gone. Who am I is the most fundamental philosophical question. So to begin with I can say that I am these three things Body, Mind and attention. Of these the alive (or I) part is just attention, body and mind are things to which I attend to, thus body   and mind  are really objects of attention. What is I at its core, it is just this capacity of paying attention to various things in the body and mind. As mentioned before meditation is nothing other than to remind ourselves of our unchanging dimension  till we don't need to...

Satisfaction Meditation and Duality

There are three major themes of this blog they are Satisfaction, Meditation and Duality. Satisfaction : Satisfaction is the goal of life, dissatisfaction is what drives us to make efforts. In a sense dissatisfaction is the fuel that runs the world. As with all things an excess of dissatisfaction is also not good, and there needs to be a balance between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. If achieving goals is the only way to satisfaction, then this balance is hard to achieve since frankly many of our goals are probably not achievable. Further, even if one goal is achieved another goal is in its place to repeat the cycle of dissatisfaction and effort. Fortunately, we can get attain satisfaction without achieving goals, and this brings us to the concept of meditation. Meditation : The aim of meditation is to produce satisfaction without any goals being fulfilled. How is that possible? The reason is that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are after all mental states and meditation ...