“The excessive importance attached to objects give rise in science to a certain kind of theory favoured by specialists, which for instance cropped up in psychiatry in the form of “brain mythology”…In all such theories an attempt is made to elucidate a very wide range of experience in terms of principles which, though applicable over a small area, are wholly inappropriate for other fields.”
Carl Jung pg 306 Personality Types
“If the attainment of the middle path consisted in a mere surrender to instinct, as the bewailers of "naturalism" suppose, the profoundest philosophical speculation that the human mind has ever known would have no raison d'etre [rationale]. But, as we study the philosophy of the Upanishads, the impression grows on us that the attainment of this path is not exactly the simplest of tasks. Our Western superciliousness [arrogance] in the face of these Indian insights is a mark of our barbarian nature, which has not the remotest inkling of their extraordinary depth and astonishing psychological accuracy.
“We are still so uneducated that we actually need laws from without, and a task-master or Father above, to show us what is good and the right thing to do. And because we are still such barbarians, any trust in the laws of human nature seems to us a dangerous and unethical naturalism. Why is this? Because under the barbarian's thin veneer of culture the wild beast lurks in readiness, amply justifying his fear. But the beast is not tamed by locking it up in a cage. There is no morality without freedom. When the barbarian lets the beast within him, that is not freedom but bondage. Barbarism must first be vanquished before freedom can be won. In order to help him out of this conflict, another attitude than the aesthetic is needed. This is shown no-where more clearly than in the parallel with Oriental ideas. The religious philosophy of India grasped this problem in all its profundity and showed the kind of remedy needed to solve the conflict. What is needed is a supreme moral effort, the greatest self-denial and sacrifice, the most intense religious austerity and true saintliness.
vaco vegam manasah krodha-vegam jihva-vegam udaropastha-vegam etan vegan yo visaheta dhirah sarvam apimam prthivim sa sisyat
A self-controlled person who can overcome the impulses of speech, the mind, anger, the tongue, belly and genitals is qualified to instruct the whole world. Quoted from here.
I found that breathing from the lowest part of my body kept me in emotional equilibrium to the point that I could feel the whole line from the tongue, belly down to the genitals completely relax. Otherwise generally for me, my tongue is very tense in my mouth. My belly feels like there is a flame burning on it. But while doing deep breathing from the lowest part of my body as I could, I found the whole line that makes the symmetry of the front of my body be relaxed. Otherwise I feel the tongue and belly are very reactive.
Waves of sensations are constantly reverberating all over the body.
We should maintain emotional equilibrium no matter what the mood of the sea is.
Deep breathing helps with that.
Deep breathing seems to remove the fuel from the flame on the belly, so to say. So if the fuel is removed, then there is no flame. No flame and the body is in equilibrium. Breathe out from where ever you feel sensations and the sensations stop burning. Then the body is calm. This worked on Ritalin. I'm curious if it would work without it.
Deep breathing seems to pretty much kill thinking and the thought process. The mind is rested. I have found that I generally have to hold my breath when I think. Apparently many people have found this. They hold their breath when they need to focus or concentrate. For me when I am thinking a lot, I feel my back tense up. That is where I feel the tension--on my upper back. I feel sensations. I visualize it like white veins. I'm sure everyone visualizes it in their own way. All I know is that when I feel this sensation, I have a very difficult time sleeping.
I've found Vipassana to be a great tool in practicing all the above and being aware of the body. The essence of Vipassana is equilibrium and awareness. Vipassana has taught me to see my body as a precision tool. Every action of the body creates an equal and opposite reaction. I feel that this is what Jung talked about when I was talking of the conflict of opposites.
Vipassana says that there needs to be a balance between awareness of sensation and equilibrium. In my case I think I was very aware of sensation but I didn't have enough equilibrium. Too much awareness of sensation produces anxiety. The more deep breathing I am doing it is cooling me down. The cooler I am getting the clearer I can think. I can feel the fire of my belly cooling down. The lower parts of my body is cool.
Boudhanath has different parts of it. The top part is what Srila A.C Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada brought to the West. The lower parts can be realized through Vipassana and the different yoga disciplines I believe.
I had read this tip from one of my favorite blog sites: Paul's tips. In one particular posting he wrote about the importance of making a lot of small cheap experiments.
Life is about making experiments. I have made a number of experiments. Of the experiments in my life, a few of them stand out with significance.
1. Chanting Hare Krishna
2. Exploring Jung's functions on Vyvanse
3. Vipassana
4. Healing myself through writing in this blog
The theoretical model that I have referred to in all these experiments are the same. I am going to post this model on this blog one of these days. I will post it as a picture. I have actually created a 3-dimensional model of this model in the physical world. It is going to be more difficult to depict it in 2-dimension space. Maybe I will make a video of it, post it on youtube and then link back to this blog with it.
Every inner force has an equal and opposite reaction. But by practicing something like Vipassana, I feel that it is possible to bring about a dynamic equilibrium in the whole system.
It is hard for me to explain what it means for a system to be in dynamic equilibrium with itself. But I feel that it is something very similar to how a gyroscope works.
A gyroscope is dynamic because it is spinning. Yet it is in equilibrium with itself. Amazingly it almost seems like the law of equal and opposite reaction doesn't work in relation to it. It seems like it is able to absorb external forces within it's own equilibrium instead of reacting to it.
I am actually a very shy person. I hide behind my own intellectualism. So by expressing myself in writing in this way in a public blog I feel that I am developing my tolerance for uncertainty. I am taking a huge risk by making my inner private life so public. But I feel that I need to do this to develop my tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. It's not going to kill me to express these things.
I know that I have had a very low tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity. And as I express this I am afraid of how someone might use this knowledge about me to hurt me. I feel like going into flight or fight mode as I write these words. Wow, I just had dejavu. And I feel that this will not get published. I almost feel like I might unconsciously sabotage myself. This is some really whacked up convoluted logic.
I believe in the conflict of opposites. I feel that I suffer from solipsism. I feel that I suffer from this from being an extreme introvert. I am trying to cure myself of this through my writing in this blog.
I feel that I developed solipsism when my emotional system went on lock down. I experienced emotional paralysis. I lost confidence in my inner security system.
Think of what would happen to a network engineer if he found that a hacker had entered into his system and was spreading viruses all over. Now imagine if the information network system was your heart and mind. What would you do? How would you react? Wouldn't you want to survive? Wouldn't you want to lock everything down so that the hacker could not destroy your system?
Well that is exactly what I did. Except I slammed the door to my heart and head too hard. The result was mental paralysis. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This is true of even the inner world. If you slam your inner system down with a force, you have to use the same amount of force to re-open that slammed door. This is what I've found in my healing process.
I have had to use the drugs Vyvanse and Ritalin in the process of opening my slammed door. It has been a nerve wracking process. It has emotionally exhausted me. It has made me so distraught. I have brought a lot of suffering in a lot of people's lives through this process. It feels really good to be able to honestly express this.
I have been so afraid to express this. I have feared all the ramifications careerwise and all that in expressing all of this. I have feared that people will not hire me. I have feared my future co-workers laughing at me for expressing all of this.
I have been paralyzed by my own fear. Fear can have a vicious cycle. I feel so overwhelmed in expressing all of this. It feels like too much at one go. I am wondering if there will be a relapse.
The tip of my heart hurts. Now I feel like the tip of my heart is re-entering my head. It feels like the tip of my heart that I had been pulling and pulling for most of my life, it is being released. It feels like it is finding its way back in my head. My head is swimming.
In many ways much of what I am expressing feels like it is too sacred to say in public. But I have gotten to the point that I don't care anymore. I really need to heal and get better. And I am ready to move forward and do whatever it takes to do so.
I'm not sure that writing all of this will necessarily help. But I don't feel it can hurt. I feel that my fear (of the impact of me being this open in public) has hurt me a lot more than the impact itself. What is to happen will happen. As I write this, my head feels weird. I feel pressure on one side of my head.
Can anyone out there use this information and hurt me? Probably. Can anyone hurt me more than I have hurt myself through my paralysis? Probably not.
I have locked myself in a vicious cycle of reactions and aversions. It was a bureacratic maze through which I had no way of coming out. Finally Vyvanse came to that rescue of pushing myself out. But that was just the first part of it. There was more hell for me to go through. More people to hurt. More misunderstanding. More of my reputation being ruined. More credibility being compromised.
And then a friend showed me an astrollogical chart. And I thought I was the messiah. And I went overboard and crashed again.What is interesting is that this astrollogical chart actually charted out the journey I went through in my life and the solutions I would provide the world. In many ways, in the course of writing this blog I am actually doing it. So it is a self-fulfilling prophecy in a certain sense.
Then Ritalin came to my life. And it opened all kinds of doors. But still everything was not clear. Ritalin came with it's own baggage. It made me very jittery and reactive.
I am continuing to write with the force that I do because I feel that this will heal me. I feel the tip of the needle of my heart at the bottom of my heart again. I don't know what it means.
I feel like I am swinging on the ball of a pendulum. The the top of the rope is attached to my head. The bottom of the ball to my heart. I feel that both are connected now. But I can't make any sense of it beyond that.
I am aware that a lot of the things that I am expressing in this post, it is in a language that the world does not speak. But just because the world does not speak this language does not mean that it is not true for me. I have been very hesitant to express myself in language not spoken by the world. Like I said, this has felt very egotestical to me.
Right now I am on Ritalin and it seems to hide my inhibitions from me in being able to express myself spontaneously in writing.
In this way I would say that I have been very gutsy in my life. I have expressed myself in ways that would be considered most unpolitic. But I took the chance. I was ready to take the impact of my actions on my teeth. I believed so strongly in it.
I can't help but feel that I am swinging on this pendulum. And it is going across the equator of my being. It is swinging across opposites. The above two sentences are opposites.
I'm practicing some stream-of-consciousness writing in my recent blog writing. It is a liberating feeling to just spontaneously write.
Write now in my life I am struggling to find my voice of self-honesty in the context of the truth that I believe in. It is tough.
My private hand in writing (when I do personal journalling) is quite fluid. But my public hand (when I write in my blog) is not steady. The inner-critic in me nags me.
I am afraid of my own ego. Does that sound whack?
I feel that I have an irrational fear of identifying with matter. This is part of my spiritual belief. I feel that I am spirit and that I shouldn't identify with matter. So being too proud of material achievements just rubs me the wrong way.
Of course I recognise that since I am not spiritually self-realized, I don't necessarily know where the world of matter ends and the world of spirit begins.
I play all kinds of mental games with myself in not being egotistical. It is amusing really. But it does end up over-complicating my life. I jump through such hoops in not being egotistical that I end up in solipsism, I feel. It's hard to explain.
So in many ways, in doing all of this writing, I feel that I am practicing the principles espoused by Viktor Frankl in Logotherapy. So this writing is very therapeutic for me. If you fear your ego then you should express your ego to get rid of your fear. Establish your spiritual ego and use it before it uses you. Establish yourself in your real ego--spiritual ego. Write from the perspective of your spiritual ego. Act according to your spiritual ego. This is my healthy ego. This is my true identity.
My spiritual identity is that of being spirit soul. And while in this world I identify myself as a Nepali and being born in a certain family.
But since the message that I am expressing is spiritual according to my beliefs, I don't feel that it is a violation of ego to expressing it. It's my healthy ego.
In saying all of this, I can feel the tip of the compass of my heart. I identify this tip of the compass of my heart as my intention. I feel that I use this compass to point at different parts of the genus. I wonder if others can identify with the tip of their heart in this way. For me, when I write honestly, I can feel this tip move. Does that sound whack?
It shouldn't. I have felt this concretely. Writing on the basis of personally experienced and realized knowledge is knew to me. I have generally only written things that I have verified through rigorous thought experiments. Trusting my body and emotions and writing from there is a new experience.
Expressing myself this openly and honestly is something very new to me. I used to feel very shy about speaking in this way. I felt that this world was private to me. Now I want to write to see if others can identify with the language that I speak. It would be great to have a conversation on this subject.
Am I being too forthright in saying all of this you think? Krishna in the Gita says that for the doubting soul there is happiness neither in this life nor the next.
Writing this spontaneously brought a memory. It was with this level of spontaneity that I started to learn how to type with my first electronic type writer that I bought with my own money when I was 14. It was an electronic typewriter. I used to just rattle off words without thinking. It was a great way to learn how to type. I felt so free just letting go on the typewriter, not afraid of offending anyone but the scattering of words across the page.
But from that time I went through a series of experiences that killed my spontaneity. I went through a time where I froze in internal paralysis. I had what others would call writer's block. Except, it wasn't just writer's block that I suffered from. I suffered from philosophical block. I had an existential crisis of mammoth proportions. It sucked.
I would go on to have many an existential crisis in my life. But the one in my teenage years was the first. And it was traumatic. It was the rock in the jar of my life. And no matter how much sand and water that I poured after this, this rock seemed to eclipse all the light in my life. All the sand and water seemed to simply settle around this rock that defined my life. It defined the nature of my misery. I feel sad expressing this. It was unfortunate to me and many others.
