Thursday, February 21, 2008

the (near) end of my reading habit ...

A couple of years ago ... a question occurred to me ... is any of my thoughts an entirely original thought, or is it primarily a result of everything that I have read from childhood ? Is anything I think my own ? Can it ever be ? If the human mind is a system that is programmed by what the senses are exposed to i.e. DATA, and that in turn plays a major role not only in determining the limits of perception in the future, but also what actions are undertaken by the human body - i.e. if DATA is interpreted as CODE ... then what degree of security do we have. And should one allow oneself to be programmed by -any- book (or experience!) at all, even the Bhagvad Geeta or the Patanjali Yoga Sutras for that matter! If 'buddhi' is also programmed or colored if you will, by sensory input then we are not just full of buffers waiting to be overflowed but we are a system with a completely exposed code area that anyone can write to. (I have since discovered that it IS possible to find a mechanism that is not affected by I/O ... but that is another story)

Seemed scary.

This led me to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of information, and the human mind.

When I hit the limits of language as we know it - I needed to work then at another level and saw that I had nothing more to read!

Why I lost my belief in words ... and how I (almost) ended my reading habit

God. When I talk with you and use the word 'God' - I have many different memes associated with that word in my mind. And -- you -- probably have a set of other, different memes in your mind. And both of us probably are not in sync with what we 'think' is 'real'. Forget what 'IS' real. Why God - even plain words like, say -- 'western culture', when used by enough people, result in a large amount of what can best be called verbal delusion or 'vikalpa' (shabda-dnyaanaanupaati vastushoonyo vikalpahaa - Patanjali yoga sutras, Samadhi paada.)

Examine any language closely, and you will slowly realize that all words are mere pointers to reality. No wonder that ancient sanskrit grammarians recognized and studied languages and grammars -- nay, not just that but whole levels or media of communication more powerful than written and spoken language. For instance - 'paraa', 'pashyanti', 'madhyamaa' ...

Examine any language you know closely, and you will also see laws analogous to Newtons laws of motion or the laws of thermodynamics ... hell, meaning seems subject to entropy as well.

When I realized this, the first thing that struck me was, it is impossible to follow the 'yama' or rule of 'satya' or truth; if I speak or use 'common' language, so to speak. If the very nature of the language I know is untruth, how can I ever claim to be truthful!

All words are lies (and so are these! ... see the loop... beautiful, but a limitation in a tool that attempts to describe reality accurately.) So words seem to me now like シャボン玉 -soap bubbles blown by children. Beautiful, ethereal, temporal ... but not very good as tools for accurately describing reality - a use case most often attributed to languages.

So ... the end of language as I knew it.
This is from my notebook - from about a year ago.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008