Author: manuscrypts

  • I am the absolute

    The translation of Ahaṁ Brahmāsmi. Don’t worry, it isn’t my ego talking.

    I was reminded of this thanks to this fantastic episode on Lex Fridman’s podcast – with Joscha Bach.

    I remember it was a while back when I first heard the postulation that Adam & Eve hurriedly covering themselves after eating the apple was an allegory for humans first developing consciousness about themselves. Joscha extends this and talks about how the Bible, specifically Genesis 1, has sections on the mind systematically creating a a game design that helps interact with the world. In his own words,

    ” where it’s being described that this creative spirit is hovering over the substrate and then is creating a boundary between the world model and sphere of ideas, earth and heaven, as they’re being described there, and then it’s creating contrast and then dimensions and then space, and then it creates organic shapes and solids and liquids and builds a world from them and creates plants and animals, give them all their names. And once that’s done, it creates another spirit in its own image, but it creates it as men and women, as something that thinks of itself as a human being and puts it into this world. And the Christians mistranslate this, I suspect, when they say this is the description of the creation of the physical universe by a supernatural being. I think this is literally a description of how in every mind a universe is being created as some kind of game engine by a creative spirit, our first consciousness that emerges in our mind even before we are born and that creates the interaction between organism and world. And once that is built and trained, the personal self is being created and we only remember being the personal self, we no longer remember how we created the game engine.”

    This is basically the development of consciousness. And we cannot remember the time we made it. The game engine is the universe we keep building until we are no longer around.

    And the Bible is not alone in this. Remember Samudra Manthan from Hindu mythology, it is full of symbolism. An individual in this world seeking immortality. Transcendence. The mountain Mandara represents the human mind and the manthan is its churning in the vast collective consciousness. The devas and asuras obviously are the positive and negative influences. Vishnu’s koorma avatar (turtle) which stabilises the mountain during the churn point to how we should try to focus our mind. (on God, but I will abstain from that part :D)

    Halahala, the emergent poison that Shiva swallows (earning him the name Nilkanth) shows how we must confront our inner demons . From Kamadhenu to Airavata to Kalpavriksha, there are all sorts of distractions that are possible. Dhanvantari appearing with the amrit symbolises the importance of health. The amrit is what allows you to merge with the collective consciousness and thereby in a sense become immortal.

    Ok, snap. I don’t think I will get there. In The Flavours of Death, I had posted an excerpt from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age

    Simone de Beauvoir Death The Coming of Age

    …’there is no place where it will all live again’. And that’s just it. Outside of photos, notes like these or maybe conversations with friends, the universe that was created in my mind will no longer exist when I die. It dies with me. And thus Ahaṁ Brahmāsmi. The universe that I made with all its affections and peeves and desires and animosities and fears and longings and expectations, disappears when I take my final breath. I will not be around in the aftermath to feel that sadness, but I am here now, and I do feel the twinge.

    Aham bummed asmi ? #okbye

  • Unwinding Anxiety: Train Your Brain to Heal Your Mind

    Judson Brewer

    The book descriptor is what drew me in – ‘train your brain to heal your mind’. in “Unwinding Anxiety”, Dr. Judson Brewer attempts to do this with a three act structure – set up, confrontation, resolution. In this context, identifying the triggers, understanding the why behind the cycles and updating the brain’s reward networks, and then tapping into the brain’s learning centres to break the cycles.

    The book begins on point with the dictionary definition of anxiety – ‘a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome’, born when our brain doesn’t have enough information to predict the future. Fear + Uncertainty = Anxiety. An early example of the author’s mother-in-law manifesting anxiety in the form of snapping (irritability) was something I could relate to (in my own behaviour!)

    In the first part, the book also covers why the typical weapons against habits don’t work- willpower, immediate substitution, environment priming, and mindfulness. In the second part, I found the idea of changing behaviour by addressing ‘the felt experience of the rewards’ useful. This is different from thinking our way out of a behaviour, something that has failed for me in the past. Another reinforcement was about how reliving the past doesn’t really fix it, what we have is the present. In this section, the twenty one day habit-building timeframe is also debunked. The third section has useful frameworks like RAIN (Recognise, Allow/Accept, Investigate, Note) and a little part on meta worry – worrying about the next time you’ll worry. A final useful bit was not focusing on the ‘why’ of the anxiety, but instead on resolving it.

    While the title says anxiety, I felt that a lot of the book was about addiction and bad habits (smoking, overeating, alcoholism etc) and the habit changing methods that you would find in other books like The Power of Habit, or Atomic Habits. If it’s specifically anti-anxiety tips that you’re reading this for, I am not sure how useful it would be. It is arguable that anxiety is a habit, and what works for changing other habits can work for this as well. Somehow, I think that might be a superficial cure, and we don’t really know how to fix the real problem yet.

    Unwinding Anxiety

  • BLR Brewing Co

    Back in the day, I had reviewed Biergarten for Bangalore Mirror, when it opened its first outlet, in Whitefield. It has lasted 8 years, and that’s no mean feat. We had been frequent visitors until the crowds became intolerable. Ok, them losing their brain, dish that is, also played a role. Zoom to now, they have a neighbour- BLR Brewing Co, and the crowd during the first week was a scene to behold. Even those who had reserved a table had to wait. I think we got lucky in that respect.

    BLR Brewing Co Whitefield

    The place is quite huge with two levels of seating. I suspect upstairs overlooking the courtyard would be a nice place, but we were led to a table near this slightly weird pool, which also had some seating in the middle (last photo with those mini palms) The day we visited, there was also a fire show.

    BLR Brewing Co Whitefield

    They didn’t have all the beers, but we tried a Hefeweizen, Belgian Wit, Dunkelweizen, and Six Decades (APA). The Wit was easily the winner, the Dunkel was not too bad. Everything else was reasonably bad!

    BLR Brewing Co Whitefield

    The Shrimp Hor Gao had shrimp, that’s the kindest I can say. The Black Sesame Chicken Tikka just about passed muster though it was highly recommended by our service staff. I’ll get to that guy in a bit. The Feta Salad was dead on arrival. I am naturally biased against salads, but even those unlike me agreed.

    We asked for the Old Mutton Seekh because despite the elaborate menu, there were really not many interesting choices. The saving grace in the entire meal was the Bheja Fry. They did this a little differently – fried so it got a mildly crunchy texture, with an excellent masala. I am not sure why they called it the Rainbow Chicken Dim Sum, it was all dim!

    BLR Brewing Co Whitefield

    The Roasted chicken-Cheese sauce pizza throughly depended on us for flavour, and we depended on the sauce we got for the dim sum. Now that was good!

    That service guy was something. He was at our table ALL the time providing commentary before, during, and after the order, or removing things, incessantly interrupting our conversations. I repeatedly tried to signal my annoyance, to the extent that D got annoyed at my annoyance! The bill came to a little under Rs.5300 for four of us. I am unlikely to repeat. At best, I will order in that brain fry!

    BLR Brewing Co, Plot No:2, Doddanekundi Industrial Area, Bangalore Ph: 08071174545

  • Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

    Claire L. Evans

    I had a sense of deja vu while reading this, and later realised that it was thanks to Maria Popova’s Figuring. The books are very different in terms of scope, but are connected by the women-oriented narrative, the idea of intellectual successors, and the presence of what one could call a ‘crossover character’ – Maria Mitchell.

    When we think about the internet’s history, and its current pantheon, the names that pop up are all, or at least mostly, male. But Claire Evans points out that the origin stories are actually mostly female. Their contributions are practically invisible both in the public eye, and while we use the web.

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  • Slowly and then suddenly…

    …because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…

    We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality?  How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?

    The man… the machine

    This is from my first post on what I called the augmented human, back in 2009. And I continue to ask myself what the man-made man will be like.

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