Month: January 2015

Uncategorized

Out of Depression – Time to Start Swimming

I have been through a number of blogs that are dear to me, here and in other places – and I cannot remain unsympathetic to those who share stories that are so similar to mine. I’ve been through years of depression more than I can count my years without it, but it’s long buried now and (almost?) forgotten.

From what I have seen in my own life-story and in people far and near me, to overcome depression and neurosis, a “bilateral approach” is needed: self-effort firstly, and only secondarily specialist’s assistance (which I didn’t get in my own situation – or, shall I say, my only specialist was my Indian Sadhguru?). It is extremely hard though, to face it or undertake it alone, while it is also true that nobody else can do the work for you – not any one person, not any one medicine, etc. What I mean is that you will need years of sustained self-effort in order to realize that the strength that you crave for, the balance and serenity that you crave for, the self-worth that you crave for, the validation from others that you crave for – and, above all, access power and realize FREEDOM,  are already there within you as a given: you are born with all that (it took me years of practicing a specific aspect of yoga). If you cannot see that yet, is because the veil of dust over your eyes has been accumulating thick along your life, and cemented already (with me, it was). This is why you’ll have to accept to die, allow your ego to shatter into a myriad pieces, in order that your Self may get space and be born. Without this key requirement – accepting your ego’s death – you risk, at best, to remain for the rest of your life dependent on your psychoanalyst, medication, etc. Additionally, you may think that you need support, love, comprehension from others, just to make it easier on you – but, trust me, sugar-coating a bitter pill is not absolutely necessary. The journey is not so easy – but it’s the journey of your life, the only one worth taking. For the while. Cause it’ll take you to another, more worth-wile than the one before.

I’m 55 now. I used to believe that my life purpose is to be a good daughter; then a good student; then a good wife; then a good mother, in parallel with being a good employee. All these cards have fallen one by one like blown away by a gust of wind, to let me see that my only life purpose is be ME. If I don’t accept that, if I keep running after the common things of life, there is a higher authority UP THERE (I guess, my being a non-believer has considerably hindered my journey) that keeps calling me to order; and it’s hard… and it gets harder every time.

Only after all these years – I’ve been a slow learner – I finally think that I know why. What is increasingly evident to me is that I am a cowardly person, not daring to accept and show myself for who I really am in the deepest of my heart. I’m nothing of the things behind which I’m used to be hiding: I’m  not the daughter, I’m not the wife, I’m not the mother, I’m not the teacher. I’m Mirella. And I know that time has come for me to throw myself into the river of life (of a different level than my ordinary) an start swimming. Live behind the excuses, like: “I donno how to swim”; “I can’t swim! “I’m afraid of swimming”; I’m going to swim, yea, sure, but not now, later”; I’d rather not swim alone, I need co-swimmers”. Meanwhile, wave after wave keeps washing away the sand under my feet, while I keep grabbing a board, a twig, a pebble, a mole of sand, a leaf, a dried shell, just to keep clinging to the sand and not let myself being dragged into the water… eventually, I’ll have no other trick up my naked skin, than start swimming. Finish that memoir – in all honesty and artistry, say it out loud, say it all.

Uncategorized

Is 2+2 Always Four??

Having a vague suspicion that I may find one more confirmation to my theory: that things are never that axiomatic, I googled:  “mathematics [blank] is 2+2 always 4?”

After one or two clicks I understood that 2+2=5 is also right:

“As any self-respecting engineer would agree, 2+2 can sometimes yield 5, for large values of 2. 🙂 –  Lucian Jun 25 ’14 at 17:38”

Going into it a little bit more, to my amazement I find out that also 2+2 sometimes equals 1:

“In Z3 it is still true that 2+2=4, it just happens that 4=1 as well. –  Asaf Karagila Jun 25 ’14 at 17:41”

Now, I cannot pretend that I understood a thing as for why are these values: I’ll just tip my hat with British elegance and give credit to specialists. I remember though learning, a number of years ago, to add up 2 apples with two other apples, and my teacher insisted that I could not add up 2 oranges and 2 apples (unless I changed their name to “fruit”).

This, among many others, was part of my life baggage of axioms – we have an existential need for absolute truths and things that are immutable. Well, reality, it so turns out, is not that axiomatic, precise and immutable, and 21st century science begins to openly acknowledge it; but this applies to our personal experience as well as it applies to sciences. It has never before been so obvious that society and individual lives are in upheaval, with old norms, institutions and taboos overturned – and it seems that this is just the beginning.

Life experience puts us in contact with things, people and experiences only to bring us to see, sometimes with pain, sometimes with relief, that clinging too hard to fixed concepts is unrealistic, and we risk to break our necks in free fall through the void of our misconceptions if we don’t give up on heavy, rigid beliefs.

With the insights of quantum physics we find out that reality doesn’t really exist, that it is just a matter of our perception, as particles shift between wave and particle under the eye of the observer. I can see that light can be only wave and vibration, but it’s hard to conceive that physical matter can, too?? The commoner like me can only wonder: how come that light and matter can be at the same time both wave and particle?

Science nowadays is discovering things that were thought impossible or unacceptable only a short while ago. We were convinced that our skies show a fundamental “emptiness”, pointed here and there by stars and galaxies. Only a couple of years ago, in 2011 became public the most recent view that all what we see, distant and near planets, stars, galaxies and all, make up just 4.9 of our universe; the rest of it, and of which scientists had no idea that existed, is dark energy and dark matter (dark, meaning non-reactant to light, invisible) that constitute 95.1% of it all. Pretty  much unknown for scientific pride, who praises itself that it can send space missions outside the solar system.

So, what is mind, after all? The picture changes here, too, so that the firm belief that human mind is just a mechanism comparable to a computer is slowly shifting, as neurologists come ever closer to the understanding of the mind as more than just brain: they start seeing soul also.

To bring just an example, Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is as close to expressing his belief in an ensouled world as anyone could hope for: he thinks that consciousness is not dependent on brain only, but that it arises in any sufficiently complex, connected information-processing system – from cells, to worms, to animals and up to humans; this can be a scientifically refined version of ancient panpsychism – a philosophical doctrine asserting that all there is, it is part of the God-Mind, or Spirit. Of course mainstream science is not yet ready to acknowledge the existence of a Universal Field of Consciousness, but I can see that it is slowly getting there.

For this, and many other reasons too, I began doubting that the world is just the one described by the science that I have studied at school, as I learned to doubt that 2+2=4; at least I know that it doesn’t always hold.

Uncategorized

You and I Are More Alike Than You Think – “In our quest for security, it turns out we all think alike. “

Security Blanket – the image above shows a quilt digitally printed with most frequently used passwords.This word cloud represents a thousand of the most common passwords for a social application and gaming website called RockYou.

( The illustration is by LORRIE FAITH CRANOR, from CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY – “In our quest for security, it turns out we all think alike. “, says Lorrie) 

“Oh, no! Another password!” Does this happen to you when for the millionth time you are being asked to change or register somewhere with a new password?? Well, it does happen invariably to me – because I have to think one more time of a smart sequence of letters (and numbers) that I’ll have to remember when asked again, maybe in a few years’ time. But chances are that I’m giving myself all the trouble for nothing: whether I think a lot or just a little, my password is very likely to look similar or be identical to the one you thought about.

 

The story of this image  began with the hackers who stole information and passwords from the site in 2009 and published a subset on the Internet. In 2013, researcher Lorrie Faith Cranor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, decided to randomly analyze one thousand of the 32 million users’ passwords hacked from the site, to see which ones were the most common.
The results are digitally printed on this quilt – the more prominent, the most frequently used, like “123456”. I must admit, though, that these too simple ideas of passwords may have been common during the more “primitive” years of networking, while they are way less these days. However, this is just a simple example of how, in matters of things of everyday life, we share common patterns of thought in our choices, likes and dislikes – and industries like advertising and marketing know how to put it to good use.

It is known by “magicians”, especially by mentalists – a great number of their guesses (you know, when they ask you to think of a number between 1 – 100.., etc, etc,) are based on this particularity – or, rather, “generality” that we share.

Uncategorized

Have You Ever Wondered? This Writing Here, Has Originated Here: Neuron Lacework

 

What I am writing right now originates in some “sparks” between my neurons that are happening right under my skull.

 

 

Here the connections are denser (not in my brain, I should say )

neurons1

 

 

And this is what we do right now, networking across the planet – is there any similarity?

Whether you are blogging – writing about food, or art, about picking flowers, or about the twenty ways to cut your nails, or  you are tweeting, or facebooking, or contacting a client, or a lover, or posting a scientific article, or sending a CV, with each action you create lines that criss-cross the planet. Maybe that Mind has been continuously creating connections and evolved the individual brain to arrive today at this collective brain – what makes today a Global Mind.

 

 

Uncategorized

New Year – The Myth of Eternal Return 2 It’s Been A Rough Year

(this is the second part from the Larger theme New Year’s Myth of Eternal Return)

Like the E Coyote in Fast and Furry –ous, I, ever mindless of the anvils dropping on my head, cannot but turn it all into a questioning of the why of it all – what is the underlying meaning. It is not hard to notice that I am not the only one targeted these past few years – just watching the news on any channel in any possible country around the world brings enough evidence. Hardship, mishappenings, disruption and undoing seem to be the share of almost anyone, high and low, and difficulties seem to pile up over the heads of the famous and of the anonymous, of the wimp and the zilch and of the unaware. I cannot miss seeing that, wherever there is repetition, there is pattern, and, precisely because I choose to be a rational being and never insult my intelligence, I cannot allow myself to dismiss as just coincidences the things that show some hidden meaning.
It is the things that I see happening around me, around others and around the world that force me to admit that there is a plan in the adversity that makes us reach out, and, like Job, give out a loud cry: “Why, God, why me??” While I am not religious myself, I can’t understand the why of all this rage that atheists show against religion (but I can understand anyone’s stand against religious fanaticism). Sometimes it becomes so passionate that I ask myself, would’t this be the jealousy of the “don’t have’s” in confronts with those who have it? I, personally, have tried hard – but really hard – and yet haven’t arrived there, at the faith of Job, or at least up to the faith of my grandparents.

 

I have always envied those with a steadfast belief in God, whatever the religion – this makes their lives so much easier: in whatever enterprise we take, (and life is by far our biggest and longest) the whole difference between meeting with success or with total failure is that of knowing the rules, how to act and how to play – and, maybe, having some idea of the why of it all. It is this core belief, or knowledge of his God, which, undoubtedly, helped Job. It helped my grandparents all the same. It helped my grandfather cope with being dispossessed by the communists of all his property and assets he had inherited and accumulated along the sixty years of hard work; it helped him cope with authorities’scorn and with the humiliations against himself and his family, and, later on, when he was eighty, with the loss of his unique son in a car accident, and, along his ninety-something years of age, the list is endless.

 

It helped my grandmother – the most recent example I can remember of was when a fire started at a major electricity pillar a few hundred meters down her home – with all the commotion from the fire-fighters’ intervention and the panicked people, she just held her calm, never rising her eyes off her Bible. When we asked her how come, she just said that nothing is more important to listen to than the words of God.
For much thinking and trying to find some meaning, I can see how my grandparents and all those people who have faith find in it the spinal bone that keeps them standing. For them, life has meaning and has purpose, all like it did for Job,for whom this explanation was good enough: God has tried him and “performed” “what is attended for him”, because “affliction doesn’t just sprout out from the dust and the ground”, but “there is a purpose for it”. The parable is intended for us all, believers or non-believers, no doubt; its sense is that there is purpose in exploring life, particularly if we probe into hardship, that it is good for our own sublimation, in order for us to “come forth like gold”, that is, pure and shiny, essential and noble.
Easier said than done – I am not made of the hero stuff. What’s more, as I don’t live in Job’s days, I have a crave for things to be rational and to appeal to my logical mind. I guess my need for rationality started long ago, with that unanswered question that my grandfather, “the man who knew everything”, left unanswered.
As I was his first grandchild and we got to spend lots of time together, he felt it was his duty to teach me the things of the heaven and of the world; he taught me about God, the saints, and, from his religious-structured worldview, he resumed to me the universe : “God made us and everything there is”, he told me.

But this only left me thinking: who made God, then? And his answer was that these are the greatest mysteries of the world and that I shouldn’t try to go there. But, without my knowing, I did – or, rather, it was life that took me there – this chaotic life that makes no sense, apparently.