Monday 30 October 2023
Fighting CA. X LOA
Saving for a stable secure future LOA
Seth speaks
SWVVKA
the Himalayas, how grand and beautiful they are; I love them. They do not give me anything, but my nature is to love the grand, the beautiful, therefore I love them. Similarly, I love the Lord. He is the source of all beauty, of all sublimity. He is the only object to be loved; my nature is to love Him, and therefore I love. I do not pray for anything; I do not ask for anything. Let Him place me wherever He likes. I must love Him for love's sake. I cannot trade in love.
CONSCIOUSNESS AS FIRE X SN CNMA MISSING 2023
A
"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."
-- Truman Capote
A
SELF IS WHAT U R
EGO IS WHAT U THINK U R
A
Sunday 29 October 2023
4hr nt lcm ced
A
A
STJ QRA
Rephrasing your question- Can I be directly conscious of my consciousness?
What is this ‘I’ that tries to be aware of consciousness?
This ‘I’ is the mind.
The mind needs something psychologically tangible to be aware of consciousness. Abstract awareness is not possible for the mind, because in abstraction, the mind ceases.
Here the mind is conscious of consciousness that is bounced off through senses, memories, and such.
When all these are negated, you are conscious of your consciousness directly and immediately with no psychological intermediaries including ‘you’.
You begin your practice by observing your mind in its dynamism. Initially, it could only be a thought observing other thoughts.
Steady practice will weaken the aggression of thoughts and thought-patterns. Somewhere, there will be glimpses of awareness.
Now, this awareness becomes your identity(so to speak) and your mind becomes an alien.
This awareness observes the mind.
This awareness is the powerful fire that burns your mind, and all the anguish and ego along with it.
naṣta-manasot-kṛṣṭa yoginaḥ
kṛtyam asti kiṃ svasthitiṃ yataḥWhat action remains to be done by that great yogi whose mind has been extinguished, and who rests in his own true and transcendent state of Being?
Verse 15, Upadesha Saaram of Bhagwan Ramana Maharishi, Translation by DM Sastri
A
What happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. RABIH ALAMEDDINE, The Hakawati
A
A
PC
“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know...
…nothing ever really attacks us except our own confusion. perhaps there is no solid obstacle except our own need to protect ourselves from being touched. maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. if we run a hundred miles an hour to the other end of the continent in order to get away from the obstacle, we find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. it just keeps returning with new names, forms, manifestations until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.”
Pema Chodron
NDM
Sri Vsnu
Upanishad itself says that Shri Vishnu is unborn and incomprehensible even to death!
अन्तःशरीरे निहितो गुहायामज एको नित्यो…
..यस्य मृत्युः शरीरं यो मृत्युमन्तरे संचरन् यं मृत्युर्न वेद ॥
स एष सर्वभूतान्तरात्मापहतपाप्मा दिव्यो देव एको नारायणः ॥"Within the body, is the one eternal Aja(unborn), located in the cave (of the heart)…
Mrtyu (death) is His body. Though He moves in mrtyu, mrtyu does not know Him. He is the Inner Aatma of all entities, the remover of all sins and the Divine Deva, the one Naaraayana.
Saturday 28 October 2023
Vsnu
SN CNMA RETRIBUTION 2023
A
"The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention."
-- John Burroughs
A
Friday 27 October 2023
Sankat Te Hanuman Chhudavai
A
28. "Sankat Te Hanuman Chhudavai Man Kram Bachan Dhyan Jo Lave"
Meaning: Lord Hanuman liberates one from all troubles and distress. Those who meditate upon him with focus and devotion are freed from worldly bondage.
A
Take a moment to examine the difference between your experience of the outside world and your interactions with the mental world. When you’re just thinking, you’re free to create whatever thoughts you want in your mind, and these thoughts are expressed through the voice. You are very accustomed to settling into the playground of the mind and creating and manipulating thoughts. This inner world is an alternate environment that is under your control. The outside world, however, marches to its own laws. When the voice narrates the outside world to you, those thoughts are now side by side, in parity, with all your other thoughts. All these thoughts intermix and actually influence your experience of the world around you. What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in. For example, there are myriad things that you see at any given moment, yet you only narrate a few of them. The ones you discuss in your mind are the ones that matter to you. With this subtle form of preprocessing, you manage to control the experience of reality so that it all fits together inside your mind. Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself. You have to watch this very carefully because you do it all the time. You’re walking outside in the winter, you start to shiver, and the voice says, “It’s cold!” Now how did that help you? You already knew it was cold. You’re the one who’s experiencing the cold. Why is it telling you this? You re-create the world within your mind because you can control your mind whereas you can’t control the world. That is why you mentally talk about it. If you can’t get the world the way you like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it. This makes you feel more empowered. When your body experiences cold, there may be nothing you can do to affect the temperature. But when your mind verbalizes, “It’s cold!” you can say, “We’re almost home, just a few more minutes.” Now you feel better. In the thought world there’s always something you can do to control the experience. Basically, you re-create the outside world inside yourself, and then you live in your mind. What if you decided not to do this? If you decide not to narrate and, instead, just consciously observe the world, you will feel more open and exposed. This is because you really don’t know what will happen next, and your mind is accustomed to helping you. It does this by processing your current experiences in a way that makes them fit with your views of the past and visions of the future. All of this helps to create a semblance of control. If your mind doesn’t do this, you simply become too uncomfortable. Reality is just too real for most of us, so we temper it with the mind. You will come to see that the mind talks all the time because you gave it a job to do. You use it as a protection mechanism, a form of defense. Ultimately, it makes you feel more secure. As long as that’s what you want, you will be forced to constantly use your mind to buffer yourself from life, instead of living it. This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came, and it will be here long after you leave. In the name of attempting to hold the world together, you’re really just trying to hold yourself together.
A
Mental Models In life and business, the person with the fewest blind spots wins. Removing blind spots means we see, interact with, and move closer to understanding reality. We think better. And thinking better is about finding simple processes that help us work through problems from multiple dimensions and perspectives, allowing us to better choose solutions that fit what matters to us. The skill for finding the right solutions for the right problems is one form of wisdom. The pursuit of this form of wisdom, the pursuit of uncovering how things work, the pursuit of going to bed smarter than when we woke up. It is about getting out of our own way so we can understand how the world really is. Decisions based on improved understanding will be better than ones based on ignorance. While we can’t predict which problems will inevitably crop up in life, we can learn time-tested ideas that help us prepare for whatever the world throws at us. Perhaps more importantly, this is about avoiding problems. This often comes down to understanding a problem accurately and seeing the secondary and subsequent consequences of any proposed action. Don’t be a great problem solver, always want to avoid problems—prevent them from happening and doing it right from the beginning. How can we do things right from the beginning? We must understand how the world works and adjust our behavior accordingly. Contrary to what we’re led to believe, thinking better isn’t about being a genius. It is about the processes we use to uncover reality and the choices we make once we do. Mental models describe the way the world works. They shape how we think, how we understand, and how we form beliefs. Largely subconscious, mental models operate below the surface. We’re not generally aware of them and yet they’re the reason when we look at a problem we consider some factors relevant and others irrelevant. They are how we infer causality, match patterns, and draw analogies. They are how we think and reason. A mental model is simply a representation of how something works. We cannot keep all of the details of the world in our brains, so we use models to simplify the complex into understandable and organizable chunks. Whether we realize it or not, we then use these models every day to think, decide, and understand our world. While there are millions of mental models, some true and some false; the objectively true mental models put to proper use, they will improve your understanding of the world we live in and improve your ability to look at a situation through different lenses, each of which reveals a different layer. They can be used in a wide variety of situations and are essential to making rational decisions, even when there is no clear path, they will allow you to walk around any problem in a three-dimensional way.
A
a
Thursday 26 October 2023
Wednesday 25 October 2023
HARIHAR SILENCE
a
EVO REASONS OF WATCHING HORROR - SCIAM
When you consider that many prey animals live close to their predators, the benefits of morbidly curious behavior such as predator inspection become clear. For example, it's not uncommon for a gazelle to cross paths with a cheetah on the savanna. It might seem like a gazelle should always run when it sees a cheetah. Fleeing, however, is physiologically expensive; if a gazelle ran every time it saw a cheetah, it would exhaust precious calories and lose out on opportunities for other activities that are important to its survival and reproduction.
A
Consider the perspective of the predator, too. It may seem like a cheetah should chase after a gazelle anytime it sees one. But for a cheetah, it's not easy to just grab a bite; hunting is an energetically costly exercise that doesn't always end in success. As long as the cheetah isn't starving, it should chase a prey animal only when the chances of capturing it are reasonably high.
a
If it's best for gazelles to run only when the cheetah is hunting, then they benefit if they can identify when a cheetah is hungry. And the only way for a gazelle to learn about cheetahs is by closely observing them when it's relatively safe to do so. For example, if the surrounding grass is short and a cheetah is easily visible, a gazelle feels safer and is more likely to linger a while and watch the cheetah, especially if the gazelle is among a larger group. The age of the gazelle matters, too; adolescents and young adults—those fast enough to escape and without much previous exposure to predators—are the most likely to inspect cheetahs. The trade-off makes sense: these gazelles don't know much about dangerous cats yet, so they have a lot to gain from investigating them. Relative safety and inexperience are two of the most powerful moderators of predator inspection in animals—and of morbid curiosity in humans.
a
Today people inspect predators through stories and movies. Depictions of predators are found in stories passed along through oral traditions around the world. Leopards, tigers and wolves are frequent antagonists in regional folklore. We also tell stories and see films about monstrous fictional predators such as ferocious werewolves, mighty dragons, clever vampires and bloodthirsty ogres.
Indulging in stories about threats is a frighteningly effective and valuable strategy. Such tales let us learn about potential predators or menacing situations that other people have encountered without having to face them ourselves. The exaggerated perils of fictional monsters create strong emotional and behavioral responses, familiarizing us with these reactions for when we have to deal with more down-to-earth dangers.
a
Children are often the intended audience for scary oral stories because these stories can help them learn about risks early in their lives. Think about the key lines of Little Red Riding Hood:
“Grandmother, what big eyes you have!”
“All the better to see with, my child.”
“Grandmother, what big teeth you have got!”
“All the better to eat you up with.”
a
The tale teaches a young audience, in a safe and entertaining way, what wolves look like and what certain parts of a wolf do. The story takes place in the woods, where wolves are typically found. It's scary, but told in a secure space, it delivers a valuable lesson.
a
Our fascination with things that can harm or kill us is not limited to predators. We also can be morbidly drawn to tales of large-scale frightening situations such as volcanic eruptions, pandemics, dangerous storms and a large variety of apocalyptic events. This is where the magic of a scary story really shines: it's the only way to learn about and rehearse responses to dangers we have yet to face.
Most people were feeling pretty uncertain about the future in 2020. COVID had thrust the world into a global pandemic. Governments were restricting movement, businesses were closing, and the way of living that many were used to was screeching to a halt.
But some of us had seen something like it before. Less than a decade earlier meningoencephalitic virus 1, or MEV-1, was wreaking havoc. It spread with terrifying speed and without requiring close contact in subways, elevators and outdoor public spaces. Society's response to MEV-1 foreshadowed what would happen in 2020 with COVID: travel stopped, businesses closed, and people started stockpiling supplies. Some of them began touting dubious miracle cures.
If you don't remember the worldwide devastation of MEV-1, you must not have seen the movie Contagion, a 2011 thriller starring Matt Damon, Kate Winslet and Laurence Fishburne. Watching it might have benefited you when COVID spread across the planet. In a study that one of us (Scrivner) conducted in the early months of the pandemic, those who had seen at least one pandemic-themed movie reported feeling much more prepared for the societal surprises that COVID had in store. The stockpiling of supplies, business closures, travel bans and miracle cures were all things fans of Contagion had seen before; they had already played with the idea of a global pandemic before the real thing happened.
a
Learning to regain composure and adapt in the face of surprise and uncertainty seems to be a key evolutionary function of play. Engaging in play that simulates threatening situations helps juvenile mammals such as tiger cubs and wolf pups practice quickly regaining stable movement and emotional composure. Humans do this as well. Call to mind a backyard party where young children squeal with fear and delight as they are chased by a fun-loving parent who threatens, with arms outstretched in monster pose, “I'm gonna get you!” It's all just fun and games, but it's also a chance for the kids to try to maintain their motor control under stress so they don't tumble to the ground, making themselves vulnerable to a predator—or a tickle attack from the parent.
Researchers who study human fun and games have argued that the decline of thrilling, unstructured play over the past few decades has contributed to a rise in childhood anxiety over that same time period. School and park playgrounds used to be arenas for this kind of play, but an increased emphasis on playground safety has removed opportunities for it. Don't get us wrong: safety is a good thing. Many playgrounds of the past were dangerous, with ladders climbing upward of 20 feet to rusty slides with no rails. But making playgrounds too safe and sterile can have unintended consequences, including depriving children of opportunities to learn about themselves and their abilities to manage challenging and scary situations. Kids need to be able to exercise some independence, which often involves a bit of risky play.
Many scientists who study play have proposed that adventurous play can help build resilience and reduce fear in children. In line with this research, organizations such as LetGrow have created programs for schools and parents to foster independence, curiosity and exploration in children. Their solution is simple: let kids engage in more challenging, unstructured play so they can learn how to handle fear, anxiety and danger without it being too overwhelming.
Even virtual scary experiences provide many of these same benefits. The Games for Emotional and Mental Health Lab created a horror biofeedback game called MindLight that has been shown to reduce anxiety in children. The game centers on a child named Arty who finds himself at his grandmother's house. When he goes inside, he sees that it has been enveloped in darkness and taken over by evil, shadowy creatures that can resemble everything from blobs to catlike predators. Arty must save his grandmother from the darkness and bring light back to her house. He has nothing to defend himself with except a light attached to his hat—his “mindlight.” Players controlling Arty must use the mindlight to expose and defeat the creatures.
But there's a catch: as a player becomes more stressed (as measured by an electroencephalogram), their mindlight dims. The player must stay calm in the face of fear by practicing techniques such as replacement of stress-producing thoughts or muscle relaxation, borrowed from cognitive-behavioral therapy. As they regain their composure, their mindlight grows in power, and they are able to defeat the monsters with it. This combination of therapeutic techniques and positive reinforcement (kids defeat the monsters and conquer their fear) makes MindLight a potent antianxiety tool. Randomized clinical trials with children have shown the game to be as effective at reducing several anxiety symptoms as traditional cognitive-behavioral therapy, a widely used anxiety treatment.
a
Scary play can help adults navigate fear and anxiety, too. Scrivner tested this idea with visitors to Dystopia Haunted House. Haunted house goers could take personality surveys before they entered and answer questions about their experience when they exited. After about 45 minutes of being chased by zombies, monsters and a pig-man with a chain saw, the visitors ran out of the haunted house and into some members of the research team, who then asked them how they felt. A huge portion said they had learned something about themselves and believed they had some personal growth during the haunt. In particular, they reported learning the boundaries of what they can handle and how to manage their fear.
Other research from the Recreational Fear Lab in Aarhus, Denmark, has shown that people actively regulate their fear and arousal levels when engaging in scary play. This means that engaging with a frightening simulation can serve as practice for controlling arousal and may be generalizable to other, real-world stressful situations, helping people bolster their overall resilience.
In one study that supports this idea, real soldiers played a modified version of the zombie-apocalypse horror game Left 4 Dead that incorporated player arousal levels. In the game, zombies pop out of nowhere, chasing players and clawing them to the ground, generating visceral fear even in experienced video game players. In the study, some players were given visual and auditory signals when their arousal increased: a red texture partially obscured the player's view, and they heard a heartbeat that got louder and faster as their stress increased. Later, during a live simulation of an ambush, soldiers who played the video game and received biofeedback had lower levels of cortisol (a stress biomarker) than those who did not play. Strikingly, these people also were better at giving first aid to a wounded soldier during that simulation.
a
These rehearsals for stress may be especially effective when people do them in groups. Collectively experiencing a dangerous situation ties people together. There are many anecdotal examples of this in history, from post-9/11 America, to military platoons, to the high levels of cooperation and assistance that often occur in the aftermath of natural disasters. There are also experimental studies showing that danger and fear can be powerful positive social forces. For example, engaging in rituals such as fire walking can physiologically synchronize people with one another and promote mutually beneficial behavior.
We don't need exposure to real danger to reap these cooperative benefits, however. Collectively simulating upsetting or dangerous situations through scary play could confer similar benefits without the physical risk. In the health-care industry, simulations are often used to teach medical skills by creating situations that are intense. In public health, simulations have been used to teach people ways to cooperate and coordinate in pandemic preparedness and response.
In other species, learning about risks is often a social endeavor. Stickleback fish investigating predators often do so with others. One stickleback will begin approaching, then wait to see whether another will approach a little closer. Then the first stickleback will go a little further, taking its turn being the one nearest the predator. The results of studies into this behavior even suggest that sticklebacks from regions with higher predation risk are more cooperative than those from places with lower risk.
In humans, morbid curiosity seems to be associated with cooperation and risk management. For example, in many societies people tell stories about dangers in their environments, whether those are natural disasters such as fires, earthquakes and floods or threats of war, theft or exploitation from nearby groups. The Ik people of Uganda, whom one of us (Aktipis) has studied as part of the Human Generosity Project, have a collective and emotionally compelling way of engaging with concerns about raids from other groups. They enact entire plays with music, dancing and drama where they reexperience both the tragedy and the triumph of helping one another during such difficult times. Such stories and dramatic enactments can bring shared attention to these kinds of challenges, and we know that shared attention is one mechanism that can help people cooperate and solve coordination dilemmas.
A failure of group imagination, in contrast, can lead to vulnerability. Some researchers have suggested that zombie-apocalypse fiction can lead to more creative solutions during unexpected and risky events by helping people become more imaginative. With CONPLAN 8888, a fictional training scenario, the U.S. military used a hypothetical zombie apocalypse to make learning about disaster management more fun for officers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did something similar with a comic they produced called Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic. Organizations have recognized that couching fears in imaginative play is productive. Right now our research team is developing a set of scary group games to help people manage shared risks and fears.
What can we learn from the human propensity for scary play? First, don't be afraid to get out there and explore your world, even if it sometimes provokes a little fear. Second, make sure that your morbid curiosity is educating you about risks in a way that is beneficial to you. In other words, don't get stuck doomscrolling upsetting news on the Internet; it's a morbid-curiosity trap that, like candy, keeps you consuming but does nothing to satisfy your need for nourishment.
Instead of doomscrolling, take on one or two topics you want to know more about and do a deeper dive that leaves you feeling satisfied that you've assessed the risk and empowered yourself to do something about it. Be intentional about gathering more information through your own experience or by talking with others who are knowledgeable on the subject.
You can also tell or listen to scary stories with others and use them as a jumping-off point for thinking about real risks we face. Watch a movie about an apocalypse, go to a haunted house, get in costume to go on a “zombie crawl,” or have a fun night at home chatting with your friends about how you'd survive the end of the world. And finally, invite creativity and play into spaces where the gravity of a situation might otherwise be overwhelming. Make up horror stories or dress up as something frightening and have a laugh about how silly it all is. In other words, embrace the Halloween season with abandon—and then bring that same energy to the challenges of the times we're living in now.
A
KS
Akula Agama Tantra is a term in Kaula philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism. Akula denotes brahmanda. Kula and akula are two distinct entities, the first called ‘pinda’ and the latter ‘brahmanda’. It also signifies Shiva and Shakti (kula), i.e. the whole cosmos.
Kashmir Shaivism has a specific way of defining terms. It is a monistic school founded by Vasugupta (850 CE). Based on the Agama, Spanda and Pratyabhija shastras, it establishes devotion to Parama Shiva and merging in him through intense practice of self realization. On a higher plane, it has recourse to Kundalini Yoga, in which energy from the muladhara reaches sahasra, where things are preternaturally illumined.
A
In Tantraloka, 29.4, the cosmic sharira envelopes the core substance with its evolution, creativity, semen, effulgence and all the related things. The cosmos is a manifestation of the Shiva Tattva, a conglomerate of the ‘aura’ of Parameshwara manifested in this creativity, all-knowingness, perfection, eternality and omnipresence, which sustain the akula belief and practice.
A
a
a
a
A
| ||||
|
