Hush goes the Hurricane
This is my first blog post of 2020. Due to various commitments, I missed my session yesterday but no matter, here I am, kicking off my rambling session of the week. It is great to own this small piece of cyber real-estate, where I can say whatever I like to no particular audience in mind.
2019 has been a happy year for the Liverpool Football Club, the team I've supported all my life. We won the European Cup, Super Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup. Looks like this year, barring any unforeseen collapse, they will win the Premier League title.
2019 has been a good year for me discipline-wise. I managed to cultivate a number of good habits. I completed a whole year of weekly blogging; I completely de-cluttered my room and I reestablished an early morning routine of meditation and work. I love morning meditation sessions--it is the best time to practice because the body and mind is fresh and the surroundings are very quiet. I've gained a lot of insights throughout the year. Some of them I've articulated in several blog posts in previous weeks.
Everyday I distill some insights from my meditation session. What I distill inspires me for the rest of the day. I've come to understand how lovingkindness actually helps the concentration practices. It sweeps away all hinderances, clearing the space for the mind to focus better.
All hindrances are like waves that arise and fall away. All thoughts have no hold on the mind if you recognize their ephemeral nature. Sometimes the recognition itself is another thought process which goes away without solidifying into a permanent concept. This is the impermanence that Buddhists talk about. All form is emptiness and emptiness form. Thoughts are the mind's natural tendency to perpetuate concepts from passing phenomena. If we allow them to pass, nothing has a hold on us.
The habit of the mind is to form models, theories and concepts, because the mind is a learning machine. Our AI neural networks copy this architecture. It has a tendency to infer, categorize and simplify. It boxes things into neat compartments. It abhors uncertainty. It must put things in specific buckets.
But nature is not like that. It is fluid, dynamic and has no clear boundaries. We give hurricanes names and treat them like marauding creatures, moving purposefully and menacingly towards inhabited areas. But hurricanes are natural processes. It has no "eye" as such, even though we like to place such ephemeral things exactly on the map. Just like the Buddhist concept of anatta - "no-self". The self within us is just a conceptual focal point for all the processes that happen to be going on in the body and mind. It is merely a "centre of gravity" that has no physical presence--useful for practical purposes, but often outlive its usefulness by perpetuating a personal ego unnecessarily.
In engineering, concepts and models are good because they are the basis for building large systems. The programmer thinks in terms of objects and tiers and frameworks. Such things only exist in the mind. When the computer is executing, it is basically semiconducting substances reacting to changes in voltages and currents, which are nothing but ephemeral energy states.
Likewise, we live life maintaining a specific image or ego, as if it is who we really are. We are nothing but a passing hurricane, all wet-and-wild for a momentary period in space and time--fluctuations in the weather system that cause pockets of instabilities here and there. Everything balances out in the end. No hurricane lasts forever.
And here I am, gathering thoughts into words, to be etched onto this blog--a passing hurricane moment, to disappear into cyberspace with the click of the "Publish" button!
