THE FIVE HINDRANCES

Oh lonesome mind, where do you wander?

You have scaled up the mightly mountain of mindfulness

Yet at the lofty peak of wisdom, you stray at mere pittances!

Oh lonesome wandering mind!

Be thou beware of the five hindrances! 

Fogged by form; an empty treasure

Luring lust, and sensual pleasure

Makes you crave, and make you suffer

Luring lust and sensual pleasure  

Oh lonesome wandering mind! 

Beware of the first of the hindrances! 

The masters of life’s most deplorable state

 Ill will, anger, and morbid hate

They form and fuel, every negative trait

And Lead the world, to an apocalyptic fate

Ill will, anger, and morbid hate

Oh lonesome wandering mind ! 

Beware of the second of the hindrances! 

Motivational inertia, so easy to harbor

Laziness, sloth and torpor

Makes you slip and makes you sleep

Makes creep when you should leap

Laziness sloth and Torpor

Oh, lonesome wandering mind! 

Beware of  the third of the hindrances! 

Rippling the placid mind; gurgling it  in a flurry

Restlessness anxiety and pointless worry

Kills the now and breaks the merry

Ruminations of negativity  in an anxious slurry

Restlessness anxiety and pointless worry

Oh lonesome wandering mind ! 

Beware of the fourth of the hindrances! 

A blunted knife of reason; filled with naivety and flout

Untested beliefs and unreasonable doubts

Pointless skepticism and hasty conjecture

  

With mindless superstition and carelessness that sprouts

  

Untested belief and unreasonable doubts

Oh lonesome wandering mind!

Beware of the fifth of the hindrances ! 

Oh lonesome mind! Don’t you wander!

You have scaled up the mighty  mountain of mindfulness

Yet at the lofty peak of wisdom, don’t you stray!

Oh lonesome  wandering mind!

Be thous beware of the five hindrances

Fogged by form; an empty treasure

Luring lust and sensual pleasure

The masters of life’s most deplorable state

Ill will, anger and morbid hate

Motivational inertia, so easy to harbor

Laziness sloth and Torpor

Ruminations of negativity  in an anxious slurry

Restlessness anxiety and pointless worry

A bunted knife of reason; filled with naivety and flout 

Untested beliefs and unreasonable doubts

Oh lonesome wandering mind

As you scale the mighty mountain of mindfulness 

Be thou beware of the five hindrances !! 

DANCING LARVAE

Dancing larvae in the palace pond

Look what you become!

 

Little monsters driven by unfortunate fate

Feeding remorselessly on royal blood

 The royal blood of the king!

Oh winged warriors of dirt and disease

Even if you change form, and choose to reform

Even if you become noble in trait

Can you ever become, the almighty king?

Ideas and passions, you may have many

But how limited is your destiny!

Oh ,dancing larvae in the palace pond

Just drink your blood and be merry!

BAT'S SONIC VIEW

The wall of music, in dark sounds of green

The noisy world, beyond what is seen

The Bat’s sonic view, of the  musical sky

 Of  echoes of creatures, fleeting by

Images and shades, of pitch and tone

Sonograms of life, and obstacles unknown

A puff of speech in grey-scale of silence

Colorless minds in harmonic resonance

Redness of red and the blueness of blue

The Qualia of life; a  mystical brew

You may look ; and you may  even see

But a  blinded bat can  you ever be ?

THE MAN IN THE MIRROR

Can you see the man in the mirror!

 

Can you see him, without his name!

Can you see his tricks and games!

Can you see his pride and fame!

When you see the man in the mirror

Can you look; can you see?

Beyond silvered illusions, of ego so vain

It’s a tinted window, not a mirror plain

Beyond pompous images of egoistic self-reflection

See the true world of infinite perfection

Beyond Mountains and valleys of paradoxical reality

See fountains of love, and streams of non-duality

When u see the man in the mirror

Can you look; can you see?

There is no man, there is no mirror

It’s just Love that lasts forever!!

CAUSE AND ESSENCE

Agency in the world of apparent individuality

Does it play the game of universal causality

If cause always has a an effect; and everything has a cause

What am I, in this deterministic chaos?

Who is it, who stills feels pain

Who cheats; and who gains

                                                                                                     

The answer to this is in the mind

And in mindfulness one would find

That all existence is purely conventional

And freewill and freedom are merely restrictional

The self, solely is a well concealed illusion

And a persistent belief, is only a delusion

Nothing has an inherent presence

And everything is devoid of ultimate essence

Thus beyond the life of apparent individulaity

There exits; an infinite world of interdependent non duality

This is the empty truth!

The empty truth of ultimate reality!

KINDS OF MINDS

Kinds of creatures and kinds of minds

Are they all of the thinking kind?

Darwinian minds are the first they say

The simplest forms; the simplest minds

Learning all, from past generations

They survive merely by genetic adaptations

Skinnerian minds still lean from real time trial and error

They learn within a lifetime, but are not yet clever

Popperian minds have conjecture and refutation

They can predict the future by empirical contemplation

Gregorian minds Learn from the past and predict the future

An evolutionary product of nature and nurture

From contemplation to self-conscious self-perception

 They are a   reverberating   loop of self-representation

And finally, the one and only enlightened kind

The venerable and undivided Buddha mind

The one beyond cognitive self-representation

The one that sees the undivided whole and its interpenetration

The one beyond delusion and egocentric illusion

The Buddha mind!! The one and only universal solution!!

IMPERMANENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND THE NATURE OF REALITY

Perception and philosophy are incomplete descriptions of objective reality. Like all perceptions and ideologies, my world view too is only a partial truth. Any philosophy or perception is still a reductionist's analysis of reality and hence it reduces the complex nebulous interdependent network of variables to  simplified chunks of manageable data that can be managed by our limited minds and its cognitive systems. Hence in my view any theory or philosophy is an oversimplification of  the nature of reality. In a sense it its partially true and partially false at the same time. According to my world view the impermanence that i mention is about conventional reality as experienced through our senses. However i can no way be sure that beyond my limited world view there could be an ocean of permanence and yet, it may be beyond my perceptual abilities. Thus i can only say , and that too only conventionally, that whatever i perceive within my bubble universe(umwelt) is impermanent. Also this impermanence refers to only to a world of actualities where reality arises from the collapse of the possibilities. In conclusion my view could be summarized as that, all philosophies, including this one are over simplifications of the truth, and actual reality is too complex and beyond comprehension to be contained in human labels of permanence and impermanence

I AM THAT

I am the sun and I am the star

I am a wandering soul from afar

I am the water, and I am the wine

I am the hand that makes it divine

I am the potter, and I am the clay

I am a little boy wanting to play

I am the master, and I am the slave

The blind man feeling, the elephant's tail

I am the cloud and I am the sky

I am the mind that riddles the why

I am the ocean, and I am the shore

 I am a being with no permanent soul

I am the seed and I am the tree

I am you and all that you see

I am that and I am thou

But, I am nothing at all, without infinite love

I am that and I am thou 

I am nothing not all, without boundless love 

RUDDERLESS SHIP

Oh mighty ship of the mind; where has your rudder gone

Beautiful sails swaying with the breeze; where has you rudder gone

No compass to guide you; No stars to chart the way

Look what the wind has done

The currents drive you and the winds steer you

Why is your rudder undone?

Beware of the winds of desire

As they lead you to imaginary shores

Beware of the currents of delusion

 As they drown you with lust and curves

Beware of the blizzard of Anger

As it shreds into your sails

Beware of the winds of hatred

As it burns your deck and rails

Oh mighty ship of the mind where do you set sail

While sailing be thou mindful; lest your voyage fail

How long can you be rudderless and sail with out a goal

For sailing such is pointless; oh lost and empty soul

So build your rudder of mindfulness; oh mighty ship of the mind

Sail with loving kindness and become the awakened mind

TAKE ME

Take me to the centre of sentience; Take me to the source of the source

Take me to the universe within; take me, oh take me home!

Where possibilities don’t collapse to actualities

Where universals do not degenerate to particulars

Where life and the lifeless are not treated the same

Where the creator and the created have no pompous name

Where there is freedom yet order; virtue yet no fame

Where there is passion but no attachment; love but no separation

Where there is justice without manipulation, and peace without stagnation

 Where there is Perception without deception, and action without self interest

 Where there is Wisdom without pride and Cooperation without greed

Where the boundary between self and the selfless has blown away

Where thought and memory have been caste away

Take me to this land of the unspeakable

Take me to this universe within

Oh take me, oh take me; take me to my eternal home!

EMPTINESS AND NON-ESSENCE

Perception is a representation of reality in the perceptual module of the mind.  Objects are representations of some features of reality that are meaningful for us.  Objects are defined in the mind as a collection of properties. However certain properties are given more value and meaning and are considered as the essence of the object.  For example the essence of the currency note is attributed to the property of  its  monetary value and not the paper its printed on . However the essence is a figment of cognition and does not exist in reality.  What exists in reality is a complex network of causes and effects.

All phenomena are dependent for their existence on this complex network of causes and conditions.  Going by the same example of the currency note for instance, the currency note is dependent on the printing press that printed it, the miners who extracted the ore out of which the metal for the press was smelted, the trees that were pulped for the paper, the State treasury, and so on.  All wholes are dependent on their parts, and parts on the wholes they help to make up. The currency note for example depends for its existence on the particles of paper and ink that constitute it but also, for its existence as a currency note, on the entire economic system it is in.  Finally, all phenomena are dependent for their identities on conceptual imputation.  The currency note is a currency note, as opposed to a book mark, because the treasury and government so designates it.  Hence to exist means to exist dependently in these senses, and hence to be merely conventionally existent.   Thus to exist interdependently is to be empty of essence. Since all phenomena are interdependent, all phenomena are empty of essence. Hence emptiness is not a nihilistic stance but rather a true understanding of the nature of things.   Not knowing the true nature of things, the mind clings to the peripheral and often sensually attractive aspect of things and in its opinion perceives it as the essence of the thing.  Using an alternate perspective; Essence or identity of a thing means that aspect of the thing that remains same through out and does not depend on anything else . In other words the essence should be free from causation and change, existing eternally in its own weight.  However the nature of reality is that, all phenomena are dynamic and all phenomena are interdependent.  Hence the perception of an essence or identity is a mere cognitive bias (Essentialism Bias). If one were to apply the essentialism bias one could possibly come to an erroneous conclusion that, the self, consciousness, the universal reality and so on are independent absolutes.  However if one is devoid of the essentialism bias, the interdependence and true nature of reality can be perceived.  This perception of interdependence devoid of individual essence or identity is termed emptiness. 

EMPTINESS

Empty is the truth of reality

Empty it is of all essence

Empty is the rule of causality

Empty it is of all independence

Empty is the world of phenomena

Empty it is with senescence

Empty is the mind that is filled with self

Empty it is of any significance

Empty is the soul that denies its non-existence

Empty it is with dissonance

Empty is the desire that craves with attachment

Empty it is with preference

Empty is the truth of conventional reality  

Empty it is of all essence

Empty is the truth of ultimate reality

Empty it is of all essence

PERCEPTION , UMWELT AND PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The phenomenal mind is based on the assumption that there are essentially two kinds of perception; objective and subjective. The hard problem in explaining consciousness is actually due to the inability to explain the subjective nature of things. I would like to resolve this issue by stating that all experiences are subjective and qualia is  the closest we can come to actual reality .

In order to explain this, I would like to speculate on the nature and purpose of perception in the context of evolutionary science.

 To perceive is the ability of an organism to receive a signal from the universe and to divide the universe into to semiologically usefull entities. In other words perception is nothing but the divison of the universe into meaningfull and not meaning full chunks. Meaning on the other hand is derived from what was usefull in the past.

For example for a single cellular animal with primitve sensory capacity, it may be meaningful to classify the universe as, food vs no food, mate vs no mate, safe vs unsafe. The similar phenomena can be hypothesized to act in higher species with complex neural systems; and finally with all the co-evolving complexity the human mind.

Thus I would like to postulate that all sensory systems evolve to detect what ever was useful for them to detect in the past.

The human mind too understands the universe by sensory perception that divides it into meaningful chunks. The simplest such chunk is a feature ( eg. colour, Shape, pitch, ). A collection of features is an object.  The relation between objects is called causality.

The internal representation of the object in the organism’s nervous system is called qualia.

The collection of certain features to be grouped together as an object is determined by its clustering in space and time and its usefulness to self (pleasure).

Objects therefore are artificial clustering of features based on their co-occurrence in space and time that are seen through the lens of the qualia enhacing feature called pleasure and pain.

 The meaning of the object is encoded in the very fact that we are able to perceive them and by the sense of  qualia  . Thus one would conclude that perception is emperical, relative and historical and is not an accurate description of the truth. The only way reality its represented to the organism / the human being is through the Umvelt of  qualia.. In other words all perceptions are qualia, which in turn are empirical and dependant of our ecological past and this qualia is the only link to reality.  Also one has to realize, dividing the universe into semiologically useful chunks is in no way a complete representation of reality. Hence one can conclude that all perception is limited. The fact that perception is limited can explain the fact that we can feel our pain while cannot feel the pain of the other person. In other words our limited perception is not evolved to perceive the pain of the other person the same way it perceives ours.

What we call objective reality are those areas, where people can agree upon similar qualiae. This is mostly dependant on language and culture. So hence I conclude that there is only individual quliae that make up the personal universes of all human beings. Thankfully there are areas of overlap in our perception that gives rise to the illusion of objective reality. Now with objective reality being nonexistent, it’s relatively easy to explain consciousness and qualia..

                                                                                                      Prabhakar.A.T   8/2/2010