Lessons from a Phd

Doing anything reasonably well takes an unreasonable amount of time and effort.

Another Vipasssana

Just came back from my fouth Vipassana Course (see www.dhamma.org, hebrew-www.il.dhamma.org)

One thing that has become clearer in my mind after this course is - there
are no shortcuts for relief that bypass making a change in the deep level of the mind.
Phrased more positively, the most effective way to make a change for good in day to day life
is making a change in the depth of the mind.

To elaborate where I'm coming from: In the course you expereince sometimes very intense physical sensations and emotions, for me at least, a lot of the time these are unpleasent intense physical sensations and emotions.
When this happened, the following thought pattern would often occur to me- I have no aspiration of becoming some spiritual master or bhudist monk- why not just live my normal life quietley without getting into this deep intense unpleasent stuff?
Very quickly at the end of the course and coming back, still having the sensitivity from the course, it becomes clearer that this route is an illusion. I am telling a story to a group of people, seeing they are focused on what I am saying, I notice how much pressure I feel to keep their attention, and how much I am worried that I will lose it. Also, I am late somewhere and notice what intense Pressure I feel that clouds my judgement, effects the way I drive.
The point is this: even in everyday life when nothing extreme has happened in external reality the deep part of the mind, the so-called subconcious or unconcious mind, has intense expereinces-we are simply not aware of it happening.

You could say, well if I'm not aware of it what do I care? But these intense expereinces cause intense reactions, and a reaction is almost always, if not always, negative. These inner reactions add up and eventually manifest externally in unpleasent feelings and situations, that you will feel.
What I wrote so far may seem very pessimistic\depressing, so I'd like to stress that when I write stuff like this it also comes with a great optimism and hope. Hope becasuse I feel that with this meditation I am really dealing with the root inner problems that effect my life negatively. Thus, there is hope for real change, real relief, not just temporary relief that comes from dealing with symptoms.

Deleting a file- a simple example of how bad windows vista is

I'd like to share the vista expereince I had last night that has made
me decide to check out linux. A simple example- no 'incompatible drivers' or stuff like that.
I go to this website where there's a link to an mpeg (video) file I want to see. I click on it to open it- the options I get are save or cancel- no open-for some reason Windows media player can't open it online. I save it, then play it with windows media player-it's fine. Now I try to delete the file-windows says the file is corrupted and can't be deleted!(Because Vista always wants the bad files to stay on the compuer?)
I close the media player thinking maybe that's confusing the system, try to delete again.. same answer, try to cut and copy into the recycle bin.. again same answer!
I think OK.. let's change the file to a text file-maybe then it can be deleted. The file name does not contain file type , I go into the properties of the file- file type cannot be changed! I think OK let's use the 'open with' option and open it with notepad anyway and simply select all the data and delete it.. Vista says I can only open it with notepad by making notepad the default program for mpeg files!
I go to the main menu where I expect to see notepad as a shortcut- as I just used it-it's not there- After the menus open up I find notepad and open it
(though I understand there's a nice method in Vista of just typing the first letters of 'notepad'-didn't work for me in any case)
I open the file, select all and delete and save.
Now I try to delete the empty file now containing 0 bytes!.. The file is still on my computer.

Boredom and Panic

It sometimes seems I live my life alternating between bordeom and panic. I
have this routine-that's not that interesting-and not that important-nothing tragic will
happen if I stop doing my job- On the one hand since it's academia stopping to work is ofcouse no reason to fire someone or not paying him, and on the other hand noone will suffer as a result of me stopping to work-as I work so slowly that it would not make a distinguishable difference to anyone. Still, If anything happens that disrupts the routine-like now- a car problem that's detaining me from going to the library-cause I simply cannot do math at home-it seems unnautral, then I feel how attached I am to the routine when the panic starts to spread:
'Oh my god! I won't have 8 hours to sit in the library today and read another page and a half of a cryptic paper!'

The death of desire

,לפני שבאתי לכאן

נגזר עלי לאהוב כמו מלאך
.בלי לגעת, רק לעודד מהצד

וקול מהעבר לוחש לי, מי שרוצה להגיע רחוק
.צריך לוותר, ואתה כבר חתמת על ההסכם

,אחרי שהגעתי לכאן

התפתתי אלפי פעמים

.אל תוך השריפה שממנה ניסיתי לברוח
רק לגלות שוב ושוב, שעבורי, רק אפר נשאר
.בלי עונג, בלי חום

וקול מהעבר לוחש לי, מי שרוצה להגיע רחוק
.צריך לוותר, ואתה כבר חתמת על ההסכם

,לפני שאלך מכאן

.אקבור את עצמי סופית
,כי כבר אי אפשר להתכחש

.שלשם כך באתי לכאן

לעצור את הטירוף

מתישהו, צריך לעצור את הטירוף.
להרגיש את הכאב, במקום להעביר אותו לשאר העולם.

Striking Commercial

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Will temporary cessation of your livelihood result in discomfort\irritation\injury\disease or death of many pepole?

Then you have all it takes to be a striker!

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Government employee: "The best thing about striking is that it's simple! You just go through your regular schedule, and take out the things that could potentially help someone.'

Start your strike today, while national resources last!

How to Catch a lion

Problem: To catch a lion in the Sahara desert

Reading Lion Catching Theory developed so far, I tried to come up with a few
methods of my own based on theoretical computer science.

The PCP method:
Ask an experienced (but untrustworthy) hunter to deliver the lion in a cage.
Convert the lion into a PCP. Now it is enough to stick 3 random fingers in the
cage and have them bitten off to be reasonably sure it is a lion.

The Conditonal Probabilites method:
We start by standing in the middle of the Sahara. At each phase, we either take a step to the right or a step to the left depending on which one will increase or at least preserve our success probability. Since it is possible to safely catch a lion in the Sahara with odds of at least one to a trillion, assuming the lion does not move while we are calculating, we are guaranteed to end up with a lion in the cage.

The arithmetization method:
The lion's action range in the Sahara: {Running fast, Eating a Lion hunter}
can be thought of as embedded into a larger range.
Now we can extend the lion from the Sahara to the entire southern hemisphere.
Going south enough the lion is slow and indifferent in the cold climate and can be easily catched.


I hope everybody is now convinced that it requires at least an MSc in theoretical computer science to safely travel around the world.

Math lecture psyhcology when an alien finds himself in a lecture on western culture

Lecturer: "So Cancer is a terrible problem. Many people die from
cancer around the ages of 50 and 60".

Alien: "Oh, so humans are normally immortal?"

Lecturer: "No."

Alien (thinking to himself): That was a dumb question. Everybody here
must think I'm an idiot. I guess I don't have the necassary background for this lecture so I should just shut up and not waste everybody's time.

Lecturer: "Here's an example of someone who's built a happy life: A good career, three beatiful kids, a great house".

Alien: Maybe this isn't as complicated as I thought. There's just a threshold
of achievement you have to get to without getting a disease or being killed and after that you've made it.

Alien: "So is this example tight?"

Lecturer: "Well no, some people have made it with just two beatiful kids
and a great appartment in a fancy part of the city"

Alien: "Oh, so is it known what's the exact lower bound of achievement you need to get immunity from disease?"

Lecturer: "What do you mean? There's no immunity from disease!"

Alien: Damn! I was so presumptious to think I was following. I 've made an
idiot of myself again and wasted more time for everybody! There's probably an advanced course I'm missing on how time stops the minute you've made enough kids and enough money. So, maybe he means you're never immortal as time passes but since time stops for you it doesn't matter-or something complicated like that. In anycase, I really shouldn't interrupt again as I don't have the necassary background on methods in popular western cultre for achieving peace and happinness





p.s- Anybody reading this Blog is encouraged to leave comments, I'm getting lonley here:)...

Vipassana

Hey, I just returned from my third Vipassana course (see http://www.dhamma.org/ for details)

What is Vipassana? For the basic facts and a clear explanation see the link above. Here are some less clear\self-contained and more personal thoughts: Vipassana is an exploration of reality with the object of understanding it better. To understand reality better not for the purpose gaining knowledge but for the practical purpose of living better. The approach is that our suffering comes from a misunderstanding of reality. Reality is never bad in itself. We only precieve it as bad and as a result struggle against our illusion trying to make it go away. And struggling against an illusion, when you think about it, is exactly what gives that illusion more substance. When practicing Vipassana, this is experienced in the most concrete form. When your mind gets tense, resisting what it feels, say, a pain in the leg. That feeling becomes more and more 'real', more and more solidified. On the other hand, when you simply take the approach of 'OK , this is what I am feeling, this is the current reality', these solidified feelings start to dissolve (though not necassarily right away). As you become more gentle with your current experience your current experience becomes more gentle with you. This progresses up to a stage where the entire body is felt as nothing more than subtle vibrations-no solidity anywhere (just to make it clear- I haven't gotten there yet..).
The emphasis here is on the practical significance. When you experience the body as something fluid and changing rather than something fixed and solid your attachment to the body and the sensations that run through it automatically decreases. You don't make as many futile attempts to hold
on to things after you clearly see that they are simply not stable in their basic nature. On the other hand, you are less worried about things that you don't like since you realize that they are also fluid and are going to change.
We've talked so far about the body and its sensations but an important idea an Vipassana is that everything comes down to the body. Everything is experienced eventually through the body. And therefore, by working with your body and your reactions to the body sensations, you can change your behaviour patterns regarding external situations more effectively than you could have ever done by directly working with the external situation. By the way, even a thought in this context, is an 'external situation' to some extent. As even in this case there is a sensation in the body accompanying the thought and that sensation is the actual experience you're directly reacting to rather than the abstract thought.
After seeing what I have written so far, I'd like to stress again-for a clear simple explanation see the link above.

Coming back from this third course, I am becoming more and more convinced that this technique of meditation is the key to making a real change for good both in my personal life and in humanity.
Looking at human history and things going on currently, it is obvious how much a deep change is required. It also becomes clear that no external solution will work. Going through history we see how solving this or that political\military crisis or external injustice just relieves a symptom (which is also good ofcourse), and a little later another external manifestation of the collective insanity begins.
It becomes clearer that a deep inner change in the minds of humans is the only real lasting solution.
I have always been frustrated by how westerm pshycology seems so
ineffective in making a real change in the deep level of the mind.
It seemed that suffering and unhappiness in my life were caused by
conditioning accumalated from an early age and it seemed that this conditioning is rooted deep and cannot be accessed or changed.
In this respect, I feel that Vipassana is truly different. Straight away from
the beginning, it enables you to go to the deep levels of the mind and make changes there, and a small change at the depth of the mind manifests itself
in countless ways in your external life.

So I guess the bottom line is that we will either reach a critical mass of humans who will make this change in themselves or blow up the planet-either way it's going to be quiet:)

p.s-I'd like to stress that I do not think that Vipassana is the only way someone can improve himself. I also think that maybe some people are simply not as screwed up as others to begin with(just to make it clear- I don't see myself as one of those people:) )

Concepts- another mind mechanism for running away from reality

Studying logic we are given examples of things that cannot be coneptaulized.
For example, there is a town. There is a barber in the town. The barber cuts the hair of every person in town that does not cut his own hair. If you try to make sense of this you get into a problem: If the barber cuts his own hair, then he is one of the people in town that cuts his own hair, therefore he does not cut his own hair. If he does not cut his own hair, then he is one of the people in town that doesn't cut his own hair. So he does cut his own hair.
When exposed to this sort of idea, alot of people, including me, inately feel that there is something 'cool' going on here, something 'Deep'. It 'strikes a chord'. I think this is so because this sort of struggle of trying to conceptualize something that 'gets ruined' when you try to concetpualize it is an intrinsic part of our interaction with reality.
For a brief moment, I have a direct experience of reality. Immediatly the mind comes in 'OK, so the reality of this moment is such and such, has the following characterstics, experiencing it feels like this, ect..' . And a brief moment later, I am not in direct contact with reality anymore. The mind has interepreted and labeled it , and now I am experiencing the mind's approximation of reality instead.
It seems that, in a similar fashion to the beloved self-referential pardoxes, you cannot run away from this: You can say "I'm not going to interpret, I'm not going to label, I'm just going to experience". But the mind can label\interpret this statement itself! Just like it can create an approximated state of "Looking at a tree", and take you away from reality while looking at a tree. It can created an aprroximated state of 'Not labeling-just Experiencing'.
These approximated states happen inside your head. In the world of concepts and thoughts. Every time you have a direct expereince the mind creates a
concept that approximates the state and takes you away from reality into the world of concepts.
Sorry, next statement not self-contained:
Reminds me, of how in Gedel's theorem, adding the problematic unprovable statement as an axiom just creates a system where there is another unprovable statement.
Similarly, when finding something that is outside the world of thoughts and concepts, the mind immediatly creates a new concept.

Assuming this is the case. How do you get out of this? Can you get out of this gradually, by practicing awerness and meditation, or does it have to be an intense experience that suddenly happens? These issues are very much on my mind lately.

Can we choose in what to succeed?

I've changed my view of this lately. I used to have the opinion that you can set your mind to anything, and since your mind is powerful, you can achieve anything. But lately, I'm doubting the part about being able to set your mind to anything. It seems to me now, that a basic part of you, is already prewired with a certain direction and goal. So if you try to set yourself in another direction, it'll be like setting part of the sails east while the big sail is still set west, which will work partially and produce limited results. Any opinions?