Freedom: The ability to determine what brings meaning to your life

David Foster Wallace is always a breath of fresh air. 

The only thing I've preached, if ever, was that "You have a choice."
You have the freedom to choose what matters.

You don't have to believe in religion, advertisers, or your parents.
You don't have to go with the trend, follow your friends, or that spiritual guru across the street.

The transition from religious morality to Absurdist morality happened in philosophy during the last century.
But humanity is postponing Enlightenment for the sake of convenience.

It's convenient to believe the morality that religion shoves in your face
because it would be such a pain to think about what's good and what's bad by yourself.
It's convenient to believe that Marriage and a 9-5 job is the only way to live an adult life,
because it would be such a pain to see past the prepackaged deals that society throws on us.
It's convenient to believe of a "Prince charming" that will sweep you off your feet,
because it would be such a pain to grow as an individual and build a life for yourself.
It's convenient to believe in traditional gender roles,
because it would be socially unacceptable to grow out of masculinity and femininity.
It's convenient to worship status-quos and social hierarchies,
because it would be harder to value who's really important in your life.
It's convenient to seek alternatives through "organic" hipster cultures,
because finding alternatives by yourself is regrettably unsocial and weird. 

If you think that marriage, a 9-5 job, a prince charming, traditional gender roles or hipster cultures suits you better than the self-made alternatives, then by all means go for it. I'm not saying you shouldn't.

I'm merely pointing out that these are all pre-packaged deals offered by society, and taken up by many for the sake of convenience.
You however have within you the power to transcend these constructs, if they don't fit who you are.
You have the ability to look at the world with your own eyes.
You have the ability to determine what brings meaning to your life.

[Photoblog] San Francisco

View from the Marriot Hotel  

View from the historic cable car at night

Golden gate bridge

Golden gate bridge from the top

This is where the sea lions hang out at Fisherman's Warf

The infamous Alcatraz prison. 

Fisherman's warf

Buddhism is big business

shopping at fisherman's warf

Sutro baths

Land's End

[Photoblog] Japanese Tea Garden - Golden Gate Park

This was quite the gem hidden behind the DeYoung art museum. If you are going to visit the Golden Gate park in San Francisco, I highly recommend a visit.

The futility of argument

Personal is political.

We live in an era of economy of scale, where large corporations control the opinions of masses and alternatively the masses control the profits of large corporations. But the freedom that an individual has is greater than any time in human history.

You have the freedom to have an opinion, to live the way you want to, and not get stoned to death. Doesn't apply if you live in certain Mediterranean countries, but for most of us it does.

So why do we argue with other people?

 I've stopped arguing about religion, politics, life and love a long time ago.  I believe that organized religion (whether it be the Roman catholic church or the sinhala-buddhist sanghas in Sri Lanka) is one of the major hindrances to the progression of society. They preach love and compassion, but underneath their rosy exterior, they're filled with bigotry, hatred, guilt-shame-based morality, irrationality, paternalism, and quite simply they are an insult to the human condition. And that's to put it mildly.

But I don't go saying this to peoples faces; I simply stay away from ceremonious rituals that involve religion. The same goes for politics. I would either vote, or not vote depending on my disposition towards the options that I have. I feel the same way about life. The way I choose to live my life is a statement of my values.

I am willing to explain my actions to anyone without ulterior motives. However that's a big IF. People almost always do have ulterior motives, and if they don't, it's about all about fanboism.  In other words, trying to compare and justify the decisions that they've made in life (or not made) to mine. For example have you ever heard conversations over which phone is better? This model has a 10 megapixel camera and a superior touchscreen, and plus I got it at a great bargain price with my Employee discount! This is the same kind of conversation that I usually run into when talking about the decisions that I've made about life, love and politics. Well my way of saying "Fuck you. I'm not going to be your escape from your own cowardice", is simply walking away from the argument.

The other simple reason for not arguing with people is that, there are those who argue just for the sake of arguing. There's an old saying "Never wrestle with a pig. You both get all dirty, and the pig likes it."

If people really wanted to seek the truth, they wouldn't argue. They would listen. They would listen to the amazing people who have actually spent their lifetimes devoted to philosophy and science. We live in an age where information is readily available; the chemistry of the brain, Absurdism and the meaning of life, love and it's evolutionary significance, the physics of subatomic particles, the birth and ultimate destiny of the universe, the meaning of time, and the meaning of death. There is so much that we've taught ourselves.

 But No. Rather than trying to understand these from the collective intelligence of the human species, people argue with each other. To satisfy their egos. To console their inner fanboys that they've got the best bargain.

Stop arguing. Carry on with life. 

On Death and Immortality

A few days ago Bill Gates did an AMA on Reddit.
He casually mentioned about wanting to live forever.
He's not the only smart person to foresee humanity's transition into a deathless state.
Ray Kurzweil, the father Singularity and the Director of Engineering at Google also craves Immortality.

I have a question though.

If our bodies live forever are we really immortal?
Am I the same person I was yesterday? My body doesn't contain any of the atoms that it held 10 years ago.
They've all been replenished by new ones.
But my autobiographical-self seem to think that I am one and the same person.
My memories seem to define who I am.
What if I was replicated atom-by-atom? Would the new me have the same memories?
The truth is, we are already immortal. We are everyone else.
We just don't see it because our autobiographical self prevents us from seeing this.

I am not against Immortality of the body. But as a species, we're not ready for it yet.
The progression of society is much aided by Death.
The death of homophobics, racists, and sexists have made societies more Egalitarian. The death of colonialists, imperialists, feudalistic lords, have brought in an era of freedom.
Imagine having to deal with all the self-righteous people from the 18th century.
Suddenly, your nagging extended family wouldn't seem that bad.

So far, humans have shown extreme ownership of ideals (or memes as Darwkins would have you call them.)
People go to the extent of sacrificing their lives and even loved ones for ideals that bring meaning to the autobiographical self.
That is the way we are programmed. To be scared of this big bad universe. To find and create "meaning" out of nothing. Usually, this would involve God, a romantic partner and/or children.
We are programmed to tell ourselves stories, build a plot for our life, with obstacles, protagonists antagonists,  and happy endings.
Rarely does a human waver from this recipe.
The only way out is Death. And what a tragedy it would be if humans were denied that privilege.

As Camus once said, the celebration of life is having the choice of drinking a cup of coffee or killing yourself.
Our paternalistic society prevents us from committing suicide. So imagine when the burden of Immortality kicks in. You wouldn't even be able to die in peace.

But I'm not against Physical Immortality. I just think we first need to build the capacity to change ourselves.

Maybe technological singularity will give us the ability to break-free from ourselves. To heal the scars from our past-lives, to calculate an infinite number of perspectives, and to build upon them without getting attached to any of them.

As always I am hopeful about the future. It's just the recent future that I am warning you about.

10 things I'm excited about 2013

1.) Finishing my PhD!
2.) Getting a real ass job with an acceptable income.
3.) 2-bedroom apartment or a House! Not to mention a new car. And maybe a husky.
4.) Possibly moving to the West Coast. Which may or may not involve a cross-country road trip.
5.) Initiating some seriously sustainable community service projects without financial aid.
6.) Jenna-Louise Coleman - the Doctor's new companion.
7.) Bioshock Infinite: the game that introduced me to Libertarianism.
8.) Man of Steel, Star Trek: Into the Darkness,  The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Thor: Dark World
9.) Salsa waves and body rolls. Oh, how I love to lead.
10.) Going my own way.

Dreamers: reductionists vs creationists

If there is one thing that all of us have in common, is that we dream. Some of us are aware of our dreams, some of us not so much. But we all dream. We dream while we're asleep. We dream while we're awake. 

Reality is but a mere, fragment of our imagination. After all, we create it, we interpret it in our own way, and we build egos around it. Egos are not necessarily bad, in fact they are an essential ingredient in the soup of "functioning properly" as a single entity. But the dreams and the interpretations of reality that lead to our egos are better served with a little creativity. 

Allegheny cemetery, Pittsburgh PA

"You don’t have to accept your brain’s first interpretation of the things that happen to you. You can frame them in any way you wish to stay undisturbed by the randomness of life, because if good things make you happy and bad things make you sad, you will forever be a slave to things that you cannot control." - Roosh V, a controversial pickup artist

Allegheny cemetery, Pittsburgh PA

Boys and girls have different dreams. Little boys have fantasies in which they're faster or smarter or able to fly. Where they hide their faces in secret identities and listen to the people who despise them admiring their remarkable deeds. Pathetic, bespectabled rejected Perry Porter is secretly the amazing Spider Gawky. Loved Clint Clarke is really Hyperman. 

Little girls on the other hand have different fantasies.  Their parents are not their parents. Their lives are not their lives. They are princesses. Lost princesses from distant lands. And one day the king and queen of their real parents will take them back to their land and then they'll be happy for ever and ever. - Neil Gaiman, author of Sandman

Dreams gives us the power to hate as well as the power to love. They gives us hope when fear and anxiety takes the best of us, but they also distorts our minds and consumes us in the process. They are the root of all our happiness as well as our sadness. Dreams are the root of our well-being as well as our suffering. When Gouthama told ancient India to "awaken the Buddha within", he realized the latter.

While we have all the freedom in the universe to dream our own reality into existence, most of us actively dismiss the notion as pure lunacy. We catch ourselves in the act and feel ashamed, when in truth dreams are the only thing that keeps us from madness. And then we do something even crazier. We try to stop dreaming. But we can't; in order to perceive, we must dream. Adding a low-pass filter to our dreams, we reduce everything into simple equations. We suppress our creations and depress ourselves by reduction. No value addition, no creative process, just an attempt at being sane.

Self portrait: somewhere in lush meadows of Penn Hills

Nirvana is essential to avoid being captive by a single dream. But in order to live, in order to perceive, in order to feel, you must dream.