A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Sit down. The world around you isn’t asking for anything. There’s nothing else to do, Nowhere else to be. Just be here. Now.

 I wake up with the same heartache I fell asleep with. Thinking about all these studies that say that the heart has its own nervous system. 40,000 neurons, not that much but definitely enough to hold on a feeling. My cortical working memory can hold a world, but I'm old enough to know that it is not mine. A representaion woven by streams of forces that I barely had control over apart from awareness.  But for my heart, there is this voice that says I shoudn't worry, I kept it hidden for that long, it is truley mine. I worry too much about ownership of my feelings, they tend to be painful most of the time, so I let them go. Yet still these leeches in the heart, despite how painful they roam around, I still can't find ways to let go of them.  "No fable here no lesson No singing meadow lark Just a filthy beggar blessing What happens to the heart"

 There is a weird lightness in place when I have to experience my body reactions to danger with a deflated ego. The cold shiver down my spine, the heavy breath, the contraction in my forehead, and the weight on my chest — these are not me.  A distance apart, I can observe these mulitude of energies and emotions travel through my body. It used to be so scary, I'd fall into a self-reinforcing loop where the danger and the reaction/malfunction amplified one another. I think of danger as a signal that tells me that there is something wrong around. Most of the time, my body reacts with some short-circuited automatic response(s) that amplify the coming signal. It's the awarness of this ping-pong of horrors that can get you out, or at least allows you to see that there is a way out. Remember what you are, it's gonna be alright.

  What is that thing I refer to when I say "I"? I can't pin it down despite how much I try to. The thing I thought is there deep down as the basis of my experience, is not. Is it the other way around? This "I" is up there, at the highest level of our abstractive capacity as humans. It's the greatest abstraction, the focal point of all other abstractions. The "I" is a virtualization of a multitude of phenomenological experiences. Is it something we curate from our fixations and attachments? A staging area for the thoughts, feelings and emotions that we think of as "me" or "mine".

One of the things that made fall in love with software development is this sense of control it gave me at some point I lacked it at many personal levels. This shiny hope that all abstract ideas can get formalized, all formalizations can get implemented, and all implementations can get optimized. What else I could ask for?  For someone like me who have been always in a fight with himself, a fight to control this illusory thing we call it "self". It always appeared as something too stubborn to define, to control. Then I learnt one hell of a lesson: it's only heavy because you are carrying it.  Most of the things we refer to when we refer to ourselves aren't actually constituents of this self, but attachments we hold onto because they are the only things we are familiar with. We confuse them as essential parts of ourselves. The memories, the feelings, the emotions and the thoughts. These are not YOU. Once I told myself that I can let them go, I didn't need to control...