(Page currently in renovation and text correction)
11 / 19 / 2011
Why fractal and not infinite?
If the mind is not a by-product of nature, I couldn't say that it falls from the sky either.
"Fractal" is a word which indicates with precision shapes, curves, objects (mathematical or from the real world) or structures which have the property to reproduce identical or self-similar patterns in breaking up and reducing, but by keeping certain of its main characteristics at its origin. The fields of application of the fractals are diverse, scientific or artistic.
To have an idea of what this word means, we will take the example of snow flakes, cauliflower and many other plants, the systems of blood-vessels and nerves, river networks, the hologram, some paintings of Escher and Jackson Pollock, and some artistic creations obtained by computer software, mathematical formulas such as recursive algorithms, models of the universe, etc.
To sum up, we discover that in a fractal, the whole is similar to one of its parts, but it doesn’t have to be identical nor infinite, its parts not being it either.
What’s about the mind and its fractal structure?
In the mind, we have the origin of a model, a kind of form if I may say so, an "entity". Whatever we think of, every thought without exception means "I think that…". The I-identity is the constant thought or primordial concept from which every other thoughts come from and are repeated ad infinitum in many different ways. They change and evolve, but they always express the idea "It's me or I who think that...". And spiritual experiences show that this fundamental and pretty obsessional idea is not necessary to perceive and think.
11 / 22 / 2011
Paradoxes and the questions which they raise enter wonderfully in the field of fractals.
Epimenides claims : "All the Cretans are liars." And he was himself a Cretan.
If he lies, the Cretans are not liars. But being a Cretan himself, he would tell the truth when he declares that the Cretans are liars, which would contradict the fact that the Cretans are not liars and that he can tell the truth. To sum up this kind of thoughts, it’s true only if it’s false, and it’s only false if it’s true. And so on… until the exhaustion of the thinking process of the one who tries to explain this paradox and the other who strives to understand it. And be sure that the mind will love it in both case. Why? Because whatever the thought is, it asserts the presence of the thinker, the I-identity who thinks that..., and that's what the 'I' desires. More it's puzzling, more the ego-entity is a reality. It's like suffering. More it's painful, more 'I' truly exists.
Another paradox, perhaps the most divine of all, which would have disappointed a good amount of thinkers and theologists casts doubt on the omnipotence of God.
One day, the devil comes to see the Almighty and asks Him :
"Could You create a stone too heavy for You to lift."
Er! Embarrassing question, surely not for the Lord, but for those who claim that God can accomplish everything.
Read again the question and observe attentively how the mind works before to carry on your reading.
Does it make you smile?
Yes or no, you have gained an emotion, a state of mind, a natural reaction of defense, a feeling and not a headache unless you try to solve the riddle.
This question doesn’t have an answer. It is absurd and as perfect as we can imagine it.
The mind raises questions to which it will never find any answer. It explores its power and sometimes, quite often to be true, it gets lost. And it’s maybe at this moment that one really appreciates silence, being purely and simply conscious.
Question :
Why a natural reaction of defense, whatever your reaction was?
11 / 27 / 2011
A spiraling escalation of violence.
_ It's not a crime to get one's revenge.
_ Great! And how do you define a crime?
And of course :
"An eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth."
11 / 28 / 2011
Body and mind are one.
But they are not the same.
Or as Indonesians like to say:
"Same same, but different."
11 / 30 / 2011
Can time have a beginning?
Does space has a limit?
And why not:
Would the infinity of the universe be in fact finite...,
even before to begin?
Which came first? The chicken or the egg?
12 / 3 / 2011
Fractal structure of an endless debate about the origin of the universe and consciousness.
Is the creation (matter, evolution, living organism, brain...) at the origin of consciousness or is consciousness at the origin of the creation?
How to know?
No logical argument will be convincing enough to answer this question.
Only the experience of the Self and non-duality suggests the truth on what the creation and consciousness are. But the experience being irrational, it does not help to explain anything intelligently.
And the debate remains.
12 / 8 / 2011
"No player is greater than the game itself."
In the movie "Rollerball" of Norman Jewison
Are you sure ?
No player, no game.
The game is over, but the player is still a person without the costume.
12 / 9 / 2011
Relationship between fractals and thoughts.
You will easily discover it by looking at some pictures of fractals available on Internet or elsewhere.
What do you see ? A model of units more or less spiral which lost itself in the infinity, or in other words, which runs out of itself in its own representation, in its own dynamics and performance.
Since the creation of the term “fractal” in 1974 by Benoit Mandelbrot, many researches has been made in various fields which apparently have no relationship between themselves. We notice in particular this phenomenon of fractal in the nature and what constitutes the universe.
"A fractal object is an object in which each element is a fractal object."
This definition points out the concept of "Microcosm and macrocosm," "What is above is like what is below", with a subtlety, the idea of a natural decline, extinction, exhaustion or disappearance.
The mind is lazy.
Yes and no, we can only say that it is far from being perfect, and only according to our own idea of perfection.
When we use our intellectual faculties to reflect on a question a little more complicated than "Where are my keys? Oh yes, in my pocket!", we catch a thought and push forward the argument as far as possible for a while until it runs out of itself. Then we take another thought or the same and start again with the same mental process.
Every thoughts get lost in nothingness. It is a characteristic of mental and intellectual life. If, on the other hand, we were able to hold a reasoning without the least interruption until obtaining a really satisfactory answer, we would probably have solved all the problems of humanity a long time ago. But this does not seem to be a human faculty. Why? We, who think to be so smart compared to animals, why are we not able to hold an argument more than a few seconds or minutes without the least interruption? To hold forever doesn't seem to be in the intrinsic nature of the creation too. The answer lies perhaps in the fractal images and structures that we discover more and more in the nature, evolution of the universe and observations of cultural phenomena.
12 / 10 / 2011
The fact : "to be."
Basic structure of intelligence : "to survive."
Basic structure of the mind : "to fear."
Substructure of the mind : "to suffer."
Modalities : "egoism, greed, hypocrisy."
Particularities : "ad infinitum until death."
"My ego"
We don't have an ego.
The ego has millions of egos.
Nothing strange for him or her to think that he or she has one.
12 / 17 / 2011
We don't choose what we are,
we choose what we do.
What we do depends so much of what we are,
that in fact, we don't have many choices.
But what we are depends so much of what we do,
that in fact, we have many choices too.
Fundamentally blasé
The more we look for the ultimate pleasure,
the more we discover the true nature of suffering.
Never say never.
You may be right.
1 / 12 / 2012
As long as we don’t complicate matters, they stay simple.
But when we try to simplify them, they get complicated.
"Everything will be alright" means that in fact everything can go really wrong.
"Ten minutes before his death, he was still alive."
Tautology is a fractal structure of the mind that the ego loves.
It's what we call the foundation of logic laws.
But also pleonasm, truism, redundancy, verbosity...
You have the choice.
Complete nonsense.
If logic is the science which has for object the study of the norms of the truth and the formal analysis of knowledge, its interest is only about forms, norms and models, and not about truth and knowledge.
So we can only discuss truth and knowledge with absurdities.
Logical or not ?
2 / 23 / 2012
If you stop thinking that you have the choice, you can do extraordinary things or carry on your daily routine. It’s up to you ! The concept of free will or fate will never change what you will decide to do nor what you will do. So the idea that you have no choice set you free to do anything you wish.
Bad people make soon or late a mistake.
If they don’t, they are really good.
Squaring the circle.
Expression sometimes used as a metaphor for doing something logically or intuitively impossible. And we still wonder what it really means. Admit that it was quite an idea! But Shankaracharya preferred : "The child of a barren woman."
You don't have any other choice than to choose
"The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy." William Hazlit
2 / 26 / 2012
Good and evil.
_ Don't do what you could later be sorry for having done.
_ In other words, I can do nothing.
_ Yes, you understood very well except that it's impossible to do nothing. So what are you going to do?
3 / 10 / 2012
The Krishnamurti paradox :
"Do what I tell you to, but don’t do what I do."
J. Krishnamurti was famous in his lecture to disapprove the relationship between Guru and disciple and the importance of the Guru in a spiritual quest. He said :
"Following Gurus were particularly stupid ways of wasting time."
"Be independent, meditate my way! Be free without Guru!"
"You must be your own Guru and your own disciple. You must question everything that man has accepted as worthwhile and necessary."
But on the other hand, he never denied to be himself "the World Teacher" and the reincarnation of Maitreya Buddha, Jesus and Krishna. On the contrary, after the dissolution of the Theosophical Society’s "Order of the Star" organization, he claimed to be the truth incarnated and said that if only five sincere and true seekers could follow his teaching, it would be sufficient. According his own words, he was a teacher and not a Guru, but in Sanskrit and Hindi, the word teacher is Guru. He also explained about himself:
"When it becomes necessary for humanity to receive in a new form the ancient wisdom, someone whose duty is to repeat these truths is incarnated."
And ten days before his death, he told about himself:
"…for seventy years that super energy, no, that immense energy, immense intelligence, has been using this body. I don't think people realize what tremendous energy and intelligence went through this body. Nobody, unless the body has been prepared, very carefully, protected and so on, nobody can understand what went through this body. Nobody. Don't anybody pretend. Nobody. I repeat this: nobody amongst us or the public knows what went on. I know they don't. And now after seventy years it has come to an end. …You won't find another body like this, or that supreme intelligence operating in a body for many hundreds of years. You won't see it again. When he goes, it goes."
According these words, he was not only a very special body gifted with a cosmic intelligence, but he was also omniscient and could predict the future centuries ahead.
Shortly before his death, he stated firmly that he was still the World Teacher and that no one had ever truly understood his teaching, no one besides himself had experienced transformation.
Krishnamurti advocated celibacy and claimed that it could lead to the generation of great energy and a psychological transformation. He put special emphasis on celibacy, but hide all his life an affair with Rosalind, Rajagopal’s wife, which lasted for more than twenty-five years and during which she became pregnant on several occasions, suffering miscarriages and at least two abortions.
In the late 1930s, he became close friend with Aldous Huxley, but behind his back insulted him as having a mind "like a wastebasket".
He claimed to be unconditioned by his own upbringing and have forgotten most of his past. Nevertheless, his teaching is almost identical to those of Buddha and the Upanishads which he studied intensively during his early years at Adyar.
Emily Lutyens said she knew Krishnamurti was a congenital liar but she would nevertheless always adore him. Her mother asked him once why he lied and he replied with astonishing frankness : "Because of fear". Then he got upset and his voice changed completely from a formal indifference to heated anger. It became almost shrill. "I have no ego!" he said. "Who do you think you are to talk to me like this?"
For someone who think to be the World Teacher and without ego, what kind of wisdom is that? What kind of teaching is it? Surely not a teaching about truth, honesty and sincerity! For the very least, it’s quite a paradox.
(For more paradoxes like this one, please read from Geoffrey D. Falk “Stripping the Gurus” available for free at : http://www.strippingthegurus.com/index.html)
Understanding more and more and always more is not going to make us happy until we understand that we understood and know absolutely nothing. Then there is life as it is and how to live it correctly without pretension.
Chaos is this order that we don't understand. We just have to watch water boiling or the evolution of thoughts in our mind to have an idea about it.
4 / 14 / 2012
To know that I’m ordinary makes me very exceptional.
To think that I’m exceptional makes me quite ordinary.
And to stop thinking like an idiot makes me free.
5 / 10 / 2012
Maya and beliefs
If everything is an illusion, why should I believe the illusory Guru who states that everything is an illusion?
True and false in a strange world.
To speak about what I consider as a "collective hallucination", I had to be absent when it happened, which means I have to know nothing about it, because this way to consider an incomprehensible event doesn’t make sense for someone who was present when it happens. An hallucination by definition cannot be collective.
6 / 26 / 2012
Words and meaning
Is intelligence a personal quality or a collective and cultural phenomenon? Let's define what intelligence is before to ask the question.
7 / 11 / 2012
We will never explain everything
Life is obviously not interesting if you have no interest in anything. But why some people find everything interesting and others nothing is a question which cannot be interesting for those who have no interest in anything. So the answer will always be only half true. The other half will stay a mystery forever.
11 / 2 / 2012
The paradox Rémi Gaillard
If absurdity is not a mental structure, why does it make laughing some people and not the other? By mental structure, we have to understand that "we are what we can do", and that the totality of our mental structures creates what we think to be our personal identity or ego, which in fact is the identity or more precisely the intelligent entity that we are, i.e. the "I" and "me". So aren’t we anything else than an entity, an illusion, a name and a form? Yes and no because the true nature of this illusion is divine. Although an illusion is not real, in order to appear there must be at its origin something quite real. If the entire universe is illusory, the consciousness which gives us the possibility to be aware of it has to be real. That’s why we call it also the Divine because only this amazing consciousness has the power to create and project such an illusion inside its own imagination.
"It's by doing whatever, that one becomes whoever". But for Rémi Gaillard, it’s by doing the best possible whatever that he became a genius prankster and not whoever. If you want to see true and not illusory craziness, watch his videos for free on Internet at :
http://www.nimportequi.com/en/
1 / 29 / 2013
"Nothing proves that we are more than nothing." Cioran
3 / 4 / 2013
The paradox of non-duality
If you had lived this beautiful experience of non-duality because of Grace, I guess you deserved it. But if you deserve it, it means that you did something special and you did it only because you had the choice to do it or to do something else. So you believe in free will, in Karma as law of cause and effect and in reincarnation which is its obvious consequence. But if you had lived this amazing experience of non-duality, you also know that there is no free will because the egocentric entity who thinks to have the power of choosing and doing is an illusion.
A more puzzling paradox
You have to be liberated before understanding that there is no liberation. Everything is at its right place. A person is a person. Consciousness is conscious. No one is liberated. And of course, liberation is a concept which only concerns those who are looking for it.
4 / 7 / 2013
A tie
"We see the straw in the eye of the neighbor, but not the beam in ours."
So if you think I don’t see mine, it’s mean that you don’t see yours.
It’s a tie. Forget it!
6 / 4 / 2013
Atheism is not really what we believe
The nonbelievers continually pray the God "Money".
The polytheist nonbelievers worship very much also the God "TV".
And for this worship, they believe to be atheist by not believing in what they believe and by believing in what they don’t believe. But could they truly believe in what they believe?
Hello, breakdown service. I believe my antidepressants are in low-tension power.
8 / 8 / 2013
The eternal recurrence
This one isn’t from Friedrich Nietzsche:
When everything is upside down,
we have to put everything upside down
in order to get it right.
But who says now that it's right and not anymore upside down?
If everything was like that before, it probably because it was right too.
"My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes...
most of which never happened."
Mark Twain
8 / 22 / 2013
"May the best man win!"
But the winner is always the best...
No?
10 / 8 / 2013
Illusion and Karma
_ We choose in the present moment a future action according to past impressions. In other terms, we are absolutely free to choose what we want. But we will always choose by sheer chance what has been predetermined.
_ And what’s about me? Do I have the freedom to express a thought?
_ Yes of course, the thought which will result from the previous ones.
10 / 24 / 2013
Being or human
You are a human being.
But are you being or human?
When you know being,
it’s easier to be human.
12 / 8 / 2013
Carpe Diem
If enlightenment, liberation and truth are not found here and now, where could they be?
In a more or less distant future?
Why not also to think that the present moment will maybe come later?
Are you ready?
If quality is truly more important than quantity, you are free to live like an emperor here and now.
12 / 19 / 2013
Always less for a little bit more
Nihilism is the most beautiful philosophical doctrine,
but it doesn’t satisfy anybody.
The paradox of mental life
"People would sooner die than think." Arthur Schopenhauer
Interesting and pretty funny remark if you practice meditation!
1 / 5 / 2014
Puzzle
Enigma or problem that requires intelligence and ingenuity for its solution.
Game composed of pieces that have to be put together logically in order to come up with the reality of an image.
We could almost believe that it’s the definition of our perceptions and thoughts.
1 / 9 / 2014
Nothing, not a thing
There is no other art than the concept of art itself.
God doesn’t exist because God exists
If everything is divine, nihilism is divine too.
3 / 18 / 2014
Sounds??
When I hear people saying that Americans have no culture, I tell them to watch "Sounds??" with Roland Kirk and John Cage in 1967:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m4xkY0WgVw
And usually after watching this video, they still don’t understand what I really mean.
So strange!
6 / 23 / 2014
Right or wrong
Everything we can say is ultimately wrong.
So what I just say is wrong too.
Does it mean that everything that we can say is true?
Logic is not always very clear.
Schopenhauer once said:
"Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills."
So if he cannot will what he wills, can he not will what he doesn't will."
What is sure is that when I want to eat spaghettis, my wife doesn't want to cook them.
She doesn't like spaghettis.
Be spontaneous!
Paradox or just nonsense?
9 / 6 / 2014
No kidding !
_ I never tell what I think.
_ Too late ! See you next time.
Karl Popper
"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."
10 / 25 / 2014
The Möbius band
It’s a surface with only one side contrary to a classical band which has two although it has two sides as any other classical bands. In short, better to see it in order to believe how it’s possible to create something so amazing and understand that human also has at least two sides in the mind !
The cube of Necker reworked by Escher is pretty good too, but never look at it when you are drunk ; you could find yourself upside down.
5 / 1 / 2015
Absolutely logical
"Fashion is what goes out of fashion."
Coco Chanel
7 / 5 / 2016
Creativity
Mind functioning relies on structures,
instinctual, cultural, fractal, social and many other kinds of structure.
But there is something really strange about all of them ;
the mind loves and hates "repetition".
Somehow the most adapted to its own functioning is kind of "fractal structures",
which are always the same, but also different.
In other terms, the mind needs to renew itself constantly
if it wishes to keep sane.
And there is nothing better than creativity for that purpose.
By creativity, I don’t mean people have to become artists,
but to find an activity that changes their habits.
"Learning and inquiring" is surely a very good one
because it creates constantly new structures and thought patterns.