It's a small world after all...

In the previous post in this series, we saw how our "sense of self" is different from our body, thought, emotions, and even our hard-coded emotional disposition. We can separate ourselves from all of them and inquire about them as if they were separate objects.  We also introduced the model of universal consciousness that is central to Indian thought, and that our self is very much this all-pervasive universal consciousness.  We also talked about "identity" and how our existential self (somewhat analogous to the "Ego" of Freudian model), called our " jivatma " has a lot of energy and cannot but identify with something or the other. A "enlightened" person would hence, manage this energy and carefully curate the set of identity objects to which it would attach to.  In this post, we will talk about the "states of being" of our existential self and what does it take to curate its identity.  The Mandukya upanishad talks about the s...

Over the last several years, I have had a growing interest in Cognitive Science and models of the mind. A chance encounter with some learned scholars, lead me to rediscovering the roots of Indian thought through a completely different hermeneutic framework from the machine hermeneutics that we study in school. I have documented my thoughts in several different ways-- Facebook posts, a series of posts on this blog with the label " Theory of Being ", and a self-published Kindle book by the same name. My dream is to recreate a full-fledged theory of complex systems based on the theory of "being" with tools and methodologies to implement them in practice.  More recently, I stumbled onto the theory of Yoga-- a practice spanning over several centuries, and which was documented and formalised by Maharshi Patanjali who is thought to have lived sometime between 7th to 2nd century BCE. This post is part of a series on my understanding of the human psyche based on the theory...