Tag: philosophy

Seeing Things Differently

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Recently I was talking with someone who suggested that an in-patient group oriented intensive physiotherapy regime postoperative for hip arthroplasty was a good idea / French practice. He was, to understate, more extroverted than I. The idea of being around loads of people “helping” me to recuperate via conviviality just does not work for me. It would be close to torture, feeling unwell and having to interact in a foreign language on a regular basis, with others. No thanks.

This sounds like a showstopper to me. In my mentality I would delay or not proceed at all.

Maybe I am ungrateful or maybe I know myself well.

It is clear in this simple example how we see things differently.

“Jack Sprat he ate no fat; his wife she ate no lean.”

What works for one person does not work for others. According to all the common metrics I am socially isolated. Some might imagine that I need help. Poor Alan.

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They may even imagine that they know what is best for me. Because as every newspaper vendor knows it is always the antisocial loner, who is not well liked, that becomes the heinous murderer. Helping the socially excluded is an anti-murder prophylactic measure, which makes sound societal sense.

Unlike most people I don’t care what the ‘phone companies do with my data, because I don’t generate any. I am not in any target marketing demographic. Daytime TV however is full of adverts aimed at the likes of me. I’ll get my SAGA loyalty card soon, to use until my pre-paid cremation plan kicks in.

The problem with seeing things differently is that it is nigh on impossible to explain or otherwise convey that difference to others, specifically the scale thereof.

I look relatively normal. I can speak “normal” for a short while. But I know from experience that the way I assimilate the world differs radically from others. I am not prone to influencers, whatever they are. I do not swallow hook line and sinker what I might read in the news of whichever flavour / prejudice. As an outsider, I need help to rejoin the fold, the group lunacy. Bless…

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Most people suffer from worry and catastrophising. I can have brutal clarity without dramatic catastrophic thinking. I can envision futures and remain calm.

It is impossible to communicate the lack of ambition / goal to anyone who is beholden to theirs. I am happy to make unilateral decisions based on available information even when I know that information is incomplete.

Once you have attained impermanence, you change as does your orientation towards life.

“This too, shall pass”, is more than just a saying.

People in general have a need to “do” something. There is a need of immediacy. A desire, an urge, to get things “sorted”. I have learned that some things simply cannot be sorted. Some have to be endured. Some need let go of. Some need to calm in emotional temperature and thence to fade away.

It is economical not to intrude, to inflict oneself upon or otherwise interfere in the lives of others. This is a form of harmlessness.

A passive approach of response when needed tends to calm. Though it can also infuriate, humans being as they are.

It is impossible to please everyone.

I see apertures in the web of life, during which things may be possible. When I see them closing, I know that the possibility and probability of things happening drops. Until finally what once might have been possible, no longer is.

One of the aspects of impermanence is the notion of timeliness. Timeliness has a time limit. If things do not occur when they may or might, they do not and cannot. The moment has passed. The “permanent” possibility or opportunity is gone.

Impermanence teaches that complacency is unwise. It is a non-nihilistic implication which many fail to see. There is only a discrete aperture in spacetime for things to occur…

You have only my word for it, that I imagine that I see things differently from others…

I could be talking BS…

You decide…..

Messaging Assumption and Miscommunication

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

Postulate.

The human ability to get entirely the wrong of the stick is close to infinite.

Herein lies the mystery of perception, bias and multiple failures in communication both as a purveyor and acceptor. People may not be aware that they are, whether consciously or not, sending messages which others are receiving and perceiving and assimilating.

I suspect that because I am largely silent and can be not expressive, people tend to imagine that I am judging and being critical. They may expect some verbal response / discussion / mutual bullshitting when talking and when none is forthcoming, they can get unnerved. The feedback mechanism is missing. They expect chit-chat. In the absence they can confer multiple meanings which simply are not there.

People can read all sorts of shit into things. They may imagine I am sending a message when I am not. People might read this blog and imagine that I am messaging them directly.

The likelihood of miscommunication in the context of different cultures and frames of refence is enhanced. People may imagine that their customs are transferable. The French attitude of laissez-faire can be interpreted as complete indifference, fence sitting and not giving a shit, disinterest. It can be read, “that person can’t be arsed, sod ’em, they are not serious. Let’s move on to someone who has a point of view or opinion.”

In trying not to impinge a different message can be received. “Waste of time.”

I’ll assume with a high confidence integral that many people have made hugely erroneous assumptions over the years as to my motivations, what I am thinking and where I am coming from. This {my} assumption is based upon my interpretations of their behaviours and could be invalid. There may be transference of their ways of thinking and prejudices onto me.

There are certain types of people who like to argue the toss and “win” arguments / debates. They like to “score” points.

If someone like this expresses a point of view and one does not counter it, remaining silent even. They can assume agreement and/or victory. The lucky recipient of opinion may disagree totally but cannot be arsed to verbalise. Agreement can be assumed and the illusion of being right /accurate taken from the non-intervention.

Many introverts cannot be bothered to do the thinking for gobby extroverts. It is not important to them nor is share of air time or limelight kudos. The introverts can be disinterested in interaction.

I am reasonably confident that I have by accident, thrown a spanner into the works, with my interactions with the French medical profession. I have not behaved in the manner to which they are accustomed and they have not had the skill or experience to handle it. There has a result been extensive miscommunication and they have made assumptions about what might transpire, what I understand and how I perceive them. It can be very hierarchical. Most medics have not interacted as I have. My need to chat and discuss is vanishingly small when viewed from the angle of French customs. If I want to find out my first port of call is research which I will do thoroughly.

Once miscommunication has gone beyond a certain point the situation becomes very difficult if not impossible to salvage. This is because face and pride have now come into play and dominate, often unilaterally, subsequent interpersonal dynamics.

Postulate

The human notion of face and implicit loss of face is one of the most expensive bits of human folly in terms of relationships and loss of human life.

Face in this context is illusion, a socio-political construct which sells gossip magazines, tabloid newspapers and underpins the scripts of television soap operas.

“Face” lies aback assumption and miscommunication. People get offended, an emotional overaction, if things do not comply with assumption and social expectation. People can assume that the {their} worldview is common and that everyone holds similar prejudices to them.

Once people have gotten hold of the wrong end of the stick the tendency is to grasp this ever more tightly. Mis-perceptions and mis-assimilations of reality are more concrete and fixed than one might imagine.

There is no better demonstration of miscommunication than the game of “Chinese whispers”. Yet surprisingly, given this knowledge, the faceless and ubiquitous “they” are somehow the font of all truth and knowledge….

There is not a lot you can do or say which is contrary to the omniscience of “they”. No matter how well you communicate it, it cannot be perceived accurately because “they” dogmatically forbid it.

The wrong end of the stick beckons with the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole…

My Five Buddhist Incarnations – Dreaming

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

In around 2003 whilst living in London and working as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry at Imperial College in London I started having waking visions of myself dressed as a Buddhist monk / priest. These visions overlaid normal day to day reality and I was able to lecture to a theatre full of ~one hundred students on chemical reaction kinetics or in smaller groups, chemical applications of group theory, whilst these visions were resident. They persisted on the crowded Victoria Line tube trains. I had repeat visions of om mane padme hum tattooed in Sanskrit on my inner forearms. Accompanying these images was/is the sensation of tattoo. These visions lasted on and on for over a year.

I did not mention this to anyone because I thought it would not go down well in the Chemistry department. I thought human resources might not appreciate this and occupational health might be consulted.

I however was pretty sure that this was past life recall.

Obviously, it is impossible to prove scientifically, that any past life recall is real. At best there can be what the courts call, circumstantial evidence. Dreaming comprises some of this kind of evidence.

In 2009 I had a series of visionary telepathic conversations, early in the morning, walking in the woods near Tring with the master Djwhal Kuhl. He told me of five of my previous lives, two of which were Buddhist. He said that I had been a very close disciple of Siddartha.

The dream yesterday has added Nāgārjuna to the list of possible life-candidates.

Irrespective of accuracy or otherwise the theme of scholasticism and scholar runs through all the/my putative incarnations as does the theme of entrepreneurship. I am “on” the second ray, of the Elephant dreaming class and conditioned by love-wisdom, the teaching ray.

One dream suggests that I was Bakula a close disciple of Siddartha who came late to the path after a scholarly life.

Yesterday’s dream suggests some six hundred years later Nāgārjuna. Who was a “founder” of Mahayana and may have taught at Nalanda university.

Another dream has pointed at a saffron trousered Muay Thai trained Burmese / Thai incarnation, a monk/priest/protector.

Then there is dreaming evidence of a Japanese Vajrayana monk incarnation, with poetry.

{The feeling for me is that I also had a Japanese Zen life but no dreams as yet}.

The next two lives were not substantially Buddhist.

Of late there has been increasing “evidence” for a 20th century incarnation as a Tibetan Buddhist. So far there is no evidence of a named individual. If it was a sequential birth then they need to have died before or in early 1964. If it is a shared emanation then there is no strict constraint of time frame.

It is not for me beyond the realms of possibility that I have had five {six} incarnations with a dominant Buddhist flavour and of a non lay orientation.

It is not going to detrimentally affect my career prospects to write about this here and now.

I can just be some crazy eccentric old git living like a quasi-hermit.

“Look at the twp boy over by there…”

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Leaving the Palace and Miscellaneous

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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Nirmāṇakāya (Chinese: 應身; pinyin: yīngshēn; Tibetan: སྤྲུལ་སྐུ་, tulku, Wylie: sprul sku) is the third aspect of the trikāya and the physical manifestation of a Buddha in time and space.

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Nearly ten years ago I tried to explain to the anaesthetist that because of the very large amount of meditation I had done there might be some anomalies in how I responded to medication – anaesthetic. They completely ignored me and did not take me in any way seriously. A few days subsequent to the operation I had strong recall of being above the operating table watching the “vultures” around my corpse operating. On going into theatre, I was chatting about the clean room conditions of the operating theatre. The same night after ~ six hours of surgery to remove a colon cancer, I stood on my own two feet. Which freaked out the nurse in recovery.

I am pretty sure that something weird transpired during the operation and that it was not spoken about.

There is no way that a modern medical professional would countenance the notion of a nirmāṇakāya or janmanirmāṇakāya; སྐྱེ་བ་སྤྲུལ་སྐུ, skye ba sprul sku. Nor that they might be biologically different to a regular human being.

If one takes the dreaming “evidence” in this blog, then there is a hint of non-standard reincarnations plural stemming back lifetimes. It could be a Soul reincarnating or it could simply be some kind of emanation. In the latter case the emanation body or nirmāṇakāya may not clothe itself in meat in a standard way. I have not read of any different approach to the medical treatment of Tibetan tulkus. But there is a vast amount of stuff which is kept away from prying eyes. My guess is that Tibetan Vajrayana etc. is like an iceberg, with only a tiny bit showing.

The body may be similar but the “mind” very different. Tulkus may be very different to normal people though looking the same. The manifestation, the emanation, need not be that of a full buddha.

On the horizon for me are up to three more major surgeries. In 2019 they put my titanium pin into the left femoral neck/head whist under the influence of a spinal injection and some other drugs. I can remember the bone shaking pneumatic drill. They would not let me watch even though I asked. It was enough to induce PTSD…I was conscious if drugged.

It can be said or observed that I left / renounced the Imperial palace, when I walked out of my job as a senior lecturer at Imperial College in London. I was a strict vegan for a long time, close to nine years. I walked out of a relationship with a wife, a home and a very young female child. I renounced my family later. I meditated extensively away from the madding crowd. I learned science sport and martial arts. There are some of the twelve acts attributed to Siddartha.

At a very long stretch one could say I share these, have them in common.

There is a part of me that wonders if the medical approach to me needs to take other factors into consideration. This adds a little reticence to the notion of drastic orthopaedic surgery. Somehow, I need to understand better…

Hmmn..

The Power of a Buddha or Evolved Bodhisattva

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

The image of Buddha is very widespread and one can get a statue down the garden centre or a poster to put up on the walls of your home. The vibe associated is often calm tranquillity. Never is it in battle with Mara, Māra. In the west Buddha is often seen as wholly benign and passive. Those fond of smoking joints may have a Buddha statuette or have paraphernalia which is Buddha themed. One can get a vegetarian meal called a Buddha Bowl. Back when I was a vegan and visiting Japan I used to eat “Monk’s Meals” there.

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Most of the statues have a Buddha who is not emaciated and with Thai style hair, a bit fat. Rarely is he seen as skinny. He is often depicted with a halo as might be perceived by a quasi-clairvoyant. 

It is not as weird as the blonde, blue eyed Aryan representations of Jesus who was probably semitic, Jewish, in appearance. But Buddha is often not quite as brown as he might have been in real life. He lived alfresco and would have tanned up well.

In the West people do not imagine the power, sometimes magical of a Buddha or evolved Bodhisattva. The imaginations do not extend beyond some dude sitting on a mat cross legged meditating.

“Hey man, that is Zen…”

Tibetan Buddhism is perhaps unique in representing wrathful forms of various Bodhisattvas. They do battle with evil. In Vajrayana there is black and white magic. Force sometimes needs met. There is significant power in a Buddha or evolved Bodhisattva. Power beyond normal ken.

The various canons have a list of special powers attained as a Bodhisattva proceeds along their journey to enlightenment. These supra-mundane powers are not to be found in garden centres. Scientists may quibble as to whether they are real manifestations or not.

As a teenager I was fascinated by the TV series Monkey.

“Monkey eats many of the peaches, which have taken millennia to ripen, becomes immortal and runs amok. Having earned the ire of Heaven and being beaten in a challenge by an omniscient, mighty, but benevolent, cloud-dwelling Buddha (釈迦如来, Shakanyorai), Monkey is imprisoned for 500 years under a mountain in order to learn patience.

Eventually, Monkey is released by the monk Tripitaka (三蔵法師, Sanzōhōshi), who has been tasked by the Boddhisatva Guanyin (観世音菩薩, Kanzeon Bosatsu) to undertake a pilgrimage from China to India to fetch holy scriptures (implied to be the region of Gandhāra in the song over the closing credits).”

Which is about the spread of the threefold Tripitaka to China and hence Japan. Evil tries to stop the dharma from being propagated and many adventures ensue. Here Buddhism is proactive and not passive. There is struggle.

The Buddhist canons have many stories of remarkable miracles carried out both by Siddartha and other Bodhisattvas. Padmasambhava considered a Nirmāṇakāya of Shakyamuni Buddha is attributed with magical powers and miracles. Those steeped in the tradition are less likely to scoff than your common or garden Western scientist. Vajrayana differs from East Enders or Coronation Street and markedly so. Exposure and immersion in its depths is likely to blow the minds of anyone lacking openness and fluidity.

Without direct personal experience there is no way to assess what the power of a Buddha or evolved Bodhisattva might be. Common sense suggests caution and not arrogance.

 A Buddha is not just a garden ornament, statuette or poster…

ma ’das sprul sku and Taking Dreams Literally

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I have found that if you start looking into things Tibetan that complexity soon arrives.

Today I came upon ma ’das sprul sku for the first time.

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Abstract: A ma ’das sprul sku is a non-hereditary reincarnate lama (sprul sku) who assumes his or her predecessor’s status, but who takes birth before his or her predecessor’s death. This paper presents ten oral histories of ma ’das sprul skus and examines what they and their narrators reveal about the logic of transference in establishing the personhood of a ma ’das sprul sku, how ma ’das sprul sku personhood may challenge conventional understandings of sprul sku personhood and temporality, ma ’das sprul sku and their creators as reflective agents, and what the dearth of ma ’das sprul sku hagiographies may imply.

Marcia Calkowski in The Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies.

https://www.thlib.org/collections/texts/jiats/#!jiats=/07/calkowski/b1/

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The notion that a being can have a second incarnation whilst still alive, kind of messes with the idea that one needs to leave the meat before getting some more. She mentions the idea of mandé trülku.

Taken to the limit that could mean that an emanation, similar to that which gave rise to the Dalai Lama, could already be incarnate whilst he lives.

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Literary Sources for Tulku Lines

Successive systems of reincarnation or tulku (sprul sku) are fascinating sources for the study of the social history of Tibet. The tulku, predicated on Buddhist metaphysics of rebirth, is a phenomena in which a person is recognized as embodying a previous person, in their own current body. This is technically referred to in Tibetan as one who is “recognized as having returned to existence” (yang srid ngos ‘dzin or sprul sku ngos ‘dzin).

There are hundreds of multigenerational tulku lines in Tibet. By looking at when such tulku lines were declared, within which contexts, patterns of interpersonal relations, institutional alliances, and regional practices emerge. We are given new visions of these trans-generational social networks and the weblike worlds in which tulkus function.

From The Buddhist Digital Resource Center.

Tibetan Tulku Lines and Networks

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This suggests that there are so many tulkus that some could be considered common or garden as opposed to the big three.

The naming and interweave is not easily tractable. If I was to start with my recent Tibetan dream, trying to find out who I might have been, there are many pitfalls.

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Tibetan Food Tibetan Caravan Aberfan – Reincarnation – Dream 24-04-2025

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This dream, if taken literally, suggests that I was being escorted out of Tibet in and around the early sixties / late fifties. Clearly that is a big if. It suggests an importance sufficient to warrant an escort and a rank above common or garden

I could search for a person, lama or tulku, who died in and around that time but the list of tulku lines is not easily searchable by date. The dream suggests that I was not going to make it.

https://legacy.tbrc.org/?locale=en#!persons/tulkus

But I may have made it. Which might make me a co-incarnation of a living person. We share an emanatory source. That co-incarnation could have passed on since and could in principle have been born biologically before me, say ~1940s in order to be old enough to march to freedom.

The feeling from the dream was that I was a youth / young man. Which puts a window ~1935 – 1945. My hands in the dream were soft inconsistent with extended heavy manual labour.

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My eight Tibetan Houses Dream

Eight Tibetan Houses (seats) Dream 19-02-2025

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Points at Southeastern Tibet / Shigatse/ Shigatze which might geo-locate an incarnation but does not take me much closer to a named individual in the twentieth century.

My Tibetan Buddhist Search Committee Dream suggests that I might recognise a magically inscribed cabinet. It suggests that I might recognise Tibetan martial arts weapons.

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Tibetan Buddhist Search Committee Dream 29-04-23.

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“The carpet on the floor of the hall has been rolled back to reveal a parquet dance floor of some considerable sheen. Amongst the entourage I can hear gossiping. “It cannot be him; he is too coarse thickset and muscular.”

I hear this and whip off my shirt to reveal my muscular bare chest. I say that I will cooperate with whatever it is they must do. Take a look if you must. I am now wearing saffron yellow trousers, training pants, that are “elasticated” at the ankles. I start to do a forward splits on the floor to warm up. I say that given I am nearly sixty I am surprised that being that old I can still do that.

One of the woman in the entourage says to me that I am much older than that both in this lifetime and stretching way back. I am nearly 73 she says. I do the mental calculation that I must have been “born” in the early 1950s. She says, “we tried to wake you five years ago”. You have been “asleep” and we have been waiting.”

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So, the dreams suggest an inconsistency of age or timing.

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The monastery airport dream points at Leh in Ladakh.

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Buddhist Monastery – Dual Airport – Flight Lieutenant – Dream 27-01-2025

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There are a number of dreams with Kālacakra or wheel of time mandala.

In another dream “Tibetan soil dream” I am given my piece of Tibet.

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Tibetan Monk – Soil – Dragon Lore Dream 31-3-23

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There are other dreams with H.H. Karmapa and H.H. Dalai lama in.

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If dreams are “evidence” then there is quite a bit suggesting some Tibetan connection. If I were a Tibetan having these dreams then the Tibetans would take them more seriously. A hairy arsed sixty-year old Welsh ex-academic spendthrift is not as attractive as perhaps a younger person linked to the sangha.

It is difficult to explain these dreams cropping up from a Freudian or Jungian perspective.

There is circumstantial evidence. It is pretty unlikely that any conscious imaginations / research makes its way fully into dreams. I did not make any of them up. They were recorded as is the morning after.

I have not tried to visualise this putative life as that is more likely to be prone to prejudice / confirmation bias.

It is possible that having looked at this theme there may be more passive dreams on the way….

Soul Retrieval – Soul Disconnect

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

I can make a statement here which will put me at odds with modern “scientific” thinking. It has no material impact on my life because it can no longer impinge on my academic credibility nor university career advancement. There is no way that I can prove this statement. The flip-side is that it cannot be disproved either, it can be designated anecdotal or opinion.

Since the early nineties I can recall instances where I have met “residues” of people who are no longer technically alive and incarnate. They have “visited” me most often nocturnally, sometimes in dreams but more in waking. I have had visitations in quiet places and times during the day. In most cases these individuals have/had some kind of bond with me and in others a strong sense of debt {karma}. They did me wrong.  These instances, whether real or imagined, have coincided with me teaching physics and chemistry at universities or high school privately. Some have been a once only short duration. Some of these have lasted days on and off. Other visits have had a duration of months with irregular and increasingly short visitations, until the visits stop. Some have seemed curiosity driven others by way of penance. Unfortunately, it is not possible to assist “people” to overcome problems which they caused. I cannot help them in their troubles. It is too late.

In some cases, where appropriate, I have done full blown Phowa practice, over several sessions, of visualizing a white Amitabha Buddha field for them and over them. A kind of spiritual WD40.

I had one visit last night. The sense of searching for me by this individual has increased over the last week or so. I do not know for sure if that person is dying, already dead or just having regrets. The feeling is that they are currently still alive in the mundane medical sense.

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In some cases, these visitations are soular, of the soul. In others they are more some kind of emotional / physical residue. At the consciousness level of souls there is a group consciousness. If you like, the white light diffracted into a rainbow, re-members that it was once a part of white light. Contact is soular and although wholly abstract the “brain” constructs a facial facsimile of the meaty body in order to “put a name and face” to the instance. After death these are nearly always more youthful than earth time / age would suggest.

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I have had shamanic training in so-called soul retrieval and have done a number of such rituals myself. The person on the receiving end always reported a pleasant experience and a feeling of being more “together” afterwards. There was an elastic snap of sorts. They seemed beneficial.

Technically speaking the soul cannot be lost from the form except in extremely rare circumstances.

The soul cannot be retrieved because it is the “real” you. It is never lost, it knows what it seeks to do. A reconnection with the wayward personality/meat vehicle might be achieved and enhanced, ritually, by magic. If the soul is fully disconnected that means death of the physical vehicle. A tenuous link can get stretched and the wayward personality vehicle disobey the soul or inner being. A weakening or very weak linkage might allow the soul to wander far from the vehicle on the soular or buddhic plane / level of consciousness. Space in a Cartesian sense does not have meaning thereupon. Geographic, earth bound distances, are no barrier.

The fact of a wandering soul suggests that its control or infusion of the physical personality vehicle is failing. The in toto being is not listening to its soul, its inner-tuition and is governed by materialistic personality whim and desire. The soul is losing the fight and may cut short the life, to wipe the slate clean and start again. The will, the stubbornness, of the lower carnal vehicle is simply stymieing the soul’s learning journey.

It is dark to prevent the soul from imbuing matter. The materialistically oriented personality vehicle thereby lacks a connection to higher purpose and hungrily consumes as an ersatz. This never satisfies for more than an instant. Dissatisfaction pervades.

Often the soul demands things which are inconvenient for the socio-political consuming materialistic vehicle. The small inner voice of calm is ignored and drowned out. The connection to the con-science, that which understands the higher soul group weakens. Behaviour deteriorates and becomes ever more self-centred. The illusion of ME grows more concrete.

The soul is disconnected. The soul is not lost but the vehicle is. Soul retrieval is a misnomer, a reconnection with personality vehicle is better terminology. The stronger the connection, the more profound the infusion by soul, the clearer sense of purpose the in toto being has.

If you, in honesty, are going through the motions of life, then you are not allowing or following the guidance of your true self. The soul.

Gelugpa Wrasse – Dreams and Snippets 21-02-2025

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The first thing to say here is that what follows is inordinately difficult to verbalize.

Leading up to the last few days and despite numerous appearances of Tibetan based themes in dreaming I have been fairly certain that I have never had a Tibetan-Bhutanese-Nepalese incarnation. In whatever visions or dreams I have had with a Buddhist flavour I have never been wearing the maroon robes of that locality and certainly never any groovy hats.

Nevertheless, the tulku {or nirmāṇakāya} phenomenon has been resident at the periphery. I have never had the Mahayana urge or thought form pertaining to a bodhisattva training journey of coming back for the benefit of all sentient beings, to teach and to aid. This idealised wish form projected onto would be bodhisattvas seems a human thing and potentially prevents beings from leaving when they ought to be exiting the wheel of rebirth. “Please don’t leave us”, is not an empowering or enabling sentiment.

A few days ago, in the twilight between sleep and wakefulness I had a few images of me dressed in maroon monks robes with a yellow hat characteristic of the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. I was surprised. It was a “turn up for the books” and does not fit with my hypothetical chronology. The only Tibetan stuff I have felt akin with are the tales of Chögyam Trungpa though I met at a distance Akong Rinpoche. Their relationship was complex if I understand it correctly. I have a hypothesis as to why Trungpa resonated.

What is safe to say is that the thought-forms associated with and to centuries old Buddhist traditions, studied and recited by thousands are firm, almost solid. The lineage has a “mind” all of its own, nurtured by devotees of and with a ruthless and tireless devotion. It exists in the mental and emotional space of humanity. People reciting and chanting for centuries make something almost tangible in a physical sense. The traditions and practice are kept vital and alive by regular enactment, quasi-archaic though they may be. They are alive.

Newtonian mechanics dominated the human psyche to be improved upon around a century ago for microscopic systems. Yet Newton is useful to this day in our everyday reality. These mechanics are a part of the mental space of humanity. They have merit. They work. There is a loose analogy.

This morning, I had a brief dreaming sequence in which I encountered a fish in a tank. The tank was large, beautiful and with coral. The fish was an ocean going wrasse. It introduced it self as a Gelugpa Wrasse. It told me that even if I had been previously associated with the Gelug, there was no place for me therein in this life. Such a thing would be way too disruptive. The wrasse was calm and relaxed. It was just conveying without colouration.

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It said that way back in the 1990s in Switzerland there had been a possibility but life circumstances had scuppered that. “Not to worry”, it said. It showed me some images of Bern.

I struggled to hold more of the dream but the wrasse part remained clear. Fish is the dreaming symbol for awareness or the need to be wide awake. The wrasse was pretty enough though contained in a tank. It was not free.

I am not sure what to make of it.

Last night we watched the Netflix programme “Adolescence” in which life for a family changes dramatically overnight. It was very good and left one with a breathless reminder of how normality can be completely flipped in a matter of hours.

We have had a few flips over the years.

Freaky Friday, an equinox talking with fish again…

Qubit Coherence Time Dream 20-03-2023

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This dream came after watching Roger Penrose discus “before the big bang” on YouTube. He suggested that in a thermalized black body compliant universe evidenced by the cosmic microwave background energy spectrum where E=hν = mc2, time or inverse time, frequency, does not exist in the absence of matter. “Time” can be curved to “before” the big bang of our current universe. Similarly at an infinitely expanded universe full only of radiation, photons, time again has no meaning without mass.

The dream starts in the refreshment area or bar off a hall full of poster presentations at a “perimeter” conference on quantum and quantum computing. I am talking with a “famous” prof in his early forties and he is holding court to some post docs and post grads. He is skinny with a beard and unruly hair. He is white. As far as he is concerned, I am a nobody.

I say to him that if I have understood it correctly the biggest drawback for quantum computing is qubit coherence time and thereby quantum fidelity. He says yes.

I say that a qubit is a counter-entropic state artificially manufactured in matter in many systems. In these matter based systems tremendous cooling is required to prevent coupling to the nearby thermal bath states which tend to bring about dephasing and lack of fidelity for the prepared qubit. He agrees.

I say that is why they need fuck off big fridges to get close to absolute zero, which is again a counter entropic state when viewed more than locally. He agrees.

That dephasing happens on a temperature and proximity dependent time scale.

I say that thermodynamics is a property of matter and hence time, without matter entropy as no meaning, nor does thermodynamics.

I ask him why nobody is pursuing fast or ultrafast time domain quantum computing? He does not reply.

I say to him if the prepared qubit state is addressed before dephasing occurs, we can use time to outwit or outpace thermalization to bath. Time domain quantum computing could be the answer.

He nods.

I say that the other problem stems from the cycle time of write to zero of the matter involved in the prepared qubits. It should be possible to use a second pulse similar to the state preparation one to reset the qubit clock on a hundreds of megahertz laser repetition rate. We then have a prepare and subsequent write to zero even if the qubit state has been used or partially used in computation. The matter is then ready for us to contravene entropy by writing a qubit.

As the dream ends, I think that it is a fair way from Guru Rinpoche.