Surveillance – Trinity or Agent Smith?

June 3, 2025June 3, 2025 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

From time to time, I get these dreams in which I am under surveillance and otherwise being spied upon. In our days of online intelligence gathering, a euphemism for stalking, monitoring of and snooping upon others is a common pass time. Very few who do such a things self-perceive as being Agent Smith an enforcer of the socially conditioned Matrix. They may imagine themselves a free Trinty hacker when they are anything but. Snooping, stalking is about control and attempts at power over. It is about status quo and positional power. Agent Smith is everywhere. Maybe you are Agent Smith and you are as yet unwilling to accept that reality.

Governments, according to conspiracy theories, routinely monitor their citizens. The NSA, DGSE and GCHQ may collect data on individuals including me. I would hazard a guess that they may have better more productive things to do. The news rhetoric is about external cyber threats and not internal state control. We are already in a pseudo-big brother world. The data on individual is readily available. Advertisers try to sell us shit with annoying “personalised” adverts. Search engines are now crap. They only show content paid for by pushers of goods. As a tool their use and efficacy has dropped markedly. They are very biased.

Some people are control freaks and this leads them to try to control all aspects of their lives even to the extent of narratives about the past. It is safe to say that these individuals are very far from liberation, stuck firm in the quicksand of endless saṃsāra. By “stalking” others they have an illusion of control over them.

Now I am dreaming of people spying on my DNA results, people from my last employer near twenty years ago…

It raises an interesting speculative question.

Is the DNA of a nirmāṇakāya birth the same as a normal one?

To answer this one would have to do a double blind study measuring the DNA of many tulku incarnations and compare to that of normal citizens to see if there was a statistically different significance. I doubt any reputable journal would accept that as a suitable subject for publications. Imagine a Nature article

“Nirmāṇakāya DNA: Structure and Function”

How would it compare to:

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Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid

J. D. WATSON & F. H. C. CRICK

Nature volume 171, pages 737–738 (1953)

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Sometimes people just cannot resist snooping on others….

Goal Orientation – Suffering and Dissatisfaction

December 13, 2024 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

If you search for “coaching” you will find many people offering their services as coaches and often a part of this is setting goals or targets for success and advancement. Few notice the similarity of goal and gaol. People can become prisoners of their goal orientation. Society is obsessed with measurable metrics and tick lists of things to do, to the extent that life can be a wearisome endless list of devoirs. It is de rigueur to have goals and ambition it seems.

Siddartha wanted so badly to end suffering for all sentient beings, suffering, or dukka, can be translated as dissatisfaction.

I’ll make a statement: goal orientation is directly causal of dissatisfaction.

If you fail to make a goal you are dissatisfied, if you make a goal, you are temporarily done but the next goal awaits lurking on the horizon. Any “satisfaction” is fleeting. This measurement obsession more often than not suggests some measure of inadequacy, could do better.

People then have massive internal dialogue about whether of not they are meeting their goals. Internal dialogue is nearly always negative and hence the being suffers unnecessarily because of this internal “mental” cacophony.

Goal orientation and rush often skip hand in hand. Focussed only on the goal there is a tendency to finish quick and this can cause poor application to task and lower standards. Goal orientation can prevent impeccability. Eye on goal one does not fully absorb into whatever it is one is doing. There are distractions from other pending goals. Quality suffers on the noose of measurable quantity. Goals hang.

The antithesis of spiritual development is rush. It is impossible to rush it, but many try and seek milestones to prove progress. The hangover of societal obsession with goal orientation is difficult to ease.

Striving is a form of suffering.

Relaxation and complete absorption is the antidote. Complete absorption brings completion but without obsessional suffering. Complete absorption quietens the internal dialogue and therefore reduces dissatisfaction. Everyone knows when they have been impeccable. Impeccability is not an absolute. If you give completely of your current very best that is all you can do, this never brings dissatisfaction. Subsequent comparative internal dialogue can cause the nine headed hydra of dissatisfaction to rise again.

Internal dialogue is a primary cause of dissatisfaction and suffering.

Endless measuring is causal of dissatisfaction and suffering.

Comparison mind is directly causal of dissatisfaction.

Rational thinking causes dissatisfaction. Therefore, rational thinking is an irrational unwise thing to do. It does not make sense.

Of course, under certain circumstances one needs some rationality.

If one is ever goal oriented one never experiences the moment, the eternal now, because the goal is very distracting. Not being fully present causes dissatisfaction. If one lives in the twin worlds of what if and if only, there is rarely now. The past whether melancholic or rose tinted, the future whether idealised or catastrophe is not now, it is mind-stuff often of the nature of internal dialogue. Trash.

Goal orientation causes impatience which is a form of dissatisfaction. Goal orientation when one is driving a car is a cause of road rage.

Letting go of goal orientation is liberating.

Try it, having no goals is harder than it might seem, because societal habituation near worships them.

Hence there is suffering and dissatisfaction, which we might call samsara or saṃsāra, which is another term for endless human folly.

The Waking Dream – Saṃsāra

August 23, 2024August 23, 2024 ~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

“Saṃsāra in Buddhism, states Jeff Wilson, is the “suffering-laden cycle of life, death, and rebirth, without beginning or end”. Also referred to as the wheel of existence (Bhavacakra), it is often mentioned in Buddhist texts with the term punarbhava (rebirth, re-becoming); the liberation from this cycle of existence, Nirvāṇa, is the foundation and the most important purpose of Buddhism.”

From Wikipedia.

If you are not aware that you are dreaming during nocturnal dreams, what chance do you have of being awake during the samsaric waking dream which people assume is the day to day socio-political reality?

It follows that in the limit a genuine dreaming practice has the goal, the purpose of liberation, Nirvāṇa.

The common socio-political mundane “reality” is a different assimilation of world from that of a being who has attained much of Buddhist philosophy. The mind of one of these follows the advice of the diamond sutra and is not anywhere near as gripping nor as adamant that the assimilated and evangelised version of reality is both factual and the only true reality. They would not kill anyone who has a different opinion.

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If you are awake in your night dreams you can wake up in the samsara day dream and see things for what they are. If you understand dissatisfaction {suffering} has a large mental component it is possible to not want to be reborn. Carnal rebirth requires a carnal re-death. If you are obsessed by the form, your meat, then you will desire another piece of meat. Letting go of obsession is a stepping stone toward liberation.

I’ll speculate that many people have had a conversation with me and been totally unaware of how differently I view the world from them. People assume a commonality of socio-political interpretation. The world is encapsulated by the boundary conditions of should and ought.

In order to wake up in the samsaric day dream one needs to quieten the mind and to really know oneself and not simply at façade level.

A very common modern form of delusion is called fear of missing out, FOMO. It stems from group mind and wanting to be “in” on whatever it is that is going on. Not being up to date with gossip can risk social exclusion. Newspapers rely on juicy titbits to sell. But nobody has ever died from not knowing what Harry and Meghan have been whinging about today. If you are awake to this you will not waste your life worrying about them and the gigabytes of gossip generated.

Some of the things in nocturnal dreams are clearly not real, likewise many of the things in the samsaric daydream are not real. There are a lot of delusions which people advocate and defend. People tend to forget that image, self-image, is explicitly imaginary yet they work to prop it up and defend it, they can get psychologically ill because of image.

The basic truth is glamour is not real, simple reality is simple and unglamorous. Yet people spend vast sums on “glamorous” things and travel. They document it in vast energy ravenous server farms and destroy the planet to take selfies in famous glamorous places. People want to show off in ultrahigh definition gigapixel style.

They are asleep in the waking samsaric dream.

Being awake aware and lucid in nocturnal dreams aids waking up in the samsaric daydream/nightmare which we call modern 21^st century living.