Cloudscape

When moving, the muscles synchronously contract and relax, but when we control our impulses of movement, some of them get through to the muscles and some don’t, causing an asynchrony of contractions. Once some muscles contract out of synchrony with the rest, they no longer get a signal from the rest of the body when to relax again, so that they remain contracted in the form of cramps. To relax these cramps, the muscles need to be resynchronized. Some meditations involve synchronous contractions and relaxations of the muscles in order to relax such cramps, but the most efficient way to do so is exercise, the contractions and relaxations of which are far better synchronized. As the mind can only relax when the body does, this is one of the reasons exercise is one of the most efficient therapies for depression.

All fear is of the unknown, and so as soon as we know what we are afraid of, we no longer are.

If the mind is stressed it will keep seeking for its cause, and if it cannot find it it will seek harder until it either finds it or until sees it where it is not there, so that it might also by chance see it where it really is. If the mind either does not know the actual cause of the stress or tries to forget it, however, it may keep seeking for a cause elsewhere until psychosis occurs. To keep this from happening the real cause of the stress must be found.

To let go of control is not only to stop dominating but also to stop submitting, that is, to make choices, which is something one does more than something one stops doing.

We should empathize with every form of consciousness, but not always with how others deal with consciousness, as the one thing we should not empathize with is the inacceptance of consciousness, as we will otherwise not accept consciousness ourselves. To do this, we should make sure that when we empathize with someone who does not accept a certain form of consciousness, we keep focussing on accepting that form of consciousness.

Future recommender services could use brain-computer interface to tell us what kind of things or people we want at a certain time, which they could base on brain scans made when we tell them we want a particular kind of thing, brain scans which could be made at once and at any time by nanorobots in our brain. In technological telepathy, both what we share and who we share it with could be based on such recommender services, so that we could at once share with whoever we can best share with, even if they are strangers, and share only whatever we can best share with them. In this way, we could even connect to just some parts of the consciousness of many people at once, so that our consciousness could become part of everyone else’s and the other way around. As and when nanorobots could be used to tell us how conscious we are, such recommender services could even be based on what makes us most conscious, and when nanorobots in our brain could be used to change our consciousness, this could also be based on them. They could be made, however, in such way as to so closely connect brain and computer that it would in effect be part of our own mind, so that it would still be us who would make these choices, rather than having someone else make them for us, even if the choices would largely be unconscious, much as those of our unconscious mind now.

The reason we are not fully conscious of everything perceived in our unconscious mind is because our consciousness is disconnected into many parts, the largest of which is our conscious mind. The reason we are not conscious of everything at once is because we evolved consciousness for our survival, so that our mind is controlled in such way as to be conscious only of that which it needs to know in order to survive, as any further consciousness could actually stand in the way of our survival. Over time, however, consciousness takes on a life of its own, upon which it begins to make choices for the sake of consciousness itself. Because each part of our consciousness can only make choices for itself, however, the only thing we can do to connect to the other parts of consciousness in our unconscious mind is through the part of our consciousness we are already conscious of, so that we should focus on the parts we are already conscious of rather than on those we are not yet conscious of, so that through the former we may get through the latter in time.

The brain adapts itself to a state in which it finds that it can best deal with the environment. If it goes through an altered state for a long time, it will therefore readapt itself to the normal state during the altered state, which is what causes both dependence and withdrawal.

Every need is a slavery, and but those who need nothing and do but what they truly want are free.

Our mind may return to any state of mind it remembers, and the same is true for altered states of mind, which accounts both for the psychological aftereffects of certain drugs, and also why, as their effects are more remembered, any further psychological aftereffects decrease.

To better connect its parts into one whole, our consciousness needs centers through which to do so, and these centers of our consciousness are what makes up our ego. The largest of these centers in our consciousness are formed by goals. Even if our goal is consciousness in general, we therefore still need other specific goals in order to achieve it, and since there is no way to tell just how much consciousness we have achieved, there is no way one can turn this into specific goals. However, as the best way to consciousness is through meditation and one can meditate on anything at all, and meditation is to connect to something in our consciousness, and connection comes through love, the best way to consciousness is to do what we love and love what we do. For those of us who have already become focussed on the goal of becoming conscious itself, however, it may be that what we love to do most is to meditate, but it is hard to turn this into specific goals as well. There are, however, two ways in which it can be done: in passive meditation, lucid dreaming, and in active meditation, trekking.

People often turn against or away from people who are suffering in order not to feel their suffering themselves, and so as to cause them further suffering in turn for making them feel their suffering. This, along with conformism, is what brings people who are not evil themselves to take part in evil.

Our consciousness must be renewed every moment in order to grow, and as we cannot be conscious of everything at the same time we must therefore let go of our old consciousness for it to move on to a new, and allow ourselves to forget it for the time being. Even a balanced degree of forgetfulness is needed to consciousness. When we are distracted, this distraction may be no more than a way of our unconscious mind to try and make us let go of something in our consciousness we hold on to too much, and we should not repress it but move along with it, not towards anything in particular but back into the whole of our consciousness.

If love is a connection in our consciousness, and consciousness is made up of connections, and consciousness is all there is to our existence, then in a sense, love is everything there is to our existence.

There is nothing that sets apart matter that seems conscious from matter that seems unconscious, therefore all matter must be conscious in proportion to its complexity, and every system of connection in matter must have a consciousness of its own, limited only by how it is separated from other systems of connections in the matter inside or around it.

Love is connection, and as we are our consciousness, love between any of us is a connection of our consciousness, and as every perception in our consciousness lasts but for a moment, so does love. Love does not last: it can only be renewed, moment after moment. Only that which causes love, which is consciousness itself, may last, and it is the only thing that lasts as long as we exist. However, consciousness keeps changing every moment, and as it does, it can and will turn into anything, so that to keep loving someone as they change from moment to moment, we have to love all consciousness.

Our genome needs a way to know how to change itself epigenetically, and to do so, it needs to know the state of the organism not just at one particular moment but over a period of time, as these changes would otherwise take place for only as long as the changes in the state of the organism, most of which are momentary. Therefore, it needs a way to remember what states the organism has been in over a period of time, and the only way it could store this information would be in junk DNA, which would be why junk DNA keeps changing. Encoding DNA may be seen as the operating system, noncoding DNA as the applications, and junk DNA as the files of the computer of the genome. Just as most software of a computer is meant to regulate other software, noncoding DNA, which likewise makes up most DNA, is meant to regulate other DNA. Based on the information stored in noncoding DNA, the genome could know what DNA does what when, and based on chemical changes in the organism caused by a change in the genome, the genome could even find out whether or not a particular change in the genome would be good or bad. In this way, it could not only regulate epigenetic but even genetic changes in the genome: when a gene does not seem to do what it should well enough, the genome could keep causing new mutations to it until it finds one that works. This could be what causes de novo genes to come into being.

Cornell University, Krishna Ramanujan: Fruit fly gene from 'out of nowhere' may change ideas about how new genes are formed, researchers report

Consciousness can only be a choice, and as meditation is meant to make us conscious, meditation is therefore no more than the choice to be conscious, whatever it may be that we choose to be conscious of at any moment. In this meditation is something that should be done every moment of our lives rather than only at a particular time, for if meditation is meant to make us live in the moment, it is against its ends to see it itself as something that is to take up a particular time. Also, consciousness takes a balance between different forms of consciousness, and so to meditate we should focus on all forms of consciousness, both feelings and thoughts. We cannot fully focus on one without focussing on the other because the two affect each other.

Who we are is but what we do, and what appear to be our qualities are but choices that we keep repeating.

Most quarrels between loved ones are not about the subject of the quarrel but about the lack of love that each feels in the other, and the only way it can end is not by saying who is right and who is wrong but by giving the other the love they want to ask for through the quarrel, but don’t dare to ask for in a non-defensive way.

Once entire buildings can be made by nanorobots, fractal art will become the new architecture

Give others a choice by making them conscious of their choice, but do not make their choice for them.

At some point our entire civilization will exist only in virtual reality, so that all of reality will be natural again, and we ourselves will still be in reality only for nature itself.

Effort is the ego’s control over the id, but control is based on separation, and the more control it uses, the more the ego becomes separate from the id and therefore, from the unconscious mind, which only makes it harder for the ego to connect to it. Savants can connect so well to their unconscious mind because their ego is mostly left-brained, and therefore has partly disintegrated with it.

In themselves, almost everyone is good through and through, and most of what evil there is in us is only there in society, as being good makes us easy to hurt in society and we therefore sometimes put up a front of a less good person. Almost all our evil, then, lies in our fear of being hurt by others’ evil.

Art is expression and the end of expression is interaction, therefore without interaction artists have no use of art, as they could then as well keep the art inside, where they can already perceive it better than when they recreate it outside themselves. Without interaction, there can therefore be no art, and this is why artists are only authentic to the degree that they can find people with whom they can interact through art. Art did not change throughout history because new genres were actually created, because every genre of art has always already existed inside us, but rather certain genres of art were more expressed at certain times because they were more accepted.

The only thing anything can be perfectly, that is to say, to the highest possible degree, is itself, so that the only way in which anything can be perfect is in being itself. In this sense and this sense alone, everything is perfect, and in any other sense, nothing is, therefore perfection has no other sense than this, than being itself, or suchness.

No emotion is in itself negative, only how we react to them can be. In itself, fear is nothing but vigilance, anger nothing but determination, sadness nothing but relaxation. No emotion in itself can lead to harm.

Meditation can be done while doing anything else, and for it to be balanced it should sometimes be active, as in tai chi, yoga, exercise, dancing or walking, and sometimes be passive, as in insight meditation or body scan. Active and passive meditation can be interchanged at any time when needed.