Category: Mind and matter

Number theory is is one of the oldest branches of mathematics, dating way back four thousand years to when the Pythagorean triples were discovered by the Babylonians. Since it is so important, it is time to refresh my undergraduate mind and give it all another go.

This book seemed to be the best step by step introduction and it contains many historical references and interesting tidbits of relevant details about the who and when of it all.

Who knows, maybe I can even develop some advanced algorithm on the computer in order to discover new stuff, or better yet prove one or more conjectures.

Is this reality, or is there something behind it which I had better be aware of? Looking through it you are transformed and reflected in another unrelated direction.

When I was little my mother enlightened me with this wonderful idea called reincarnation, that our lives do not end when we die but that our souls keep on returning to different bodies in an endless cycle of self-improvement.

For a small child this concept is very difficult if not impossible to grasp. For me however it made much more sense than those crazy stories about going to heaven (or even hell mind you) which I'd been learning at church.

If I had to believe in something then it made more sense to believe in a more appealing alternative to death. At the time disappearing into complete darkness and emptiness was not yet a viable option, that would come in later life as a more likely way to go.

So the idea that I'd keep on coming back and being reborn into a new family sounded like an exciting adventure. Sitting up high in the sky and looking down upon the Earth just before my next birth, choosing carefully the next nicest-looking family to be a part of. That young woman down there looks like a nice mother, not quite sure about that man though, will have to take the risk and see what happens. It's the recycling that counts the most, should not wait too long.

Unfortunately part of the deal is that your memory would be wiped clean and you would not be able to recall anything about the previous life. You have to fantasize about having been one of the famous Egyptian Pharaohs, Napoleon Bonaparte, Albert Einstein or Emperor Charlemagne. Unless you had been someone's pet, a worm, dolphin, chimp or a number of other animals. Or a molecule or a dust particle or part of someone's DNA strand.

A so-called paranormal healer once told me that in my previous life I was some French freedom fighter and had been buried alive under a bunch of rubble after a big earthquake. Her eyes rolled up and she was trembling slightly as if in a trance, as she told me the story like she was witnessing it happen in person, and this is how it continued: while slowly dying I realized that I had a number of important achievements just outside my grasp, that there was still so much more to do in life. That's why I was reincarnated in this life, in order to redeem those lost opportunities and achieve all of that unfinished work, whatever that may be.

Remember that a nasty side-effect of reincarnation is loss of memory. So I could not refute the paranormal healer's discovery, nor could I come up with a more interesting and creative previous life than that as a freedom fighter. Better than being Napoleon or Cleopatra or whoever, that's for sure.

Can a person only get reincarnated into a future time? Is it possible to be reincarnated into the past? What about getting reincarnated back in time to the period between your birth and death? Anything is possible in this crazy world we live in, where an infinite number of intersecting universes and parallel timelines criss-cross all over the place. Watch out for that neutrino shower and better duck for those Higgs particles (they do exist by the way).

Unfortunately we are very limited creatures. Only after an infinite number of rebirths will we ever fully understand the truth and at the same time be able to experience ultimate reality as it was always meant to be.

That seems like yet another insane idea. Maybe it's time to revert back to being a God-fearing churchgoer when life was alot simpler. Dear Lord, I pray that ...

See you in the next life, I mean in heaven (or even in hell mind you). Still would be nice before I finish this life to figure out what all those lost opportunities were in my previous life. That way I could achieve all of that unfinished work, feeling more satisfied on my death bed.

Or could it be that that collection of unfinished work and unredeemed opportunities is carried on automatically into the next life and then the next life after that so on until it is completely redeemed and finished, meaning final closure at last.

Then the cycles would stop and I would achieve absolute harmony. I'd much rather keep dying and being reborn than that, in fact just one life and one final death into complete nothingness would be a million times better than achieving absolute harmony.

How can I remember what I was doing ten years ago when all of the atoms in my brain are being replaced every couple of weeks?

All of these atoms inside of my head are vibrating and colliding with each other. Their movement allows the intricate web of electrical impulses scatter and come together in new designs never thought of before.

These are some more thoughts that have been inspired by Richard P. Feynman in his essay The Value of Science which like most of the other stuff he wrote I enjoyed immensely.

"So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! ... To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance ... the atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out."

Sometimes positive thinking alone is not enough. In fact, overusing positive thinking in situations where it is not relevant let alone effective can just as easily back fire and make things worse.

Thoughts create moods which influence behavior and finally express themselves directly and/or indirectly as physical reactions. The body is connected to the mind and they communicate intimately with each other.

Just thinking positively may distract us and make us avoid the more important signals our bodies are trying to tell us: hey, something is wrong!

Let's say you have a problem and it is so frustrating that it is making you feel mad, letdown, depressed, irritable. By considering the situation from as many angles as possible, negative and neutral as well as positive, your thoughts are reformed to view things from a new perspective.

This reprocessing of mind can lead to new conclusions and solutions that make you realize that things aren't as bad as you thought, pushing depressing thoughts away and opening you for healing through change and improvement.

Mind over mood: the book and the website.

Who are those unfortunate souls out there who are the most predisposed to depression?

Those who are excessively dependent on close personal relationships, a constant need for reassurance and support from others, as well as an inability to cope with stress.

Perfectionists who are not in touch with their inner feelings.

Those masking the truth with a fabricated world of thoughts and actions molded towards what one thinks other expect one to be instead of what one actually wants to be.

It's a dangerous world out there, so be very careful.

This evening the moon looks so close that I can almost touch it if I reach up high enough. The night sky is clear and cold and the silvery moon is just barely dangling there by a single celestial thread. Welcome into my mind logical moon. Tell me something interesting and inspiring at the same time.

The poor guy over there has been left to himself to figure things out, deal with the daunting situation on his own, which is not easy. Do you see him? There he is sitting on the oversized sofa. Nobody in the near vicinity feels even the slightest urge to give him a hand. A low-flying bird flutters by in front of the window and no one seems to notice. Not that he couldn't handle it himself, but it would have been nice if others beside himself would take the initiative. He already knows that that will never be the case, never happen. Ten minutes later. Same bird is now high-flying over there in the distance and everyone notices. Because that poor guy has gathered up enough courage to raise his voice and point to it. "Over there, that's where it is. Have a look!"

The trick is getting things to work like they are supposed to work, but that can be a real challenge. Remain adaptive, flexible in many regards, and aware that unpredictable events may define things slightly differently than originally planned.

Alright so it is the true owner of the subtle knife who has the unique ability to cut through the thin fabric separating one universe from the other, allowing you to enter one of the infinite other worlds running parallel to ours.

This is a powerful and treacherous tool which needs to be used solely by the wise, otherwise the worlds will be destroyed many times over, for no reason at all.

Do not let this powerful tool get into the hands of the undeserving, for that will be the end of us all, no matter how hard we try to make things happen otherwise.

That is the reason that the child named Will has taken it upon himself to make sure that things happen like they were always meant to be.

"But Will knew without the slightest doubt that that patch on the other side was in a different world..."

This will not prove to be a very easy task, but as readers of this endearing piece of fiction, we remain glued to the edge of our seats in the hopes that good will prevail.

We will just have to be patient and wait.

The name Aleph comes from a fictional point of singularity described by Jorge Luis Borges as "a point in space that contains all other points. Anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping or confusion".

See also: www.dott07.com.

For some time now they were saying that the time had finally come and was about to happen at any moment. They being those kind wise folks who knew everything better than the rest of us.

Not that everyone was as prepared as the other, I certainly was not. The group had as a whole succumbed to the inevitability of the situation, providing a collective consciousness that prevailed in more ways than one.

Let yourself go as an individual bubble and become a better part of the whole, it's pretty much up to you. That's what they said, suggested, or whatever.

Years and years later, we can now sit comfortably in front of the fireplace late in the evening, watching the flames assuming various degrees of awareness, reminisce about old times past, chuckling softly here and there.

Still at the back of our minds we know what had happened, was bound to happen no matter, what could have happened if things were otherwise. But they weren't nor would they ever be.

Acquiring the needed individual traits over time is something for which we need not prepare as it happens naturally as long as we let it happen of course.

The real challenge is retaining as much of one's core without compromising, without giving in, and at the same time moving forward without too much worry. Good night and pleasant dreams.

That guy over there said to me that no matter what I should just hang in there and see what happens.

Not so sure that I feel comfortable with such an approach, but perhaps that is the best way to proceed at the moment.

Or not?

Just supposing for the sake of it that I happened to be walking too closely to the edge of the platform without realizing it and at that precise moment I inadvertently poked my elbow out two or three or maybe even three and a half centimeters (just enough) over the edge right when a speeding train decides to pass by swiftly onto the next destination without the slightest consideration about any angled obstruction that might be standing in the way making painful contact with splintering bones and other unpleasant ripping and crackling sounds, what then?

Speaking of usefulness, how useful is it spending days on end trying to get that vertical white rectangular support balk in the kitchen really smooth? So perfectly smooth that there is not a single ding, scratch, groove or imaginary unevenness visible any more?

If I were to tell you that none of this is really happening, would you believe me? And then again, if I were to tell you the exact opposite, would you then change your mind and decide that I was telling the truth afterall? Either way, you are caught in a bind unless you can think of another way out. Try it.

Most people try to predict the future through logical thinking. Trends in the past extended into the future should be a relatively good indication of things to come. But is this really the most accurate means of deciding what the future will in the end bring? Intuition and plain common sense can very well balance out the boring technical details of what mathematically should occur, at least say within a ten percent margin of error. The differences are what we should actually be looking for and not the similarities.

There is a creative mind out there but it is not mine. The challenge now is somehow to harnass that little bit of whatever or whoever and reform it into something that appears similar to me.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people there still are out there who underestimate and/or are completely unaware of the power to change the realities around them. Such a shame of the unharnessed, untapped unperceptions right there at our finger tips. Have a look over there and think about it. Maybe then you will understand a little better what I mean. Actually.

In eastern cultures cracking your joints is a way to release negative energy from your body. Link.

People often try to escape the truth by complaining all of the time and doing nothing about it, as if they are the poor suffering souls who cannot do anything about it. Little do they know that the blame lies purely within their own attitudes and blindness. Simply looking the other way will never change things.

 

So you see, technology will never get the upper hand, unless of course we are not extra careful and alert for possible errors and/or changes of plan. Be warned.

There was this little picture over there inside of the mind that gave one the inaccurate impression that things were otherwise than what they should have been up to now.

In view of this situation, it became quite apparent that in oder to get past this illusion of an obstacle or whatever it was it would be necessary to assume a slightly different approach.

The trick (real challenge) would be to:

1. Just ignore it and continue as if nothing had changed.
2. Do the best that was humanly possible to change everything no matter what.
3. Choose a middle path even if that did not seem feasible at first.
4. Close both inner and outer eyes and make that mental picture go away by dreaming.
5. Not care what other people might think as if that did make sense when it did not.
6. Go back in time and relive things the correct way once and for all.

Choose one and only one of the above and please elaborate to the best of your ability.

Can't decide on your own? Try a random number if that helps.

It has been told that in order to be really and truly successful in life, you must be YOU.

Y-O-U. Nothing less, nothing more and nothing else.

This is very sound advice, indeed.

But YOU also need to survive in the real world at the same time. That's the tricky part.

So that's what you get when you bury your head in an interesting book the whole train ride to Amsterdam without even looking up once out the window. Lost in thought somewhere else when there it was all around you.

By the time the train arrived I was too far north and it was an hour later in the day, meaning that the skies had cleared and the temperature had risen just enough. Nothing out of the ordinary around here.

- Sure is hard to believe?
- What is hard to believe?
- That it snowed so early this year.
- Snowed?
- Yes, snowed - didn't you notice? (look of astonishment)
- Sorry, I didn't.

Turns out that it had snowed fairly hard in the south, and an immense whiteness had blanketed the landscape for as far as the eye could see. Simply beautiful (I could only imagine).

- The earliest since way back in the nineteen twenties or so.
- Yes, pretty amazing.
- Are you sure you didn't notice it?
- I'm sure, very sure.

I had missed it because I was reading some boring book.

So why did I continue cycling past the trees when I knew for a fact beforehand that one of them would fall over on me at the exact second that I passed it?

Strange when you think about it.

While I was certain that this was going to happen, at the same time my inherent sense of logical reasoning told me that this could not possibly happen, meaning that the chances were infinitesimally small. One chance in a million, a million million to be more exact.

I kept right on cycling anyway. Onward to destiny and further (at least that is what I had expected: further).

So when that tree which was already slightly bent over towards the path upon which I was cycling decided on its own to fall over completely, I was not quite expecting it. Well, I kind of was but in another way not really.

Creak, snap and crash. Splinters all over the place, and my poor skull bashed in and my brains smashed to smithereens. That is the sound of a falling tree, just before it hits home.

Too bad. I should have trusted my intuition better, but it is now too late.

Better luck in my next life, wouldn't you say?

There's this guy out there and he wants to know everything. And I mean everything. Nothing more and nothing less. That is what he keeps telling me, what he has been telling me since I can remember. Way back then.

At first glance, this guy does not appear any bit out of the ordinary, except perhaps for the very slight limp he has on his left side. Or is it the right leg?

Well, there is also his long and untrimmed gray beard which is indeed out of the ordinary, so I am exaggerating a little if I fail to mention that also. Sorry about that. And that cap he is wearing which looks like it is about to fall off but never does. For some reason. Like it is glued to his forehead.

So this guy has to know everything. Everything, everything, everything. The only problem, and this is a very big problem depending on the way you view it, the annoying problem is that the process extends and then prevents.

Extends and prevents.

The process of knowing everything, the very process itself, extends the realm of information he needs in which to contain it all and thereby prevents the process of knowing from knowing everything. Get it? This is because the knowing part is not instantaneous, it takes time. With time flows more information which means that in the end it is impossible to know everything.

Like a balloon filling up with water but never bursting. Like the sky becoming bluer but never attaining the real blue of the sky as you would expect. Like that hissing sound over there which is a bunch of air escaping through a very small opening which does not.

Does not what? Just does not.

At least that is what I thought when this guy was trying to explain it all to me. How could I have been so very naive? He was right, and I should not have been so stubborn. Just ignoring him all of the time. Like that cap of his that would fall off any moment but never did.

So you see, the way it all really happens is a little different from what you would normally expect.

Lennart looks up from the newspaper he is reading while having a late morning breakfast. He is aggravated by my presence for some reason.

"Why do you always have to do that?!"

"What?" I ask after feeling a little shocked by his tone of voice, as if he is the boss in the house not I.

"You always have to shift things around a hundred times until everything is perfectly straight."

He is absolutely right. Lately, perhaps because of a slight feeling of insecurity, unable to communicate with the older kids in a spontaneous and normal way, I have become neurotic.

I hang around and start straightening piles of papers, plates and/or cups, pencils and pens, a crooked magazine, any article with geometry, on flat surfaces with angles and sides which can be re-oriented to produce symmetry, parallel edges, converging lines, etc.

This activity has gotten so bad that I have not been aware of it. Got to do something about it soon before it becomes incurable.

My answer then, "Sorry, you are absolutely right. I will try not to do it any more."

After I grab my cup of coffee and head on up back upstairs, I realize that this promise will be hard to keep. My idiosyncrasies have gotten the best of me the last couple of months. Need to find a more efficient way to release extra psychological energy.

What I mean by frozen in time is that while I make myself believe that I am really busy every day and every minute and every second trying to get this and that and all of this other stuff done, the fact of the matter is that I am getting very little if anything accomplished. Actually nothing to be more precise. Kind of like remaining motionless all weighted down at the bottom of a ocean with its strong current streaming by and my arms and legs waving back and forth in the turbulence but caught in this big huge net at the same time. I mean, each day is just passing me by with a blink of the eye. Then what? Okay, then let's slow things down, at least in the mind the perception of events, think things out and get focused. That's it then, concentrate and focus. Slow things down in the mind's eye.

So you have finally decided that you want to look representative and professional. You say that this is necessary in order to come across in a more positive and convincing manner. Alright, I can relate to that. The first thing you have to do is have a look at your hair. Yes your hair. Go ahead and have a look in the mirror. This is one of the first things the person over there or the potential customer or the secret lover sees, and like all first impressions it can be a big disappointment, for him or her as well as for you or me. Take my own hair for example, what little there is left that is. Last summer, I decided to be cool and to shave it real short. Like what they used to call a butch. This was alright for a time and it did look sharp and clean for starters, but one big disadvantage was that I looked balder and thus older. About ten years older than I really am. Not that that is important but you know how it goes. Nowadays I want to compete with other young bucks who are dynamic and enthusiastic junior entrepreneurs, but an old man sticks out like you know what. No way to compete in the world this way and expect to win. Gotta look younger and energetic and pretend I can keep up with them. The answer then is simple you would think: just grow your hair. And that is exactly what I have been doing for about two months now. At least, trying to do. But look at it now! A large ball of see-through hair tangled in a gossamer mess of nothingness and a half, pointing all over the place. Not very representative at all, unless of course I am trying to sell cotton candy or want to land a job in the circus. This phase is a necessary evil in order to grow my hair to the proper length, a middle path to success, a half-way house along the way. I will put extra effort in extrovert motions and expressions in order to distract the potential customer or distant lover from the way things are. Hey what's that giant bird doing over there? This will be good practice for me since by nature I am an introvert trying to prove himself in more ways than one. Looks are a big part of it, but actions and imaginary tendencies are more than enough to keep you going. I have had enough of the halfway house for now.