Meaningless or meaningful?

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” Guess what !! Nietzsche is almost always right. And Westworld is blowing me again and again. Just watched the recent episodes. Had to dig some explanations to really understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9kwaPFKcEs

Nietzsche writes that man’s problem “was not suffering itself, but that there was no answer to the crying question, ‘why do I suffer’ … The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse that lay over mankind so far—”

Natural selection is optimized for survival, not enjoyment. Once you understand that, an awful lot of stuff makes sense.

No wonder we behave in ways that make us miserable — so long as we pass our genes on, our misery is of no account.

Nietzsche’s implication is that you cannot survive meaningless suffering unless you can find meaning. Finding meaning means the creation of values that structure life and make it possible to live in spite of “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. That’s how religion, desire, goals, accomplishment, sense of enlightenment – everything has originated ultimately.

(Some cut paste from agnostic and youtube.)

But profound. Isn’t it?

Advertisements

Breathing in an agnostic life

We love to hang out with other people. We love to feel safe. If we don’t have friends, if we feel rejected, if we feel unsafe, unimportant, we feel to die and in the extreme level, some take the decision to suicide. It doesn’t always need to have a religious origin as both religious and non-religious people suicide. For example, the suicide rate in Japan or Sweden (highly non-religious) is very high. But it’s easily understandable why a non-religious person can feel secluded, feel rejected, feel unsafe, feel unimportant in a religious community. So, for a non-religious person, just being non-religious, being knowledgeable about science and facts are not enough, they need to develop self-love, need to develop high interpersonal skills which go beyond anybody’s religiosity, may be need to try to be less argumentative and understandable about irrational human mind and psychology. It doesn’t matter what other people are determined of doing if you know very well about your own determination. But that requires a strong will power that takes time to develop and I know a lot of people, even myself very often don’t or can’t have it. But I strongly stand by these existentialistic/nihilistic/stoicist approach towards life that I learnt from Sartre, Neitzsche, Kahlil Gibran and other philoshophers. And I hope to continue to learn and grow and live amidst differences of all kinds with a smile in my face. So, it’s not sin at all to trust and value your own strength.

If you are not always thinking about God or Agnosticism/Atheism all the time, if you are the person who will not be bothered by every single religious bullshit you hear and can just lightly ignore the shallow talks to focus on good interpersonal relationship based on momentary smiles and joys, if you are involved with some of the plenty of fun activities like sports, dance, dining, kayaking, hiking, biking, running, video games, book reading, blogging, vlogging, cooking, yoga, arts, music and are willing to know passionate people who are involved with these activities and can share their passion, I don’t see why you won’t be able to subside the religiosity or religious conversation. And I don’t know how even a religious people can avoid such an interesting person like you. So, be interesting, be fun, be friendly, talk important things with those who may understand the importance, you will never be out of friends. But still you will often feel lonely like I am feeling in this morning coz I am far away from my family and haven’t met them for over 4 years and lots of other personal issues and insecurities. But I know I will move my ass to make my day as fun as possible. I make my day and I try hardest not to allow anyone to ruin my moments and my peace of mind even if they try hard. And I can tell you that most of my religious friends don’t dislike me, if not love me. Only one life we got. Enjoy with everyone ! And those can’t appreciate who you are after all these, why will we even waste a single bit of seconds thinking about them? We do because we are human, but may be we should not sometimes and let those feelings leave.

Oddness of existence

Pessimism alert! Bad trip alert!

However, I am optimistic.

I’ve been thinking about life and miseries and roaming on YouTube and watching some documentaries. It seems to me where ever you are, what relative condition a life is ticking, every living being seems like struggling and feeling pain and suffocation and longing for getting out of the cage. Each seems to desire to live in a better condition, has a goal where each wants to reach, but then it can not, and then it is frustrated and unhappy. Each seems to feel confined in its living condition. And it’s easy to die and the fear is real. It is like neverending unhappiness and struggle to live. All an individual animal and human think about are all that it don’t have, can’t have. Each has the survival instincts and the ability to feel joy and pain. Some are not naturally selected well. Some are trying to climb the ladder, some are falling, some are rising, some are winning, some are being extinguished. Some are not better equipped for existence, some are endowed with good social and physical environment, some are not. Some are lucky, but they feel unlucky. Some are unlucky, but are unaware of the way to bring a good fortune. For human, education and information acquisition seems necessary, but then even with education, with information you can feel trapped. It seems like in life feeling trapped is inevitable.

It was a wild trip for me through internet. Normally you call or recognize that you were in the dark side of internet or youtube after such trip, as if you try to kick yourself into the good reality from a bad one, as if you feel the desire that bad things don’t exist, at least not for you, you only want to watch the good stuff, feel the good feeling, as if you want to believe that your problems and miseries are the biggest problems on earth. But it’s not. But it’s also true that you are only stuck with yourself. The first and foremost thing is your wellbeing but it’s asy to be tricked if your world view is small nd not wide enough to have a global view of existence on our pale blue planet. All may be illusion, it’s hard to figure what’s real and what’s not, as most things are beyond your reach and beyond your subjective world.

Life should be easy to live. But the baggage from evolution, from culture are too hard and the trap seems to be too tight for any individual to break through.
I am on a peak of my personal realizations.
Nothing is weird.

My mind is mashed with conflicting thoughts. But it’s all good.

May be whatever you are, where ever you are, accepting and embracing it is the first step, and then the continuation. Being a human is probably lucky that you are uniquely positioned to think through all these. But then a human mind is so tricky, if it’s not filled with the positive stuff, if it’s not directed towards a good path, it can make a living hell out of itself even in the best livable condition. So, life is a blessing and a curse at the same time; it’s ultimately how it’s perceived. You can know the light, when you experienced darkness.. and vice versa.

If you want to have the same trip like mine…it will be a bad trip for you if you watch these videos sequentially.. . in total I probably watched 50 videos over a long time. Haha.

There’s also almost infinite good stuff and videos too on YouTube. You can always cherry pick and demand to see the good instead of the bad.

A struggling penguin..

Survival of a bear vs a seal

Tribal limitedness

A brothel in the south east

Unhappy women seeking for marriage

Crazy girlfriends

Unhappy rich people

Purpose

Sometimes I forget what I myself wrote.. And then when I read and realize again, I feel to slap myself for not remembering everything I told to myself. And I wake up.

“You don’t find purpose, because there is no purpose pre-ordained. You make your own purpose of your life. There is no ultimate purpose. I know, that feels like a huge slap on the face like most truths. Every morning you wake up, you will have to reinvigorate your purpose. You are free to change your purpose, you are free to not have any purpose. You are responsible for every thing your brain produces even though you have no control over most of them. You are mostly responsible for every action you make with your conscious, unconscious or subconscious mind. Yes.. Life is scary. But it’s better not to live delusionally but to face it. You were not alive on this mother earth for billions of years.. you won’t be alive on this universe filled with joy and distress for more than trillions of years.. So, the less than 100 years you got, don’t waste.. enjoy and live.. if you can have a purpose and propagate that in human culture, that’s a plus.. Even though there’s only one earth physically, but actually the number of perceived earth and the number of human brains are equal. If the purpose you think about is dictated by someone else, you are doomed. So.. You need to open your heart and reach other people who have purpose in their lives to learn and live and probably get a reference. And then.. you probably make your very own purpose. And be happy that you are alive. Pinch yourself to verify. You can either feel scared how little and insignificant you are amidst of the billions of exploding stars or you can think that you yourself are a stardust meaning you are part of everything. Every urge you have to eat, sleep, fuck are evolutionarily designed into you. Learn how to deal with it with good examples from others who lived meaningfully.. But eventually you will have to live on your own. Miserably if you choose wrong, meaningfully if you can make a purpose of your own and strive to be happy and productive. Existentialism at its core, but not ridiculing nihilists too. Hail to Sartre and Nietzsche. And blue is the warmest color.”

My other quora posts:

https://www.quora.com/profile/Zehady-Abdullah-Khan

Richness – Opportunity in block chain space

From my understanding of life, becoming a billionaire or becoming rich is not the goal of life. And I used to call myself ambitious, but I learnt to dislike the word “Ambition” now. Ambition is a self-centered outlook that only works within your context and is more often disconnected. I rather love the word “Vision” now and want to be a part in the bigger process for creativity.
Anyway, if you become rich, good for you. But I will value you for the things that matter for me or the society around, not for the things that you own personally. Being happy and feeling the passion for living and doing good things for you and people around you give you the purpose for living further and create. If you have realized the complexity of life and managed to remain happy, then probably you would like everyone to be happy around you with your rich mind or create jobs to employ people so that they can have better life. An inclusive mind and an inclusive society and an inclusive economy are what we should envision.
However, I am posting this to make you realize that there are people who seize the opportunity, who can see through and work hard to become what they become. And they create and contribute even more sometimes. And it should be inspiring for us to explore and may be find our own path to richness of both kinds. There will always be things in the hand of luck, but what you can change or take is what you should focus on. And that’s where the dimension of time comes into place. All we are losing is time every moment if we haven’t made the best use of it. I feel like the block chain, Bitcoin space is full of opportunities for many, for researchers, academicians, statisticians, economists, engineers, programmers, data scientists like me, businessman or woman, large companies, governments, individuals. For change, you need disruption sometimes. To be enthusiastic, you need something that excites. So, cheering for all of your endeavors and everyone to utilize your opportunities in this space to feel proud of. Hope you will create opportunities for others through your service of whatever kind.

But if you don’t want to read a story of a crypto billionaire, but rather prefer to read about philosophy from a Yogi about creativity, vision or ambition. Read this: http://isha.sadhguru.org/blog/lifestyle/success/ambition-to-vision-more-to-all/

Have a great day, guys.

https://amp-timeinc-net.cdn.ampproject.org/c/amp.timeinc.net/time/money/5198682/cryptocurrency-billionaires

Software is eating the world

It’s past midnight. And I just realized how I depend on softwares literally my every awakening moment. And I googled how many people feel the same way. And here it is.. “Software is eating the world.” You see how this sentence scares our feelings. If I would use the word “improving/enhancing” instead of “eating/devouring”, you would have imagined things differently. Words can misconstrue and mislead. And here it gets more spooky on artmusicdance if you have time to read —

My Speculations About Reality- Really Speculative!

http://www.artmusicdance.com/vaspi/pythagoras.htm

I think freedom of choice is the most important thing over anything else. So, if everything we do is to live the way we want and if we are always trying to seek for something better for our lives towards the goal of perfection, and if on a positive note, we continue building software for the betterment of our lives and society, we will be software driven. May be in a more radical sense, we can say that we ourselves are gonna be part of softwares, though I guess everybody hates these type of ideas, connotations because of the scifi transformer type movies, where anything mechanical is non-spiritual and thus non-humane, thus undesirable. We have these feeling of separation from things that’s logical, that’s mechanical from things which are spiritual, illogical, irrational – even though our whole consciousness basically rely on both at the same time. But anyway, our ideas are ever evolving I guess about what kind of world we want to live in. It’s not that we know everything or we can know everything, but we try. And as far as I can see, there will be softwares everywhere, inside and outside, more and more. Like money is turning into software based, software generated, virtual. The friction we have about whether it should be accepted or not can link towards very much psychological, philosophical questions like what’s the value of your memories? In far far future, will you pay for a software which can help you regain some memory that you lost but you want to regain? What if we come up with technologies with which it’s possible to store our brain and thus choose different physical bodies, will we call ourselves software, will we coin some new term? When the general artificial intelligence will be capable of giving birth to seemingly sentient robots which can have human like conversation with you, with whom you can form better bond or friendship than with your neighbour, will you call psychologically matured, software driven, human-like robots your friend? The world we, the human species if we exist, are gonna live years from now is not going to be the same world as it is now, like it was not the same, rather was quite different 500 years ago in terms of standards and morality. But I do believe that some basic ideas of life and morality and culture probably won’t change, but how we express and exhibit may change very much along with every other changes that I can not fathom right now. Now why is that relevant to you? That’s a good question to ponder on. Only if you want to!! Haha.

 

So I will quote legendary Investor Andressen:

http://lingualeo.com/es/jungle/why-software-is-eating-the-world-marc-andreessen-wall-street-journal-131474#/page/1

“””More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan and Pets.com still fresh in the investor psyche, people are asking, “Isn’t this just a dangerous new bubble?”

 

I, along with others, have been arguing the other side of the case. (I am co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, Zynga, and Foursquare, among others. I am also personally an investor in LinkedIn.) We believe that many of the prominent new Internet companies are building real, high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses.

 

Today’s stock market actually hates technology, as shown by all-time low price/earnings ratios for major public technology companies. Apple, for example, has a P/E ratio of around 15.2 — about the same as the broader stock market, despite Apple’s immense profitability and dominant market position (Apple in the last couple weeks became the biggest company in America, judged by market capitalization, surpassing Exxon Mobil). And, perhaps most telling, you can’t have a bubble when people are constantly screaming “Bubble!”

 

But too much of the debate is still around financial valuation, as opposed to the underlying intrinsic value of the best of Silicon Valley’s new companies. My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. “””

 

Nvidia CEO: Software Is Eating the World, but AI Is Going to Eat Software

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607831/nvidia-ceo-software-is-eating-the-world-but-ai-is-going-to-eat-software/

Touch the sky

Once Upon a Dream

Upular

Let Me Go – I don’t wanna be your hero

I wanna grow old with you.

You Raise Me Up

Nothing’s gonna change my love for you.

Dancing in the dark

Boo Bass

I’ll be here

Remember When

Let it go

How far I will go

Try Everything

 

What you have?

I wish I had realized this early in my life. I was reading this:

“If they have to be chased, then they don’t want you. And if they don’t want you, then you shouldn’t want them . As Maya Angelou says, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

If someone, be it potential friend, wife, business partner, is showing you that they would rather not get along with you, believe them. Be confident and live.””

I personally feel like literally everyone, at one point or other in their life, intensely feels the fear of being left out, be it in a broken relationship, be it rejected by a job interview, be it get fired, be it not being able to achieve something very desirable, be a friend mistreating, be your parents being horrible with you. The fear, the loneliness eats the soul, takes us to the darkest corner to hate living. I realize now it’s all for good ultimately. Being challenging and resilient truly takes time and you need to fail to learn. But boy, it’s so hard to keep your sanity sometimes.

“This cannot be said enough. Imagine you walked into a car dealership and the salesman told you he had a car for you. He says, “Well, it’s kinda old and beat up. It still runs, but it’s high on gas, there’s a few scratches on the paint, and I’m not sure how reliable it is.” Now, how much would you want to buy that car? You’d be out of there in a New York second and looking for something better in no time, I’m quite sure. Why? Because if the person selling you the car doesn’t even believe in the quality of the car, why should you?

This is exactly why you need to increase your confidence and self-esteem. If you don’t believe in what you are selling, then why should others? Confidence is attractive. If you believe you have something valuable to offer, so will others. The more you truly love yourself, the more convinced you’ll be that you will find right things for you. ” — From a pairedlife.com post

Realize what you can offer.

Within you

Within your heart lies the love you have always seeked for.

Within your imagination you reach the missed and loved ones.

Within your soul lies the beauty of every moment.

Within your eyes all doubts take flight.

Within your reach, all can glow.

Within your words, you and they live forever.

Within you, you find the company.

You can conquer heaven and hell by the grace of you,

Just stop time so that you can understand..

You are the only one and you complete everyone else.

Then you never stop feeling..

Last weekend I was bored. I was super bored, up to a level that I was literally trying to escape from everything. This weekend I am feeling really good. It’s really nice weather outside here. I am in the new Starbucks coffeeshop near our campus. I love the new atmosphere in this coffee shop. The old one was really small and congested, the new one is wide and feels having more room. It’s interesting how space makes us feel. The feeling of wideness and narrowness I mean! And I am thinking about ups and downs of life. May be I have some obsession with playing with my feelings ;). The ups and downs are so common, but still every time you are in the down side, you hate being there. On the other hand, the ups are the ones you want to sustain. How to really get used to with your failures? Some failures are just hard to accept as you firmly believe that you could have done better. It’s that your laziness and lack of conscious thoughts in the moment just ruined it for you. But then no physical event should really define your potential, but it’s just hard to reconcile. My friend Adil gave me a book. It’s “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran. Reading Gibran is such a delight. I am reading page 29 on Joy and Sorrow. The chapter starts with

Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow. And he answered: Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

There really is no hard line between joy and sorrow. But as human being, we know we feel; We feel joy and we feel sorrow. And we don’t want sorrow for ourselves, we only want joy. Because it just feels good being joyous. But the natural world, the unconscious everything doesn’t have the least concern about how we feel, what we want. Should we call the nature ruthless then because it doesn’t care us at all? So, it’s on us how we can feel, what we can feel. But feeling the power within yourself is not that easy. Well, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Frankly I have a feeling that I understand this sentence, but do I really? I am doubtful, may be because you can never appropriately measure the depth of your sorrow or your joy. When you are in misery, like when you lose your closest one, or you fail in something you deeply desired for, the sorrow just feels endless, when you are in the joyous state, like making love with your sweetest one, like sitting beside your mother and listen how you used to be when you were young with some disbelief, the joy you feel is just unimaginable. Every time it’s new, because it’s a new moment.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the vey cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

Gibran talks about how inseparable joy and sorrow is. He denies the superiority of one over the other. He brings some metaphor like a cup or a lute and how they stand with both of the sides- the harsh and the mild. He asks us to be introspective, to see our heart like a dual being observing its other self standing nearby.

We are always thinking. And if I look at my own thoughts, they are so sporadic. It takes some effort to linearize my thoughts. It requires concentration to steadily and critically think about a single topic. It may be a very important neuro – scientific question why and how we evolved to be like this. A broad answer may be that millions of our early evolutionary past, all we thought and cared about is our survival in the wild. But were we not more focussed than what we are now? What I mean is – when you are running away from a danger or chasing down an animal or heavy lifting or climbing, those normally require intense focus. It can easily be said that when we didn’t know how to read or write, those were our primary activities. Did we then used to live in the present more than how we live our life now? In our modern lives (last few centuries) through urbanization, through industrial, scientific, academic revolution, we brought more stability in managing our resources, properties. We live more in our mind now that we live outside I guess. But this is a big claim? Isn’t it? And probably it’s just not very easy to prove it. Our modern activities have changed, moved from high physical labor to low physical labor tasks, require more mental activities, because we learnt through imagination we can touch the infinite. It’s a huge dilemma, isn’t it? If I understand the mechanism of joy and sorrow, I know that these emotion are deeply attached with your connection with your presence in the world. But then we know that only through imagination, prediction of future and inference of the past, we can enjoy the unknowns. Both are true and so is the struggle in the mind. I will just end with the last sentence in the chapter by Gibran.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.

And I am now watching this to add more spice to my burning mind-oven.