D219/P20: Take 2 — this time it is about Langhana
I was halfway though a post about IoT when I decided to draft it and start writing afresh. Hence — Take 2.
It is no news to us that the human population is growing at an alarming rate. With so many of us, I wonder sometimes whether there is any thought that has not been thought or any emotion that has not been felt at some point by someone else.
Flashback to a couple of weeks ago: I have practiced self-taught meditation for many years. One thing I experienced during some experimental breathing exercises is that the feeling I get when holding my breath out after exhalation is very different from the feeling when I hold my breath in after inhalation.
I feel much more relaxed if I hold my breath after breathing out or just keep breathing out as long as possible. If I can do this for a sufficiently long time, something seems to sort of pop open somewhere (for lack of a better description) and my breathing becomes uniform across both nostrils immediately. Which is remarkable if you consider that I need to meditate for quite a while before my breathing becomes uniform across both nostrils.
Now here, I thought was a presumably hare-brained experiment and observation that I had made in isolation. I assumed that no one else would have noticed something as inane or noted it down even if they had. I googled nonetheless and was surprised to find that there is a huge chunk of literature about this. A lot of other people have experienced this and in fact, there is a name for it in yoga — Langhana. The opposite is called Brahmana.
People don't just know about this, they know a lot about it and I have apparently just chanced on to the tip of an iceberg. This led me to promptly sign up for a formal meditation class at the end of the month. However, it also left me with this feeling that is there any experience or emotion or thought that is truly unique?
We like to believe we are unique. That each of us is built of an “I” which is fundamentally different from every other “I”. However, is that necessarily true? If every soul (assuming there is one) is part of something bigger, then they must all be fundamentally exactly alike. If one atom of hydrogen is exactly like every other atom of hydrogen, how and why should we be any different?
Perhaps the only way in which we are different is in the sum and temporal sequence of our experiences and what we retain of them.
The world then is like an (in)finite state machine and we are entities that traverse this. All of us are exactly alike and the only thing that shapes us is the sequence in which events occur. And which event occur — given the vast selection of possible events.
And if we decide to believe in the existence of the soul and as a Hindu, in reincarnation, then perhaps the other thing that matters is our internal state — which determines how we react to any given event.
And if someone happens to have past life memories it is probably because somewhere in the flow, someone forgot to bzero out some chunk of memory perhaps. It isn’t supposed to happen and it normally doesn’t but then there are race conditions that have not been tested out properly.
Yeah … The Matrix all over again.
You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
…
The pill you took is part of a trace program. It’s designed to disrupt your input-output carrier signal so we can pinpoint your location.
-Morpheus
