Egosphere To Spacetime: The Mapping We Are ! (From my BS collection)

I have been dreaming of the floating sensation in the six dimensional fluid that always flow from here and now to the end of time and space.

There is no moment no event, there never was... it's just ... a collection of points that we associate with the abstract thing that we think to be something like space-time.
We change the association rules.. and so we feel like moving and growing or decaying. ...
And at some point we lose track of these point to point one-to-one associations... that moment we lose consciousness or identity... perhaps forever. .  unless in some rare occasions one can recover the mapping rules. 

These mappings from egosphere to space-time-sphere are the things that give us the illusion of meaning and existence.  But we actually exist forever (in a way) as mappings that never cease to exist... just each one of us have different number of points to be mapped to. .. but we are floating forever along with our imaginary sphere to sphere mappings.. each one of us with different Winding Numbers that define the Lie group that we create.

   Photo source Nicole Brangwin

As far back as I can remember, I always thought about death.. almost all the time.. even in my dreams and I still do. Most of the time it scared me or saddened me at least... at first I tried to avoid it... but that seemed impossible.. you avoid it and it comes back and haunts you more...that's why I wanted to conquer it, mostly thinking about plausible physical immortality due to advanced technologies in the future ! But this is something you can never be certain of... although there's another way... by "embracing it and accepting it" .. that sounds too simple and achievable yet does anybody know how to do that ? If you ask maybe the response will be "huh.. why would anyone do that ? ". But somehow deep withing I knew that however crazy it may sound.. this is the only way to conquer this damn inevitable thing !

This is all the more reason to visit Bhutan, the country that has accepted "death" not only as something inevitable but something you must keep reminding yourself of every day and embrace it.

Everyone must read this beautiful BBC article.

Lone Rickshaw

The Gods

Death, After-Death and The Time Dilation (From my BS collection)

We all know about death as well as the relativistic time dilation more or less, but I am not going to give a crackpot theory of relativistic death or something like that but I am going to use the idea of the relative nature of the perception of time to explain what death and after-death may look like and how science and religion fit together!

(The Persistence of Memory - Painting by Salvador Dalí)

               The theory of relativity has made us familiar with the idea that time is not a universally fixed quantity, perception of time is different for different observers! For example, if you are standing near a railway track and you see a train passing by, you will see all the watches and the clocks on that train running a bit slower than yours and that doesn't mean the speed of the train is somehow only effecting the tiny mechanical machines inside those clocks, it actually slows down the time itself, in fact, those passengers on that train will age a bit less than you !! It's not just a theory it's an experimental fact! The GPS that you use in your smartphones is working because of the adjustments in the satellites made using this time dilation effect. The amount of slowing down of the time is related to the speed if that train was moving at ridiculously high speed (close to the speed of light), 100 years in your watch could be just a few hours on that train, and as the speed approaches closer and closer to the speed of light this difference in the rate of passage of time increases unimaginably, so much so that at one point when the speed is exactly the speed of light that is almost three hundred thousand kilometers per second, time stops inside that train for an observer at rest, meaning, when only a second passes for any passenger on that train it will be an eternity for you (outside the train on the ground), from Big Bang to the end of the universe and more !! 

             But I am not really going to use this relativistic time dilation, what I need is the perception of time in a dream-like state of mind. Let us take the example of the movie Inception, I guess most of us have watched this movie but those who haven't (you should) let me explain the idea briefly: the idea is that time runs faster in a dream than it does in reality, so if you were in a dream and according to you the dream lasted for a few hours it might actually be a few moments in reality, and again that difference increases as you go deeper, that is a dream inside a dream and maybe even deeper. This is the kind of time dilation that I am interested in.

           Now that we know what time dilation is, I can proceed to explain what this has to do with death or even after death so to speak.

            To define death let me use the doctors' definition that is the "brain death", where all electrical activities in the brain cease. When death arrives there's a window of 30 to 180 seconds, the brain is filled with neural activities all over, the whole brain wires up and a burst of neuro-chemicals in the occurs, it gives a "more real than real" experience because of heightened alertness and warmth and other emotions because of those fun chemicals like dopamine, etc. I can go on describing what scientists have learned about death but it's better if you have a quick look at this Discovery News video that explains pretty much everything that you need to know about death. I am interested in that 30-180 seconds time window. 

(The Creation of Adam - painting by Michelangelo)

            So here's the idea, what if when we are dying and in that time window we actually spend almost an eternity in a dream-like state, a fast flashback of one's whole life and then more.. more experiences which will, of course, feel real because of the burst of neuro-chemicals as I said "more real than real", you may see angels, gods, monsters and even God and a whole new world of unimaginable beauty and beings and experiences. You have the memory of all your favorite people who were dead, so you meet your loved ones and spend an eternity with them and because of all the good chemicals every experience is warm, you feel positive about everything ... You live an eternity and you feel like "this is THE heaven" the promised land the salvation! 

But in reality, that is for the people who watched you die, it was just a few seconds ! just an idea but I think this is possible and if this is the case then the infamous death won't be that bad after all! 

Geneva and Around During CERN-visit, August, 2015

Chillon Castle

Model in Medieval Attire (Chillon Castle)

Chillon Castle

The Happy Family Selfie (Chillon Castle)

Seagull or a Lakegull ? (Chillon Castle)

Kids Fishing in Lac Léman

Not so happy family/

Chillon Castle

Near the Museum of Olympic (Lausanne)

(Lausanne)

(Lausanne)

(Lausanne)

Living Under The Shadow of Death

[A few months old dream]

Like several times before, this morning once again I had this horrible nightmare of erupting Vesuvius.. only this time, it was elaborate, so real... the fear of death that also burning and/or suffocating to death ! If I were a good painter I am sure I could paint it perfectly... 

Not sure it was dawn or the sunset... I think it was a sun-set because streets were busy and full of people... but it was't the streets of Napoli, rather it was a kind of my home town Lala in India morphed into Naples. I was alone inside my parent's house.. I heard an explosion and looked back immediately and what I saw was the death itself... biggest possible explosion, as if the whole Vesuvius mountain has exploded ! Vesuvius lost it's head long time ago... much longer than we can think of, but what I saw, felt like it's happening now... the blowing off of the peak of that mighty mountain opening up the portal to hell that started to throw out black smoke, fire and all hell... as if the lava tore apart the clouds and were going to touch the sky and even farther... the sky was full of ashes, much like the burning of the slash-and-burn that I witnessed from the window of Chhurda's house in Gharmura, several years ago when I was just a little kid... I remember, ashes of the burnt leafs were flying away from that distant mountain and reaching far away lands... some of them ended up near my window too ! Only that time the fear of death and the meaning of life was out of the picture.. but what happened in that sunset, this morning was as I said, death itself... but I don't know why I was confused, one moment it scared the hell out of me and in the next moment I was thinking about the ethics of, "What if I take a picture of the eruption with my smartphone ? " ! Because I could hear the cumulative scream of thousands of burning humans and yet that shameless desire to take a picture was popping out somewhere in my mind ! At that moment I saw maa watching the eruption as if she was enjoying it... as if it was not much different than the Diwali-fireworks... as she always enjoyed the Diwali.. I think probably she enjoyed much  more than little-me, because even at this age, I have lost my enthusiasm for fireworks and things like that ! I was thinking all these and then I saw a wave of black stuff flying fast, approaching towards us... chunks of Lava hitting everywhere in our neighborhood destroying big buildings in a moment... I started to warn her, to come inside the house as if it would be much safer... but she wouldn't listen..  this feeling was much like the one that came to my mind when I was in Cherrapunji with Subhasish and Pritam, I remember we were standing at the edge of a mountain and there was an ocean of cloud beneath our feet... it was beautiful beyond all metaphors and we all almost at the same time uttered, "I want to jump and die", I believe that Japanese couple uttered the same thing in their language ! I saw this feeling clearly in my mother's eyes... I don't know what that guy was thinking two thousand years ago when watching the same thing  from the other side of the Tyrrhenian  sea, from Naples !

Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines - Pablo Neruda [A recitation by me]

Recitation of Pablo Neruda's one of the most famous poems, "Tonight I can write the saddest lines" .. the background video was recorded by me during the way back to Naples from Campobasso, Italy... 

9th February 2015, was a beautiful [not sunny] day... my first snowy train journey through the beautiful valley of river Biferno... and the hypnotizing silence and beauty of the forests of of the mountains Sannio and Matese...  

Here is the poem:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 

Write, for example,'The night is shattered 

and the blue stars shiver in the distance.' 

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings. 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too. 

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms 

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky. 

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too. 

How could one not have loved her great still eyes. 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. 

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her. 

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her. 

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture. 

What does it matter that my love could not keep her. 

The night is shattered and she is not with me. 

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance. 

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. 

My sight searches for her as though to go to her. 

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me. 

The same night whitening the same trees. 

We, of that time, are no longer the same. 

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her. 

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing. 

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before. 

Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes. 

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. 

Love is so short, forgetting is so long. 

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms 

my sould is not satisfied that it has lost her. 

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer 

and these the last verses that I write for her.

---Pablo Neruda

Where The Lane Takes a Turn

The lane takes a turn exactly where there are glass windows... someone watching through the windows in leisure... listening to the silence of the snow... losing the soul into the past as old as those mountains climbing up from the backyard... perhaps I would have lit my cigarette and listened to the silence too... would have watched through my windows where the lane takes a turn...

Photo Courtesy Gaurab Sundar Dutta

This Is How 2015 Came To Torino : Walking The Streets of Turin