Observing

Why are we here?

2011-09-06T21:29:00.001-07:00

Statement: God created us, but gave us freedom to choose- a prerequisite for the test of attempting to intellectually evolve.

We choose actions or make decisions by three main influential factors;

1. Genetic, effects our cognitive inclination by determining our temperament (aggressive, violent, timid etc), emotional stability and so on and;

2. Environmental nurture and conditioning- what we were believed to think when we were young such as the standards of right and wrong through family, societal peers and media. However, a customized version of their influence is formed in us because it is perceived differently and subjectively depending on the variance of our contemporary knowledge and genetic disposition at the time.

3. Fitra, or conscious of good conscience, meaning not necessarily being good or having a good conscience, rather being aware of what is good and therefore, having the ability to do good (except if the person is brain damaged). Fitra works in essence as an active and intangible buffer that gives meaning to that which the brain screens through our senses with an inclination to detect good. It does not screen the stimulus, rather it interprets it and is part of the cognitive process.

Best way to explain fitra is to first understand the impulse of action and the cognitive process. Once awake, a human is hammered with thousands of impulses to do. Even in the case of inaction, it is also driven by the impulse to do. These reams of impulses are constantly in competition with one another and only succeed to manifest themselves if the cognitive process allows them to activate. Again, the impulses that are in competition are all active but are only manifested if they are triggered or activated by the cognitive process.

So what is the cognitive process? The process involving the impulse to act at a point in time. Actually, a good question to ask is what comes first, impulse of action or the cognitive process? Does the CG trigger the IMOA or does the IMOA activate cognition. In order to understand that, let’s resolve what cognition or the cognitive process is first.

Cognition is made of two parts-

1. Subconscious, a broad category to encompass what is actively involved in motor and sensory functions and is involuntary.

2. Voluntary consciousness. Again a broad category culminating the four lobes and their specialized tasks.

Both the subconscious and the consciousness interpret reality simultaneously or at the same time, and if the person is not schizophrenic, they will have a consistent viewpoint. However, the subconscious contains fragments or blocks of information, which when they takeover, are rudimentary, instinctual and not analytical and are derived from past exposure, however, it produces faster impulses of action than the voluntary consciousness. Infact, the subconscious part is involved in activating the impulse to do and the impulse to activate the consciousness, similar to muscle tonus. But once active, the consciousness can succeed in limiting (but not completely restricting) the extensions and influences of the subconscious. The subconscious does not deactivate like the consciousness because the organisms organ and systems cannot afford to hibernate it’s processes.

Because the subconscious is also involved in interpreting information, when a person relaxes and goes into default, the subconscious pathways takeover the cognitive process, and competition arises. Consciously, we want to do one thing at a time, however, we find ourselves trapped in a myriad of interspaced and incomplete actions. This is especially true if we are young and untrained to this struggle between the giant and the mouse.

The more conscious we are, the more highly energy consuming and catatonic the body is, think studying.

Getting back to point, the choice or motivation to do selfless good comes from the combination of fitra + self-conditioning phenomenon (SCP), or the process of using both cognition and information or awareness to stimulate the intellectual resolution (IR) of nurture and the resultant impulses of action.

We constantly self-condition to adapt to our environment, meaning using intelligence to try to device ways to alter our actions and habits to help us succeed further in our environment. The succession can be good or bad, however, ultimately it improves our chances of survival. Moreover, conditioning is initiated by first acknowledging the existence of a threat and trying to identify clearly the sources of those threats and course of action needed to modify them.

Therefore, SCP = Stimulus + IR.

Example: A person was brought up in a poor neighbourhood. Now, the stimulus is poverty and the intellectual resolution can either be guided by the fitra to resolve the environment and the course of action required to succeed or improve chances of survival or, neglect the fitra (because it usually tends to take the long, hard route) and choose evil to better improve chances of survival and therefore adopt an evil pattern of living. As you’ve noted, ultimately, the goal is improve chances of survival or quality of life, but one is absolutely selfish and the other is less so.

Of course, with their fitra, they will be compelled to acknowledge that living at the cost of others is unfair. And injustice is destructive to the ecosystem which the person had depended upon before in order to survive. This acknowledgement will further compel the evil person to reconcile their daily script of action or habit in order to be more conscious about their action and of their will to do evil. Thus, this is how fitra can give us the ability to do good, even though it is intangible and does not stimulate action, rather, it tampers with the will and the motivations that stimulate action, all the whilst, being independent of both the will and the impulse of action.

And as Muslims, we believe that the first two factors (genes and nurture) can be molded or shaped if we choose to adopt new rules and principles or guidelines and standards of right and wrong based on the Quran which will influence our perception.

Because the motivation to choose to adopt new guidelines is-

1. An environmental stimulus (which can also be alluded to God’s hedaya if the stimulus triggers a cognitive pathway that activates the fitra) and;

2. An internal feeling of discomfort with the status quo (fitra part of consciousness getting empowered).

Humanity’s test is to follow the signs of the hedaya and heed the fitra.

We believe the ultimate test when one follows through with the hedaya or fitra is to constantly struggle to intellectually evolve. To remain in the battle-field with the self (genes and environment) or in other words, the subconscious.

This persistent struggle will improve our conditioning and create intellectual growth that will lead to a changed environment. The only remaining, unchangeable factor is genes, which we shall always struggle against and must not succumb to.

Response: Hedaya is controlled by God and can be blessed to us at any given moment depending on whether He wants to give it to us or not. And He is merciful therefore, He must’ve given everyone the stimulus. Agreed?

Okay, when we choose to follow through with the hedaya, we do so because of our fitra and when we don’t, we don’t because we choose not to and that is the sin- to be lazy and prefer the default mode of living.

The customized information formed in us (based on as we said, genes and environment) that determines what our choices will be leaves fitra as the only independent variable or anomaly that can counter the influence of the uncontrollable amalgamation that produces our impulse of action.

Therefore, the argument put forth is that it boils down to whether or not we choose to use the fitra in our cognitive processes. Correct?

Freedom to choose the fitra itself is an impulse of action and involves the cognitive process which we believe has the potential of generating more than one outcome, but depending on whether the consciousness is at it’s optimum or is defeated by the subconscious, only one decision or action will be generated at one point in time.

Note that the competition between the impulses of action is always lopsided and only one outcome is always produced so the factors involved in our decision making will also determine whether or not we choose the fitra and intellectually resolve and alter our will and motivation and consequently our actions. The person who chooses it did not have the ability to not to choose it because the cognitive processes involved in his decision-making would lead to only one outcome.

Using fitra is thus, not an independent variable, it is also a predetermined one. The person who chooses to challenge these concepts will act out a certain way when young but will then realize that they can either use fitra to increase chances of survival without harming anyone or vice versa. God already knows what we shall choose because of His awareness of our cognitive processes which are influenced by the genes and environment, both of which He has installed.

Therefore, intellectual evolution is not the test. And to prove that, we Muslims have had the Quran for over 1400 years and even though at some point our civilization did succeed far better than others (during times when the imams were ostracized or imprisoned and had very little impact on society), today, even with the existence of people who pursue it dearly, we have yet to reach the far heights of Western civilization or even Eastern development.

Then where is the test?

Wrong question. The question should be, what is the test or better still, why are we here?

I don’t have the answer to that now.

How to be Creative

2011-06-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

I’m not an authority on the subject and will welcome any different analyses or views and in fact encourage them for the sake of interaction whilst we wait for Imagine- Lehrer’s upcoming book on creativity that's due to be out in March 2012.

I’ll try to elucidate how I think creativity works by explaining various concepts and intersect them.

The best anology I can think of akin to the brain is of the processor, RAM and hard-disk of a computer. When I opened Word to type this, the PC’s processor ran the application MsWord and whatever I typed was temporarily stored in the RAM. Later, fear of losing my work, I saved the document in a permanent folder on the hard-disk.

Similarly, when we shed our mind’s light on something and focus our attention, we can digest a limited amount of information and in a brief period of time, thus we memorize or store limited information to attentively process. And the more we expose ourselves to the information (or if it registers a high emotional impact) it gets stored in the cerebrum’s as a permanent source in the form of neuronal cells that are “on” and ready to be triggered or activated.

However, they also need to be turned “off” and this usually happens when we sleep and the lack of causes them to take turns shutting-off, like workers on shift. This explains why we tend to get obscure and disoriented if we don’t sleep well; parts of our brain are taking turns in recess.

And similar to how an average PC uses around 4GHz of processing power and 4GB of RAM with a relative storage capacity of 250, 320, 500GB are even up to 1Terabytes nowadays; the unconscious can store a lot more than the attention can hold. And that capacity cannot be realized with one’s attention span so a persistent effort to create neuronal cells is necessary. If you haven’t caught on the correlation yet, the processor and RAM of our brains are our attention span and the hard-disk is the cerebrum or unconscious, part of the Telencephalon and Diencephalon.

During the day, we come across terabytes of information that we either consciously or subconsciously process. You can think of the people you pass by or who come in your field of vision and for a moment, will register and then they’re not even a fragment of a memory. I read somewhere that strangers we dream of are people we’ve come across in real life.

Our mind filters information during sleep and either holds on to or discards them depending on their significance. Filtering is an ongoing process. It also very probably describes the “gut” instincts or the hunches we feel but can’t rationalize. So there is, in fact, a very sophisticated process underneath that broad and arbitrary feeling.

This analogy, albeit limited in it’s scope, has far-reaching consequences in that our consciousness is the gateway, or the door-keeper to what we allow entry or exit our minds by focusing our attention. Unfortunately, unlike Eternal Sunshine, we haven’t figured out a way to permanently erase the neurons that store information negative information.

Furthermore, we all have ganglions or groups of neuronal cells, what is generally referred to as the lateral interpreter that is responsible for randomly fusing different thoughts and ideas. You can think of the programming code or the search algorithm that Google uses to retrieve our search requests.

It’s responsible for our ruminating over issues late into the night and for drifting the mind when we get bored or tired and careless. It’s also responsible for creativity although random most of the time (think of all the mistakes one makes in order to finally get it right) it will yield after several attempts. And this causes the corpus striatum (brain’s reward center) to secrete the reward chemicals, a high we’re all too familiar with- day-dreams can be therapeutic sometimes.

Information in our brain exists in the form of flowcharts, by clustering familiar neuronal cells together and forming dendrites and axons (or information highways) throughout that bundle. So when attention is directed towards a particular idea, information that the neurons encapsulate cluster around the particular concept and the random mashing actually generates a structural framework for some genius idea.

Even in matters of thought and cognition, the processing, assimilating and generating facilitated by the lateral interpreter is an interesting experience partly because when we identify the pattern of something, we’re rewarded with the high.

Now, think of a recent movie or tv serial and how, for a moment when you relax, thoughts about it seep through to your consciousness. The randomness of it is so evident sometimes. That is because the information that have high emotional registry remain at the fringes of our consciousness waiting to be activated either consciously or when we default into auto-pilot mode, that plus the experience of decoding the movie is interesting.

I read somewhere that if you want to write a book, you have to read a hundred books first. So say you read a hundred horror novels because you love the genre. The more you read and process the story, the more neurons are built around those concepts and will remain at the periphery for you to either consciously or unconsciously activate.

And that is what we can call creativity. In simple terms, everyone is creative in whatever we’ve constantly been exposed or are exposing ourselves to; it can be language and syntax, it can be video-gaming, it can be whatever you want, just name it (or constantly expose yourself to it).

In this talk by actor/ writer/ comedian Sir John Cleese, he talks about how the creativity process worked for him. He mentions seeking space and time as the two key factors as undisturbed, extended periods in which he would allow the mind to unwind and get emotionally oriented for the characters he would write about.

The likely reason for that is stress. An unwanted phone call can trigger the release of glucocorticoid, a hormone which does us well when we need to be physically alert to act but distorts the intellectual processes and disrupts the formation of neuronal cells because it diverts the body’s metabolic resources away from the higher thinking areas.

Assume, we’re writing for a character that is emotionally turbulent. This requires that we remain in a mode of stress. The difference here is the brain will adopt a stressful intellectual state without being metabolically stressed.

This distinction arises even in real life, when we improve our stress-handling capacity through meditation. The stress makes an intellectual impact but we can avoid it’s biological effects and the emotional distress by stretching our meditative muscles (scientifically, by diverting from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic nervous pathways).

More importantly, the lateral interpreter accesses the endless pit of our unconscious and the countless information stored there, when we’re in a serene mode. It’s an exciting experience because it’s surprising to find knowledge we didn’t know existed.

When athletes, who learn by rote, play against a superstar athlete, they tend to, out of nervousness, be highly alert and self-conscious in the hopes of playing better. Unfortunately, they’ll use their RAM or temporary storage as a source to access their skills rather than the bottomless pit of their unconscious and falter. This is called the Superstar effect. Blame the stress hormone.

The unrestricted access or the ability to tap into our unconscious as a source requires “space and time”. Not to mention a lot of exposition.

If the quality of this article is comme si comme sa because I’ve only read a few books and few more articles about cognition. I am certain, the more information I shove in my cranium and with enough space and time, I can write an excellent piece. Also, check out number 5 in this article which debunks my entire premise.

But maybe I’m right. I can feel it.

On getting motivated to change. Part 2

2010-04-04T10:10:00.000-07:00

(This is part two of a three-part series on my ignition process to change. Image Credit)

The history lesson in the first section of this article is important because for motivation to occur, the background information is thoroughly essential in understanding the collective perspective with which we assimilate our reality and the sprouting intellectual and moral dilemmas we face; the ability to contrast can help us detach from our environment, detect our points of intersection with society’s false ideas, extrapolate our flaws, recognize what matters at the end of our days and capitalize on our potential for change, genuine drive and appreciation of the growth process.

Lie #2: The more we own, the happier we become

Depending on the pattern with which we live life, with our minds we can rationalize anything and so it should be easiest to work in our own self-interest. But we all know that sometimes, we’re more destructive than we are constructive, because when emotion comes into it, the wiring changes the way we ‘should’ function.

Sophisticated techniques are used to engineer our consent for a product. For instance, during the late twenties, the American Tobacco Company decided to expand their market share by advertising overseas and approached Ed Bernays to handle the project. But Bernays informed the delegates that half the US market was yet to be tapped, he meant the female population because it was stigmatized for women to smoke then. So he sent a group of young models to march in the New York City Easter day parade. He then told the press that a group of women's rights activists would light "Torches of Freedom". On his signal, the models lit Lucky Strike cigarettes in front of everyone. The New York Times (1 April 1929) printed: "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'". This helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public. When the women were asked about it, they responded with a scripted line of it being their expression of independence (go figure).

If you’ve noticed, American corporations set the fad and their ads are the cannon against which we measure our evolution. Subconsciously, if I have the latest iphone, I am a hip person. Celebrities act as spokespersons promoting products so you too can feel like your committing your two cents in the direction of success when you make the purchase.

Success to an average Earthling means material gain and the climate created for this fantasy, think Hollywood and MTV, only purport corporation’s aims. It also generates a self-centered, narcissistic mentality akin to vain celebrity magazines. Our planet has enough resources to create a utopian society but the ambience of the now aggressively presiding ideology focuses on the satisfaction of a few which, inevitably comes at the cost of others.

Top notch physiologists are hired to manipulate us. Adults barely stand a chance, let alone children and adolescents. We need to stay informed to have better lives but when we’re reliant on the mainstream media, we’re exposing ourselves to their hypnosis. This is one man’s testament.

What else is there besides consumption to make us feel content about our lives? What’s the alternative to spending? Actually, a better question to ask is what is your motive for action? What is it that drives you in your life today, or even five years ago?

I understand we all need money to survive and I’m not advocating a monk-esque sacrifice or lifestyle but the words humility, evenness and modesty incorrectly connote meekness and timidity in today’s modern jungle This stretching and warping of behaviour is another symptom of the capitalist system, magnified by the mainstream in pop music, video and culture (think any pop/hiphop lyrics + video). In our society, the first thing they ask about is the car one drives because it exhibits one’s financial status and indirectly, one’s social status and the amount of respect and honor deserved. It shouldn’t be the case but it is, more often than not. And the reason society has normalized this is because, under the influence of corporation’s suggestions, this mentality empowers a materialistic drive.

By all means, do aim to make more money. If you work hard, you deserve it. Almost everyone works hard, but not everyone is equal in that sense. The scale is skewed towards the powerful few who want to continue to dominate and concentrate the flow of revenue in their direction. One percent of the world’s population own 90% of it’s wealth!

Can we penetrate the ‘scheme’ and ‘make it’? It’s built in a way that chains your labour (in other words, you) for a very long and miserable life: You graduate from college and Uni only to be debt-laden and desperate to find a job. You end up accepting a 9-5 job with a meagre salary which follows marriage and then you have to work within the framework of a family which cups any future thoughts of risk.

And as I mentioned in the first part, the very few who leach into the rich class, are the ones who are paraded as natural results of Capitalism, when in reality, they’re rarities who are idolized. Do you want to be a model, a superstar athlete, movie star or rock star? Ironically, they’re valued so much in repressive societies because they provide visual escapes from a depressing reality. If you aim to be a surgeon, a physicist or any other real superstar, you wouldn’t care less about a bunch of cosmetic people.

Maybe we can share? Maybe we shouldn’t wait for the ones in the one percent to humble down. Maybe we should start today, without any grievances, to empower each other using our own intellectual and tangible resources?

After all, we are who we are corresponding to our surrounding recognition, formed by our own thoughts and actions. And we can be great without having someone’s name on our clothes or a logo to brand our possessions or spend wasted time hanging out at malls and coffee shops confabulating like the cast of a TV show under the pretense that that’s a progressive lifestyle!

“The lesson of life that is rarely mastered is the art of fulfillment. And the reason is, it's about appreciation and it's about contribution. You can only feel so much by yourself because we all know, corny as it sounds, the secret to living is giving. We all know life's not about me, it's about we.... You must grow. We all know the answer here. If you don't grow you're what? If a relationship's not growing, if a business is not growing, if you're not growing, it doesn't matter how much money you have, how many friends you have, how many people love you, you feel like hell. And the reason we grow, I believe, is so we have something to give of value. What makes the difference in the quality of our lives is our ability to contribute; to do something beyond ourselves.” Tony Robbins

So why is that we can empathize with others and feel good about contributing to their lives? At a recent TED conference, V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at Salt Lake University, sheds light on this mystery.

“In the front of the brain, there are ordinary motor command neurons that will fire when a person performs a specific action, such as rotating a chair to sit on.

One recent discovery that has been made by researchers in Italy, in Parma, by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues, is a group of neurons called mirror neurons, which are a subset of those command neurons that will also fire when you’re looking at somebody else performing the same action, as though this neuron is adopting the other person's point of view, performing a virtual reality simulation of the other person's action.”

According to Ramachandran, the significance of these mirror neurons must be involved in things like imitation and emulation, “..because to imitate a complex act requires the brain to adopt the other person's point of view. Well, why is imitation important?”

“Let's look at the phenomenon of human culture. If you go back in time about [75,000] to 100,000 years ago, it turns out that something very important happened to human evolution. There was a sudden emergence and rapid spread of a number of skills that are unique to human beings like tool use, the use of fire, the use of shelters, and, of course, language, and the ability to read somebody else's mind and interpret that person's behavior. All of that happened relatively quickly.

Even though the human brain had achieved its present size almost three or four hundred thousand years ago, 100,000 years ago all of this happened very very quickly. And I claim that what happened was the sudden emergence of a sophisticated mirror neuron system, which allowed you to emulate and imitate other people's actions. So that when there was a sudden accidental discovery by one member of the group, say the use of fire, or a particular type of tool, instead of dying out this spread rapidly, horizontally across the population, or was transmitted vertically, down the generations.

So, this made evolution suddenly Lamarckian, instead of Darwinian. Darwinian evolution is slow; it takes hundreds of thousands of years. A polar bear, to evolve a coat, will take thousands of generations, maybe 100,000 years. A human being, a child, can just watch its parent kill another polar bear, and skin it and put the skin on its body, fur on the body, and learn it in one step. What the polar bear took 100,000 years to learn, it can learn in five minutes, maybe 10 minutes. And then once it's learned this it spreads in geometric proportion across a population.

This is the basis; the imitation of complex skills is what we call culture and is the basis of civilization. Now there is another kind of mirror neuron, which is involved in something quite different. And that is, there are mirror neurons, just as there are mirror neurons for action, there are mirror neurons for touch. In other words, if somebody touches me, my hand, neuron in the somatosensory cortex in the sensory region of the brain fires. But the same neuron, in some cases will fire when I simply watch another person being touched. So, it's empathizing the other person being touched.

Now, the question then arises: If I simply watch another person being touched, why do I not get confused and literally feel that touch sensation merely by watching somebody being touched? I mean, I empathize with that person but I don't literally feel the touch. Well, that's because you've got receptors in your skin, touch and pain receptors, going back into your brain and saying "Don't worry, you're not being touched. So, empathize, by all means, with the other person, but do not actually experience the touch otherwise you'll get confused and muddled."

Okay, so there is a feedback signal that vetos the signal of the mirror neuron preventing you from consciously experiencing that touch. But if you remove the arm, you simply anesthetize my arm, so you put an injection into my arm, anesthetize the brachial plexus, so the arm is numb, and there is no sensations coming in, if I now watch you being touched, I literally feel it in my hand. In other words, you have dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings. So, I call them Gandhi neurons, or empathy neurons.

And this is not in some abstract metaphorical sense, all that's separating you from him, from the other person, is your skin. Remove the skin, you experience that person's touch in your mind. You've dissolved the barrier between you and other human beings.

And this, of course is the basis of much of Eastern philosophy, And that is there is no real independent self, aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world, inspecting other people. You are in fact, connected not just via Facebook, and Internet, you're actually quite literally connected by your neurons. And there is whole chains of neurons around this room, talking to each other. And there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from somebody else's consciousness.

And this is not mumbo-jumbo philosophy. It emerges from our understanding of basic neuroscience....So, the mirror neuron system underlies the interface allowing you to rethink about issues like consciousness, representation of self, what separates you from other human beings, what allows you to empathize with other human beings, and also even things like the emergence of culture and civilization, which is unique to human beings.”

So just like your brain’s reward system is made active at a fulfilling experience of your own, a similar sensation comes about when you are responsible for a similar sensation in someone else.

And a new Cornell study finds that lust for material things dissipate but our unique experiences remain with us for a long time, “The satisfaction we get from buying vacations, bikes for exercise and other experiences starts high and keeps growing. The initial high we feel from acquiring a flashy car or megascreen TV, on the other hand, trails off rather quickly.” At the same webpage, several similar articles are present that indicate possessions come second to experience mainly because, "Your experiences are inherently less comparative, they're less subject to and less undermined by invidious social comparisons" says professor of psychology Thomas Gilovich.

Whatever it is, even if it’s the shopping experience rather than the product that makes you feel good, at least it replenishes that high of good feelings and cures boredom, no?

At least it’s another quick escape from this malicious modern wilderness.

The emotional agony that is being dodged contain the ammunition that generates motivation for change. And by anesthetizing or stupefying ourselves, we are just delaying results. This was the loop that had vacuumed me into a depressed state of mind. Where was my climax moment that always came in happy-ending movies, I used to wonder? Had I not endured enough? Had I not slain the dragons and saved the princess? Maybe you’ve also internalized these false concepts and attributed your failure to some superstition.

Seek, analyze and decipher those feelings. They are your cues that bear your exclusive questions and your very own solutions. Don’t cheat yourself out of them. The oscillations in our mental temperament are there for individual reasons. And they only untwine one at a time, ricocheting from the previous conquest. The oscillations will never go away, i.e., there’s a universe of truth out there waiting to be uncovered and a lifetime won’t suffice. It’s these struggles; these explorations that must matter to you because they produce life altering effects which increase our capacity to give and add value to others.

This is the cycle that we must all indulge in- improve and contribute.

“Explore your web, the web in here -- the needs, the beliefs, the emotions that are controlling you. For two reasons: so there's more of you to give, and achieve too, we all want to do it. But I mean give, because that's what's going to fill you up. And secondly, so you can appreciate -- not just understand, that's intellectual, that's the mind -- but appreciate what's driving other people. That’s the only way our world’s going to change” Tony Robbins

On getting motivated to change. Part 1

2010-04-03T08:24:00.000-07:00

(This is part one of a three-part series because, well, it’s a long process. Image credit)

I was not proud of me. I sometimes hated myself more than anyone else. There are things I’ve said and done that make me so ashamed. I think you can name some of them too.

In my misery, I’ve made other people unhappy. Especially my family.

I think I always had a good attitude, but never proper guidance. Things would’ve been ideal if I had that.

We’re not always right and we can never make amends for all the pain that we are responsible for. That would be impossible. And that’s why there’s a God.

And until two years ago, I was so sorry I wasted all that time.

So how did I make it up to myself and others? What motivated me to move and evolve?

First, we’ll sift through history to expose three major political lies that most of us have internalized as natural truths. This will aid us in extracting the dysfunctional social mirror from our present thought-patterns and help alter our reality maps to, second, get closer to the objective truth as we investigate our external world.

What I also intend to delineate is that we’re not rational beings in terms of what we ideally want as opposed to what we do; the small wiring in our left hemisphere has very little control and is usually dominated by the emotional centers and the limbic system and unfortunately, a highly sophisticated and corrupt political system has been able to tap into it and rewire us for their causes.

A bold statement. So let’s examine the evidence...

Lie #1: Communism = bad, Capitalism = good

After WW2, the US and USSR emerged as the only two superpowers. Each had a distinct political system; the former Capitalism and the latter, Stalinism (referred to as Communism. I’ll resolve the difference).

They grappled with each other to dominate the world by trying to influence as many countries as they could with their school of thought. They set off on bloody campaigns and proxy wars (cold wars) to incorporate their political ideologies in neighboring countries to increase their circle of influence.

Those attempts have shaped the current average Earthling’s mentality, and if you live somewhere close or in between, you’ve most likely been affected too.

Roughly, Communism, or Marxism to be more accurate, is described as being the political and economic theories of two German men named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis for the theory and practice of Communism. Central to Marxist theory is an explanation of social change in terms of economic factors, according to which the means of production provide the economic base. In simple English, the community, specifically the proletariat (working class: people like you and me who have to work for a living and produce) influence and determine the political and ideological superstructure in the country as opposed to the few rich and sedentary. It’s like democratizing the workplace so that the workers or employees are involved in the decision making and profit-sharing too. Sounds like fair democracy right?

It was originated in reaction to the natural evolution of Capitalism, which I’ll detail in a few.

Stalin ruled as a dictator. He and his “comrades” made decisions so we call his dictatorship Stalinism rather than Communism. (Prior to Stalin, the Russians were controlled by the Czar and Lenin persuaded people to revolt based on Communist ideologies through the Bolsheviks’ party. Right after his death, however, and the usurping of power by Stalin, Russia turned into another autocracy under a communist banner).

Communism was viewed with disgrace because of people like Stalin, associating it with authoritarianism, fascism or even Nazism. Today, countries like China and North Korea project themselves as Communist countries although they’re run by authoritarian regimes and dictatorships.

To add insult to injury, the standard definition for Communism in modern-day textbooks has devolved into: countries with government controlled business activities, implying that a central authority allocate resources and stifle choices and variety. This caught on, in part, due to capitalist propaganda.

That is false. However, since it caught on and many think that way, we refer to the original communist ideology as Marxism.

Since the Russians felt betrayed at what they perceived to be a stark Communist regime, after it’s downfall in the early 90’s, Russia accepted Capitalism with arms wide open presuming it brought with it freedom and equality. Thus, the only superpower in the world wielding the greatest influence was solely the US and the dominating business activity worldwide was/is Capitalism. Keep in mind that even in those fake communist countries, it’s capitalism for the rich and a form of feudalism for the poor.

Marx and Engels predicted the revolutionary overthrow of Capitalism by the proletariat and the eventual attainment of a classless communist society. Unfortunately, several failed attempts have been made but thanks to CIA orchestrated coup d'états, pandemonium and chaos has predictably been the corollary to such attempts.

Why fight Capitalism? (You’re probably more like,”What does all this politics have to do with me?” I’ll come to it, bear with me please.)

Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state (i.e the community). The core business textbook definition is: a society in which private individuals have the freedom of handling business themselves. In fact, the other term used for a Capitalist economy is Free Market economy, and then there are explanations outlining why either/or economies cannot be self sufficient because they both lie on the extreme ends of the scale, i.e., Communism to the left and Capitalism to the right (it’s more complicated than that but this is valid and clear enough).

Of course throughout history, we’ve been ruled by elites who owned everything due to their “divine rights” and made their friends and family flourish. And until recently, some 200 years ago, those who were in favorable positions were able to hand down their fortune to the now politically and economically dominant. And the very few who permeate the rich class, i.e., the ruling class, are the ones who are paraded as naturals to Capitalism, when in reality, they’re a bona fide rarities that are idolized.

The main argument for Capitalism is the existence of a democratically elected government that will regulate the private sector’s activities to maintain social interests and public goods and thus, create a balance. This will be somewhat in the middle of the left-right scale.

However, even before the second world war, and the resurfacing of anti-semitic hostilities across Europe, Sigmund Freud became extremely pessimistic about human nature as he witnessed the outcomes of the first world war, and began advocating the idea that the public have to be controlled. His nephew, Edward Bernays, combined the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle with Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter’s crowd psychology and became one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the subconscious, but for the benefit of the Corporations that hired him. He was employed as a Public Relations person and in charge of selling their products by creating (sometimes dishonest) marketing campaigns, or what we know of today as commercials and advertisements.

This went to full throttle (and in the wrong direction) after the second world war and the emergence of the US as one of the two major superpowers.

This is where we converge with politics.

Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in his book Propaganda (1928),”The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized....In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

The American oligarchy, that hired Bernays, did to Capitalism what Stalin did to Communism; they attempted to overpower the government’s influence and hijack authority.

Rather than herding the masses towards democratic ideals, Corporations with the help of Bernays, gave us the illusion of freedom and democracy by suggesting that Capitalism and Democracy are synonymous and that their companies represented man’s venture for progress. And with the amount of profit they made, they began buying congress. (There, it rhymes as well.)

So basically, the leaders of both superpowers fused their people’s ideologies to maintain a self-serving fiasco. Symbolically, today, the Russian Mafia control the big businesses.

The US corporations are no exception. With delicate, complex and effective campaigns, they’ve propagated their own causes and converted them into lifestyles. ALL mainstream media belong to a few people who want to further their own agendas: Newscorp, Disney, Time Warner, Viacom etc. With the money they pocket, governments have been swayed (think the recent financial crisis and the corporate bailing. Who took care of the redundant workers?).

Thanks to Wikipedia, I also found out that, “Bernays' most extreme political propaganda activities were said to be conducted on behalf of the multinational corporation United Fruit Company (today's Chiquita Brands International) and the U.S. government to facilitate the successful overthrow (see Operation PBSUCCESS) of the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Bernays' propaganda (documented in the BBC documentary, The Century of the Self), branding Arbenz as communist, was published in major U.S. media. According to a book review by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of Larry Tye's biography, "The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays & The Birth of PR", "the term 'banana republic' actually originated in reference to United Fruit's domination of corrupt governments in Guatemala and other Central American countries. The company brutally exploited virtual slave labor in order to produce cheap bananas for the lucrative U.S. market." “

If you’ve been educated within the system, you probably have a dilute sense of anguish about Capitalism’s “democratic” propaganda. If you're a business student, for example, you might argue that people have choices and can make their own decisions and that globalization creates job opportunities and helps the economy of a country by employing it's factors of production.

The above statements are true, but when contextualized with the status quo, relinquish their validity. Capitalism, today, is just another autocracy under a democratic banner. (Yes, even Obama’s America)

In a very enlightening documentary, John Pilger talks about what people are starting to wake up to: "Welcome to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund Conference in Bangkok. The aim of the conference is, and I quote, 'To find ways of eradicating poverty all over the world'. Alas, there are contradictions. You see most of the delicates are bankers. Now this is not to suggest that bankers don't care about poor people, it's just that somethings are hard to explain. Such as why the officials of the World Bank spend, in their pursuit of solutions for the poor, an estimated $45 million a year flying first class and staying in five star hotels? And why at this conference, chefs have been flown in especially from Paris to a country where children still die from malnutrition? And why they need to be shadowed by more doctors than most people in South East Asia see in a life time?

Fortunately, the people who can best advice them on how to eradicate poverty are just across the road! However, the bankers can't see them because a wall was put up to hide the poor people during the conference. The people responded by painting the wall in bright colours in order to attract attention. No doubt worried that the delegates might spot the odd poor person, the government then had buses parked in front of the wall! Most of these people are street traders, but in the build-up to the conference, hundreds of vendors were almost literally swept from the streets of Bangkok.

So here they sit, with their empty carts, hidden from view, unable to earn a living, until a conference discussing poverty moves on."

Not that these countries are poor, not at all, figurative international organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the UN are created to “regulate” trade and indirectly shackle poor countries with obnoxious debt and then, cut them some slack with very “lucrative” offers that bestow corporate control over vast amounts of resources. Capitalist/Private/Corporate control whose sole objective is acquiring more money. It also means using and abusing euphemisms like “globalization” and “externalities” [See Naomi Klien’s: No logo] to divert our attention from the fact that it means starving, underaged workers being paid by the hundredth of a second in sweatshops throughout the developing countries. To corporations, it’s profit at all costs and the ultra rich are protected from just about any crime they commit in a Capitalist system.

They set the conditions with which to create poverty and invariably benefit off of them. Also part of those conditions are indoctrinating us with the materialistic mentality that is so prominent nowadays and some other part is installing dictators with Western inclinations, specifically, Western corporate inclinations through out the world.

All we hear is 9/11, because the arms industry in the US needed a booster so they, along with the US government (which I hope that by now, is clear that they’re PA’s for corporations) created an excuse to continue with their operations and generate revenue and invariably maintain the US hegemony.

These are a list of countries that have tried to democratically elect popular leaders and have been victims of US foreign policy and the CIA.

Prof Edward Said reminds us why the Middle-East has so much antagonism towards the US, "All 22 Arab countries are dictatorships who are in desperate need of US government patronage to support them. So we are not about to engage in a real dialogue and in that respect, the Arabs keep themselves collectively in a way that is subordinate and inferior to the West and in fact fulfills the kinds of representations that most Westerners have in their minds about the Arabs.”

By placing a bunch of puppets as heads of state who cripple their people into accepting "globalization" as a saviour and a God-send, the US corporations gain and the US government establishes itself as an authority in the region to further it’s hegemonic agenda. For example, the Gulf countries trade oil in US$, which means we only accept Dollars for oil and no other currency, and that creates a huge demand for the dollar paper money, and seeing as America can print it however they like, their currency monopolizes the financial status of international commerce (because most the countries in the world need oil, which is refined and used for all kinds of industrial purposes). The stooge Saddam Hussein considered selling Iraq’s oil for Euros. This links to a website that tracked the political escalations of the beginnings of the war against so-called ”terrorism” to remove the tyrant from power as soon as he made public his views on selling Iraqi oil for Euros.

In addition, the Gulf pretends to have wealth, when it’s really concentrated in the hands of a few, especially in Bahrain. And to Bush, we’re a “beacon” of democracy in the ME.

This is where the history lesson comes to end and reality emerges out of the ethers.

Scraping for sanity

2010-03-12T09:28:00.000-08:00

I overslept today.

The testes make around 100-300 million sperm cells a day. And when they’re not released, the body has the unsolicited tendency of ejecting them during REM.

Life becomes a bit more complicated then because one has to change the sheets, cover the ‘manifestations’ and shower at 3-4 in the morning.

I was so tuckered I didn’t even hear the alarm.

I overslept.

Later, as I dragged myself to the bathroom, my cell’s SMS notification beeped.

I brain-stormed all the possibilities of that message; Who? Why? What? When? It was made all the more gratifying by the discharge at the toilet.

I rushed to the mobile.

It was a missed-call notification message: Grandma.

Right, her sister’s spouse died last night at the hospital because of gastric cancer (stomach cancer) and we agreed that I would pick her up on the way to the funeral at 8am.

It was 07:24.

I switched off my phone.

Mom was sleeping on the couch in the living room.

It means today’s a Friday.

Dad’s a bit of an exhibitionist and we have a domestic helper.

Mom’s been suspecting foul play.

She’s been asking me help monitor the situation but I decline.

“I wish you were dead” she usually retorts at our every disagreement. “Really. I wish you were dead!”

Ouch!

Sometimes, I would be run over by a tractor or, if she was in the mood, wish she cut her womb open when I was in it.

It doesn’t have to be something serious, even if, say, I parked the car at a different spot from where she had asked, I’d be assassinated in a variety of ways.

I counter with her contextual perspective. I know she isn’t a typical suburban mom.

My mom’s father, my grandfather, was an abusive alcoholic.

A few years before I was born, he developed throat cancer. It metastasized so fast he couldn’t talk, walk or eat, just tied to a bed with the drip for a couple years till he succumbed to it.

Karma.

During this time, my grandma took care of him and the eight kids by working as a domestic servant. She was a Persian immigrant without any acquaintances and his family were evasive.

As a result of his neglect, one of his sons has furthered his father’s reputation by becoming a rapist and a pedophile with a criminal record.

The other, the youngest, was too young to be influenced by him when he was alive but he’s, nonetheless, a philanderer.

The six girls grew up with obvious security and emotional issues, but apart from that, they’re very normal.

My grandmother’s a derelict with one eye now.

The prostitute, whom he escorted into their home and force his family out the house where they would spend nights on-end sleeping at the doorsteps of a mosque, is a religious scholar now.

Karma?

She was asleep on the couch.

Like her mother, my mother makes major sacrifices to stay within the bounds of a dead marriage.

Speaking of, I had to attend to the funeral.

---------------

It was crowded.

Two other people were going to be entombed today.

Someone remarked he hoped other people shared his burial date to have a similar turnout.

Persian men remind me of the Italian Mafioso.

Race and appearance apart, they make uncanny facial expressions and gesticulations. Some of the older men there wore thick wire-framed glasses, like the big heads of ‘the family’.

They even have conversations reminiscent of Goodfellas. For instance, an elderly man was telling us stories about his childhood, growing up, in Manama ‘City’ and how he worked in a series of “odd” jobs just to afford a living.

He used to be called Ali “Tomato” now he’s Ali “Tillah” (Gold).

The orthopraxy of the burial was postponed for a couple of hours because his sister in Kuwait wanted to be present.

I left.

I went to my Grandma’s (dad’s mom).

So her knees were hurting, she called earlier to tell me she wasn’t attending the funeral.

She was cooking and turned the TV on to keep me company.

MBC were playing a segment about Prince Charles, the British monarch. They were portraying his turbulent life and marriage with Princess Diana.

It dawned on me that if he couldn’t keep that standard under control, what would’ve happened if it were people’s lives he was governing?

To my recollection, thousands died and the church of England was established because of some King who wanted to marry a woman forbidden by the Pope.

Human history is interspersed with wars and other man-made disasters that were ignited to serve the interests (and ego) of elites, who go to extreme measures to convince their people into accepting the repercussions.

Our King’s son died in a car accident too a couple of years back. He was just 15.

The sad part is the King never acknowledged the reasons in public: a spoiled, underaged, speeding in a suited-up Audi.

A fake leader has to look invincible. His son would’ve tarnished that public image.

It’s funny how the papers here run stories building a hype about the ‘elected’ parliament’s ineptitude and then inject the “Majesty’s” wisdom and generosity in solving the issues.

Of course the joke’s so intimidating we’re too afraid to laugh.

And any dummy parliament, through out the Middle-East, that grows the nerve to challenge the Monarchs gets dissolved.(Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain)because a politically active monarchy depends on drones to resume it’s reign, which explains the artificial cities all around the Middle-East and the stifled inherent advancement.

No amount of cronies or surveillance-cameras or tell-all moles can assist in that grand ambition.

One has to be in the middle of all the privation to fully apprehend society’s ever changing requirements and the sprouting austerity.

It’s a relentless process that demands a humble presence.

I don’t see how anyone living in a sequestered palace can have the good-will to do that.

The irony is, we have to tolerate an entire family and an extended family, with the impression that they’re holier than thou, and who, as a corollary, have BIG, FAT Swiss accounts.

Thanks to them and their nepotistic ways, Wasta (connections), works like magic and makes the impossible possible.

The sad part is a change of government is usually achieved through violent and bloody means because you can’t talk somebody out of so much power and privilege.

There’s really no point complaining about a monarchy to a monarchy.

Would you exchange a palace for a residential villa?

Would you exchange a throne for anything else in the world? The afterlife?

No?

She was beautiful, Princess Diana.

Reminded me of a coquette I fell in love with.

Would I have waged a war for her (had I not known she was a phony)?

-------------------------------

Fridays have khutbah and jama’a.

The khutbah usually contains a recycled sermon in which the Imam blames our lack of faith and religiosity for our debased lives. A speech almost written by government officials.

Today he spoke about optimism. “We need to generate more optimistic views on life.” he said, “We need to take the example of so and so...”

What about Sweden?

They’re majority atheists and one of the most advanced countries in the world, also, a refugee haven; thousands of Iraqis sought asylum and got them in Sweden.

Are they more humane than we are, even though we pray five times a day?

In fact, let me pose another question: What have we achieved by praying to God for the salvation of Palestine the last 60 years?

It’s salvation?

Ok. What have the Israelis achieved through their proactive smarts?

Do we really need to pray harder, or work harder or work smarter?

Saudi protests were clamped down during the Gaza massacre of 2009 because according to one bearded hypocrit,“It diverts our attention away from asking God for help.”

Remember when Sheikh Faisal starved the world of oil? What an inconvenience huh? The US almost immediately rolled over.

All we need is one phone call from their Secretary of State and over night get the 1960’s Israel/Palestine geography back.

Can’t we do that? Collectively?

No? Why?

Oh yes, that’s right, life in a palace can only generate the good-will for a fat bank account.

What if, my dear Imam, you tell the whole truth next time during your Friday sermon?

What? The consequences of speaking that truth is imprisonment, torture, rape and death?

See, that is why we have debased lives.

Glad I cleared that up.

I’m not an anti-Semite, I’m an anti-injustice and in my opinion, what’s happening in Israel is much less harsh and brutal than what’s happening in the Middle-Eastern prisons and political-detainee camps.

In fact, if we had the means, we’d indiscriminately attack Israelis too and take pride in our actions. How are we any different?

How?

Pathetic, our double standard.

Glad you agree.

No matter what its aspirations or ideals were, today, greed and the subsequent loss of democracy, racism and a heartless inhumanity are what define the Israel, and the US. And of course, us. In fact, we’re proud of it.

Wait, why did this get so political?

----------------------------------------------

The only reason we get out of bed is the unpredictability. I’ve managed to somehow change that for myself, and as much as I need it, it’s proven to be destructive for my mindless-self; my brain’s autopilot.

The most effective way to have a predictable circumstance is to be isolated. I’ve learned it calms the senses, at least mine, from all the noise and the flash. So much is out there that creates a visual stimuli so hard to match with whatever boring manual that needs to be read and studied that improves us as people.

In fact, almost any creation demands a set of restricted movements for a stretch of time.

One call can create a digression that requires a 15 minute restart time; another 15 minute stationary wait to calm the senses and reduce the emotional high.

I’m sorry if this is all very cryptic. My intention is to delineate the fact that almost everything I wrote, apart from this last bit is noise. It may seem like interesting material, but it’s useless. And we’ve become programmed to accept noise as an intellectual stimuli. We’ve internalized the idea that pop culture refines us.

I don’t need another human to validate things for me. I don’t need more noise.

------------------------------------------

I wrote a poem:

Eco-friendly parking lots,

For gray pastures and green minds.

More and more budding issues,

we should get more aligned,

with solar-powered industrial designs.

now’s the time to breakaway, and think about the dandelions.

With the pace with which we plough the fields,

Other life dying will cease to thrive.

In our lonely planet this should generate a flagging sign.

Stop the madness and the withering, lets bring back the good old times.

Good old times of life-style necessities.

Not one of fad-driven-cosmetic-high

And extradite those corporations,

whose sole purpose is to exploit,

every resource for your every penny,

And strip this world of it’s God given right.

It’s with now, and you and here.

So come bring back the good old times.

Sounds like a nursery rhyme. If I edit it some more, I can make it sound much better.

“The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly.” - Chuck Palahniuk

2009-12-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

You’d think you know yourself and because of that knowledge, you assume you’re in control.

Spend extended periods of time alone, trying to live your dreams and taking responsibility for them and you’ll realize how wrong your assumptions are.

You know you based on the situation and the circumstance. You know you when you’re home, at work, at school, with friends, at a restaurant. They tend to play out as we have perceived them to be from our social cues, be it television, music, culture etc. Once you come across a new, unfamiliar scenario, you can lose you because you’ve lost your point of reference.

I study on a daily basis, trying to compress years of info into half-a-dozen months.

Most the energy I muster gets dwindled into settling down. My mind spends more time in the past and future than in the present.

Eight hours a day, no more than four hours of quality study takes place. Half my time is lost in conflict; where I should’ve been and what I should’ve been saying, how things are supposed to be.

Usually, the nostalgic conciliation of the past gives me the illusion that I’m in control now and can be too in the future.

I enjoy it sometimes. Especially when the lie is humungous.

We all feel cheated, like we’ve been treated unfairly in some way by mother nature so we create a seclusive imagination to help us deal with this depressing present.

But I also know that I must accept mine first and correlate it with time.

The seconds ticking away determine what I become.

The world, for me, is ‘right now’ and a science textbook. A ‘this moment’, one day at a time, and my dream.

A vain day-dream is nothing more than a lucid drawing on the shore. A regular schedule is concrete.

Once you chose your path, appreciate the bitterness of it’s now as a sacrifice for the after. Because after all, the after will be a product of the culmination of nows’.

And there’s no other way- there are no shortcuts. Just an accumulation of unpleasant presents.

Aj’s my cousin, Ali (the guy in the pic)

During a phase of my adolescent years, I used to enjoy seeing things from his POV to the point, and where in my opinion, I was obsessed about making it my own.

He was a wonderful storyteller and had a colourful perspective on life, which is, discernibly, a reflection of his attitude and character.

He had a good childhood at home until pubescence and, as life is sometimes, things spiraled out of control.

It gave him the opportunity to realize, very early on, that life can be lived in only two ways: responsibly or be delegated; independently, detached from the scenario and rooted from the self or dependently, with a shield named ‘blame’ and guided by expectations and false hope. The latter was my pattern.

He was mature and responsible and his circumstance labored him to stretch his stride.

I resent the fact that I used to take his presence in my life for granted. To the extent that I enjoyed his company, I never before shared his pain, the reality which he resisted constantly everyday.

In retrospect, I remember that I hardly went out of my way for him. Partly because he was so damn good in pretending to be all-right that I would usually compete with his style and ways.

Most people who live through broken homes lose rectitude and I've seen it and listened to them and can't help but admire him afterwards.

He is raw energy and always fun to be around in spite of crying in his sleep or having to find shelter some place random in the middle of the night or live through most of his life with empty pockets. He has the power to lift us up; to stir our imagination.

To care.

He gave no matter how much it took from him.

And it's most unfortunate that people who meet him never know that they've met someone who has an excellent story to tell about life’s bitter nows’.

A concoction of many painful realities woven to compose one beautiful consciousness.

He was lucky in a sense because he had no choice. For those of us who live a comfortable life, I feel truly sorry for you.

You have no scars. You’ve made no progress.

Why Bodybuilding Helped Me Understand Success.

2009-12-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

I read once that writers have this advantage: they can literally reproduce their thoughts and disentangle many issues on paper and as a result, they have the potential of solving their problems way better than non-writing? people.

I’m not a writer per say but I do enjoy expressing myself because it encourages me to dig deep down and find new insights.

To me life is like bodybuilding, which is why you can find many references to it on the blog. (Bodybuilding or I guess any stressful athletic pursuit). The reason being that it has so many parallels to principled living that I find myself making a connection every time I introspect.

No pain, no gain; say no to Morphine!

No words can express the pain one must endure every second in a workout to make the average gains on a weekly basis.

No words.

I mean I can say it hurts like hell, and that would probably make for figure of speech but you wouldn't be able to fully comprehend how it HURTS LIKE M@#$@%#$%@#$@#$ HELL!

You probably have a stronger sense about it now. But what if I say I get past the point of nausea and feel like I’m about to pass out once a week? And when I wake in the morning, my body feels like I was trapped in a children’s b.day party as a piñata. Yes, it’s bad.

Trainers generally provide an abstract sense of the pain by explaining that every set should be taken to the point of concentric muscular failure: the point at which one is unable to complete an additional positive repetition of a given exercise despite one’s greatest efforts.

On the other hand, if I knew that it took what I endure today, I would’ve never considered it. That’s because I never had a grasp on the term ‘good pain’. But thanks to the exponential nature of human comprehension and tolerance, I’ve persevered.

“That which we persist in doing becomes easier- not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased” Emerson

Also, we never talk about the pain in the gym. You can see guys heaving and huffing and screaming and in pain. But when a conversation sparks, there’s a collective-consciousness conscientious of the pain as our signal to improvement.

See the body does not want excess muscle because it is a metabolically expensive inconvenience. It is considered an unnatural state and so we were meant to be lean and smaller framed. When a person stops training (and I am living example to this), their excess muscle tissue is broken down for use as energy because the body wants to get rid of it! Thereupon comes the need to FORCE muscle growth upon it; hypertrophy.

I have to walk into the gym every week and increase the strain in order to leave no choice for my body but to adapt and grow. In doing this, the muscle-mass increases to protect them from a possible future strain.

Since the body is always working to protect itself against potentially dangerous situations in nature, it will have no other option but to respond to threats. The body must make adjustments so that if the situation were to arise again in the future it would be properly equipped to deal with it.

Growth is all about adaptation to the environment so we must present ourselves with the incentive for change.

Are you starting to see the big picture?

If you constantly present yourself with tasks that do not threaten your current reserve resources, no new adaptations will be built and no new strength will be gained.

Some have a lifestyle in which they have it easy and things are smoothly controlled. They have no genuine struggles for progress, and don’t even begin to break a sweat. Or worse still, they bicker and seethe because things are not going their way and they expect things to be different either too quickly or passively, the result of which is the sum-total of their insecurities, which is very real. They do what they usually do (and have excelled at it) and that’s all there is to it.

Why on earth would their body build new skills in response to this? It already has plenty of resources to complete the usual task. There is absolutely no reason at all to build upon the existing resources.

If you want to see a positive change in your life, the work you perform MUST be intense enough that they threaten your current resources. They must place you under enough stress that it forces the build up over your existing capabilities as an adaptive response.

These guys are not just meat-heads, some of them are the smartest and soft-spoken people I know. In fact, I have yet to meet the stereotypical ‘roid-raged driven Neanderthal.

And if a bodybuilder decides one day that he/she wants to become a success in other aspects of life, they know what it would take. I would also add that they wouldn’t appreciate their progress unless they felt the pain of progress first-hand.

The improvement occurs in a progressive way of course and traumatizing oneself with unrealistic burden is dangerous.

I decided, not long back, to get into the science field. I am studying for my Advanced level certificate and sure enough, I study daily and don’t feel satisfied until I can’t digest any longer.

Until I feel the ‘good pain’.

Remember, if you continually present your body with the same stimulus, it will have no reason to grow.

C'est la vie, so up the intensity.

The bigger Jihad; bodybuilding happens in the kitchen.

“The most excellent Jihad is that for the conquest of self.”- Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)

The Battle of the Trench was one of Islam’s most endangering battles. It was a war of attrition (thanks to the trench) in which each side was waiting for the other to wear out.

The Muslims were outnumbered almost 10:1 and their very existence was at risk. After about a month or so, the hostile Qurayshi army quit.

When the news of the victory spread, an excited Muslim warrior frenzied towards the Prophet (PBUH) announcing their triumph. The Prophet (PBUH), unfazed, responded, “We are now heading from the smaller jihad towards the bigger jihad [pointing at their tents].”

Evidently, he was implying that it is easier to struggle with the troubles that are tangible and ‘out there’ rather than the ones that are intangible and within the self.

Why? IMHO, because the visual cortex is not involved. You can’t see the benefit of delayed gratification and self-control, so it isn’t flashing the limbic system as much as it should. (This ‘mis-wiring’, if I may, is also why we have the tendency to judge things based on their aesthetics. It does have it’s evolutionary advantages though!).

Truly, I wonder, were it not for the balance of religion (or religious myth), that deterred us from our innate hedonistic selves as we intellectually evolved through time, would we’ve been able to develop a civilization? (Some people, in the guise of religion, have attempted to set in motion their own personal or political agendas that were destructive and if one were to remain objective, that would not be an appropriate argument against my implicit question.)

The Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon cranial capacities, for example, were larger than Homo sapiens, indicating that their latent potential intelligence may have been equal to or even greater than ours. So how is it that these surprisingly latent abilities emerged in the pre-historic brain but have only been realized in the last five thousand years?

The answer is because we developed the idea of principles and the need to incorporate them into our lives.

Only 20% of the labored-work in bodybuilding is exerted at the gym. There’s the 60% that dominates consuming an appropriate diet and the 20% of rest and recovery that compete for the bodybuilder’s attention on a daily basis and complete the struggle for a healthier, fitter body.

This is to say that bodybuilding is more than just the hour of training. It spreads into your entire day’s schedule.

It is a principled lifestyle.

It’s a lifestyle I wasn’t prepared for back in 2004. I had not gotten over the 3 meal/day mentality. And I may have increased my strength, but I have, by no means, increased muscle mass till today.

The 3 meal/day mentality must be replaced and forgotten with the 5-6 meal/day that is evened out during the course of a day, two or three hours apart. And by ‘appropriate diet’ I mean consuming 1-2 times of protein the body-weight in pounds. And that’s just proteins! There’s the right proportion for carbs, essential fatty-acid oil, creatine monohydrate and many other additional nutritional requirements.

The body is in constant state of building and repair so it continually needs to have the resources to do so.

If you spend say 20BD on a monthly gym membership, you may end up spending up to 70BD for nutritional supplements. Just supplements and not meals, those are different. Check out the disparity!

If the body is in short supply of ingredients to do both build new tissue fibers and provide the energy for exertion, it will always use up the available resources to provide energy. The pituitary gland secretes the hormone Cortisol to inform the body that it needs to trim off the muscle to convert to energy in response to the scarcity. It’s called being in a catabolic state.

So you’re either building and repairing or tearing and catching up. Unless you actually follow a maintenance schedule that has it’s own set of exercises and diet, you won’t be able to maintain the muscle mass that you’ve worked so hard to build.

There’s moving forward or going backwards. You can’t have a neutral condition if you’re careless.

Of course you can no longer accommodate late nights if you have to wake-up early for work or school. Sleep is the most essential time for building and recovery. You need to get enough hours daily. And apparently, so is the requirement if you want to be creative!

You can also no longer accommodate delinquencies such as smoking or drinking or pornography etc. Your body will automatically offer you symptom-like ultimatums.

My point is bodybuilding permeates many areas of one’s life and holds us accountable on our next visit to the gym. A lack of sleep, nutrition and every carelessness is paid in double the compromise levels with pain.

Win or lose pain; competition podium or hospital bed pain.

I remember as a noob, countless times where I lay on the bench, exhausted and transpired to almost a corpse, reassessing whether I place more value on my health and physique or my bad habits, and whether I should continue having the same values as my peers.

That led to my transformation (apart from other similar jolting experiences).

“One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.” -- James Russell Lowell

I realized that I could not lie to my body- I cannot live life the way that I want, or the way that I’m conditioned by my habits, and expect things to yield my way.

There are natural laws (hypertrophy and metabolism) that my body’s biochemistry is governed by and the only way forward is to apply them rather than ignore or trivialize them.

I would’ve never guessed I wanted to do something in science. My passion was music. I had no religion, no information and certainly no talent. I was lucky to have some friends who instigated my doubts and questioned the sincerity of my beliefs. They reminded me that living a preconditioned life was as useless as draining my body and ignoring it’s other, more important needs, and then expecting progress.

One who has an unexamined belief system can never improve or generate the motivation or aspiration to change. So if you’re lazing and have no worries (I should say reasonable fears) about your life, then you’re dead, right?

I also understood that you cannot erase bad habits. You can only replace them with better ones because “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop”. We are only limited by what we know so our ultimate quest is to further expand that circle of knowledge. And just as many times as one fall’s back on their bad habits during stressful periods, one needs to proactively double the intensity towards something good. Catch up with something better.

“Verily, a man hath performed prayers, fasts, charity, pilgrimage and all other good works; but he will not be rewarded except by the proportion of his understanding.” Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)

The real reason why bodybuilders convey power; the will of steel.

If I were to ask you what it is that you strive for? I think, if you’re the average individual, your response would be that you wanted freedom. Financial freedom coming from the root of doing and being what you want.

People get caught up doing something monotonous and have a hard day, and then they come back to relieve the tension by spending the rest of the time in front of the TV or a cafe or the internet and justify it with their lack of freedom and time.

“It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, 'What are we busy about?'” -- Henry David Thoreau

I myself started out with finding tones of excuses to avoid going to the gym along those lines. I would end up not going for days on end. I thought I had a perfectly good reason not to.

After a while, when I pushed it too far, and my guilt-ridden conscience forced me to face my weakness, I conceded. However, I also observed something I’d never noticed before, most of them were ordinary people and they were there not because they wanted to be there either.

They knew they had to make a choice between being a victim of their daily routines and settling for an inferior mindset or take the opportunity of making a conscious decision that would overcome. Overcome the TV, the cafe and their shackles. They had to chose between adhering to the pressing frontiers of their lives or accept the responsibility to breach it. That automatically creates a stronger sense of control in us as humans.

Some of us are imprisoned in the wrong job, the wrong relationships and ultimately the wrong life and we would like to escape that captivity, but we don’t know how!?

Not only that, but the faint awareness is dressed in the steel-overcoat of excess and self pity. Otherwise, our addictions.

Freewill means that you can do what you want, when you want and how you want. And that is what gives you freedom. It’s scary because there is responsibility attached too.

"You can no longer blame your parents if things go wrong, or your job or your society (because the government conspired against you), and trap yourself in an unfulfilling universe.

It means you have to let go of the blame crutch and walk unaided, and compromise everything you are. You stop waiting for the nod, and instead give yourself permission. You stop waiting to be discovered and discover yourself." -Geoff Thompson

It’s all down to you.

Is your pulse racing? Are you getting scared?

You’ve been telling yourself stories about what you would do if you won a million dinars, where you would go and how you would live. You thought that that would make you a free person :)

To acquire freedom you must empower your freewill. And to empower the freewill, you must let go of all that certainty that you’ve grown up with. Of course, you get compensated with a different type of assurance. For example, time comes from being scheduled and having a schedule comes from our freewill; which also gives birth to freedom. And just as many times as things go wrong, that many times things will go right. The problems we might face, might offer the very solutions we need to the other problems we may have in our lives as well.

“When you try something new, when you're faced with a challenge, realize that you cannot lose. It's impossible because even if you don't set out to accomplish what you tried to do, you learn something you never learned before because you never had that experience. You gain knowledge. And as the saying goes, we all know that KNOWLEDGE is POWER. POTENTIAL power. That you should convert into kinetic power (aka action) once again to learn some more.” Brian Kim

“Big shots are little shots who kept shooting.” -- Christopher Morley

People over-eat and over-stupor because there is reliability in them. No rejections. The rejection is felt by our true, innocent, unprotected self, that requires unconditional love. But it is at this crucial time that you must listen and feel that pain in order to invoke the powerful, avenging hero inside us all.

Like I earlier explained, it is good that we have a challenge because we are not much interested and don't much care what happens when there is nothing to overcome, nothing to be discovered, no ingenuity and problem solving.

You'll spend years on something and you've been let down. So you sit and ask and the solutions stare at you right in face. But implementing them is too hard.

We can only take action that flows from who we are and where we are. If we are not sure about either, we can ask what our avenging hero would do and use our imagination.

We learn to respond to events from a deep sense of our own truth.

All that may seem reliable, even dependable, is ultimately, a prison sentence for the weak willed, and the ignorant, because the reliability of addictions comes at the cost of our freedom. That’s why, although I don’t know each individual that works out, every time I walk in that hot and humid place, I am filled with humility and respect.

I understand that every one of them has their battles to fight. These are our courageous warriors; the cornerstones of society. They’re honing, practicing, surveying, improving.

Without them, or their example, what can we hold on to?

And then I am reminded of a very simple truth- darkness is simply the absence of light.

How to Study Effectively.

2009-11-19T04:18:00.001-08:00

Since I’ve been studying non-stop for the past eight months, four to six hours daily, I guess dispensing this advice is sort of an obligation.

I’ve categorized them into 6 basic ideas that are subdivided under Preparation and Execution:

Preparation:

Number one: Get a Goal. No end direction; no motivation to endure the pain of studying. You have to understand how what you’re doing will contribute to your overall progress. No vague connections because when times a-tough, I remember the only thread that kept me going was this.

Number two: Sleep. If you haven’t had enough sleep, then you’ll get nothing. Just like a computer that has been overworked, it will not function as speedily and effectively unless it has been shutdown for a while. Of course, there is a certain number of hours that you’ll need to get. If you go over, or less, than 7-8hours, you’ll still stagnate. There are reasons why oversleeping numbs your brain.

But the general idea behind sleep is that the brain masters information by creating comparisons with relative and familiar existing knowledge present within your reality map. This requires alot of mental energy (the brain respires glucose/sugar, so make sure to have a healthy supply) and without sufficient amounts of rest, it’s capacity diminishes to store info in the hippo-campus.

If I sleep late for some reason, I wake up at my usual time but make sure that I cut down the number of hours and intensity. And entertain myself the rest of the day to re-schedule my sleep hours. Consistency being the key.

PS: The brain respires over 70% of the oxygen in the body!

Number three: Environment. Or as I’d like to call it- the 3 W’s;

Where, When and With Whom. It has to be at your body’s most productive time and with minimal distraction. Of course ideally, to study alone, but just incase you think you can study with a group or just one person, you have to be honest about the progress. Oh and make sure that your seated posture is comfortable enough to keep you concentrated. Don’t lay down, that's a lie :).

Number four: Plan. So far, there is no study involved just simple tasks to help you prepare. And this is the final compulsory arrangement. A day before you study, make sure you’ve broken the task down for the entire day. I usually do four A4 pages of completely new information a day (that, I’ve discovered, is my limit). Or twenty pages worth of familiar information. So I plan my day down to the hour everyday, ahead of the next day. Your mind’ll be a menace to you if you don’t follow the rules so make sure you set something realistic and implement it so that you finish what you’ve started during the day. Carried forward work that was meant to be dealt with will not amuse. In fact, you'll get in denial about it.

Execution:

Number five: Feel It. Our brain responds in three general ways to incoming information; it first scans to find anything similar or relevant to conform it’s views; otherwise; it creates some extension to the fundamental premise it already has; and finally, if none of the above, then it outright rejects it.

I always wondered why it was so difficult to learn something quickly even though it made perfect sense. When I overcome and champion it, I am refreshed- like a crack-addict, I’m constantly on that expedition.

So I reason here maybe because absolutely new information, like the Latin or Greek syllables that are used as scientific terms, requires neural memory cells which are metabolically expensive to build and maintain, like muscle-cells. And another reason might be that information is not pocketed like files in PC folders, rather, in a human brain, they’re integrated within a large framework of inter-related webs. Information is intertwined to help format a consistent viewpoint; a reliable reality.

We shut down during study because our brain decides not to allow information in as it views it as being relatively new and unfamiliar. This relative novelty of the information is not readily handled by our brains. Infact, our brain’s first instinct is to feel intimidated. Why? First, imagine you accept every new information that you come across, how consistent will your reality be? Another way of putting it is if two people tried to explain a story in two different opposing ways, wouldn’t the contradiction be hard to sustain rationally if you were to have the ability to promptly believe them both?

You can argue that we’d judge based on our experiences and existing knowledge and then decide which to believe. This means you’ll dwell on it until you feel comfortable with it. Keyword-feel.

Another issue is the amydgala; the emotional center. Everything that our brain processes has to be scanned through the amygdala first because it is part of the primary cerebral organs and we later evolved the neo-cortexes (gray folds that are attributed for much of our analytical intelligence); this means we have to be emotionally (not logically) comfortable with the information! So you see, how you feel decides whether you’ll be open, cogent and balanced- NOT THE OTHER WAY ROUND!

And we’re usually relaxed around acquainted people, things and ideas. Original and firsthand is generally seen as a threat. So if I shove the endocrine system infront of you and ask you to read and understand it, you’ll subconsciously be like “No, I won’t” and shut down.

We do many things which does not make sense because we react to how we feel at that given moment. And that initial feeling or impulse is aroused by an organ that is too complicated to map. Especially since it lies at the center of our cranial base, somehow interconnected to different regions with no acute telling of it’s influential scope.

Now, in order to accustom ourselves, and more specifically, our amygdala –to the new information, I suggest we quickly sift through whatever it is to get a “feel” of it and then try to identify some familiar notion that is (and this is in most cases) the central theme; the terms and concepts that help define, structure and edify it. Thus, hastening the process of learning and greasing the information path in our brains by becoming more familiar and comfortable with the setting. Especially since the “seeking system” (lateral hypothalamus) ignites like fireworks and is claimed to be responsible for us waking up every morning- on the prospect of going on an information seeking adventure. More on this in a beautiful article here.

Btw, this makes introspection an even more important tool in education.

When the second scenario of scanning for familiar memory cells when cross-referencing incoming information is run, the brain need not build a new neural cell or synapse, it simply needs to build the neural pathways or axioms that make the connection. This requires less effort and therefore is the second prioritized task.

Finally, if it’s perfectly new information, there’s a problem- no memory and nothing to cross-reference with, so the initial impulse is denial because to integrate this new piece of information will require remodeling of the entire existent neural complex.

Our RAM’s are called Hippocampus; a temporary and extremely malleable storage of all that filters through our senses. Here, anything and everything gets skimmed and makes a fleeting impression of what we experience during the day. For the sensory information that is emotionally charged or often repeated, they leave a deep imprint and are then mirrored within the neo-cortex and that’s when the information is stored in the hard-drive.

There are many conjectures for methods to help facilitate learning, some of which I have adopted are; familiarizing myself to the background of that which I am studying by briskly scouting the educational terrain and identifying the basic familiar terms and concepts which are the building blocks or the focal points. This will make exposure to the new terms around them easier to learn because it won’t drastically alter the consumed understanding of the premise and subsequently threaten my reality map.

Number six: Create 'Visua. After memorizing them, since what follows are extensions of this focal point, I create visual representations, or for concepts that are yet to be seen I use my imagination, which would then be pasted all around my room.

Thus, the brain’s task is reduced to simply synthesizing neural highways around those basic points which is reinforced by the diagrams as I view them on a daily basis.

Number seven: Finally, Plan/Revise Progress. Simultaneously, I re-summarise the topic to wane-out the ideas and terms that have cemented themselves in my memory which funnels into a few revision post-its before the exam day.

This exercise keeps me engaged- as I break the task into writable or drawable points; and motivated to be consistent- the build-up of the visual representation indicates the advancement I am making and is a tremendous lifter during low times.

Best of luck!

This human

2009-11-01T10:22:00.000-08:00

"I guess I'm going to wrap up here and I just want to say that, for wrestlers and everybody and everyone around the world. If I could give one message to them, it would be that the best chance you have if you want to rise up to the top is to give yourself up to loneliness. Fear nothing and work hard. One thing you'll discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned, and much more than you think on what you have inside from the beginning." Bret Hart: 2006 Hall of Fame Speech

I'll write about what this means to me.

There is universal truth and it’s always hard to find. You just need to seek it. And make it a need to seek it. It’ll come when you’re ready because being bored with conventional responses and wanting to hear something shiny and glimmering does not qualify you for the truth. Yes you must qualify first. It gets confusing sometimes because common sense is not the truth. No one can give it to you because we all approach it from a different angle. Or sometimes, simply, you don’t appreciate it when it waltzes in on you.

You understand the difference between right and wrong, but how you respond to any given situation will depend on a number of factors apart from your conscious decision making and only through practice can you react ideally and not allow the other elements to affect your action/reaction to the situation.

The outer-you is very flexible and usually operates in comparison with the reverberations of the moment, often and regrettably, with the motivation to be a charm. This creates a rift between the two yous’ and as a result, our aims to achieve our wants or secure our values diverge with that egotistic part of us.

Ego is an influential part of the outer/attached-you as well. It’s a charm-counter and when turned on, scales the degree of your appeal. It’s a threat for those whose want for answers succeed the desire to be charismatic.

Another unconscious-developed mechanism that can be a threat to the self is the reticular activating system. Have you read the Secret? It tells on how our brain functions as universal towers that broadcast and receive information and can attract or repel any thing the mind’s eye can imagine. Like I explained in the previous post, people generally tend to focus more on what they don’t want in order to achieve what they do want and this causes those exact things that they’re constantly trying to avoid to be attracted to them in circumstance. IMHO, there is some truth to this philosophy because everything around us is a charge. Our brain’s work with electric impulses that channel through the nervous system and we’ve been able to measure that charge. A resting human’s nerve potential difference (voltage) is -65mV and an action potential, triggered by a thought or an action can have a maximum potential difference of +40mV. So whether you’re burning or simply pricked with a needle, your body will trigger the same amount of potential difference across the axons (cytoplasmic process of a nerve cell that transmits information or impulse). The difference will be in the frequency and hence, your brain will interpret this as high or low, pain.

Now, imagine yourself wanting something really bad. You think about it and even see it in your visual cortex (which processes visual information from the eyes as well). This triggers a set of emotions, be it happy or sad emotions that fuels the reticular activating system. This is a combination of organs; eyes, brain and a few other senses. When it gets activated by, for example, using the imagination, we create new reality maps that help us realize the circumstances and opportunities that help bring that picture into reality. In essence, the inner/unattached-you, with all it’s might and glory, will understand this new desire and quietly act on establishing it by filtering reality and attracting to it’s eye what we’ve been able to feed it via the imagination, whether we like it or not. Afterall, almost 80% of everyway your body function is involuntary. Did I mention the Einstein got his E=MC2 revelation in a dream? He rarely experimented in his life.

Case in point- almost half the time, you don’t see things the way they really are because of all the noise that requires filtering from the environment, there’s also the conscious shit you’ve been trained to love by society/media that requires sifting. The part of your brain with the real power is being strung-out. You can’t see the Truth.

Even without all the noise, you’re still almost one dimension away from your true motivations amidst the inner/unattached part of you. But only by deciphering it through the outer/connected-you can you reach the point where you learn to improve and grow yourself.

“…the best chance you have if you want to rise up to the top is to give yourself up to loneliness.”

We create boundaries to live with the fact that there are things we do not know, but, "A mind that has been stretched will never return to its original dimension." - Albert Einstein.

Like the S-shaped graph of a dissociation curve, every single step that stretches your being will double your chances and that many times bring you closer to what you want. But first, it must stretch your 'being'.

“One thing you'll discover is that life is based less than you think on what you've learned, and much more than you think on what you have inside from the beginning."