everything that is
was made from nothing
© 2021 Markus Heikkilä
2nd Edition
First Published 2017
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand GmbH, Helsinki, Finland
Printed and bound: BoD - Books on Demand GmbH, Norderstedt, Germany
ISBN: 978-9-5156-8656-5
SPOON BOY: DO NOT TRY AND BEND THE SPOON. THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE. INSTEAD ONLY TRY TO REALIZE THE TRUTH.
NEO: WHAT TRUTH?
SPOON BOY: THERE IS NO SPOON.
NEO: THERE IS NO SPOON?
SPOON BOY: THEN YOU’LL SEE THAT IT IS NOT THE SPOON THAT BENDS, IT IS ONLY YOURSELF.
DISCUSSION OF SPOON BOY AND NEO
THE MATRIX (1999)
PART I
YOUR REALITY
Everything you think you know about the world comes through your senses. What you don’t usually realize is that your senses are very limited. For example we can see only approximately 0.0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum. You also sense and memorize only your surroundings. With the extremely limited information you get through your senses - including any communicated information - your mind creates representation of the world. It is kind of ever evolving holograph. It is a virtual reality. In ancient cultures of America it was called the Dream, since they didn’t have virtual reality goggles at hand. This reality of yours is indeed just like a dream. All characters in your reality are creations of your mind. You can never enter anybody’s mind other than your own. All information you have about any other person is just a living hologram your mind has created to represent somebody.
The character you are playing is just like any other character - the only difference is that you can move it around like the character you control in a video game. All the characters live in your mind whether or not they are present and they also include all fictional characters and anything you believe to exist as well as dead people. Usually this ever going play goes on without you noticing it. When you do not notice the play, these characters of your mind control everything you do.
You are not any of the characters, not even your own. Besides controlling your character, you can only observe. You are the observer. The process of finding yourself again is actually process of unlearning everything. That does not mean that you will lose your memories. It is only a process of realizing that you are not your memories and not anything you project into the future. As said your reality is just a projection of the real world. Your reality is usually distorted by obsolete information and feelings. Your reality is usually so distorted that it has absolutely nothing to do with your real surroundings. In most occasions your reality is next to white noise.
The intention of this book is to help you to restore your natural aware but relaxed state of being. Gradually you will learn to see what is behind the white noise. It is like transforming the black and white cathode ray tube television with fuzzy picture and crackling sound you inherited from your grandparents into the latest model of full HD smart television with brilliant colors and surround sound system. When you are not aware of your surroundings and yourself you also drive mostly on auto-pilot and the time seems to fly. It’s like fast forwarding the movie most of the time. When you unlearn your old habits, you get huge amounts of extra time. It is in fact an extra life. But don’t expect too much. The programs on the television will still be the same. They change only gradually within time. Only your way to watch the world changes. But it will be a huge difference.
ASSIGNMENT 1.0
Memory is funny thing. We usually think that we remember things exactly as they happened. Do you think that is the case?
NOTE: You can write the answers down or just ponder the questions in your mind. Whatever suits you. This applies to every assignment in the book. The assignments are for your own benefit. There won’t be an exam - except the life itself.
SADNESS: OH, WE FELL DOWN.
WE SHOULD CRY.
FEAR: EEAARGH! WE CAN’T CRY IN THE FRONT OF OTHER KIDS!
ANGER: STOP HER!
JOY: STOP IT, SADNESS!
SADNESS: I CAN’T HELP IT, JOY.
OH, WE’RE IN A SADNESS SPIRAL!
DISCUSSION OF EMOTIONS
INSIDE OUT (2015)
SOCIAL SENSORY INPUT
You experience the world through your many senses. You can feel pressure, warmth and pain. You can hear the movement of air when the frequency of the sound wave is from 20Hz to 20,000Hz. You can taste seemingly endless combinations of flavors with your tongue. You sense balance and movement with an organ in you inner ear. You can smell even the tiniest amount of particles with your nose. With eyes you can see electromagnetic waves. Or is that really the case?
In fact all your senses work in a same way. You have so called receptors all around your body, and certain kind of stimuli activates them. Then the activated receptors send a message through your body. The location where the raw data goes to depends on the significance evaluation that your body does. Usually the information is passed for automated procedures. For example if your heat sensors message that body heat is rising too high, the data is sent to your automatic nervous system that activates sweat glands and you start to sweat. Only if that is not enough to balance the body heat, the message comes to your mind. It can then find a way to solve the problem. Usually the part of the mind that solves this kind of a problem is not the conscious part of your mind. Most of the issues that come to mind are processed and solved in automated - or robotized - section of the mind. Automatic response to overheating would be to take of clothes. But then things get more complicated.
At this point you enter social area. Your programmed mind has to evaluate which clothes can you take of within the current social situation. If you are alone at home, you may take of all your clothes but if you are at the gym, you can probably take of only your sweater if you are wearing one. At this point your conscious part of the mind is alerted. You have to come up with some other solution like drinking something cold or stopping exercising for a while.
This is still easy. But when you are dealing with emotions things get extremely complicated. Especially when you don’t understand where your emotions originate and not even what they really are. Emotions are like any other sensory information. The social sensory input system is just more complicated than the basic senses. It is actually not a separate system at all but an upper system that combines information received by all other senses. When these combos come to your mind, they can be identified as certain emotions.
So far this probably seems clear, but now its time to get the message distorted. The social sensory input that comes to your mind passes through the section of mind that is called subconscious. Everything that you have ever experienced is stored here. Its like an enormous hard drive. But the stored information is not stable. Everything is constantly been reorganized and rewired. Every new experience changes at least a bit all previously acquired information. The experience has not to be a “real” one. It can be a dream or a thought.
After passing through your subconscious, what reaches your mind is not at all the pure signal that your sensory system sent. To exaggerate a bit it is a message similar to the message you receive in broken telephone game after the message has been passed through 10,000 participants. Instead of being able to watch the reality channel, you see distorted picture in your TV set with overlapping reruns of programs of your past and endless trailers of imagined future.
ASSIGNMENT 2.0
Do you remember when you last time studied your own body and its different sensations? You did that probably in the early childhood and again in puberty when your body went through huge changes. Now it is time to get to know your body all over again.