Fasting and the Focused Mind - Part 2 - The How

Continued from Part 1

My plan was to fast for a week, Sunday to Sunday. Living only on lots and lots of room temperature to luke warm water and Green Tea in hot water. Based on my reading on such fasting, I decided to use this as a detox opportunity and give myself an enema every day as well. Gross. Yes. I know. It was recommended to be medically good as part of a detox plan as well as part of our Ayurvedic and Yogic tradition as well. It was simple and Healthy. So that was the plan. :-)

Break out of fasting slowly, with just a small amount of juice in a lot of water, and slowly increasing the juice strength. Then on to bread and milk.

As preparation for the fast I turned vegetarian for a month before I began the actual fast.

I took notes. Observing how I felt each day both physically as well as mentally. I'll spare you all the long details and summarize the week and more for you below.

To summarize, 

Day 1(Sunday) was pretty uneventful. 

Late Evening 1(Sunday) was pretty hungry.

Day 2(Monday) was hungry as hell. Being a work day helped keep my mind busy and out of the hunger. 

Evening 2 the hunger was really bad. I almost gave up on the fast. But barely held on by a thread.

Day 3(Tuesday), I felt the hunger but the peak had passed already. 

By Evening 3(Tuesday), there was just a lingering thought of hunger, nothing more. 

Day 3(Wednesday) certainly felt a bit more tired, physically. But my mind felt a bit spiffy.  

Day 4(Thursday) my mind felt sharp and focused. Never for once thought of food or was hungry. I kept physical activities to a minimum these days. Walking to a minimum. Had to drive into work and back which wasn't a problem. Spent an hour a day meditating.

Day 5(Friday) was brilliant.  Absolutely brilliant. I didn't feel any physical tiredness but kept my activities to a minimum too. But it was my mind that felt like a million dollars. Ultra focused. At work you notice it because you are more attentive in meetings and feel more productive in general. But the biggest difference was when meditating.  Normally, my mind is erratic and wanders a lot. I find it difficult to focus on an object for more than half a minute. It was different on Day 5. I felt my mind was calmer. I could easily stretch my focus for a few minutes which is record for me even today.

Day 6(Saturday) was the same as Day 5. Brilliant. Slept very few hours this whole week.  Yet felt awesome through the day. Everything felt brighter and more focused, like someone had turned on a 500W bulb around me. I just felt much more aware of surroundings and what was happening around me.

Day 7(Sunday) morning, it was time to break my fast, but do it slowly.  I started Sunday morning with a glass of water with a few tablespoons of Orange juice. Lunch was the same.  Dinner the same, but with a few more spoons of juice.

Day 8(Monday) was my day to start solids. Breakfast was a slice of bread and a quarter glass of milk. Lunch was the same with half a banana to add. Dinner was the same. 

Day 9(Tuesday) was a regular breakfast, a bowl of cereal, with milk. Lunch was a light salad at work. Dinner was back to normal food, but vegetarian. 

I continued to be a vegetarian for a few more months after that. And continued to meditate during this period.

Fasting and the Focused Mind - Part 1 - The Why

Fasting without food.  Why? Why Not? How? How Long? Does it work?

I grew up reading Amar Chithra Katha comics. Some would question, the growing up part, but then thats for another blog post :-)

For the unfamiliar, these are Indian comics that cover Indian mythology, history, religion, children's tales and much more. And if you know Hindu mythology, there is a lot of stories that involve penance and fasting and meditation going on. Anytime some character in these stories  wants to win, beat, get power, develop some skill or wishes for incredible wealth or happiness, he or she goes off into the mountains and fasts or does penance.  We are talking of hard penance and long fasting. Months and years as the stories go. They made it sound fantastic, the deity always showed up in the end,  and he or she always got her boon. Yup. Don't you love happy endings.

I've always wondered why. Whats the deal with penance, and fasting and meditation. I believe mythological stories are always fantastic exaggerations of some basic facts or lessons. Hinduism has always revered knowledge as power and meditation and self realization and enlightenment as the ultimate knowledge and all paths to it as being sacred. I am guessing these stories aim to interest the young readers in that ultimate goal. To encourage and motivate them to meditate. To develop ones mental faculty, to develop focus,  to develop an understand of ones self, attain Self-Realization.

So I hypothesized that fasting had something to do with developing exactly that. Or to put it simply, fasting, may be it helped the brain function or focus better in some way.  So I decided I wanted to experience it for myself. But anyone with an understanding of basic biology will know that prolonged starvation is deleterious to your health. So I decided to research the topic on the internet and spoke to a few Doctor friends of mine.

Armed with all that information, I decided to try a one week fast.  No Food. Just water, and lots of it.

Disclaimer: This was my experiment and plan for my fasting. I am an average healthy person.  If you choose to reproduce this experiment, do so at your own risk. Do your own research and consider your health status and consult your own doctors too.

Continued in Part 2

Astrology - A Hypothesis

Astrology is the science that studies the effect of the stars and planets on human behavior, relationships and the events that surround them. And through this study, based on the position of the stars and planets at the time and place of their birth, then attempts to predict as a probability, the future of the person as well as their relationships .

Is that really science? Is there really a correlation between the position of the stars and planets at the time and place of a persons birth and his future behavior or life events or his relationships? Is there any empirical proof?

Empirical Proof, No.

I have a hypothesis on the idea though, that I would like to propose here.

Its definitely a puzzle to which there is no concrete answer or empirical proof. Yet there are many schools of thought that believe it and many more theoretical and mathematical systems that attempt to predict the future of a person using that science.

There is at least one significant commonality between all these systems. All these various astrological systems, are at least partially rooted in the science of astronomy. They all attempt to accurately and very scientifically calculate and understand the position of the stars and planets at the time and place of a persons birth. But it gets less scientific from there on. The correlation between this accurately calculated star chart of a person's birth and the prediction of their future or their behavioral characteristics is less scientific or empirical at the moment.

There is no scientific or even statistical proof. But there is a lot of more than just anecdotal evidence that has a substantially large group of people believing in the idea of astrology.

But even before we attempt to try to collect evidence and prove or disprove correlation between the two through statistical significance, it would be interesting to consider a few questions.

1. Could it even be theoretically possible? 
2. Could the star chart at birth have a correlation to the life of a person? 
3. Then what about free will and does it not really exist?

Lets consider the first question. Could it even be theoretically possible?

To answer this question, it would be interesting to consider another related question, i.e. the behavioral characteristic of the Universe.  Is this Universe completely chaotic or is there some level of symmetry or order to it? I see both symmetry and chaos in the universe. The universe is a dynamic system that works based on some natural laws such as gravity. In fact I see a dynamic system in play between chaos and symmetry.  A sort of the Chinese Yin and Yang. I see symmetry transform into Chaos and better symmetry development from that Chaos. Everything from the astronomical to the atomic or even smaller, seems to have excellent symmetry from certain perspectives and complete chaos from another. Perspective here is being the relative point in both space and time from which one views a set of events in the universe.

The science of Fractals for example, is something that uses this dynamism in Nature between Chaos and Symmetry to understand, describe and simulate nature.

Now if we then believe that the universe has symmetry and chaos at every level, then there is no reason to believe that human beings as part of that universe are any different. There must be some symmetry as well as chaos in the way human beings behave as well as the events that surround them.

Where there is symmetry, there is predictability. The correlation within the symmetry can be measured, understood and used to predict the pattern followed within the symmetry. To predict where certain objects in this universe will be at a time X(t), or how they will move or behave at that time, requires amongst many things, the position of the object at some time X(t-1) as well as the position and movement of other objects in that universe that might have a pattern of co-relation with the objects under study. At least on a theoretical basis. It may still be practically infeasible because of the shear size of the problem and the number of simultaneous measurements necessary to make these predictions.

This then opens the possibility that a system can be developed to predict human behavior or the events that surround them with some amount of probability. This does not empirically prove or disprove any of the existing astrological systems. It just explains the hypothesis that a such system can theoretically be developed.

Could the star chart at birth have a correlation to the life of a person? 

The star chart at birth of a person is a reasonably unique set of parameters based not only on the time of birth but their location as well. Its like fixing a persons origin both in space and time relative to the pattern of the stars and planets in that space and time. So it feels like a significantly unique set of parameters that can have a potential correlation to the persons future. It essentially fixes a human beings position in space and time at birth, which you could call X(0). And how he moves for his rest of his life and where he will be at time X(t) may then have a pattern of co-relation with the biggest objects in universe namely, the planets, stars and entire galaxies. This is does not prove that it does. It merely suggests that it potentially could.

Does that mean free will does not exist?

Well, not necessarily. As much as nature may have a mind of its own and hence symmetry that may allow predictions, it also has a healthy dose of Chaos that constantly tries to disrupt that symmetry.  It is this Chaos that adds uncertainty to that order or symmetry and hence a level of uncertainty to any predictions that can be made based on the symmetry.

This uncertainty then leaves room for "free will" to exist as an instrument of that chaos and uncertainty. This means that not everything is destined nor can it be predicted. This last one is pretty significant, for people to ponder.  Specially for those who believe in fate, destiny and astrology.

So choose wisely and act.

Fear and the Fiery Want

I've been meaning to start writing this blog for a long time. Opened the account almost 9 months back, but never got around to writing anything. 

The blog was supposed to be a critical analysis of the mind, its thinking, how it perceives the world but more importantly, the totally and completely insane ideas I come up with to experiment and torment it with. :-)) As if life doesn't throw enough curve balls already. Totally Nuts!! I know :-))

I seem to always have my foot perennially stuck in my mouth. Its life as usual :-) 

I had one of those moments a while back and started writing. 

Thats when I realized I had the perfect post to start my blog with. 

Relationships stump us all the time. How we perceive and deal with them in our minds is a live experiment of its own, that deserves analysis. I realized that this is hugely significant because how we perceive it affects how we deal with it. And how we deal with it, positive or negative, has a potential to affect a lot of people around us in vastly significant ways, some near and dear. 


So here it goes.

When faced with a relationship decision, and you find the person wonderful in many ways yet thinking I could be get hurt or worse hurt that person, I've found it to have one of two root causes.

Either, I don't really have the spark or passion for the person. I call it the Fiery Want. In which case its best I remained just friends with that person. Its normal and no offense to the person. There are many wonderful people in this world, we may not have that spark with everyone. This doesn't make them any less wonderful. And relationship requires that spark and a lot of fiery Passion with a capital 'P'. But this is also the easiest to recognize. You will find that you think about this person more often than anyone else. And it will bring that warmth of thought that no one else will and you absolutely love spending time with that person, more than anyone else. The key is to give it some time and let the relationship hit some rough spots as well to make sure the 'P' still burns strong.

This feeling is not  a unicorn. It really does exist and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

We've all been there at one point or the other. And sometimes we miss out because the world truly connives against us :-)) and other times our own mind connives against us, aka, because we were "too afraid" of the type below.

The second type of "too afraid" was really fear. The primal kind. The kind that clouds your judgement from within. It distorts your view of things that may be right in front of you. And stops you from recognizing the passion and spark that I describe above. Passion that you really might have for someone but can't see past your fears. This is the worst of the two. Because, it makes you practically blind. 

You could have all the spark and passion in the world for someone. But if you are too blinded by fear and anger to recognize it, its as good as you didn't. Its actually even worse than that. Because the passion and spark you may have for someone is very obvious to that person, even if it isn't to you. And it can confuse, mislead  and hurt that person even without you intending to.

Where am I going? 

There is this very happy child in a play ground looking to have some fun. But she trips on a rock and hurts herself. Weeks pass by, the physical wounds have healed. And she is back in the play ground wanting to have some fun.  But she doesn't see the playground, or the other kids playing hula hoops, or those jumping ropes or playing 7 stones. The child is too angry, afraid and busy arguing with the rock that hurt her, that all she sees are rocks all around, coz thats all she is looking for now.

We all get tripped at one time or the other in our lives. 

We get up and dust ourselves off.

We then have 2 choices. 

Look for rocks OR have some fun :-))