Thanks CloudSpokes and Appirio for helping us out

DocuSign Hackathon 2011 - Scored by CloudSpokes from sal partovi on Vimeo.

The goofy guy on stage is me.

Cosmic Game: start with a creative destruction of your understanding of yourself

My previous blog post on the Cosmic Game got some quick twitter comments. Thanks @rzeligzon and @siguy for not letting me be lazy.

Fair warning:
if you are content with the Newtonian physics and the hierarchical view of the world with a Creator on top - stop reading now. Just like discovery of the theory of relativity, some of this knowledge will have a ripple effect that will force you to re-examine your values. For the rest I'd like to start with a little creative destruction of your own sense of "I".

The "I" as you know it is at best incomplete. Number one exercise that I tried was an observation of my mind. I have not yet successfully been able to control my thoughts for more than a few minutes at a time. As you become an observer of where your thoughts go you quickly realize that your mind is actually not you. This is contrary to the western notion of "I think" and "I reason." The control of one's mind is generally worse then their control of their pinky. Because of that you can safely say that your mind is as much you or as much not you as other organs in your body.

The second exercise is an attempt to describe yourself without describing your environment. Try to convey what it is that you are by just sticking to your physical body parts. For a complete description: very quickly you will start involving your environment. In order to describe what you are you will need to pull in information about what you do, where, with what.

These two very basic exercises challenge the normal notion of an "I". An "I" is neither your thoughts, nor is it your physical body. The things that surround you, other beings outside and inside of you are also a part of the "I". There is a way to understand the more complete "I" and evolve the "I" beyond the basic machinery that has reflexes to internal and external forces.

Part of the danger of disclosing this knowledge is that you start getting the power of interacting with other "I"s in non-obvious ways. Some of that is touched on by Bandler and Grinder in their work on the Neuro Linguistic Programming. A simple example of mis-use of this kind of knowledge is the following: someone who learned how to interact with you in non-physical ways, and influence your mind which you don't control can take advantage of you and still be completely within conventional legal boundaries.

My research on the Cosmic Game

Yesterday I had a very engaging discussion with someone about the research that I've been doing. The topic of the research is very hard to boil down to just one sentence. If I had to do it it would be: "a worldview of awareness"

Some of my sources have been works by Alan Watts, G. Gurdjieff, Buddha and other philosophers. Without going into any detail that is probably not going to do any subject justice I want to warn any like-minded "Seeker of the Truth" that the world is not what you think it is. Taking into consideration our sources of information you can say that the world is not what people tell you it is.

In the midst of this discussion a question was posed to me: "So why is this useful." While I don't know the final answer to this I can tell you that for me knowing is better than not knowing. There are some good side effects to having a small glimpse of this new worldview, but it is hardly justified if you are not ready to wake up. The general population is actually not ready to wake up and given the rules of the "Cosmic Game" would probably be harmful to itself.