The train missed the station
Published:
How do you do..hello! In case you are pissed off that you did not get the ‘weekly issue’ of “Dhruv talks” last Sunday it was because I was busy in doing some random shit. I warned you that I won’t be writing every week regularly; this is a blog not a weekly magazine.
Since the past few weeks, I disappear mysteriously on Thursday frm 4 to 5 and head to the Schiffert Heath Center for a Koru meditation course. Now I joined this because a friend was eager to and he needed numbers so the course does not get cancelled. 5 Thursdays later, I get a certifcate and all. This Koru is just a form of meditation and some of its techniques are good , some of them are just not , let’s say fine. I have tried meditation before: hell, I came from India where we had Yoga in schools and meditation classes in school, college and what have you. The basic technique is this :
- You sit down on the ground cross-legged.
- You close your eyes, inhale and exhale an focus on your breathing
- If your thoughts wander , bring them back to breathing.
Gee, that’s so easy you know as if you have the power to bring your thoughts back to focus. But that does not work. There is a thought train that runs faster than the meditation station. You focus on your breath and then you go on your nose and then cartilage in your nose and then sharks and then you could see those creatures in Australia instead of being in a place that has a crazy weather in February. Or you could have dual thoughts: one on your breath and the major one going someplace. Meditation helps you to focus. Focus what? into your work? Damn, that is almost like if your curiosity wanders someplace you can bring it back. And since you have ‘mastered’ meditation your reflex will always bring you back to one damn thing. If you are hungry you would just eat that cake without wondering, “Hmmmm…is this cake chocolate or just plain old vanilla?” Because if you do that your brain willl command you, “Just focus on the damn cake, you are hungry.”
And that’s why I don’t like this meditation. Let your thought train wander. Don’t let it stop. It can give you numerous solutions to any problem in the world out of which maybe none would be the correct ones. But it would still give you solutions! If you are in a closed book exam hall and you don’t know the formula for one thing, you have two choices: either you play around trying to derive that formula or you just meditate to get you focused on the exam and make it clear that you are a dumb fellow.
But there was this one technique called visual imagery where you try to define a place where you want to be and with each feature that place becomes more and more real. That sounds a bit dreamy and it is exciting. I had been doing that since I was a child and I enjoyed it a lot. Hell, I had seen places where I had never been in actual life (I had once been in Egypt although I have just read about the place and never been there.) I also thought that if we could try to go back in time when we actually didnt exist was possible or not. I tried doing that and I found myself in a place in the time between the 2 world wars (The hint was a newspaper boy selling papers and I buying one to see that date; it was an unknown language but it had a photograph of Hitler and on the street there were lot of people just sitting there). I don’t remember the place exactly but it was surely in Europe. I found this experiment quite dopey and have tried to do it sometimes when I sleep but it has not been completely successful; there are times when I immediately get it that this stuff is all a dream and sometimes not. That’ enough of the meditation baloney for now.
I had started reading a biography of Richard Feynman by James Gleick and came across this paragraph,
[He] opened a fresh notebook. On the title page he wrote: NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT. For the first but not last time he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.”
I now think of this as the initial steps to be one of the greatest physics teachers the world has even known. But this notebook thing seems dopey and I feel I should start one too: not on physics or fluid mechanics (that would be too large). I have had troube finding OpenFOAM documentation and this thing would definitely help me for my research. Let’s see if this thing works out for me or not.
That’s enough for today; let’s discuss this notebook next time!