What is the true Nature of THE SELF?
Learn more about the nature and the existence of your true SELF. Get to know your quantum self.
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The Self — A Tale of Three Minds
Nature of Myself
Humble Beginnings
Most of us do not remember the humble beginnings of our own self. Conceptually it is difficult to envision that we started our existential journey as a tiny cell hardly visible to the naked eye. It is also hard for us to imagine ourselves in our mother’s womb for nine months waiting to be fully formed. Even harder to imagine is our journey initiating from our first home inside the tummy of our mother to the visible universe. We displayed incredible trust in strangers that we later understood as parents or guardians. We had no capabilities of doubting and we did not. In that humble and simple existence, truth was with us. We did not or could not sugarcoat our emotions. When hungry or thirsty, we cried until we were fed and felt full. There was no sense of social protocol, and we pretty much followed queue from our body. As naked as helpless and as truthful our self was, we had no idea that we will become what we have become today. Despite of all the pictures and movies capturing most of those occasions, we tend to forget or disregard that period of our humble existence.
Most of us do have some memories from our childhood. We recognize that learning was a crucial part of our lives as a child. Even though our parents tried to convince us that childhood was the best state of our existence, most could not wait to be an adult. We wanted to grow up to be someone. There were many suggestions. Be a doctor, lawyer, president, CEO, or a teacher. The list was endless. Mother always wanted me to marry a lovely young woman and have a terrific family. She made that clear repeatedly until I understood. Whether it is family, friends, relatives, organization, city, country, world, humanity or life or universe, we learned to see ourselves as contributing individuals and part of a myriad of larger organizations. We were conditioned to see an individual self or ourselves as one unit.
In 1927 Ludwig von Bertalanffy first proposed the human organism should be treated as an open system. An open system may interact with its environment in a growth or balancing fashion. Human body comprises of over 50 trillion living cells. Each of these cells is also open system aware of its environment through a network of molecular sensors. These cellular open systems perform collectively to cause the human organism to have a motion and various other functionalities. From a systems perspective, one may describe the self that we have conditioned ourselves to be as an emergent property of human system. As the emergent property, the nature of self is different from mere collection of 50 trillion cells. For example, self might enjoy a game of poker while 50 trillion cells may not appreciate sophisticated moves of poker. Consciousness is the basis of this Self.
Myself for Me or for Others, the Conflict
What is the nature of the self that is conscious?
The nature of myself is centered around two basic tendencies. First, I am for myself. Second, myself is for others. This duel nature of self is almost like the nature of quantum entities such as photons or electrons, which exist in dual state of being wave or particle. This duality leads to conflict in our mind. It also matches with the duel nature of the cosmic mind itself. One forms many, and many form one. The action of robber, in the headline below, pictures a deep conflict within, a conflict that relates to the dual nature of our self.
Calif. robber confesses to priest, turns in cash
Police still seeking identity of the thief who vanished after handing over $1,200
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
WALNUT CREEK, California—A man who robbed a San
Francisco Bay Area bank apparently felt guilty enough to confess his sins and hand over $1,200, but not enough to turn himself in.
Police say a man went to a church Sunday night to confess that he robbed the Walnut Creek branch of the Patelco Credit Union last week. After expressing remorse, the man handed the priest $1,200 and left. The priest then called police.
Walnut Creek police Lt. Shelly James says authorities don’t know the man’s name or if the money he turned over was the entire amount lost in the robbery. The money will be returned to the bank.
Police say the man entered the credit union Thursday afternoon and gave a bank teller a note demanding money. He claimed he had a gun.
James says police are still looking for the robber and will arrest him when he’s found.
What gives rise to this duel nature of self? It took me several decades to recognize the dual nature of my own self.
Seema and I have been married for twenty years. Just like most marriages, our marriage has been an instructive exercise in getting to know each other. I was born in a small city in India called Aligarh in 1960. Most of my childhood was spent in Delhi in a typical Indian middle-class family. My father, who retired as a professor of business management in a prestigious university in India was then a lecturer in a college in Delhi. With my mother not working, five children, my father had to work hard to just simply bring money to fulfill our basic needs. My mother came from a wealthy family. She could not see her children being deprived of basic wants. She always felt that she could work and support the family with extra income. However, times were such that my father felt the role of a wife was in the home, not outside working and bringing the bacon. In fact, women working outside were a social taboo in the Indian society of those times. My mother was one of the exceptional women of her times. She was educated and brilliant. She was a debate champion and distinction holder throughout college years, in times when most Indian women did not get any college education. My father was also exceptional in studies and topped throughout his college education. My parents married through an incredible alignment of fate. In
a typical Indian arranged marriage style, both went through many potential suitors and eventually ended with each other through divine intervention. In India, all matches are made in heaven. There appears to be a deeper truth behind that saying. We grew up in a household where our mother and father constantly argued about finances, and my mother constantly wished to work to raise our living standards. My father held the line throughout, and my mother never worked. She died in 2005 leaving incredible impact on my eventual personality. I grew up with incredulous need of not be financially mediocre.
I am fourth of five children in my family. I have two older sisters and one older brother. Just like my parents, I turned out to be the one good at studies. For some reason, I was naturally inclined toward science and mathematics. I studied most of time and got admission in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, a prestigious institution for engineering education. I came to United States in 1982 for graduate work at University of Southern California (USC). Lure to penetrate the glitter of material wealth could not be greater anywhere but here. This land of opportunity is such an incredible engine for wealth creation that everything else such as skin color, accent takes a backseat. Money is like divine here. What creates wealth is almost always more important than what does not.
I engaged myself in that pursuit like most others. I was in a rat race.
Rat race is an amazing race. Winning is more valuable than anything else. Winning promises material rewards. These could be significantly greater than bare financial security. For example, Bill gates, once the richest man on earth created wealth that would be enough to feed many generations of Gates to come. Rational mind is the hallmark of the rat race. Apparent determinism, certainty, and result orientation are the essential ingredients of this race. Every rat, in the end, is for himself. Power struggle, fear, and anxiety are common and prevailing emotions. I was in that mode. I was determined to do well, for myself. I sought my benefit in everything I came across. I judged everything with that standard. I was not trusting. My body showed signs of fatigue from severe negative emotions; unhappiness was rooted in my psyche. This new paradigm for me was different from what I grew up with. As a child, I recalled I was trusting, social, respectful, and simple; unlike what I had become. My child was still alive in me. It was fighting for what it thought was right. The kindness, love, empathy, friendship, freedom, selflessness, and truthfulness were uncompromising traits.These were not the hallmarks of winning a rat race. Not much made sense. My inner conflict was at paramount. I was in search of meaning of this existence, meaning of myself. Being a science person, I thought I will find answers in science, but decades of search in the scientific literature could not take me all the way to my true reality, my true self. This awakening came later from subjective experience of my inner self in the deep state of meditation.
Seema came to United States in 1989. Her concept of herself was rooted in her heart. She listened to messages that surfaced from her heart and gave them priority over mind. She always cared more for others than herself. I did not recognize her goodness right away. In fact, we struggled for consensus for many years. As I struggled to get answers that would transcend me beyond the powerful paradigm of the rat race, using science and spirituality mainly through many of the self-help books, it was becoming clear to me that myself had two distinct natures, both very real. One catered for my own self-interest, and the other was selfless or catered for others interest. What could lead to such opposite nature of self-residing in one body? My search led me to an answer, from a surprising source. The answer came from the fundamental nature of quantum computing. A new science of information processing that has a potential to combine all science, mysticism, and religion. It provided a clue to explain the dual nature of self.
Computationally Astute Informational Self
At the deepest informational level, living cell is composed of trillions of quantum variables, qubits. At the physical level, the quantum information stored in these quantum switches or qubits combine in the form of atoms, informational molecules, and other nano structures. Living cells form tissues, organs, and finally organized as life-forms including the human body. Therefore, the life forms such as humans are large macroscopic structures, which are buried deep in internal quantum features. From a top-down perspective and as a macroscopic body, humans would be closer to a classical computing or binary processing. At the root level, these structures are computationally astute to take advantage of both binary and quantum mode of information processing.
From a bottom-up perspective and as a quantum inner body, we would be closer to quantum processing. From this perspective, we form a seamless oneness with everything else in the universe. From the top-down view, derived from binary computation, we form a perspective of being separate from the rest. The consciousness is the interface of these two perspectives. On one side of consciousness, there is this grand oneness, whereas, on the other side, the separation with the rest.
Myself is fundamentally an informational entity whose fundamental aspect of being is the ability to know and act per guidance of a mind influenced by these two perspectives. Many programs drive my conscious self. These programs live in my mind that finally guides myself. My mind directs all the actions of bits and qubits through these programs to cause various experiences of self. Everything that myself does, therefore, can eventually be described by a series of interconnected tiny quantum of action or the qubit or programs governed by the interaction of one or more aspects of my minds.
“C’mon, Papa, we are not like computers with programs running inside of us,” my eleven-year-old son Monish exclaimed as he heard of my newfound wisdom.
“Maybe not the kind that we know and are used to, but we compute incessantly and information is also at the root of our being.” I was not sure if it consoled him.
Most of us do not see ourselves from this view. Our image of ourselves is mostly based of perceptual reality of our senses, consistent with laws of classical physics. We see ourselves as large solid three-dimensional physical beings where energy breaths life into our material body, separate from everyone else. Our top-down view based on binary computation makes us aware of this separation.
The separation leads to incompleteness, the product of which is desire. The most basic desire, common to all life, is of food, or a source of energy. Life is like a toy that operates on batteries. Food is the battery that all variety of life needs. Safety is another desire that is innate and results from preservation of the form. The separation need takes on a wide variety of forms to be complete. The self has evolved to have a free will to pursue the fulfillment of the needs and desires. Humans along with a few other life-forms have evolved a capability that enables a rational mode of processing information using our rational mind. It is physically contained in and informationally synchronized with the emotional mind.
My physical body is my emotional mind and is eventually rooted in the cosmic mind at the quantum level. The emotional mind provides the information network involving the molecules of information and emotion that facilitates communication from nonlocal regime to the self. In other words, the inputs from the cosmic mind are mediated to the living entity through the emotional mind. The emotional mind also links information circuits that allows the decisions from rational mind to reach all part of the physical body. So what I call as myself is interplay of these three minds. Which mind I use is a matter of what I feel is important and where I put my attention.
The nature of myself reflects a tale of three minds—emotional, rational, and cosmic minds—that work in concert, resulting in the experience of the self. Therefore, even though I am physically limited, I am unlimited from informational perspective as myself linked to the cosmic mind spans the whole universe. Each of the three minds contributes differently to the nature of myself by altering the computational mode of this informational entity. Since the nature of the three different minds is decidedly different, their influence results in different nature of the self. Two of these natures of the self are recognizable and present in all of us. First is centered on myself being separate from others, and the second one result from myself as one with others. If you recall from earlier discussions, these are exactly the two basic tendencies that make the cosmic mind or the whole. So from this point of view, self is made in the image of the whole.
Each living cell in my body is a self in its own right. It has made a commitment to support my being. My desires are imposed on my cells through a top-down network of informational commands. My cells obey to fulfill these wishes. Many times, my self-interests will put extra strain on my cells. My cell’s functionality depends on it being healthy. Just like I feel tired or sick when my system is overused or abused, each of my cells feel the same through network of informational signals that flow throughout my emotional and rational brain. Each of my cells is also rooted in the cosmic mind and receives signals from that mind in the form of waves of guidance. If signals from rational mind and the cosmic mind do not match, my cells are often in conflict. Which proteins sensors and gears would need to move and in which direction? The conflict leads to internal pain or suffering. Since the programming of our modern, rational mind is often at odds with the functionality of the cosmic mind, this suffering has become a normal feature of our existence.
When rational mind is in a state of surrender, our decisions are made through the cosmic mind. This leads to ease of conflict within and thus a sense of peace or calm spreads throughout the body. The rational mind also can make decisions that can benefit the community or others. In this case, the rational mind works in concert with the cosmic mind as they coconspire to create the reality. Therefore, whether myself operates in a state of surrender to the cosmic mind or works in concert with it, the resultant processor is quantum in nature. I would call it our “quantum self.” It is also our bottom-up perspective.
After its origin from quantum information processing, it appears that life has been evolving toward this binary mode of information processing. Our free will allows a choice between the queues from the grand cosmic mind and the rational mind. Through intentionality, we can choose one or the other. When we choose the rational mind over the cosmic mind, we act with our rational mind. This leads to second of the two essential natures of our self. The information processor dominating this nature is binary. I will call this as our binary self. There is a strong temptation for the rational mind to make decisions so that they benefit the self only. This mode of action leads to development of egoic entity, which is highly prevalent in our modern societies.
A Case of Mean Bacteria
Robert Austin of Princeton has been studying the social behavior of bacteria in order to help understand the social dynamics of other organisms, including humans. He has intriguing results about selfish and altruistic individuals and the social dynamics between the two.
Austin and his collaborators have found a single gene that controls bacteria “selfishness.” If it is off, bacteria slow down their metabolism and reproduction rate when they sense their environment has been depleted of nutrients. This prevents them from entirely destroying their living space. However, if this gene is turned on the bacteria go right on eating until nothing is left. They even develop the ability to feed off other dead bacteria.
Interestingly, the gene is off by default when bacteria are found in the wild. However, if one puts these in a petridish, and cut off their food supply, the selfish mutants emerge in matter of only days. These mutants consume all the remaining food, including each other, and then starve.
The experiment shows: first, the selfish bacteria win, and then everyone loses. This is a situation where selfish seem to have the advantage over the self-restraining altruists, but if everyone is selfish, then everyone is worse off. These results, however, could not be reproduced in the wild where selfish bacteria would not emerge. The bacteria in the wild exercise restraint, so there must be something different going on in the wild than in the petri-dish. This is a fascinating example where a simple organism like bacteria is informationally able to change the nature of its “self” from quantum to binary depending on the influence of environment.
Modern human device contain both binary, egoic or selfish, and quantum or altruistic self in one body. The result is a conflict or internal unrest that is the prime cause of suffering in modern humans.
An excerpt from the book “Joy From Deep Within”, Nature of Quantum Self
For More Information please visit
http://www.roadtodigitaldivine.com
http://www.joyfromdeepwithin.com
Buy Joy from Deep Within Please visit http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=82193
Buy Road to Digital Divine Please visit http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=79861
Key Words
Does GOD exists, The silence, Meaning of Life, The self, True Self, Digital Divine, Divine Meaning, Feel The Joy, Joy and Happiness, Life meaning, My Stress Relief, Stress Causes, Where is GOD, Joy, Divine, God, Quantum, Stress, Depression, Meaning, Life
My True Self
What do you think is the number one desire that most people have? Many of you will say “Money” or good looks or that car or house or may be win that lottery. However, surveys after surveys have suggested that the most people desire to “to be simply themselves’.
Why is so? This is because being oneself and actually behaving and being accepted as our true self is a pleasurable task. We are all incorrigible seekers of bliss or joy. Our minds are wired to be happy. At least that is what our modern scientific studies contend. We all innately know this. If it is all true, how many of us are truly happy? May be with exception of a few most us struggle to be happy and keep that feeling of joy most of the time. What has gone wrong?
I was born in a small city in India. As a kid, I was smart, very curious and studied pretty much most of the time. I always got good grades and admission in prestigious universities. I came to United States to pursue higher education. I got many degrees like Masters, PhD and MBA. Etc. After education I accepted positions in the field of applied research. I continued path to be successful becoming VP of research and development at a major corporation at an early age.
My formula said I was successful and should be happy and content— but I was unhappy, dissatisfied and wanting even more. We all have formulas. Make money. Get a job. Be successful. You will be happy. It took me many decades of suffering to realize that many of these so called popular formulas don’t work. So what works? The only formula that works for me is “know and act per your true self”. So the question is “Which of the selves in our personality is our true self?” or “how well do we know our true self?” Or even more appropriately “Who is it that needs to be happy?”
You may say “me” with your name, titles, education, place in the society with certain face, body, the one you can see in the mirror. Great! Then that voice inside you may say, “I think I know that this is not all I am, maybe there is more to myself than my physical self.”
Who is doing the thinking? Who is it that is doing the act of understanding or doubting? Maybe there is a little “I” within my physical body that I cannot see in the mirror. Is this the one which needs to be happy? Has science found any such entity called inner I?
Where does this inner “I” reside? Could it be any organ in my body or a cell or a molecule or may be an atom that is part of my being? Or perhaps a combination of many atoms or molecules or cells or maybe organs that represent this inner “I”?
As I discovered that true I within my being, I was surprised that my true I was not for me, it was for OTHERS. What non-sense? All the formula I used to be successful in this world said it is okay to have more. Cater for my self. Have more money, more power more influence. But my self that resides inside and truly decides my happiness is opposite and for others. How could one reconcile such bizarre behavior of SELF based on current science of mind and matter?
In order to understand the true nature of this entity, we would need to revise our 3-d space-time view based on materialism. We would have to adopt a new view of the universe that is based on information, quantum information to be more precise the new science of quantum information.
I elaborate this view in the first books of this series, Road to Digital Divine. Since this newer understanding rests on digital and informational nature of being and has divine-like qualities, I have referred to this as “digital divine”. It is an incredible bridge between science and spirituality and offers one model that integrate ALL, matter, mind and Divinity.
So what does that mean? It means that laws of information rather than the laws of classical physics govern the behavior and nature of this entity. In the second book of this series I describe our true self as our quantum self. It acts for the benefit of community rather than self. It gives rise to saint like nature in humans. The title of the book “Joy from Deep within” describes what happens when we discover and act according to our true nature.
Transcript of a talk given by Dr. H. Gupta in Los Angeles, CA
For More Information please visit
http://www.roadtodigitaldivine.com
http://www.joyfromdeepwithin.com
Buy Joy from Deep Within Please visit http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=82193
Buy Road to Digital Divine Please visit http://www2.xlibris.com/bookstore/bookdisplay.asp?bookid=79861
Key Words
Does GOD exists, The silence, Meaning of Life, The self, True Self, Digital Divine, Divine Meaning, Feel The Joy, Joy and Happiness, Life meaning, My Stress Relief, Stress Causes, Where is GOD, Joy, Divine, God, Quantum,
