Cognitive Dissonance & The Seeking

Yet again I got into the whirlpool of questioning, this time around “Attachment”

One side of your life you have wonderful job, friends, love which forms the epicenter of joy and misery. And on the other I’m drawn more and more towards the quest or search for self which also lead me to find what a true bliss of joy and love is like. For simplicity let me call this bliss as Krishna J.

So when I’m pulled on both directions of life, I get tattered apart miserably and wish that I chose one path either on my left which is materialistic where there are several beautiful & lamenting moments in it and on the right is my Krishna where only his bliss of love and joy exists. The ambiguity OR rather failing to completely subscribe to one path of life is what I call the cognitive dissonance.

Let me explain this a little more ,

Material Life –

So let’s say I appraise myself to getting married or committed to seek love and happiness, I then seek more love and more happiness by having a home, and a Kid and a family. There is no denial that when a kid smiles at you, your hearts melt away. You go and lift the kid in your arms and at some point you have to let it go. Or may be at some point you have to walk out, HOW do we confer these moments of joy and misery on each other should be viewed critically. One must realize that all these moments of joy and misery are extremely transitory by their very nature.
After having a kid, you seek more fulfillment by seeing the kid getting married and feel more content when I play with my grandchildren. Doesn’t stop here, I will then start yearning for pilgrimage and reading and all sorts of divine rituals at the far end of it because there is still a sense of more happiness and joy left to achieve. This word “More” stands on the theory of incompleteness or constant search which happens every day to everyone in varied degree and forms which I experienced and shared in my last write. It takes out a lot of time from one’s life until he spins out of it to say “I Don’t Know what I’m searching for”. “ I don’t know if this much is enough”. “ I don’t want to let you go, but yet I have to” . Let me call out a statement that we often use, “Love is Blind” bullshit I feel, I think one doesn’t know what he wants from that love or what is love. There is nothing called as love, there is only “SEEKING”. So love is feeling of seeking or desiring materialistic or emotional gains. Nothing else. And that’s y I feel even all these are manifestations of materialistic seeking. It appears to be a terrifying idea to give up what we love. We need not give up; the so called loved ones will themselves give us up in time because the worldly love and matter is extremely superficial and constructed. The quest takes a different direction here and if one is able to channelize this in the right direction, the journey to spirituality dawns on him. You could be the monk who sold his Ferrari.


Nevertheless infinite moments of joy are indeed sandwiched in this journey. What is also a part of this package is people, objects, experiences, transiting constantly and therefore one falling under the vicious cycle of constant bondage and demise of bondage, excitement, happiness, devastation or stressed out of a bereavement. This constant circle of arrival and departure is the truth of material life which should be accepted. It’s extremely transitory and not the absolute and therefore it will exhibit its true nature. Again things of the world will themselves tell us they are not be depended upon.

In my personal experience I fall in love very easily from the depth of my heart and get completely attached and give into what or whom I love. This, at different points of life raises some sense of belonging, happiness, security and insecurity, fear, jealousy anxiety etc etc which is as unpleasant as the pleasant times. Feelings like jealousy, anxiety, fear, insecurity stems from the subconscious mind which can be easily corrected sometimes. All these feelings are a result of materialistic obsession or indifference. Correcting the unpleasant ones and equally knowing the pleasant ones requires “EXISTENTIAL AWARENESS” . You could be happy and painful or oblivious to these in different ways at different times.

So when you know all of this is so fleeting, there are the following set of cognition's I have come across.

1. Live and sustain each moment , meaning savor the love and mourn when someone or something leaves you. i.e. Live and sustain both pain and glory, Live each moment.
2. Don’t be excited when you are happy and don’t be attached to the grief, imagine you are a third person and both these are a passing fad on your body.
3. Seek , search for yourself who is beyond these material objects and connect with Krishna’s bliss therefore you are completely detached to transitory feelings.

The first one is completely fit if I chose the path on my left. There is no question of quest here and says to only enjoy and live each moment whatever it is.
The second and third are more or less the same but just the articulation is different - “The quest for the bliss” I don’t know yet how this search for self and bliss is related closely. I know that “Self” is something that I can’t express as yet but definitely not bound by a definition of 250 characters. I’m like the air which is universal , I’m like the mirror which reflects what is shown in front of it. I have experienced these feelings momentarily and I’m flabbergasted to articulate such an experience.


The seeking

What is the purpose of life? Does it need to have a purpose? Do u need a reason to wake up in the morning? Do you need someone in the room to go back to? Do you need a billion to be happy? Are you happy if you have kids? Are you happy if you have a date? Why do you need more and more all the time? What is an answer, what is truth, what is true love, what is love, what is jealousy, what is happiness, what makes one sad, Etc etc

I feel my answer to all these is in seeking of his bliss, I strongly get pulled towards this as it’s the only truth that you will arrive at if you were pass through a deep and critical examination of all or any paths of life. It stops when you reach him, you fall in the bliss when you arrive at the scene. You will see him in everything you do, see, touch, smell whatever. You are not connected to the physical manifestation of yourself and thereby you are isolated from the joy and misery that flow past your body. When I run behind you o Krishna, I feel no joy I feel no misery I can only feel you which I cannot explain. Things like love, relations, money, luxury, characteristics crumble down with shame and incompleteness in front of you, my purity of soul and my love to you is the only thing that I can give you for it is me!. Accept me!

I also feel that I must seek help and help all my co passengers who are in this journey to reach him. I feel like I need to help those who are despondent in this vicious circle of materialism and are seeking themselves and Krishna. If I call the seekers as “Class apart from the Mass” , Well then class is still present in the mass, Krishna loves both mass and the class, then why help only the class not the mass too? I feel the answer is its meant to be a mass. One is meant to be living the materialistic world until a threshold point. After which he graduates to the class. If you imagine a melting pot of energy that contains both positive and negative particles, I feel there is so much a imbalance between the positive and negative energies, good and bad, poor and rich, material and divine, class and the mass etc. But both positive and negative energies are still a part of the concept. Positive is positive in reference to negative and negative is negative with reference to positive. May be the imbalance in required to reach a balance or may be balance is not meant to be balanced. Mass is meant to be mass until it graduates to the class, It’s like the circle which never ends. Then why help the class seek the bliss? Let them be the mass till they graduate to the class!!

Now the Dissonance part of it!

5 days during a week, I love my swanky job, I like the little bit of money, I like to see my parents happy, , I love to experience the moments when
I sing and sink in my tunes, I love to be belonged to someone close to my heart, I like to party, I like to go watch a movie, I love to be in love, I feel hard to let go of people whom I love, I’m very passionate about certain things, I LOVE kids,

When triggered by a event, when i win something, when I achieve something, when I see misery, when I fear of losing, anxiety, or nowadays when something really good happens or someone just comes along, it start slyly pricking my conscience and I go into this questioning mode and try to be oblivious to both sides of life. Then it starts , all of the above comes crumbling on me. It seems meaningless to me, I get drawn towards him more strongly. I feel like I should shut all the doors and completely get detached of all the above, I feel like walking out on all of it, I feel like running in search of him,. Yet my feet stumbles, yet my thought twitches, and the streams of reasoning lose its way in the midst of this unreal beauty, unreal joy and unreal smiles.

I’m muffled in the noise of a crowd, I’m stuck in the void between this running maniac and seeking maniac in a dreary desert. It’s like a crying child in a locked door, suffocated completely, while I see the door open I can’t run and when the door is shut I can’t live. How then do I carry myself oh Krishna, please show me my way, please guide me into your heaven of freedom and joy. Show me the path to the absolute. You either throw me in the circle and make me enjoy or mourn all materialistic gains and losses, or you call me unto you.

If you remove a part from infinity or add a part to infinity, still what remains is infinity

For the past few days my psychotic mind was dwelling on the question why it is always necessary for transient variable to be in my life. Why am I not complete without any transient variables? What is completeness? I did some mental masturbation on this for four painful days and the answer seems to come out quite interesting. Of course there is a hell a lot of difference in realizing the answer and living in the real world. It’s difficult to be adhesive and still be cohesive but let me see where I go with this. So here it goes. I never read any books until I got my answer but I came back to my desk to read some contextual articles to extend my cognitive conclusions...

You must find your own answers.. like I have done with my own rules herein.
This is also an example to say when you are deeply dwelled in the world of analytics or physics or mathematics beyond the realm of their material explanations it leads to a wonderful spiritual experience. So yes analytics is one of the drivers for my spirituality now ..


So here it goes…..
If you remove a part from infinity or add a part to infinity, still what remains is infinity
-The Isha Upanishad or Yajurveda

My Equation for completeness---

So say X + Y = 5
2 + 3 = 5
5 is incomplete by 5 for 10 and 10 is incomplete by another 10 for 20. Therefore no equation can substantiate the ‘complete’. A variable can only be merged with the complete.
For him who owns and or is infinity, Transfinite and complete, giving something doesn’t make him incomplete or less than infinity or little less than transfinite. He is still complete and transfinite.They say whole is something else than the individual sum of parts. because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful. Summing takes its meaning because we have zero as a referrence point. Imagine that as an arbitrary point in the space and you can start your own scale of measurments. Its like none of us is smart than all of us put together, so think what all of universes put together could become. Therefore taking out a quantity from the whole - the whole hasnt decreased. Your ability to measure, comprehend, hold etc has reduced. Thats all. Absolute - Anything is always > anything always. --Vasanth

For him who has 1 and needs another one and another one and another 100 AND MORE. No 100's will satisfy him because it is not really the 100's that he wants. What he wants is that which is does not have. And that what he has is always incomplete.
For him therefore Absoluted + anything is still < absolute always

So there you go, these are my answers. therfore i already know that all the variables are taransient,incomplete with referrece to absolute by nature and fleeting because it is with respect to a start point and by such referrence always needs to have another referrence point. there is nothing called as temperary or permanent the only "thing" that is permanent, complete, truth is the space. I call him as Krishna. so the only path to complete bliss, happiness where these is nothing called as "sorrow" or "pain" or "happiness" ( materialitically) there exists no illusion but just the truth is in the fact of merging yourself with the complete. Being completely aware of your inner self, being constantly seraching yourself and paving your way to merge in the complete is the true path!!!! yes it sounds very philosophical but when you are faced with this question in your life do remember these words!!!.

Just when you thought that this job was not giving that kick and money that you wanted, say you changed your job and went on changing your job untill the ground broke and the questions errupted like a volacnoe in your mind that which job wuld give me the ultimate happiness that i want? the question you must ask is what is happiness!!!!!!! what is truth? what is making me so restless? how many billion dollars do i need to be happy? how may girfirends do i need to be happy? and so on and you will find that a million questions and conginitve conlficts will surface.
its good to live in a state of conginitve confusion untill you find your own answers !!


In addition to these, I read some really good articles by a mathematician and I’m calling out the abstract for your extended reading, though complicated but very interesting.

Here is one intresting article i read
Franklin Merrell-Wolff's theory on what is infinity, Space, point and zero?


Just as in mathematics there are infinitudes of higher orders infinitely transcending lower infinities, so it is in the Transcendent World . . .I have found an Infinite World, and then another Infinite consuming the first. . .It is an Infinity of some higher order, that is an INFINITY which comprehends lesser Infinities .

Upon zero we build our systems of reference,
Which is merely a way of saying that with nothing as a center we have the fulcrum for control of all elaborations in form . . . The pure 'I' is the zero-point of organized consciousness. This first ego-lessness, this bare point-I, is then transformed into the Space-I. "The Transcendent 'I' is as much a space as a point. (I’d like to call out here the correlation between disparate philosophies. Science says to attain speed of light the particle must have no mass. Spirituality says to attain enlightenment one must have no ego, no desire etc etc etc )

Its mathematical symbol would be both (zero) and (infinity). Yet in the High Indifference, this self blows out leaving only Consciousness- Without-An-Object (and Without-A-Subject). "Consciousness-Without-An- Object is the universal solvent within which the centers of tension, or objects, have their field of play. All tendencies in that play is counter-balanced by its counter-tendency, the culminating effect being an expression equated to zero.

It is zero that symbolizes the durable Reality, or Consciousness-Without-An-Object. This is the higher sense of zero or emptiness, symbolizing the cancellation of the positive and negative polarizations corresponding to the Universe and Nirvana Wolff coined the term 'inverse cognitions' to describe cognitions polarized in the opposite sense as objective cognitions, i.e. toward the Nirvanic.

"Awareness of the absence of objects, in its purity, is not cognition of an object, but another form of consciousness that is not concerned with objects. However, a reflection of this state of consciousness may be produced so that a special cognition arises, of such a nature that its content is definable as the inverse of all objects. .

I hope these raise a lot of cognitive questions in your mind, may you be drawn towards the truth and complete – Vasanth.