Stuff

AI

While walking home, discussed stuff with a student that I'll be supervising. At some point we reached the following:

• In general, we the people don't like to take on additional responsibilities.
• We would rather have someone else take the other responsibilities because we are already busy with our own responsibilities as is.
• Somebody has to take the responsibility for a group, country or even mankind.
• Becoming a politician is quite unappealing. However, if nobody wants to take the responsibility, then it makes sense to create an artificial entity that would do the dirty job.
• Mankind would have willingly developed an AI to enslave itself so that it wouldn't have to take the responsibility for itself and its own actions.
• No corruption, right? /s

Note that this is not really that far-fetched. For example, there's Duncan Cameron who claims to have visited the future and seen a similar system in action.

Some realizations

One day I realized that in reality there is no such thing as a plunge. There is only concentration and object(s) of concentration. I believed I had slipped or fallen but it was just me concentrating on a variety of fleeting feelings and emotions instead of the everlasting.

Discussed stuff with the student from India again today. Waved him bye and continued my walk home. While on the way, I realized that many years ago when I reached bliss 24/7, I simply lacked the concentration to penetrate the pleasure and became lost in the pleasure. It is not the lack of desire to evolve further that was the problem. Instead, I mistook the bliss as my goal. Having experienced now that the bliss is also impermanent, it's not a very good goal at all. It's not any better than bodily pleasure, just higher by a layer or two. There are many layers.

Dreams of dwelling

Dreams have become more of just sleeping somewhere else. Whether it's an imaginary bed in the livingroom or just grass with dew on it on a cold morning, the dreams are also brighter than before.

Waking OBE?

It was about two weeks ago that this happened, I think. Not sure, meant to blog about it but forgot.

Spent some late hours in the cleanroom at work. Stood up and noticed that something was off. Way off. Had to focus on walking straight because it constantly felt as if my head were tilted to the left .. as if tilted out of body. Quite disorienting. This lasted for about a week, fading away gradually.

Edit: Realized the cause today morning. I've been sleeping without a pillow for a while. I had probably slept with my physical head tilted off axis, whereas my astral body must've been sleeping straight.

Finite or infinite universe? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmajala_Sutta_(Theravada)

Expected more of the sutra. An enlightened master like Gautama surely must have seen the nature of the universe, and yet all he used to disprove the 18 beliefs was one sentence irrelevant of what the belief was about:

All of the followers of these beliefs defended and clung to their faith and didn't believe in other faiths.

Aversion or clinging does not make a theory become any more wrong. I would have expected him to mention which of the theories describe reality the best.

While thinking about it, I stumbled and fell onto Buddhist cosmology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_cosmology

This seems a bit too advanced for me just yet. Would take a lot of research.