The Unknown

Friday, March 15, 2024

This is what I know

I know that there is a story in me

I know that this is a story I’m also living

I know that it isn’t easy to categorize like me

I know that the writing style itself tells a story

I know that the message of the story is layered like a cake

I know that I wish to put my heart and soul into writing the story

What I don’t know is how I can get the story out

I don’t know if I should first read other stories to learn how to write 

or if I should learn the mechanics of good writing 

or if I should first structure my story

I don’t know if I should first live the story 

or write the story

I don’t know if free writing would help me tell the story

or dilute the story

These are just the things I know that I don’t know

The unknown unknowns intrigues me.

And as I write this, I now know that all the things I don’t know will soon be known

And perhaps I will temporarily call my story The Unknown.

Lines

January 2024

Moments not lived in love but steeped in heartache are moments of grief. What I feel is me grieving the loss of unlived parallel possibilities of love.

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The work of my heart is the work of the world’s heart. There is no other work.

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To be patient means to wait or suffer or experience. When you have no choice, but to be patient. For each strengthens your ability to be present, to be in the pain of not knowing, to feel yourself age in body, but grow in spirit. To be patient is to not escape into fantasies of predictions, which I am oh so good at, to not live for tomorrow, for tomorrow was never promised.

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“What if we pointed all the energy that typically flows towards seeking, and instead directed it towards stewing in the moment?” 

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Did I know I was too much for most people
Yes I did, even when I was 19 years old. Email me at toomuchh@gmail.com

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State over story. Use breath to change state. 

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In what ways are you complicit in creating the conditions for your challenge?

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 Learn from those climbing down the mountain that I wanna climb.

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I reveal myself to you not for you.I reveal myself to myself through you. 

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Wonder & Intelligence

December 20th 2023, SFO-KOA Midair

The human emotion that propels humanity forward is wonder – an umbrella term for awe, curiosity, surprise, reverence, delight and doubt. Doubt is what makes us human. 

It’s in the state of wonder that presence and play happens.

AI & Consciousness, Product Market Fit & Product Growth

December 14th 2023, Esalen

There’s two modes of building products. One is when you are striving to find your center or fit with your self and the audience – commonly called product market fit (PMF). This requires coming up with hypotheses, testing, learning and iterating till you find flow. Sometimes it requires taking big bets to test wide and deep if you are really off center. The other mode is growth of product of self (Product Growth i.e. PG) – this is when you have found your center but you are growing in relationship with your audience. This is akin to play – you give and receive continually to stay in a state of flow but you are growing to expand to a higher state together. 

The two modes require slightly different energies. PMF requires bold action to cut through the noise and find the center. This to me is masculine in nature. PG, on the other hand, requires a more feminine energy to nurture and co-create. 

As humanity we have found PMF with nature or had at some point (hunter-gatherer). What we need next is something more nurturing, to co-create with nature and grow in unison. It requires patience because it looks slow like a pregnancy but it’s happening. Life creation appears slow and then happens all at once. 

Feminine energy is directing and masculine energy can fulfil and support its creation.

An ML model has an objective function, multiple data points and a gestation period which is training followed by a prediction with error rates. 

If we can develop consciousness as a product where we are mindful of what the objective function is and can be present during training with accurate data, and then play with prediction, as response and intention and give and receive feedback, what we can generate is a reality which is true to our objective function. Objective function can be our collectively chosen purpose and desires. If we don’t know our collective purpose, we start with desires and the purpose will emerge.

On Purpose and Desires

December 14th 2023, Esalen

I have often wondered why I haven’t yet received fruits of innate desires I have – a spiritual, loving partner and family. I encountered the Hindu concept of four desires: Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha. As I understand it, Dharma is the primary desire or the ethical framework to pursue Artha and Kama, while all 3 desires are oriented towards Moksha.

Fulfilling my dharma, or my righteous duty or my unique role in the larger cosmic order, requires me to show up fully and authentically and co-create my reality and path towards fulfilling my dharma. The other desires will follow – I still co-create but it is in support of my dharma. This includes spending money on comforts so that I can play my dharmic role to the best of my abilities. Attracting and being with a partner who can walk with me on this journey. Quite simply, dharma is my purpose.

So what is my dharma? As I experience it now, it is to express the world as I see it, shape the tech industry to operate in ways that allow for our collective soul to expand and to co-create something that advances humanity in a positive direction in unison with the natural world. 

In support of my dharma, I desire a loving partner who sees all of me and can walk with me, loving children with whom I can practice being responsible everyday and a home that has elements of wood, stone, water, fire and earth, in tune with nature and community.

Dmae ias is short for ‘deep meaning and etymology in a sentence’

Big Sur

December 13th 2023, Esalen

It was probably 2009, a few months after I moved across the planet to America for my Masters. But what it really was was my first encounter with the blue, vast, infinite Pacific Ocean. I had a rust colored dress on and I was happy. I remember because I have a picture of me from then. I was happy. It didn’t matter that I was still hurting from a painful breakup, I was full of joy. It was not just highway 1, it was not just California, it was the land and space around Big Sur. What is it about this place that makes it so special? Why am I drawn to it?

It’s 2023 and it’s my fifth time (!!!) at Esalen. It’s a beautiful retreat which has somehow managed to become a microcosm of everything Big Sur is. It’s a place of joy, connection and coming into your own path. It offers an altered state of being with a community of other seekers. But what it really offers is access to Big Sur. There’s the ocean with different shades of blue, aquamarine, cobalt, green, turquoise, dark blue with its waves foaming in white lapping against white-topped rocks, creating whirlpools for as far back as you can see and merging with the blue open vast sky. This is the backdrop of hills laden with trees paining a pretty silhouette against the sun rising and the ocean glistening, sparkling the same sparkle you see as night turns in and you watch the sulphur vapors from the hot springs, but when you look up the same sky is studded with countless stars which glisten the same way. They, the ocean and the sky are just playing catch with all that sparkles. Star dust and magic. The monarch butterflies, warblers, sparrows, stellar jays, hawks, seagulls, and of course the barking sea lions, raccoons, lizards teach you how to be. Like the otter on its back floating with the waves in the ocean every now and then playing, turning over and back on its back again. 

Big Sur has the elements – water, air, wood but not fire. The living beings witnessing it perhaps brings the fire element. The beauty I sense is perhaps from the fire I breathe and to see the land respond, and perhaps that’s why there is alchemy happening at Big Sur or as it’s more commonly called—Magic.

Dialogue

December 12, 2023, Esalen

“I wish you have dialogue in there”, says Claus. Amelia later tells me Claus was a pastor and taught that book (Slaughterhouse five). She tells me he is very well read. He mentioned Pico Iyer and how we are global citizens and can choose our own spirituality. I mention my plans of writing a book about raising consciousness using AI. And how the only way to make it readable is to make it a story. 

Claus: So, it will be an academic paper?

Me: No, it will be a novel – something like science fiction. 

Claus: You know what would be a perfect read? Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-house five. It’s got everything.

Me: Yeah, I can’t read much, some kind of reading disability. I don’t know about my style. If it is fiction or non-fiction. Maybe this dialogue will be in there.

Practices and Will

December 12, 2023, Esalen

I lived 27 years of my life flowing through life. Actually 18 years of life, after which I discovered my own abilities both to offer and to receive. This spooked me and I did not know what to do with it. Flash-forward to 26-27 years, when all had broken, and by that I mean, the model no longer fit the data I was noting post a significant breakup. I, however, was optimistic, and was it mostly out of no desire or option, I was just living day to day which surprisingly translated to being present. It is then that I first felt desire. 

A moment of clarity & insight drove me to NYC in a very impulsive move. This leaning into my instinct and trusting it led to the most beautiful gift I have ever received. Filled with gratitude, I experienced pure energy—love—which ricocheted me into a new higher plane of presence. It did not occur to me that I could co-create, cultivate this state for eternity. I did not exercise my personal will and took the lead of what I called God. A decade later, I am experiencing something similar. I am feeling present.

After a chaotic few months where I operated at the speed of light, I hit escape velocity. I escaped my existence in NYC, glided through Esalen, Burning Man and rummaged through garbage at work to learn the most important lessons or data points for me to upgrade. Or in other words for the model to fit. Which is leading and has led to major insights that I am in the midst of integrating. But I am different now. I have grown. I have will that I am exercising now. Purpose and desire. Working through that, trusting my instincts, co-creating my reality.

Not just that, I also want to maintain this state, be present in this edge of where I end and the universe begins. I have been thinking of how to do that. What could I do differently this time to operate at this level of clarity and operate in the world? I suspect its practices. What are my behaviors and actions in this state and can I continue them in everyday life? JJ Jeffries from Esalen said it aptly: Practices are habits with awareness. I am going to try this in addition to being intentional about the objective function and milestones of development of the new enhanced ML model that is ME.

Neuroscience, Machine Learning and Product Management

December 12th, 2023, Esalen

From as far as back as I can remember, I have been curious about knowing and understanding what it means to be human. My very elementary-level presentation on the topic of philosophy and Turing test from 2005 when I was in undergrad is proof. As is my rabbithole into neural networks and bio-mimicry in 2007 in GITAM. I intuited that the language of understanding and explanation would come through computer technology and machine learning specifically. I evaluated pivoting to Neuroscience after joining the most apt place for machine learning study at CMU. I didn’t because it needed me to redo an undergraduate degree. I did end up studying machine learning and eventually building a career centered around it. The third aspect apart from the human brain & machine learning which had my full attention was product management. The principles of Silicon Valley’s hot and popular career path or more straightforwardly art & science of building products came very naturally to me. You make a hypothesis based on observations of reality, test the hypothesis and use innovative ways of testing that to validate or invalidate the hypothesis. To what end? A hypothesis is a way of learning and inching your way to product-market fit (PMF). PMF is where you find flow. It’s presence. Growth of a product is a natural next step and that requires play. Is the play before and after PMF the same? What works before may not work after. You have more freedom before which requires and allows you to take big bets for hypotheses, however, after PMF it requires discipline, precision, forethought to grow and build. PMF is nothing but the moment in time and space that the model fits. Prediction is perfect. PG is when the product is willing and influencing the market. The model leads and the data follows i.e. prediction precedes reality. These are fascinating concepts and schools of thought which I, and I suspect, other humans, approach life.

The Great Breakdown

November 2023, Sublet in Brooklyn, NY

I woke up to a dream of water pipes bursting. I checked my email from Blogspot notifying me that my untouched blogs were going to be permanently deleted. Blogs I had forgotten I had written or existed. They were from 2004. There weren’t many posts. I cringed at my writing and in my heart rolled my eyes at the title of the blog – “The Third Eye”. I was struck by a particular post. It reads like an 18 year old wrote it and I can’t get myself to share it without editing out some very cloying pieces. 

Woke up to a dream about bursting pipes at 4ish am

Rediscovering my old blog at 4:36am

Life comes at you fast but only at the pace you choose. The beginning of 2023 felt like the last season of a dragged out series. I was living the life I had dreamed of and worked hard to bring to fruition – healthy (enough) and wealthy (enough) in NYC,  rich (enough) with friends and family I loved, plenty of avenues for fun, a job that was intellectually stimulating and I was passionate about and most importantly in line with what I had pinned down to my life’s purpose and my mission. I was, however, 37, single and childless. Wanting a loving and equal partner and a family as a byproduct of that was not just a personal desire, a societal expectation or evolutionary in-built, it was a deep knowing of its inevitability. One which I had both challenged and submitted to over the last decade with nothing to show for. I had tried to make it happen, let it happen, wait for it happen and also tried to let go of this desire. Yet I was discontent. And so much like the desperate writer of “the last season of a dragged out series” with too many characters, plot openings and seeking a triumphant and satisfying ending not just for the protagonist but also the audience, I decided to go all in. If nothing, to be able to tell myself that I gave it my all.

The wrinkle with saying “bring it” to life is that it comes at you fast. What followed over the course of 2023 can only be described as a chaotic spiral with me moving at the speed of light. The culmination of which was a breakdown at work in the form that I find most anxiety inducing – a writer’s block – henceforth referred to as The Great Breakdown. 

The Great Breakdown happened hours before I dreamt of pipes bursting and I discovered my prescient blog from 20 years back hoping “I don’t end up as a wreck”. The wreck revealed a pattern. I feared my thoughts and my emotions controlled me. In 2003, I failed all six subjects in the mock tests the school runs to prepare students to write critical 12th grade exams. I was a good student throughout school, in the top 5 of the class easily, even though I never truly gave a fuck about achieving or proving. The school principal had called my parents and told them she couldn’t allow me to write the 12th grade exams lest I bring shame to the school as a failure. My parents were shocked. Unable to tolerate their helplessness and truthfully out of pity, I pulled myself together and rewrote the exams and cleared my exams with distinction. I have often wondered what came over me to have failed all six subjects – it wasn’t out of rebellion or spite. All I can remember is that it felt like a daze and I have since feared losing control over myself like that. Leading up to The Great Beakdown, it felt like the familiar daze I had felt as a teen. For 20 years, I controlled myself until I couldn’t and it all came out as snot-filled emotion.