I'd like to talk about three books that I've read in the past few months that interested me. The first book "The Power of Now" was special. It taught me about my mind. It is funny how the previous sentence seems so funny. How can a you learn about your mind? I think therefore I am. Right?
A monk goes to a great sage with the complaint, "Sir, my mind is troubled. Help me" to which the sage replies "Alright, bring me your mind I'll cure it." The monk says "But I'm not able to find it!".
It is like looking for a horse while riding it yourself.
The next book is "The Tao of Physics". I first tried reading this book in second year. When I started out, I was prejudiced. I did not like it. I found an online copy of it a month ago and read it. It was pretty intense. A lot of it made sense. Some of it didn't.
The third book was "Fooled by Randomness". When I asked Nishkarsh about the book, he gave me a lengthy description during which I caught the words "stock market", which put me off. That was in third year. By the end of final year I had read most of the chapters in the book albeit in a discontinuous fashion. Turned out to be very interesting.
During the TedX talk in Kundapur, there was a novelist who gave a speech titled "connect the dots" or something to that effect. It was pretty boring.
I hope I do a better job here trying to connect them.
"Fooled by randomness" in a nutshell can be summed up in the crisp quote "Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen". That was by Einstein. The truth is that the world is complex. I know that is a platitude, but it has to be said. In order to make sense of it all, our brain works overtime. Calculating, judging , comparing. In the process, our minds get prejudiced. We tend to look for patterns in our environment and make decisions based on what has been learnt previously. I'm talking in a very general sense, "Fooled by Randomness" is specific to stock markets. The gist of it is that an event is always judged on your experience from a prior event. Both seem to be the same though they may or may not be related. Bull and Bear markets are characterized based on past events. Statisticians and market analysts mainly use these, i.e, knowledge of prior market behavior in certain circumstances, to predict future trends.
"Tao of Physics" aims to bring to light the string parallels between eastern mysticism and modern physics. Specifically, I'd like to talk about the concept of "Maya" because it has so much in common with what was spoken of in the previous paragraph. "Maya" literally is illusion or in more severe terms, delusion. I don't want to get into philosophy, it can get quite tedious because I don't know much and one can argue endlessly and not reach a conclusion. Thats the beauty of it, the more you ponder, the more profoundly you doubt what you know because in the end what you thought you knew sounds like rubbish. Thats a story for another day. Maya is taking something to be what it is not. We tend to see body, mind and world around us as separate, individual entities . Advaita philosophy says that the three are the same. We perceive the world through our senses. Our senses create a self that is the ego which gives us a sense of separation from "the world out there". In order to make sense of events our mind divides time and space. Space into objects and time to understand relationships between events, to understand cause and effect. This division of something that is in essence indivisible is what creates "Maya". What all this mumbo jumbo means is that our mind "see's" "things" in a relative sense. Everything exists in duals. Thin-fat, beauty-ugliness etc. The mind cannot "see" beyond relative comparisons. It just can't. Try and think of something ( by this, I mean an adjective) that does not have an opposite.
The same line of thought runs through Taoism,Buddhism,Sufi's and all the Eastern Mystic schools ,although with some minor modifications. The more I read the book, the more I saw how it has so much in common with "Fooled by Randomness". Two unrelated authors speaking on seemingly diverse topics,one of them a pragmatic, money minded trader and the other a philosopher and physicist.Yet,the similarities are striking.Or am I just reading too much into it?
Lesson learnt, go with the flow, use intuition, rely on your mind when required but not all the time. Everything is not what it seems. It's what the mind makes of it.