Apr

25

Dear Muskaan,

Soon, in a couple of months, you would step out of your teen years. Your daddy is very happy to find you have worked at configuring a fine personage. One has written to you a few years ago, a great mind works well in a healthy body & the two are held together well by a fine personality. While you are pursuing varied extra-curricular activities that range from numeracy skills to verbal to spatial I take note of the fact that you are moving forward in the Rubik’s cube championship in moving to the National round. Heartiest congratulations! The cube puzzle is a test of pattern memorisation, mind-body co-ordination and highest levels of focus! All three are a matter of practise. If possible, for preparing for the national round try to pick up a cube that resembles closest the one provided to you at the contest and buy several pieces of the same and set them up for different levels of smoothness and practise across all of them. This will provide you the familiarity with any cube piece you may get to work with at the National Round!

 
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One draws immense satisfaction that you have worked at developing a vocabulary that is talked about much amongst your peers. Today amongst a few things daddy would like to first share with you how a powerful vocabulary can be delivered with unprecedented impact. Daddy has learnt from his Gurus those who are champions are economical in their movements & speech, on one hand. On the other it’s a well- known and widely known truth that body language is what brings impact to frugal speech. A rich vocabulary empowers you to express the closest hue of the most relevant emotion for the moment. The impact is brought in by emoting your words. I suspect, body language drives communications deeper for two reasons:

1. Mind processes things at the subconscious level much faster

2. Body language actions travel at the speed of light & reach faster than your speech that can travel only at the speed of sound.

In any Acting 101 class it is taught early to students of acting that if body language of physical actions accompanying speech are signalled out before the words are let out the acting becomes way more real. Likely the two facts enumerated above make this happen.

While there are a few good books always on the market on explaining body language, a fine personage that is always a student will continue to learn by constantly being observant. There are three perspectives from which any observation can be made as far as body language is concerned. To observe which physical expressions or signals of yours worked well in achieving your communication goals and which did not is one. To observe how others’ body language triggers positive & negative feelings in you is as good. To observe how one another impacts with her body language yet another even better. The best way is however none of these three. If you can train yourself to observe yourself as a third person in your interactions with any other person you will begin to minimize the self or ego and maximise the objective mind in you.

Ego is a construct nature built into all beings to give them a sense of identity so as they can practise with greater seriousness self-preservation, self-propagation & self-expression. One cannot thus and should not be ego-less. The problems of most relationships are a far heightened sense of self, i.e. an extra-ordinarily larger than required ego. All of us know what is wrong with most things. Few of us get the opportunity to learn from others or by self-deduction how to overcome the wrongs. One good way to minimize the self, down to only the necessary level is to be observing the self from another’s point of view at all points of time.

A heightened sense of the self or a larger than required amount of ego is also the origin of all passions or passive emotions. The switches that world can trigger within one make one easier to be manipulated into digressive emotions. To suffer pain & fear or to be taken over by lust or anger are all due to this larger than required ego.

When the ego is huge, the sense of entitlements is huge. In this world those living with a sense of entitlements undergo most denials! The switches of an ultra-sensitive person with higher sense of entitlements are dangling out in the open. Anyone can click those switches. Hide & fade away your switches. This can be done only by fading and minimizing “you” to just the required humble level!

So I urge you to think about this know-how that daddy just shared on how to dilute the self by containing the ego through always be observant of the self in third person. Such a personage is also able to generate feedback ahead of what the world will tell you about your “self”. You will be a step ahead then! Humility is one of the big outcomes of ego-reduction & it is the world’s most powerful currency that works even when money fails! It helps you provide a continued supply of put options that the world writes to you at your own follies! The other equally important outcome is annihilating the sense of entitlements. You are the daughter of a capitalist & one knows you have learnt today the communist ideas of entitlements make the whole life and not just economics, a paralysis.

Emotions are not at all bad. They are necessary. But the problem with emotions is only when we get driven by them, due to this ego, instead of driving our own motions / petitions / proposals / pitches to the rest of the world. You must not by any chance understand that daddy is an anti-emotion robot. No way! Emotions drive relationships & all engagement in human society. Yet one must ride the horses of emotions and not be dragged by them into a directionless whirl-wind of a life. However, any energies you draw from your well thought out principles for life & values are emotions rising from within and they will make you compassionate, honest, and sincere & therefore a happy & successful person. Let them prevail. The rest need to be left outside like you would leave your shoes.

Having discussed briefly emotions & how to emote, daddy has stated in passing that you would be a happier person in doing these effectively. Yet, the essence of life is not happiness, it is really how each will overcome suffering. Pain is guaranteed to each in some or the other form in some or the other intensity at all points of life yet suffering is optional. Those who can train them to choose to not suffer and handle pain really only as a signal requiring one to bring change are the ones who are successful at whatever they could choose to pursue in life. Pursuit of happiness is a chimera. The real pursuit of evolving as a human being is to be able to minimize suffering. Those who choose to not suffer are the ones who are happy. Else happiness becomes contingent on outcome of events and quality of objects & behaviour of other people. To have your locus of control right within yourself it’s important you switch your perspective today and now that the pursuit worth undertaking for this life is to minimize suffering. Daddy awaits to realize in the near future his daughter has become one of the strongest people, he has known, who chooses not to suffer!

Change is the only constant in the world we live in. A transitory, impermanent universe of objects, processes, people & ideas is what our world is. We have a finite beginning & a finite end. Our body continuously keeps changing and it can be proven that in approximately seven years every single atom in our bodies is new. So that brings to this concluding note for now, your body is not you. Your body is one of the key devices given to you by nature. You are an infinitely more potent force than can be seen, heard or perceived. So, while you must take care of this very important device your body, you have to be confident as this body changes over time that the real you is an infinitely more sophisticated and capable construct.

Today the world is getting swept by ideas of the internet of all things and the coming wave of artificial intelligence. There is excitement as well as fear that the coming AI Robotic age may destroy us humans. Elon Musk has often been tweeting about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. You however might agree with me the term Artificial Intelligence itself is ultra-egoistic. No one can prove if we the humans are not already one layer of Artificial Intelligence brought into being by a higher degree intelligence that is often called God?! Perhaps AI should be renamed to Derived Intelligence? Irrespective, of the nomenclature, the fears are uncalled for. Perhaps mankind will learn to emote well enough with the coming AI Driven Robots & turn them emotional when required (wink, wink).

All I would tell you for now, fear again originates from a sense of entitlements and too much attachment to the idea of the self. The way evolution of species has propagated so far the best would survive. If AI is going to produce entities driving emotions and not driven by emotions then daddy has rested a compelling case on your desk now, emote better my daughter than getting emotional! You will then certainly be riding well through the age of AI & Robots also & until then more effectively with mere humans! Wink! Wink!

Proudly yours,

Daddy


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