Collective wisdom

Stumbled upon this page where a lot of learning was collated. Advice from wise men and teachings of great achievers, just dumped in a single paragraph, probably in the hope of fulfilling a decade long hunger in a single days meal.

Even so, here it goes(points separated contextually):

Be brave. Even if you’re not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference.
Don’t allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It’s there for your convenience, not the callers.
Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.
Don’t burn bridges. You’ll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river.
Don’t forget, a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated.
Don’t major in minor things.
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
Don’t spread yourself too thin.
Learn to say no politely and quickly.
Don’t use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved.
Don’t waste time grieving over past mistakes Learn from them and move on.
Every person needs to have their moment in the sun, when they raise their arms in victory, knowing that on this day, at his hour, they were at their very best.
Get your priorities straight. No one ever said on his death bed, ‘Gee, if I’d only spent more time at the office’.
Give people a second chance, but not a third.
Judge your success by the degree that you’re enjoying peace, health and love.
Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly.
Leave everything a little better than you found it.
Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation.
Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life and death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems.
Never cut what can be untied.
Never overestimate your power to change others.
Never underestimate your power to change yourself.
Remember that overnight success usually takes about fifteen years.
Remember that winners do what losers don’t want to do.
Seek opportunity, not security. A boat in harbor is safe, but in time its bottom will rot out.
Spend less time worrying who’s right, more time deciding what’s right.
Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life.
Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
The importance of winning is not what we get from it, but what we become because of it.
When facing a difficult task, act as though it’s impossible to fail.

The mind

One of the most incredibly devious creations we are aware of and know very little about is our own mind. It's a tool on one hand, yet pretends to be who we are. It's wayward mostly, swayed by external circumstances yet absolutely capable of utter stillness.

One needs a lot of practice to know and realize what it wants, how it behaves and to then tame it. There are very few people who can actually lay claim to have tamed it. But for the majority, its a lost cause. And to such an extent that we don't even realize the need to keep a check on it.

Its so powerful that it can create ripples by just thought and yet so weak that the minutest of untoward incident can throw it off balance. It dictates how we feel and how we live yet it is not really the one. Is your mind really you? If you can ask that question, then you'll know it isn't. It's this realization that probably leads the way to know more about who we really are.

So who are we for real?

Quo Vadis

The mind is an organ of inexplicable complexities. It's known to work about a billion times faster at parallel computing than the fastest computing systems at home. And guess what? The mind, doesn't even have a basic parallel computing capability, it's just a super awhsum serial computer as per current understanding.

But humans have some pretty fast ones, called super computers, running at a whopping 16.32 petaflops, or 16 thousand trillion calculations per second!(at the time of writing this.)

Now allow me to clue you in. 1 petaflop is 1 quadrillion(three zeros after trillion, 10^15) floating point operations per SECOND. 1 floating point operation indicates how many mathematical operations, involving decimal fractions, the computer (or microprocessor) can handle.

Some world renowned experts claim the brains power is limitless and cannot be calculated. But the reality remains that eventually, it's just a matter of time before we get there. If and when we do, do you think we'll be able to just plug in that alternative reality that the machines could create? If we did, could we unwind into a plugged in, but virtually alternate reality where we could have our own world with customized reality? That would bring in the much needed faux pas in our imagined universe. Its like the Matrix revisited, except, this one would probably be the one we want.

Some basic research on the internet gave the following information about the human brain.
http://www.ualberta.ca/~chrisw/howfast.html

"About the raw speed of a brain in terms of cycles per second. A human being has about 100 billion brain cells. Although different neurons fire at different speeds, as a rough estimate it is reasonable to estimate that a neuron can fire about once every 5 milliseconds, or about 200 times a second. The number of cells each neuron is connected to also varies, but as a rough estimate it is reasonable to say that each neuron connects to 1000 other neurons- so every time a neuron fires, about 1000 other neurons get information about that firing. If we multiply all this out we get 100 billion neurons X 200 firings per second X 1000 connections per firing = 20 million billion calculations per second. This estimate might easily be off by an order of magnitude- that is, it might be 10 times too high or low."

"The second question was about the storage capacity of the brain. Some people have estimated that the storage capacity of the human brain is functionally infinite- that is, we can essentially always find room to store more information if we want to, so no practical limit exists."

All of this and further speculation eventually brings to forth the question, if this brain thing is doing this and that, storing and processing, what or who exactly is it doing it for? Is it for a purpose in itself or is it a tool for something which is beyond our understanding and comprehension as yet? If it is a purpose in itself, then why do we continuously keep looking for a purpose to everything? Why should everything have a reason? Then again, maybe we are just bits and characters in someones game and this whole world is just a video game where we are simply supposed to live without having to know what is not needed to be known. If so, why this ability in the first place to understand things around us? We might as well just have been animals!

Since we are not, I am just presuming there's something out there or else this all seems like a cruel joke.

Presumptions

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question. -Niels Bohr

We lead a life of preconceived notions where there is absolutely nothing we can ingest using our five senses which can be understood for what it truly is and not because we are conditioned to do so. It is sometimes said by neuroscientists that colours are imagined by our mind because evolution made it inevitable. If there were no colours, we the then primitive sapiens would have probably not survived.

It's also said, that the image we actually see is reversed for a fact and the mind turns it upside down again just so we remain sane. Now imagine if we were to see things as they were actually presented without the mental tricks, the world would turn downside up with no racial biases! It'd just be the lighter or darker side of grey with gravity pushing us up. The sun would go down every morning and rise at night.

Surely, there would be skeptics who'd claim we'll just name everything opposite. But holding that chain of thought, why not implement the same principle as a cure for folks afflicted with say dementia or depression? You could say sunsets were the way to go! The returning tides of the ocean are the best moments of life where light fades away to give way to darkness., which would obviously be the way to go!

Some peace at last. Just to be discarded as soon as your reality kicks in.