CURRENT MISSION

To sublimate inner chaos into something beautiful.

ABOUT ME

A condensed and CS-relevant version: not dangerous, usually behaves within socially-accepted norms. However, tends to get overly easily inspired and passionate about something that he might not fully comprehend (hm, assuming "full comprehension" is practically possible). In those cases, may exhibit socially-unacceptable behavioural patterns.

Also, a cat.

PHILOSOPHY

Let me quote a Zen story (what a cheap way out):
"A man was walking across a plain. A large tiger began to chase him. The man came to a deep chasm. The man looked from the tiger behind him to the sharp rocks that would spell certain death far below him. He spotted a vine descending down the rock face and decided to climb down the vine to escape the tiger. As he lowered himself down the vine he heard a noise above him and saw two tiny mice chewing through the vine. Facing certain death above him from the man eating tiger and painful death on the rocks below him, the man noticed a ripe, red strawberry growing on the cliff face in front of him. The man picked and ate the strawberry and it was the best tasting, juiciest, most savory strawberry he had ever eaten."

"I want to be freed neither from human beings, nor from myself, nor from nature; for all these appear to me the greatest of miracles. Nature, the psyche, and life appear to me like divinity unfolded - and what more could I wish for? [...] I cannot be liberated from anything I do not possess, have not done or experienced. Real liberation becomes possible for me only when I have done all that I was able to do, when I have completely devoted myself to a thing and participated in it to the utmost. [...] A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them." (C. G. Jung)

Maslow's definition of a peak experience:
"Feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placement in time and space with, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject was to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences."

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I hope to help people traveling to/through Lithuania; I am more than willing to host this and other species. Consult your intuition first and/or send me a signal of intent.
Note: now, more than half of the year in Glasgow; might be able to host.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Hosted twice and surfed a few couches in the summer.

Interests

Recent intra-psyche happenings: feeling of (a need for) transcendence (layers (reality layer; meta), fractals); utter relativism (e.g. in the context of validity of perceptions / epistemology / objective understanding and such). A human being's ability to jump up and down the layers of abstractness / reality very quickly (e.g. something involving abstract/generalization (phenomenology / problems of universal understanding / etc.) -> down to awareness of the physical/sociological context in which this thought process is taking place -> then back up (down?); and so on).

Right brain-related: reading books, writing (or attempting to), music (listening), films (from Trier to Tarkovsky, Bergman to Forster) and filmmaking (watch and get inspired by the story behind "Primer"), one's psychological relation to the Whole, the phenomenon of self-awareness (that, in my view, creates a paradox that can be felt/visualized as a chain of recursive reflexion layers that might be seen as a function approaching infinity; infinity, in my view, is a direct symptom of a paradox; so there's a problem with consciousness in general ("problem" from our point of perception/reference, of course)). Strange loops and related.

Left brain-related: programming, popscience-level astrophysics and science quirks (everything from Hawking radiation to single electron interference), neuroscience.

Mixed: philosophy (metaphysics / ontology / phenomenology / epistemology / philosophy of mind / Other / Self), psychology, thought and feeling. Talking and then realizing that this is one of those talks that leave you close to experiencing some kind of a catharsis. Unexpected, thus genuine.

• cats
• writing
• books
• film making
• walking
• movies
• reading
• traveling
• music
• hiking
• divinity
• neuroscience
• psychology
• science
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

One of my personal favorite films is "Stalker" (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky. A few of the films I enjoy watching could be: "21 Grams", "The Great Dictator", "Stranger than Fiction", films by Sharunas Bartas, films by Kusturica ("Life Is a Miracle"!), "Dead Poets Society" and "Good Will Hunting", "12 Angry Men" and its really good remake "12" (Nikita Mikhalkov); "25th Hour"; "Matrix" (alas, only the first one). I hope to delve further into Lynch and watch more of Jodorowsky (trance-like meditation while high on "El Topo").

Everything made by Hayao Miyazaki.

Good anime.

Books by Franz Kafka ("The Castle", "The Process", "Metamorphosis"), Irvine Welsh, Paul Bowles ("The Sheltering Sky"), Albert Camus ("The Stranger"); "Master and Margarita"; Douglas Coupland; "Alchemist". Hopefully, "An Eternal Golden Braid" soon.

TED.com, Everything2.com and Wikipedia, of course.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Mountains, hiking: limitless fog and abyss. Walking on a rail from somewhere to the house where you stay - late at night because the train driver had thrown you and your fellows out. (That was a summer when I felt free.)

Teach, Learn, Share

I enjoy long talks about anything from sharing crazy psychological constructs in our heads to developing ideas, thinking and feeling in silence.

Have some experience in programming, know some stuff in psychology (not very much).

Countries I’ve Visited

Albania, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Denmark, Lithuania, United Kingdom

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