Philosophy and Poetry – Think, Know, Experience Mind & Life.
Fr. Adesh
Adesh Acharya is a writer and content creator. His expertise lies on philosophical self-improvement content and poetry. He is on a Life & Mind Exploration.
Something significant is about to take place in my life in 21 days, and I am both excited and nervous about it. And I am not in control of those two states. All I know is that when I imagine the future going as per my desires, I get excited and when I don’t see it going as I want, I get nervous.
When I am excited, those 21 days seem long. ‘There’s a lot that can happen in 21 days. Time and life changes quick. I am ready but time is long. I hope something wrong doesn’t happen,’ I say to myself. I then become nervous.
On the other hand, 21 days seem short when I am nervous. ‘Nothing substantial happens in 21 days. Everything takes time. Change is slow. It is here and I am not prepared,’ I tell myself. I then become even more nervous.
From this perspective, time seems to move slow when we want something to happen fast and time seems to move fast when we want something to happen slow.
But there’s another perspective to all this. Something in the line of what Einstein said explaining relativity:
Scrolling through Raymond Carver’s poetry collection, I came across a poem titled ‘In the Year 2020.’
As a 21st century man filled with fear and confusion, I got excited at the prospect of having discovered quality perspective on the future from one of the better literary minds of the 20th century.
‘Now I will have a solid and unique perspective on modern technologies and their implications. I can now boast about AI on Medium and shock everyone,’ I said to myself and began reading.
But what I read caught me off guard. The only technology or its implications mentioned in the poem is a faucet — that too as an analogy.
‘How can it be possible? How can someone write about 2020 without any mention of technology?’ I gasped and read again.
No, Nothing about technology!
Instead, his 2020 is about someone from the 20th century getting old by then. Carver talks about old age, friends, friendship, memories, love, legacy — things human! All he talks about is human life and human relationships. That’s all!
HIS POEM IS ABOUT HUMAN LIFE. IT HAS HUMANS AT ITS CENTER!
‘Damn!’ I say to myself.
Carver’s poem reminded me that we (poets or normal people) no longer place ourselves at the center. We have already given control away to technologies. They have become the focal point of our conversations, poems, and stories. All we now do is keep technologies at the center of everything. Phones, apps, maps, followers, shares, chargers, AI, airplanes, roads, buildings, towers, systems — that’s all we talk and think about these days. Everything revolves around them today!
Everything should have revolved around us, our relationships and life. But that’s just a byproduct of technology these days. No wonder we are scared and confused! No wonder we piss our pants about AI!’
‘Now I have a solid and unique perspective on modern technologies and their implications. I can now boast about AI on Medium and shock everyone,’ I say to myself and write this.
When I wrote Mental Discipline Is A Ceaseless Process last August, I promised myself I wouldn’t allow internal chaos to confuse and destroy me. I said I would always remember that the workings of the mind are complicated and I need to be on the constant lookout and endeavor if I am to make my life more tolerable and comfortable.
Yet, countless times over the past six months, I have trembled, feared, got uncomfortable, and have found mind and life to be intolerable — not for once remembering the promise I made to myself!
I forget the thing I invent myself
I forget the lessons I teach myself
No wonder I lost myself!
But this morning, it came back. The idea of Mental Discipline came back! Not through a sudden or miraculous solution, as the mind sometimes produces. It came while I was reading Goethe’s maxims
…False, irrelevant, and futile ideas may arise in ourselves and others, or find their way into us from without. Let us persist in the effort to remove them as far as we can, by plain and honest purpose — Maxim 317.
And then, BAM! The lesson I taught myself last August came back:
false ideas, persistence, effort, removal were the keywords for me when I realized and wrote that Mental Discipline was a ceaseless process.
I had once written Mental Discipline and put it as my phone wallpaper, but it was no longer there when I needed it the most.
It has to be said right now that ideas in phone wallpapers evolve, develop and vanish. I may have stopped using the wallpaper with Mental Discipline written on it, or may have removed the text when I must have thought the idea was permanent in me. I will come back to this whole thing in a while.
For now, I want to know why the ideas I need are elusive.
Is it because there are too many ideas that I think are important and I get confused? OR,
Because all ideas have their appropriate time and place. And the time and place of the mental discipline idea hadn’t come until this morning?
If it is the first case, I need to do something with my ideas. I need to be clear about the value and importance of each of my ideas and find a way to manage them. Like by using phone wallpapers better. I will also need to know which ideas are of general importance and which of particular. I need to master my ideas. This makes me a conscious agency with a strong will.
While it may seem like a style-statement of a 21st century wannabe thinker who has come to write here right after reading Socrates’ quotes, it isn’t!
And I am going to give you some evidence:
I was sure the bus would fall off the cliff. It didn’t.
I was sure the airplane would crash that day. It didn’t!
I was sure someone at home had died that day. No one did!
I was sure I had killed someone with my car that day. I hadn’t(?)
I was sure I would get rejected on that application. I didn’t!
I was sure I would get that fellowship. I didn’t!
I was sure that girl liked me. She didn’t!
I was sure the other girl didn’t care about me. She did!
Although I have written ‘I was sure’ up there, I was actually CONVINCED about all those things. C-O-N-V-I-N-C-E-D.
I was convinced the bus would crash, and I took my ID out from my bag and almost threw it out of the bus window that day — until something else intervened! (I will come to that something else in a while.)
All those ‘sure’ up there are based on my knowledge of myself or the world at some time and place. Those knowledge came to me through my thoughts. I even called them ‘gut-feelings’. But all of them turned out to be false. That’s why I say:
The only thing I know now is that I know nothing and
SOME THOUGHTS ARE USELESS. Garbage.
The examples given above had immediate outcomes, that’s why it was easy for me to validate their truth. I fall off my chair wondering how many of those knowledge and thoughts I have been breeding inside me whose outcomes take time to come.
Here I have to undertake a difficult task:
While I say some thoughts are useless, I will try to understand thoughts through thoughts.
Another family wedding reception party. Another night of heavy drinking and conversations with people I wouldn’t even look into the eye for more than a second on a normal day. Another morning filled with enormous guilt and physical weakness!
I am making weird sounds every time my mind gets flashes from last night, which my wife says is me cringing on myself.
Why, Adesh, why?
Why do I drink, when I know it hurts the next morning?
At first glance, things seem something like this:
I don’t have friends so whichever party I go to is a family one. Which means, it is about obligations.
Obligations mean it is something I do not want to do. I do not want to go to such parties because I do not want to socialize. I do not want to meet my extended family members.
Yet, obligations mean I have to go, despite my lack of interest! Which means I need to find a way to make it tolerable and manageable. (I also need to find a reason to tell myself I am beyond obligations and I am doing it out of my free will.)
And what do I lure myself with?
Alcohol!
It becomes the thing that makes the visit tolerable. It becomes the thing that makes me alright.
I drink even though it hurts the next day because I have to make obligatory family parties tolerable for me. And alcohol makes that happen!
Or so I thought before writing this. Because from a slightly different glance, things seem something like this:
If I go to parties for obligations only, why the hell don’t I stay for half-an-hour and leave. I mean, that would be perfect, wouldn’t it? Obligationsdone✔ ️Alcohol none❌
But I don’t do that, do I?
In fact, the thought of such an act makes me feel I am missing out on something big. It’s like everyone’s playing outside and I am forced to sleep in my bed with a fever.
And then I discover another reason I go to such parties. A reason that is in contrast to the reason I thought I drank alcohol at such parties:
As I read H.G. Wells’ A Short History Of The World this morning, a particular section grabbed my attention and made me draw correlations with our modern times.
In the 12th chapter Primitive Thought, he speculates how power and religion must have sprung in primitive times:
What Wells has tried to say in this is that the primitive men were unable to form sound judgment on the important things that were happening around them. Those things spanned from the availability of their foods to illness and death. Although they tried to make guesses, they weren’t able to discover the proper cause-effect. This made them prone to fear and panic.
It was then that the older and steadier minds among them took lead and began advising, teaching and eventually commanding the multitudes. Those leaders were priests, which then gave birth to religion.
The Correlation
I am the proof that our modern time with computers, internet and now Artificial Intelligence, Space-Travels, Medical science, etc. is taking us into the great unknown which is making us fearful and anxious.
If the information overload — which has given us more confusion than wisdom — was not enough, the thought of machines taking our jobs, megalomaniacs stepping into moons, diseases taking our lives, have guaranteed almost nothing as we are unable to form sound judgment on what will happen tomorrow, let alone in five years time. We are confused about our livelihood and health — important things — just like the primitive men. The only thing that has changed is the tools. For example, anxiety about the availability of foods has been replaced by anxiety about the quality of foods. And in some places, quantity of it.
Although we try to make guesses, we aren’t being able to discover the proper cause-effect of all this. A quick scroll on Medium will prove this. This has made us fearful.
Once again, as per Wells’ narrative, this problem in primitive days led to older and steadier minds among them to take lead in advising, teaching and eventually commanding the multitudes. Those leaders then became priests, which then gave birth to religion.
Although the tools and mediums have changed today, we have seen an uprising of religious and spiritual pursuits on a global scale. We saw that in the mid 20th century due to bombs and we see that today due to computers, AIs, medicine, as mentioned above. The 20th century crisis had limited sources of threat from what we have today.
But a big part of us isn’t satisfied with the religious and spiritual doctrines that have its roots in spears and stones. We are today dealing with machines that threaten to be more intelligent than us. The ones that threaten to even eradicate us! We do have the option of deeming them ‘devil’ and ‘monsters’, otherwise those teachings don’t touch us in the regions we want to be touched.
If history does indeed repeat itself, what that leaves us with is to identify the older and steadier minds among us that are taking lead. Who are advising, teaching and commanding the multitudes.
In the ancient times, those leaders were called priests who gave birth to religion as we know today. Who is doing that today and what new religion is being formed from all this? Should we not be skeptical of what forms from all this?
Once again, if history repeats, they are here. They have to be here by now. So, Who are they? Is it me? Is it you? Is it us? Or is it a billionaire?
I just saw a school bully of mine in my dream. He was a powerful person waving a flag at a big event of which I was a mere spectator. Although the crowd booed him, he seemed to care not. He was as confident and cocky as I remember him to be all those years ago.
I woke up a few minutes earlier feeling bad. I am in my bed. I have recalled the dream and analyzed it. It is midnight. I had just fallen asleep.
At first, I couldn’t stand the thought of him or any other bully of mine being a successful or powerful person in society. And then I asked myself if he or any other bully of mine were successful or powerful yet. The answer was no.
During that questioning, I noticed that I didn’t seem to care if they were successful or powerful in ‘my’ country Nepal. In fact, it felt natural. ‘What else would they be?’
But I couldn’t stand the idea of them being successful or powerful in the world.
‘That would be unjust!’ I thought.
The biggest change in me in the last couple of years has been my disgust towards ‘my’ country Nepal. In fact, I am disgusted by the concept of nation-states itself. But Nepal is the cause, so I hold the darkest and deepest disgust towards it!
I can’t confirm the amount of influence the bullies have had on my eventual disgust towards Nepal — which is made up of Nepalese — but I can sense some.
I then asked myself if any bully of mine was successful or powerful in the world stage. I found none.
I then asked myself if any bully of mine could be successful or powerful in the world stage. ‘NO WAY!’ I laughed.
I then asked myself if any bully of mine could be successful or powerful in the areas of my concern like literature, art, philosophy, science?
‘NO Fucking WAY! They are light-years away from all this,’ I laughed louder.
I felt glad and satisfied.
And then I asked myself if any Nepalese was successful or powerful in the world stage yet. No was the answer.
‘There is justice after all!’ I said to myself and wrote this.
Now I will try to sleep.
But I am startled by the question I have asked myself just now:
Did I subconsciously choose the field I thought would keep me the furthest away from my bullies?
I can’t confirm the amount of influence the bullies have had on my eventual choice of field — writing — but I can sense some.
I have no idea how universe functions on these things, but, what I discovered once was:
When I want something, my mind conspires in helping me to *not* achieve it.
Take for example when I woke up early one morning and said to myself that I wanted to live and die as a writer. Full Stop.
It was okay for a couple of hours, but after that…my mind began its functions:
‘Writers are dead.’
‘There’s no point being a writer.’
‘You’re not living in the 20th century! Now, we have videos. Nobody writes.’
‘Only the people who can’t be billionaires become writers.’
These are just a few specimens. Not that I was scared from all this, the intensity was such that I was in fact, traumatized. Still am. I no longer want to be a writer. Which obviously means, my mind keeps showing me the benefits of being one:
‘Writers are alive.’
‘Life is all about being a writer.’
‘You’re not living in the 20th century! This is the best time for writers. Look at the platforms!’
‘Only the people who can’t write become billionaires.’
In my childhoodplays, I imagined (created) a perfect sportsman with a perfect new name, gave him a perfect look and personality and put him into the team I liked. I then simulated tournament(s) in my head. The team with the sportsman obviously won everything. And the sportsman obviously became the player of the tournament. It didn’t matter if the sport was cricket, football, basketball or WWE.
It was fun! The player reflected my inner urge to be the best. To be perfect. To be a hero. Living a perfect life for a change was fun.
But when I tried to recreate that type of storyline this morning, I got bored.
‘What’s fun about having a player who always performs. Who is flawless. And who – even when he goes through a bad phase – will surely end up winning?’ I asked myself.
‘Isn’t it too predictable. Too perfect. Boring. Dead?’
Like playing a game with cheat codes. Or, playing an easy game.
And then I thought of something else I have started to find too predictable, perfect, boring and dead:
MOVIES!
Of course, not all movies. I am talking about mainstream, popular, franchise, movies. I can’t stand them anymore. Especially Hollywood, Bollywood and all that shit. Ones with HUGE budgets and huge Superstars, Megastars and all that!
If you understand the types of movies I am talking about, you would surely know that I am also talking about heroism in those movies.
Aren’t the Mega/Superstars ethically and morally flawless? (Yes, even the ‘bad-guy-protagonist’ is shown stylish, sexy, hot, whatever) And even when they go through bad phases, aren’t we sure that they will surely end up winning?
Yes, there are aberrations, but that’s not the point here.
The point is: I now find perfection boring. No wonder I feel dull and get bored when I imagine my future self with everything I desire today!
Life is not perfect and that’s what makes it fun. That’s what makes it beautiful and live-worthy:
To overcome the next challenge. Decode the next hint. Solve the next problem. Enjoy the meal with your loved ones after the entire day of separation. To be generous towards each other, knowing that we will all die one day.
Think what would happen if life was perfect. If life threw no challenges at you. If it had no puzzles, no problems, no separations. What if life had no death?
Living would be like playing a game with cheat codes. It would be like watching a tournament in which a team won’t lose a game (Arsenal playing in Nepali football league, perhaps?). Its best player scores a hattrick every time. Like watching a popular Bollywood movie. It would be dull and boring.
The Perfect Ones
But there are people who would prefer that. In fact, those people must find perfection fun and colorful. I used to find it non-dull all those years ago! When I simulated perfect sportsmen and enjoyed Shah Rukh Khan movies. I am obviously not the same person as my childhood self. It means there is a difference between such people. There’s a difference between the childhood me and today’s me.
In my personal case, I can clearly see the reasons behind the difference. One is age. Obviously. But I see many people my age still enjoy those movies. So, it must be something else. And what else but the fact that, a decade ago, I decided to go deep. I decided to explore dense Literature and Philosophy. And my life has never been the same. I have never enjoyed perfect movies, perfect games and perfect beings since. I haven’t tried to be perfect since. Although there have been sporadic desires to be one.
With my example, it would mean that perfection wasn’t dull until I experienced true reality. Colorful reality. Or deep reality. stupid reality. Or worthless reality. Whatever you would like to call it. I will call it depth.
Those who go deep, don’t care about being perfect. They no longer see anything perfect. Perfection becomes a charade for them. A show. A pretension. A shameful effort of superficial people.
Those who can enjoy perfection, must be all that: Show-off, Pretentious, Superficial.
It’s not that they must have never seen the depth. In fact, they maybe deeper than me. It might just be that they are too weak to let go of their superficial desires – their Kingly, Godly, general desires.
You can locate them:
They are the ones trying life-extension techniques, building perfect technologies, enjoying being called kings, making heroic movies. For them surviving is clearly more important than living. Being is more important than feeling. Death concerns them more than life.
Readers are doubtful types of people. Writers even more so.
What can we do when we are doubtful whether we should continue our search for more meaning and knowledge when the majority of the world seems to be doing fine with their food and drink?
What can we do when we are stifled by the thoughts that tell us that the words we type with passion, expressing hours of hard-thought wisdom might actually end up being read by no one apart from you and your computer?
I think I have found a solution:
Fill the working room with book smell!
Old book smell, new book smell, all sorts of book smell. Paper smell. Books. Books. Books. Book Smells.
On one hand they will remind us that the meaning, knowledge and wisdom we crave are real things with real presence and not random abstract stuff inside our heads to be suppressed by food and drink. One might tell you that the thoughts you have and talk are nothing, but what when you hand them a bulky physical thing? Are they still nothing?
And on the other hand, they will remind us that we are not alone in the thing that we are doing. If the smell is a mixture of old and new books, it will perfectly remind us of the permanence of meaning, knowledge and wisdom in human affairs. While old book smell will remind us of a glorious human past where knowledge not only freed but also evolved humans, new book smell will remind us that such search still matters and exists. It may matter to fewer people, but it still does. And who knows your writing can be the flame that ignites half of the world with a desire to know and be profound?!
You might question the need for written texts and books to ignite half the world.
‘I can do it with my podcast and YouTube videos,’ you might smirk. ‘I can fill my room with microphone smells.’
But, if birds could fly without wings, we would see birds flying without wings!
Even if all the books are about cookery and wine, they will still help to show us that fundamental things such as foods and drinks can be thought about deeply to be stored in books. Even those things can be dealt with wisely.
This should allow us to continue our search for more meaning and knowledge.
This should allow us to write words with passion, expressing hours of hard-thought wisdom.
Smoking leads to disease and disability and harms nearly every organ of the body.
Smoking causes cancer, heart disease, stroke, lung diseases, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis. Smoking also increases risk for tuberculosis, certain eye diseases, and problems of the immune system, including rheumatoid arthritis.
But I have persisted with smoking. Despite knowing the risks. I have persisted with smoking solely to deal with my thoughts and emotions.
‘I’ll rather die than deal with this shit,’ I have said to myself on many occasions.
Let’s say, I sacrificed my body for the mind
Or
So I thought!
Until
A few days ago, I realized that I was actually destroying both my mind and my body.
Last night I watched an Indian movie in which a reputed medical institution deceives couples with fertility issues by making them believe that the sperm is of the husband, while they actually use those of other people.
That took me to a pessimistic void — Which amazingly made me calm and which, I found to be beautiful!
HOW AND WHY DID I GET THERE?
It is not about whether the issue presented by the movie is prevalent and accurate. It’s not about the movie! It’s not related to anything personal either.
As I sat in my bed with my wife watching the movie, I thought of every single institution that must be doing some form of deception. Then I generalized and saw every single institution as deceptive in some ways. Then I generalized further and saw the entire human race as deceptive and cruel.
That view…that view of the human species as deceptive and cruel took me to that pessimistic void!
And then I was calm. I felt good. It was beautiful!
Humanity and all its affairs appeared as a giant South-Parkan turd.
I saw no beauty in any achievement of ours. I saw no charm in any glory of ours. I saw no value in anything human. The only beauty was in that deceptive view of humanity.
I then paused the movie and said to my wife (which annoyed her of course)—
‘Looking at how deception is trending these days — from government and companies to people around us — I wonder if there will come a day when anyone who is even slightly conscious will get disgusted beyond repair, pessimistic beyond hope and will start living life just for the sake of living! Without any values to live-for, without any beauty to pursue, like playing a mundane mobile game. You are just living to live. To pass time. To die! Nothing excites you. Nothing impresses you. Nothing deceives you. ’
I said that, she thought for a while and said something.
I fell asleep with that beautiful pessimistic void inside me. No values. No excitement. No deceptions. No care. No anxiety!
This is not a religious thing, it is psychological. It is about our mind!
I am not a religious person. I am not a theist. I am not even an atheist. If anything, I am a person who has gone full UG on things —who has denied every system of thought and deleted all reverence from me. Which makes me a person whothinks that not enough has been known about the mind to know higher truths and who likes to find his own truth and reality his own way. This probably makes me an explorer. A mind and self explorer if you want to be precise.
But I have grown up in a Hindu family around Hindu myths, gods, stories, narratives, spirituality and philosophy. Which equips me with certain information on what lies within this religious system.
I am currently into mind and self exploration which takes me into the components of mind and their functions. I dig through my past and my present to see what I am all about and what I can make of myself.
While into this process, I observed something about the Hindu trinity that finally made them relevant and significant for me. It was their basic and commonly consented definition and description that gave me the idea of using them for my exploration and made me hypothesize that they may have actually been created not for worship but for mental exploration and idea programming. But I don’t want to get into whether they created us or we created them debate here! I also do not want to get into the history of the religion, it’s various sects and all that.
All I am concerned about is on using their basic description and definition for mind exploration and experimentation.
Before I get into how I think we can use them for creating new us and destroying the old, let me share a few things I have discovered as of now and how I got here:
The best way for us to see ourselves is through our desires.
Desires — apart from basic ones — are ideas. We create names and concepts, identify with them, get shaped by our environment, mix them all up and project basic desires into ideas. Eg. basic sexual urge turns into fascinating choices and preferences.
We can program our non-basic desires ourselves. That is, we can delete or modify old ones and create new ones. This is idea programming.
This means, we can create new versions of ourselves by modifying and experimenting with our desires.
We can use the Hindu triad for such a task.
This is how idea programming works:
You identify the prevalent idea
You identify its history and components
You design a new idea
You destroy the old idea
You persevere with the new idea until it is time to move on
It can be generalized in this way:
Identification
Design
Destruction
Preservation
Now, into the general and common definition and description of the Trinity.
Vishnu: Preserver and protector. A personification of preserving power. Calm, Relaxed.
2. Brahma: Creator. A personification of creative power. Restless, Innovative.
3.Shiva: Destroyer. A personification of destruction, reproduction, change. Meditative, Aggressive.
Let’s add them all up:
Identify: Desires that exist in you at present. The desires currently preserved. Enjoyed. Desires that are there. Just in themselves. Not as good and bad. To do this, you need to dig into your past, observe your present, notice everything that excites or frustrates you. You have to list them all down. Generalize them. Shove them into categories. Understand why they might be there. Understand their cause and effect. In simple words, you need to know the things you want and not want; desire and not desire; like and dislike. You need to know the identity you attach yourself to. You become Vishnu to do all this. Accept things as they are in order to know them and enjoy them. Approaching them with good/bad will make them elusive. Just be them. Preserve them. See them. You need to be calm and unimaginative in all this. Be Calm and Relaxed.
Design: Desires that you would want in you. At this phase, you should be imaginative and creative. Think and feel what you would want to become. What you would want in you. Judge your pre-existing desires. List the desires you want in you. Generalize them. Shove them into categories. Understand why you want them there. Understand their cause and effect. In simple words, you need to know the things you now want and not want; desire and not desire; like and dislike. You have created a new idea! You become Brahma to do all this. Don’t accept anything until you are fully convinced. Keep searching, keep designing. Until you reach the sweetest of spot. Once again, you need to be extremely imaginative and creative in all this. BeRestless and Innovative.
Destroy: Desires that you would want modified or destroyed. After you have identified the existing desires and designed the future desires, it is time to destroy the old ones. Destroy the old ideas. Destroy the old you. You need to operate at the emotional level for this. Like a surgeon. Like your own surgeon. You got to be able to feel things. You need to be able to suppress. You need to be able to ignore. In simple words, you need to get rid of all emotional residue of the old you. Get rid of all ideas of the old you. You become Shiva to do all this. Be savage. Be detached. Be both Meditative and Aggressive.
REPEAT.
Q: But how do you actually use them?
A: Remember their basic definition, description and characteristics and use their images as symbols. Place their image in your phone or computer wallpaper as per your phase.
You can modify the image as per your requirement. You can use symbols and metaphors as per your need. THIS IS HOW THEIR IMAGES HAVE BEEN MODIFIED AND PLAYED WITH FOR CENTURIES, ANYWAYS!
As a kid, I didn’t have access to friends outside school and I wasn’t too friendly with my family members. This meant I had only myself to bond and play with.
My self-bond and self-play included various forms of imaginary fantasies, stories, and games — expressed through various parts of my body and books around me.
It is in light of the latter that I want to share an idea here.
So, How did I express imaginary fantasies, stories, and games through books?
A drizzle,
Under a metallic roof.
Surrounded by,
leaves dancing to an unadulterated tune
Real ones!
Cool breeze…literally
Not contaminated by globules of global fetish
bulbs…too far away.
What else does one need?
While you’re there
Just while you stare
you are not,
A desiring clockwork.
A small light in these dark caves,
for now enough to save from extinction.
Slowly…igniting and turning into a dragon’s breath
I come from there,
the thought of where itself will frighten you of thinking
forever.
The fires will burn and burn…
drift and drift…
on it’s way
burning the heavens itself –
The same heavens
you lust for,
and kneel down or bend over for!
See, you are constructed with codes of geometric perfection
I have been spit due to lack of inclination
if you are an atheist
then I am God
if you contempt on barks
then I am a Dog.
You ascended into the mountains
I descended into the caves,
for you heavens are dearer
for me darkness is nearer.
Soon…when your mountains and heavens have burned
and turned
into thick dark clouds overhead
then…
when you finally see what I see
and shiver at the sight of raw darkness
I Will be your God
and show you that light
and watch as you learn to levitate and rise beyond
and smile at death forever
bless you!
I have written about anxiety before. But today I want to discuss one of its lethal forms called Anticipatory Anxiety.
What is Event Anticipatory Anxiety? — This is something I named before I knew such a thing as Anticipatory Anxiety existed. I was trying to describe the same anxious feeling I felt while anticipating certain types of different events. I noticed that the idea of those events caused the anxiety way before the event even occurred.
What are events? — Events are occurrences of limited time-span. Life is the sum of events.
What kinds of events cause such anxiety in me? —Events that include people or entities I am not comfortable with in the event environment. For example, if the event is a walk in a certain street at night, stray dogs that bark are things I am not comfortable with in that environment.
What is common in all those event anxieties? — Something undesired will happen in this event.
Personal Examples of Event Anticipatory Anxiety—
While smoking inside the house
While entering a classroom
While checking Medium notifications
While meeting certain people
While visiting one particular relative of mind.
Descriptions of what goes on inside the head (the undesired will happen thought) during these episodes —
While smoking inside the house:A family member might come and create a scene about me smoking. While entering a classroom:The class laughs at me While checking Medium notifications in the morning:No response, followers or comments! While meeting certain people: This person will insult or humiliate me While visiting one particular family of relatives:They will talk of stupid and sensitive issues.
Real life instances where the descriptions above have come true —
While smoking inside the house: A family member might come and create a scene about me smoking. There have been instances in my young-days when I have been yelled at for smoking. Beaten and even jailed for drinking.
While entering a classroom: The class laughs at me. The entire class laughed at my buckteeth deformity when I first entered the classroom after joining a new school in the 5th grade.
While checking Medium notifications in the morning: No response, followers or comments! Daily these days.
While meeting certain people: This person will insult or humiliate me. I went through a lot of insults and humiliation during my childhood and teenage years.
While visiting one particular family of relatives: They will talk of stupid and sensitive issues. They always do so.
What have I learnt from all this? — * The undesired will happen * thought is due to the traumatic memories of true events of the past. Especially of those during my childhood and teenage years.
What is the solution? — Try to recallinstances of events above where you have been successful in order to wash the traumatic memories and replace them with successful ones.
While smoking inside the house: All instances of smoking in the house in the last decade. I have come out of the smoking room unscathed every single time. When I have enjoyed and woken up calmly at home after drinking the night earlier.
While entering a classroom: When I entered the classroom of the same school one day confidently chewing a gum and humming the tune of a song knowing one of them will ask me to write them a lyrics of any song anytime.
While checking Medium notifications in the morning: When one of my stories on Dostoevsky went viral.
While meeting certain people:Multiple instances in the last few years when I have bossed meetings and have come out of them as the leader.
While visiting one particular family of relatives: All instances I don’t visit them.
Conclusion —
Event Anticipatory Anxiety is when I have the same anxious feeling while anticipating certain different types of events.
Such anxiety is caused by events that include people or entities I am not comfortable with in the event environment.
The prevalent thought in all those events is this: Something undesired will happen.
This is due to the traumatic memories of true events in the past when the undesired has happened.
What is the solution? How to be free from this crap? Recallinstances of events where you have been successful so that you wash the traumatic memories and replace them with beautiful ones.
This film began the journey of Shot Chitra, a mobile-film project started casually by me and Sanket Dhungel and later joined by Subesh Bhattarai.
Our goal with this project is to have fun shooting short films with our low-battery and low-storage mobile phones. Editing with terrible computers hasn’t been fun though! The satisfaction after publishing them have been euphoric, however.
In the earlier films, we improvised a lot. No screenplays, no stories, no plans – just general ideas. But lately we have started to co-write screenplays. We even wrote one with an AI tool!
At Sundarijal filming Be Brave!
At Dhulikhel during the shoot of The Selfish Game!
This is an album I created more than eight years ago. My goal with it was to experiment with weird noises and digital plugins to relax and explore my mind and soothe my feelings.This was my first attempt at all that. HAPPY MIND EXPLORING!
This is an album I created in 2018. My goal with it was to experiment with static noises, funny voices and digital plugins in order to relax and explore my mind and feelings.I was listening way too much of Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Tanpura sounds of Indian Classical Music, Faust, Early Darkthrone, Burzum. HAPPY MIND EXPLORING!
It was a sunny morning
and so you planned to bask all day
when a lusty cloud came
from who knows where
and made it dark:
Now you shiver in pain.
You write these words
They go talk with gods
The gods get it
and make it sunny again!
Though the cloud seemed gone
You see it in the horizon
The damage has been done!
You have to be a Rshi:
Compose mantras and chant them full time.
And you have to plough your field
Chant and plough
Chant and plough.
You can see some clouds out there
But the sky is clean up here
You can’t un-see the clouds now
Chant and plough
Chant and plough.
It is night
but it’s too bright.
You want that cloud now
So you write different words
They go talk with same gods
The gods get it
and bring the cloud back again!
and the next morning…
you repeat it again.
The gods are greedy
The gods are crazy
They want sweeter words
They want them all the time
They want to play
They play with you all the time
But you don’t mind
Because you need a clear sky in the day
and some clouds in the night.
You are greedy
You are crazy.
You go through all this
to keep them near
To eventually reach beyond
them and there.
It’s evening and you sit here with your laptop in your room
while the world rushes home closing their desktops at work.
You’ve always been this way. You realize.
You and the world have always been this way.
When you were a kid,
while they learnt real politics outside with their imaginary guns
You learnt imagination inside because you couldn’t understand the politics of the world!
When you grew up,
while they played kings and slaves in streets, classrooms and playgrounds
You played god and designed and destroyed sportsgrounds and movie-sets inside your head.
But you were not as strong or stylish as you present yourself here
You were weak, bleak and you were scared of their breath
Not because they spat fire. But because they stank!
But you couldn’t ignore them because your horizon was still a virgin
And so you sat with them and even tried to impress them!
Even their bad breath you thought was a norm
So you stopped brushing too…
You were not at all as strong or stylish as you present yourself here.
It’s always been this way.
And then when you reached an age where boys made girls cry
You yourself cried in a classroom.
And then you were stared-at, kicked, teased, yelled-at:
By insecure blokes who saw nothing when they looked at themselves in the mirror.
You didn’t understand then that their expression towards you
was their expression towards themselves
You couldn’t understand that because you didn’t play with them outside.
And now they look at their watches at work, nervously waiting for the time they get to go back home
while you get to sit here calmly in your room writing magical words like these that turns them into whatever pleases your mood.
You’ve always been this way the world and you
First, the world throws shit at you and then you throw the world into shit.
And now the world plays king-king down there at Troy
While you play god-god up here at Mount Olympus!
Composed at some point in 2016. This is about an alley near my home named Kush Galli where I frequently went to smoke.
Never knew when this passage became a rest-path
A path of contemplation, solution.
You stood there, never knew from when
and lighted one cigarette after another
conquering one thought by another
While you always gazed around in reluctance.
It has become a house now,
yet always trying to illustrate a reason to make it home.
Sometimes,
You get there after a long while,
assuming you have got a license.
Other times,
You try to hide there, yet go there to hide.
Oft,
you act as a passer-by smoker
Yet, a ring of smoke you leave over…
If smokes could carry thoughts and desires
then may be,
someone can smell it
and inhale what I had to exhale…
Poems: Power of words to those who like to both think and feel.
Poetry, if done and read right, can thrust your mind (states, perception, beliefs, etc.) into previously unvisited zones at such breakneck speed that in no time you find yourself changed beyond even your own recognition.
This is largely because of the concise nature of the art: Mental States, Environment, Perceptions, Opinions, Worldviews, beliefs, knowledge, etc. compressed into a few words with analogies and non-linearity. They are like mighty bombs that can decimate any walls, bridges, boundaries and frontiers — If done and read right!
I say all this because I have had a strong and healthy relationship with poetry. Myself having published two books of them.
They have changed me, shaped me, destroyed me, designed me. They have helped me come out of many misery and sufferings. They have shown me many beauties and feelings. They have helped me break shackles and relationships. They have helped me build relationships. They have helped me explore, experiment. They have opened many closed doors. They have closed many open doors. They have broken emotional and mental frontiers allowing me to feel and see things I never would have even imagined existed.
Here are 10 pieces/sentences/lines/stanzas of poetry that have broken my mind’s frontiers.
Lunatic: Laxmi Prasad Devkota
Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
You’re clever, quick with words,
your exact equations are right forever and ever.
But in my arithmetic, take one from one-and there’s still one left.
You get along with five senses, I with a sixth.
You have a brain, friend, I have a heart.
A rose is just a rose to you-to me it’s Helen and Padmini.
You are forceful prose, I liquid verse.
To break any frontiers, you need energy. You need constant energy and force. These few words did it for me. This is mental poetry at its best and finest.
Alone: Edgar Allan Poe
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone — Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —
From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view —
This poem connected me with myself.
I started seeing differences between me and others. I started seeing things in me I had never seen. I started accepting myself like never before. I started exploring my desires. I began the process of knowing myself. I ceased to be afraid. I was finally proud of who I was. I developed self-respect. I developed strength. I discovered myself.
When I breathe,
This sound in my chest
Lonelier than the winter wind
Japanese poet Takuboku Ishikawa died of tuberculosis. This particular poem expresses a lot. It grabs you by your outward looking head and rotates it enough so that you can look at yourself. Here and now.
There were bright glowing stars in my frontier, but after I read this…the direction of my frontier changed and I saw black holes.
the wine of forever: Charles Bukowski
the writing of some
men
is like a vast bridge
that carries you
over
the many things
that claw and tear.
I could have chosen a lot of Bukowski verses but I chose this particular stanza from this particular poem because with it I accepted that there were and are people in this world whom you can trust. In my case, those were people who wrote words. Although I consumed a lot of words in my lifetime, at one point I was stuck with mistrust and paranoia towards everything. This one helped me break that wall.
Also, Bukowski’s writing has carried me not only over things that claw and tear but also over many things that pinch and sting.
A Question: Robert Frost
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
I was taking life too seriously when I stumbled upon this poem. This helped me tone down the seriousness and smile at the absurdity of existence.
Worldly Wisdom: Friedrich Nietzsche
Do not stay in the field!
Nor climb out of sight.
The best view of the world
is from a medium height.
While Nietzsche’s entire bibliography is a string of dynamite that knocks down frontiers after frontiers, this particular poem from The Gay Science gave me the perspective of perspective. I may look at all the frontiers I can and analyze them, get drown in them — yet is my view of the frontier itself proper?
Where’s the poet: John Keats
Where’s the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
’Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan
Or any other wonderous thing
A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato;
’Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or Eagle, finds his way to
All its instincts; he hath heard
The Lion’s roaring, and can tell
What his horny throat expresseth,
And to him the Tiger’s yell
Come articulate and presseth
Or his ear like mother-tongue.
I had written a Medium story about this a little while back:
What Is A Poet? — According To John Keats
A Poet is a complete Human!
fradesh.medium.com
This poem is crucial for me because I like poetry. Reading, Listening, Writing, Spoken, whatever. But, my mind likes confusion.
While I yearned to consume/compose poetry and be a poet, my mind told me that poets were things of the past, waste of a life and things of no impact and substance. Be a king. Kings are the best. Be a businessman. They are the best. Be a pilot. Be a minister, etc. I listened to my mind for a long time. Not completely! Else I wouldn’t have discovered this particular poem.
I could finally see myself reading and writing compressed words and be proud of it.
The Best Time Of The Day: Raymond Carver
Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.
Next to the early morning hours,
of course. And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love
these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.
I discovered Carver when I had too many things going on inside my head and too many desires flowing inside my chest. I was emotionally and mentally confused. At my mental frontier, there was this big fucking question-mark laughing at me all the time. My personal life was disastrous. I was always anxious. I wanted to read everything, watch everything, be everywhere, be everything. Of course, this made me explore a lot of poetry too!
And I discovered Carver and this poem.
This poem demolished the question mark and showed me through tremendous magnification the real thing worth aspiring for.
Tune: Calming Wind And Waves: Su Shi
Listen not to the rain beating against the trees.
Why don’t you slowly walk and chant with ease?
Better than saddled horse I like sandals and cane.
Oh, I would fain, in a straw cloak, spend my life in mist and rain. (From Selected Poems and Pictures of the Song Dynasty)
The desire for power and ways to get powerful were the furthest my thoughts were managing to reach at one phase of my life. This particular verse from the 11th century Chinese poet erased the boundary in one sweep, opening a brand new horizon in front of my eyes where I saw things more important than power. I spent hours basking in this poem.
Courage: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
CARELESSLY over the plain away,
Where by the boldest man no path
Cut before thee thou canst discern,
Make for thyself a path!
A decade ago, this particular stanza filled me with courage to go take risks, do something new, become something new, become myself, explore myself, design myself — become whatever I am and do whatever I do today!
Three of us were having a conversation about weed experience. All three, weed smokers at some point of our lives. One (me) already quit, another a sporadic user and another a regular one.
The sporadic user said weed didn’t do him much good. I said the same.
‘It’s because you haven’t smoked much. Once you get used to it, it won’t harm you,’ the regular user said.
‘No, I have tried it a lot! In fact, I have done everything to conquer it. I have tried to enjoy the mental games by strengthening myself. I have tried to use it, exploit it and conquer it. I have tried to enjoy the game it plays with my mind and smirk at it. But it just doesn’t work for me,’ I said.
After that, I got excited and shared one of my experiences with weed:
I was alone in an office one night. Everyone had left. I had some weed given to me by a friend. I went to the roof and smoked a stick, trying to tell myself I was now strong enough for weed to bother me. Strong enough to fight the paranoia!
For half-an-hour, I was strong. I was excited at the idea of having conquered the beast that had been responsible for many fits of anxiety, paranoia and depression. I was excited at the thought of having been a strong person now.
45 minutes in, I started to get dizzy and my mouth went dry. The thoughts were normal — largely because I was doing everything in my strength to stop a few from coming. I thought it was time for me to leave. Feeling dizzier and drier in the mouth by the moment, I shut down the computer, turned off the lights, locked the doors and left in my car. Aphrodisia had kicked in and I was in a hurry to go to my bed, open my laptop and do what lonely young men do!
The distance between the office and my home was 10 minutes. I must have been driving for about 5 minutes — still feeling dizzy — when I reached to a major junction. Cars and bikes with headlights stormed from all directions. I got blinded for a while. But I tried to maintain the traffic discipline and drove. But things had changed:
I got nauseous. Seriously dehydrated and experienced vertigo.
I struggled to keep my hands on the steering. My legs were shivering. I thought I could drive no more. But it was still rush hour so stopping the car wasn’t a good idea. I kept driving. It kept getting worse. My heartbeat went faster and louder. I don’t know what I did and how, but I reached home.
At home, as I parked the car and shut the gates. A strange question hit me:
‘I hit-and-run someone, didn’t I?’
I got more nauseous. Severely dehydrated and experienced serious vertigo.
‘I have hit-and-run!’ kept popping in my head.
‘The police will be here anytime now.’
Of course, the police didn’t come and after the attack was over I could recall clearly that I hadn’t done anything as such. But the impact was devastating. I don’t remember having smoked it since.
‘Yeah, it happens to some. Such people shouldn’t smoke,’ the regular user said after I narrated the incident.
‘How’s it with you?’ I asked.
‘Oh! I get hi~~~gh. I feel rela~~~xed. And the sexual side of it is just unbe~lie~vable. When I fuck while high, I go on and on and on…’ he said.
I wish I could use weed like that, now that I am married, I said to myself.
But why does it work on some and not on others, I wondered.
‘It must have something to do with blood-pressure and all,’ I had been explaining myself.
But yesterday I had a different perspective.
Maybe it isn’t about blood-pressure, maybe it is about character!
The regular user I talked about earlier is one of those fun-loving guys. He likes to go to parties, on trips to Goa and Thailand, watch and talk football. Take one day at a time.
Once I had tried talking classical music and philosophy with him but he kind of scolded me by telling me those things were for the boring or for the old.
‘Don’t waste your time on those things. Life is for enjoyment. Enjoy!’ he had said.
Of course, my version of enjoyment does include classical music and philosophy. And introspection and self-awareness and self-enquiry and mental exploration and all that!
But he isn’t someone who will sit and wonder why he or the universe exists. I will bet every dime on the fact that he doesn’t sit idle in front of a lake thinking of how deep he has reached in his wisdom about life. Nor will he sit in front of a sea questioning whether he should be powerful in society or not. He lives by the day and does what’s supposed to be done by a modern youth.
There’s where I see a difference in character:
I have done all those things (Sitting idle in front of a lake, sea, etc.)
I see myself as too self-aware (emotionally too) for weed. Yes, it does make all people self-aware but maybe not to the extent as it impacts me. Because I get emotionally traumatized by it. Because maybe I suffer from emotions too much. I have always been troubled by them. That’s why I say, it’s in the character.
Maybe I am being judgmental or maybe I am missing a trick or two. That’s why I would love to know your experience with this thing called weed.
The Process of a answering this How To live question Begins With another question:
How am I feeling right now?
It should always start with this question. It should always be about this question.
But how do we track things as elusive and vague as our feelings?
Why do I keep coming back to these questions whenever I feel prominently about something? More important than that, Why are these questions even relevant when I can tune into any form of entertainment available in abundance and forget about my feelings (wash them) and shut my thoughts?
I don’t think I can get into the first, second and third questions without answering the fourth.
Yes, I have used sports, games, music, movies, TV shows, novels, friends, cigarettes, coffees, teas, alcohols — I have used them all in plenty throughout my life. I have used them all to get out of all sorts of feelings dwelling inside me. Good, Bad. Get out of feelings intolerable. Even getting out of feeling enjoyable to me as a celebration.
I have used them all to shut-down the thoughts that those feelings have generated in me. And those things of entertainment have helped me. They’ve helped me get out of the dreaded zone. But always temporarily. Unwanted feelings haven’t stopped. In fact, feelings haven’t stopped. These days, whenever I think of going into entertainment or distractions to get rid or celebrate my feelings, I am reminded of their transience. Of their ineffectiveness.
A person who goes to entertainment all the time never has to understand and feel the feelings. But the question remains: Why should anyone have to understand and feel diverse feelings when one can feel ‘entertained’ all the time?
In my case, it maybe because I have also done time of introspection in my life. And once you go inside yourself, you never completely come out, do you?
I got into introspection all those years back because I wanted to know what life was really about. I wanted to know what I was. I wanted to know why I was existing. I wanted to dig and reveal all sorts of feelings and emotions possible. I wanted to live completely. I wanted to live colorfully.
I haven’t seen those people who live for entertainment feel much about things. I have seen myself not feeling too much about things when I have surrendered myself completely to entertainment.
So, understanding your feelings is important if you want to live an introspective, profound and colorful life. You can use entertainment as a bonus. As one color in all the colors of your life. But you cannot make entertainment the only color of your life. (If you want to have a profound and colorful life, that is.) Yes, I can wash my feelings and shut my thoughts whenever I want by merely pressing y in my browser address bar, but I want so much more from life, don’t I?
With that out of the way, I want to share how I try to trace my feelings.
First thing is to be feeling-conscious:
‘How and What am I feeling right now?’
It’s difficult to do this all the time. In fact, I feel lucky whenever this question does grace me at all. But it’s sporadic. I have been trying my best to increase the frequency.
The thing to do is to try to stop yourself from getting lost in your feelings, which means from getting lost and carried by your thoughts. I see thoughts as slaves of feelings.
This is contradictory. How do I make my life colorful and enjoy the feelings when I stop myself from feeling the feelings?
My experience is that being feeling-conscious gives you some amount of control over what you are feeling. This control is important because then you can decide what to do with the feeling. This act of being conscious itself is control. You can then decide how much suppression or allowance you are going after. For me this control is important because I have found even good feelings to be intolerable for me.
Let me share something with you
A few days back, I went to a party, Got drunk and shared things with people with whom I usually don’t share things much. The next morning was devastating. I wanted to kill myself. I couldn’t stand to go back to recalling the previous night, yet my mind wouldn’t allow me to go anywhere else than there. That day passed in intense suffering. Only time shall heal this misery, I said to myself. Until…
Immediately, the intolerable hangover vanished as I started searching for words to describe whatever I was feeling.
Humiliation
The word appeared as if by magic. And the feeling and thoughts that had made me suicidal, vanished, as if my magic.
But it wasn’t magic.
It was a pretty simple thing: Introspection. Feeling-consciousness.
I don’t want to and have to lie to you. After that, I was in control of my feelings. I pushed as if I was pushing something physical and heavy and successfully stopped humiliation from appearing in me again.
Trivia: I had spent the day watching a stupid movie for an escape.
The mere act of being conscious of my feeling and naming it worked for me. Of course, the humiliation hasn’t completely vanished, but it is something I know-of and am in relative control of as of now.
Let me answer the questions I asked in the beginning.
How am I feeling right now?
It should always start with this question. It should always be about this question.
But how do we track something that is as elusive and vague as our feelings?
We try to increase the frequency of the question above and name the prevalent feeling. Use Words. Use terms. Name it! Human beings have managed to create words for almost all the feelings, and even if they haven’t, it’s your chance to coin something epic.
Get in control of your feelings. This will help you control your thoughts. If you manage to do it, you will live a profound and colorful life. You won’t need to be dependent on the entertainers. You can use them in your own accord to provide you entertainment whenever you feel like having one!
Whatever you go through in your childhood will have a profound impact on the rest of your life. This is because in our lives – like in the world – a thing will cause the following event and that event will in turn be the cause of another and so on.
While this holds true for all phases of our life, childhood is especially significant because it is then that we change the most. That’s the phase when we are the most passive and relatively unconscious of ourselves and the surrounding. This passivity and lack of proper consciousness means we are not at all in control of ourselves and whatever happens to us happens without our consent and will. We are at the mercy of other entities. Which means, our actions of that phase are reactive. We are malleable.
I reach back to the days my childhood whenever I try to understand the thoughts and feelings I currently behold. Almost everything takes me back there. Everything seems to have its roots there and then.
For example, today during my evening walk, I tried to understand my passion towards the unacceptable things in society. My digging took me to the stage of my life when I was mentally ill-treated and bullied by someone who was acceptable in society. I can’t recall being fascinated towards the unacceptable before my close encounter with that person and the ill-treatment/bullying I got from him and his supporters. This must have developed a sense of rebellion in me which prolongs to this day and which has largely shaped a lot of my crucial decisions.
Of course, that person must have been valid from his point of view for his ill-treatment and he might not even consider it to be an ill-treatment, but what that did to me shaped not only my behaviour but my character and entire personality. He was conscious, I was not!
Of course, I don’t have an issue with how I ended up, but I could have ended up worse if I hadn’t dared to work on my self and if I hadn’t dared to stand-up to rotten values.
What do I take away from this?
Be careful with things that are malleable and sensitive. Tougher things will resist you and will probably shape you instead. Don’t express that frustration of yours on weaker ones. Take care of softer things if you’ve got balls. If you’ve really got it, try to shape things bigger and stronger than you!
P.S. Maybe that person was more unconsious than the childhood me?!!!
Each time you are self-aware of what you are doing for a living, you realize that you are on the lookout for the next true revolutionary thought, idea, so that you can sell them on platforms such as these and earn your money or things that humans are built to earn.
This way, you may flatter yourself by seeing yourself as a ‘natural-being’ because you are like a tiger or an eagle, or a pigeon or a sparrow:
Constantly on the lookout for the next meal.
This also means, you are not like a domesticated animal in that you are not fed based on your service to others.
But there’s a major difference between you and them (nature’s foragers), in that, what you are after is not the meal itself. In fact, if you are not after viral-content but are rather after some true thought, idea, then what you have collected could be the most worthless thing for any creature. Worse, it could be worthless for you in terms of its value in the marketplace. Take the idea that I have built this particular story upon for instance: I cannot guarantee that this will be read or listened-to by people such that my views and reading time go up. In fact, my experiences have time and again shown me this outcome in the form of proverbial slaps!
On a personal level, this hardly matters for me, because I would have already gathered my share of true experience and knowledge from the exploration and the writing. But, such ‘true’ experience and knowledge aren’t foods, clothes, houses, etc. in that they can’t be eaten, worn and they won’t save me from the winter cold. Which means it matters a lot from a professional level.
What am I trying to take-away from all this? What am I trying to say?
This life of an online creator is amazing. It is amazing in that it allows one to go wherever one wants in search of whatever thoughts, ideas, ‘truths’, stories one wants to discover. But it comes at a bargain. There has to be a certain ‘smartness’ if one wants to take it out of personal use and earn ‘valuable’ things from it.
The ‘smartness’ required is of productive-story-selection.
You have to be able to winnow:
You have to be able to carefully select (productive) publish-worthy true thoughts, ideas, stories from the mass of all conceived thoughts, ideas and stories.
You are like a forager but a forager who can’t directly consume the thing discovered. A forager who has to winnow the thing discovered and distinguish between things suitable for personal use and professional one. A forager who has to then come into the marketplace and then try to sell the thing discovered.
As a creator, you are like a beast but a beast that hunts for thoughts, ideas, and stories. A beast that then filters the things hunted and comes to the marketplace trying to sell whatever seems fit for selling (from the perspective of the beast.)
Q: But what about all those who teach you to express everything without winnowing?
A: My life experiences have taught me that people in general do not care about you, let alone your thoughts, ideas and creations.
But there is nothing unethical with this, is there? In fact, everything is natural about it. Most hunting animals do know whom they want to prey upon. And the reason they prey is for their survival. You have all the right to winnow sellable thoughts, ideas.
Most fascinating thing is that there’s even something called surplus killing where certain animals at certain times kill just for fun. Which should give you further inspiration and reasons for winnowing. Seek all forms of true thoughts, ideas, stories; sell those that can feed you and use the remaining for your personal use.
Q: Which type of creator are you?
(We are not considering killing for self-defence and all that)
A Human-Creator: A human-creator is a creator who tries to feed-off almost every type of thought and idea. This type of creator is experimentative. Of course, some will be successful and some won’t, but like a true human, such a creator wants everything and keeps an eye on everything too. They will use the useful and keep the rest for potential future use. Force marketeers too fall into this category.
A Crow-Creator: A crow-creator is a creator who creates part-time: Like crows foraging. If there’s an easy meal to be had somewhere they will eat there. But if there isn’t any, they will be out there trying everything. Just as human-creators, they will try and taste everything. For them, it’s just about the earning.
Scavenger-Creator: A creator can also be a scavenger. I have seen a lot of those and I fear I will become one. A scavenger-creator lives-off dead or second-/third hand things: Thoughts, ideas, stories, knowledge that others have conceived. The scavenger-creator takes others’ works and re-interprets them for the consumption of the mass-public. You can find a lot of those in the form of informative YouTube channels with millions of subscribers.
Eagle-Creator: This type of creator knows what he/she is supposed to create and sell. They are precise and meticulous. Niche creators you can call them. You don’t see them experimenting much.
What about the winnowing creator?
A type of creator who has a niche. This is because I have used the word ‘true’ up there. Which means, this type of creator cannot settle with publishing everything. The search for the true makes them like eagle-creators. But the search for truth in everything makes them human-like.
So?
They look half eagle, half humans:
Half-Human, Half-beast.
(Maybe we should take our favorite animal and try to be like them)
A trick for Self-Improvement. Unfasten all the seat-belts that bound you to seats. Wear something comfortable. Stretch your body parts. Take some deep breaths and get ready to go for a long thought drive.
A thought drive is a drive where you free yourself from the cycle of static sitting or sleeping and hence, free yourself from many shitty and sleepy thoughts.
A thought drive is a drive where you move around in such a manner that it sets the platform for your thoughts to take you to amazing mental places to see spectacular things.
A thought drive is a drive where your movement acts as an accelerator and the thoughts that you will have inside as the views you would see from your physical vehicle window.
How do you go for a thought drive?
First, you have to be willing to see what your thoughts have got to show and tell you. After that, you have to move around. But, you have to let go of all those meditative, sedative mind-control, self-control, god-focus, self-focus lessons that shitty and sleepy gurus have preached to you. You have to be ready to listen to your thoughts. Listen to what they have always been meaning to tell you but you have always been shutting them off because you fell prey to the scam of some philosophical conman.
After all this, go for it. Move around in whichever pattern you feel comfortable. Long walks, short walks, to and fros, stand and stares. Find the sweet spot of movement, like you do with your car seat. And then welcome your thoughts. Accept them. Invoke them. Do not use dull philosophical theories to understand them or control them. Let them flow. Let them come. Accept them.
But how do you make sure you don’t get lost?
That’s a good question. Thoughts are stingy and lethal at times. that’s why you have to learn to be strong. You have to learn to be able to take every sting with a smile and you hve to be able to respond every slap with a deep breath.
Once you are ready with that and good to go for a drive, you have to begin with a single thought. It could be an image, a sound, an idea, concept, desire, goal, person, computer, star, whatever. Yes, right before you go for the drive, begin with a single thought. Then, finish the drive by coming back to the same thought. Finish it by bring the original thought back. And notice how that thought looked before the drive and after. If you manage to do that, you will not only have discovered a lot of things, but you will also have returned to your home safely!
Being Visionary is more about will than originality.
I don’t know how it goes with entities such as stars and rocks and rivers but with those of us living with cell (s): we are always forced to make decisions.
An ant crawls on my table and I for my own leisure block its path with my finger. Now it has to make a decision: persist with the obstacle or go a different path. The ant has obstacles apart from me: The dog, the wind. Which means, it has to make a lot more decisions in life. However, regarding the approach to making those decisions — looking at its circumstances — I believe it has only one: pragmatic which tells it to go to the currently most beneficial place.
I, as a human, am similar. I go along with my business and for some god’s leisure, a thought comes and blocks my path.
Then, I am left to make a decision: force myself out of the thought or go a different one. Lots of thoughts and events occur, which means I have to make a lot of decisions. But, when it comes to approach, I have observed two in me:
Pragmatic
Visionary
Within the pragmatic approach I am like the ant. Whatever thought or obstacle I face and have to make a decision, I decide to do that which seems currently the most beneficial.
While taking the visionary approach, I become a human in that whatever obstacle I face and have to make a decision on, I decide to do that which seems in line to the vision of myself I have in my mind. It’s like the ant going, ‘I have to climb this finger thing and die so my vision of becoming a martyr is realized.’
Pragmatic approach is understandable, you do that which ensures your survival and life-success. But where the hell does this thing called vision come up on me?
Where does the vision come from?
Ingenuity?
What else?
My observations of myself have shown that I do not in fact envision a future for myself. What I do is simply decide to not be pragmatic and allow my mind to drift along the inner voices, the rest is done by my mind. This way I don’t think it should be called vision. It’s more like natural is the correct term.
Why?
While I envision myself, I am in fact, not as creative as I think I am. This is because I am not designing a certain type of me from scratch. Rather, I am merely imagining (projecting) a me who has fulfilled all the desires that exist in me during the moment of envisioning. It is like the perfect balance of all my desires. THE SWEET SPOT. This way, fulfilling my dreams or realizing my vision is more like me being that which is natural to me: achievement of all desires, with the desires being the things which are natural.
Pragmatic approach is more about advantage. I will have to sacrifice a lot of my desires in the process. Success is the key here.
Let’s stay with the visionary approach:
Even if it’s not about free designing and creating, there is a certain skill required to envision yourself.
As mentioned above, firstly you need to agree to listen to your desires and let go of certain pragmatism (Of course, mixed approach exists in people but let’s not talk about that here). Even after agreeing to listen, the path won’t be easy. Your mind will make you scream, yell, cry, want-to-die in its search for the perfect image for your desires. It’s like pulling out a healthy tooth. But when your mind finds one, it fills you with ecstasy. You are freed. You are free to work on the how’s and finally forget visioning and decision-making!
And then the sad part begins:
The desires you have inside you are not constant. They change with new knowledge and experience and so has to your vision.
The irony of it all is that even if you go after the vision and reach the situation envisioned, there is almost complete certainty that things will end up being something completely different!
Do you also worry you are not doing enough or learning enough? Given your standard of yourself, do you think you aren’t productive enough? Do you feel like something is stopping you from being a certain place, feeling a certain way?
Even when you do manage to get rid of all distractions and do the things you ought to work on, do you feel a certain rope kind of thing pulling you into something — away from your deed? Do you also get anxious if you do not allow yourself to be pulled by that rope?
Do you feel anxious, nervous, sleepy, tired, insecure, confused, jealous, etc. most of the time?
If your answer is yes, than it implies that you too — like me — have been falling prey to the Seven Deadly ills of modern life.
I’ve been successful in avoiding all seven of these ills as of the time of this writing.
Yes, at some point of my life, I have experienced all these which makes me sit here and think that I should be sharing these ills with the world. I — with confidence — hold these ills responsible for many of my weaknesses, unproductivity and misery. They have threatened me, sucked life’s joy and beauty out of me and have almost killed me. These are serious diseases and should be cured/removed/avoided.
I will now share my personal experiences with each and communicate why I consider them to be ills.
Here we go then…here are SEVEN DEADLY ILLS OF MODERN LIFE:
Facebook: It’s been a dozen years since I deleted my personal facebook account. In between, I have created random accounts to manage my business accounts.
The major reason I deleted my personal account all those years ago was because certain people I didn’t want anything-to-do-with started appearing there. Those included distant relatives and school-bullies (teachers included).
I was going through a transition in my life which included a lot of pdf learnings in my devices, and the last thing I wanted was their face in my sacred temple. Whenever any of those people appeared through suggestions or through posts of friends’ friend, I got agitated. I was clear with myself on the fact that I did not want to befriend them at any cost. Yet, facebook didn’t understand this! It got to a point where opening a facebook app meant anxiety. I thought: I can talk to my family members and close-friends on a cellphone, having them on facebook has less reward than the risk of those unnecessary craps appearing on my screen. I deactivated and have never had a personal account ever since.
A few years ago, when I started a publishing company, I felt the need for a facebook account. I created one with the company name and created a few business pages. My sole motive was to use facebook for work. A few months later, I was fighting with a random stranger in a stupid group! I was checking my account every ten minutes. I wanted more likes and comments on my post. I was getting more anxious. Things soon started to get personal. I began adding a lot of friends…and yet again, some unwanted people appeared! I deactivated the account soon — my business didn’t go anywhere through facebook promotions (paid/unpaid) anyway. Illness because: Facebook thrusts you into the rat race.
Instagram: Oh, facebook’s younger sibling:
how late you came into my life
and how early you disappeared! If facebook is racing in a crowded city, Instagram is you reaching the posh-area. It’s not just about running here, it’s about how hip you look while you run.
As in facebook, I opened an instagram account when I started that company. I was told that it was THE platform to reach out to young and ‘cool’ people. I created my personal account and a couple of business accounts. Looking back at it now — considering how uncool I am — I wonder what was I thinking back then!
I tried to use it for work — which for me is all about expressing who I am. But what I ended up doing was checking if each post I created fit into the norm. While this may be looked upon as being business-friendly or staying relevant to the trend, my experience was such that I had become something completely different. I didn’t say what was to be said, I said what should be said!
The original me vanished and was slowly being replaced by a cool funny youth. Once again, I am neither cool nor funny and I am proud of myself for that. Whenever I went to a place that looked nice (by posh standards), my eyes searched for a spot where I could take a photograph of myself and post it with a stylish caption. When I did it, I spent every five minute refreshing the page and scrolling down the human coolness. I hated it. My account got relatively relevant, but it was me no longer. I deactivated it. Illness because: Instagram pressurizes you to fit-in.
Twitter Where do I even start on this monster?!
During the course of my life, I must have activated-deactivated twitter on more than ten instances. I start one, gain a few followers, get fed up, deactivate. I start another, gain a few more followers, get even more fed up, deactivate again…
The supposed platform for the intellectuals attracted me for the same reason. I thought I could share wise opinions and change the world. How it ended up was, I found myself intoxicated in half-baked thoughts — always looking for a line that would increase more followers than one that was actually wise. Another thing that happened to me while I pushed for those words was I hoped some significant celebrity would retweet my stuff and I would be popular forever thereafter!
Of course, that didn’t happen, so I must have been fed up due to that too…but the bigger reason I suppose for being constantly fed up was that twitter was more for show than for a pro. I was getting exposed to mediocre thoughts disguised as world-changing just because a person with a great following had said it. Words have quick impact on me and twitter’s impact wasn’t healthy. I should rather spend time finishing, polishing my thoughts and reading finished, polished ones, I concluded. And so I deactivated. Illness because: Twitter is seeming intelligent, not being one.
YouTube I wrote an entire story about YouTube and its impact on me the other day: This Thing Called Video-Addiction | by Adesh Acharya | Jul, 2022 | Medium
Let me list out the points I made there:
a. Videos expose me to ordinary people and content
b. Videos make me mentally weak
c. I may be getting manipulated Illness because: YouTube is just TV with even more mediocre channels!
Tiktok Okay, I am not familiar with this as much I am with the ones above. Yet, I have been around those who are and what I have noticed is: It’s goddamn addictive!
Uninterrupted supply of short-length videos with provocative music in the background that give you everything from the dance moves of that relative of yours to the review of that obscure restaurant in town means Tiktok has enough going-on within it to make you forget to turn off the stove. It doesn’t even allow you to get bored.
Although I do not use this platform as much, what I do know is that the more you enjoy shorter content, the more tedious longer works get for you. This means your patience dies and only quick stimulation can satisfy you. Depth gets boring. I don’t think all those are qualities you would want to miss.
Given Tiktok’s popularity, it has facebook’s rat-race quality within it. Also are twitter’s half-bakedness and TV with even more mediocre channels within it. This could only mean one thing: DISASTER!
Tiktok also seems to normalize otherwise embarrassing behavior. While it’s good not to get embarrassed at what you do, it is better for us all to not have normalized certain things. And there are lots of those certain things in Tiktok! Illness because: Tiktok satisfies your darkest urge.
Reddit While I had — without much intent — used Reddit a long time ago, I went back to it with purpose last year when I wanted to promote a link. I created a username and joined subreddits I thought would be relevant for me. Within a few days, I forgot the work purpose and started enjoying the opinions I and discussions I could read there. A few days later, I started posting comments and posts. A few more days later they started to get noticed. I wanted to post more. Comment more. I let my urge flow. I let it flow to such an extent that I still remember a morning where I shivered, fumed in anger trying to think of a reply to a comment of mine. This continued for a while.
Reddit is like school. There is knowledge there but you don’t pay attention because it is not provided well. There are bullies, and there are good guys. There are teachers. But one thing there is that, you don’t matter. YOU the person, the individual with an identity, with a context, doesn’t matter there. While it may be a nice thing considering how all other social media platforms exploit YOU, the discussions in Reddit don’t get humble and serious for that very reason. Illness because: Reddit devalues ideas.
Quora: It’s not at all a good idea to search all of your curiosities in Google. We should be able to answer certain questions ourselves — by reading and thinking about them. Yet in google you have the option to listen to credible people. It’s worse to ask random people about your curiosities in Quora. The flux of opinions you get means you will forget about thinking-for-yourself and turn into a mere pinball in the game of opinions of others. Illness because: Quora habit won’t let you think your own answers.
(Bonus) Entertainment Websites: Websites about sportsmen, movie-stars, musicians, etc. They are built and written to prove to you that the heroes they present and the works they do are superior to you in every way. That you are not like them. That you missed out being like them. That you should consume this and this to even slightly resemble them. Illness because: You can do better!
With experiences in all this, I have finally found some respite on Medium. It has allowed me to freely express ideas as these without having to worry how my neighbor will judge me, or how unkempt my hair must be, or will a Phd. from xyz trust me.
As of now, I don’t consider Medium to be among these ills. Hope it won’t get into the top seven anytime soon!
Before getting into why books should be read books in hardcopies, let me give some background.
This mind of ours is a weird thing of which we still have a lot to decode. When you think you have unearthed its mechanisms, it surprises you with something else. I mean, look at it, all I had done was sleep with a book in my bed last night and this is what I thought I this morning:
Hardcopy books are something you feel. The smell, the weight, the cover, the design, the font — it all adds up to the overall experience of reading a book.
In many ways, they are like wine. You don’t say this wine gives me this amount of buzz so I better drink this amount of whiskey. You don’t say it. It doesn’t work that way. Wines have their own essence and it is not just about the alcohol.
Similar are hardcopy books: You don’t say this book gives me this information so I better watch a video on YouTube or listen to an audiobook. You shouldn’t say it. It shouldn’t work that way. hardcopy books have their own essence and it’s not just about the content within it.
In fact, we humans don’t work that way. We aren’t utilitarian. We want beauty. We imagine. We philosophize. We want love. We want to feel. If we were only utilitarian, you wouldn’t have this thing called computer in your hand right now. So stop bothering hardcopy books and go enjoy your shorts!
For those who live by the ultimate questions of their existence and yet cannot satisfy themselves with the religious-spiritual view. Who cannot convince themselves with the scientific-evolutionary narrative. For them, the whole situation of existing is like a long scary dream that just doesn’t stop. The meaning of life isn’t readily there!
In a world where we are taught to seek reason in all thoughts, feelings and actions, the perspective that there is still room for dissatisfaction on that ultimate question means the existence is the biggest joke, the biggest irony, the biggest paradox.
I don’t have enough courage to walk in the streets without reason. I can’t make a call to those whom I call friends without reason. Yet, here I am existing — without an indisputable truth on why I do so. Yes, if I believe hard enough or think casually enough I will be able to ignore, satisfy and convince myself on one view-point/narrative or the other, yet the fact that a question of such magnitude and relevance is open to interpretation is itself the biggest irony. Joke. Paradox.
This feeling is nothing new as far as I know. The history of philosophy is the history of this realization. Notably, there has been a Russian novelist, a German philosopher and host of French thinkers who have come up with one or the other solution to this ultimate irony.
Yet, to each generation and each individual who is foolish enough to go through it again, this problem hits newly in new places. It hits so damn hard, sucks the taste out of the juice, juice out of your life, and life out of you. It turns you into a zombie if there ever was one. You are already dead in your mind, the thing which thinks inside you is only there because your body hasn’t stopped breathing yet. In a world where they question you why you want to visit their venerated nation, you are mocked if you are the type who ponders upon the most important question that can ever be raised by any creature. Man is an animal after all. The most ironic. The most bizarre.
You have looked at animals and birds and have tried to learn the meaning of existence from them, haven’t you? But they don’t seem to care, do they? Or maybe you don’t understand them just like you can’t understand the meaning of your being. Even when you do interpret them, they all seem busy. Each and every one of them. Busy finding the next meal, busy finding the next mate, busy finding the next shelter, busy finding the next joy, busy in alertness from the next threat.
There can only be two explanations for their behavior: either they have been whispered the meaning of existence by their creator or they don’t have the ability to question. Either way, they go about fine. While you don’t see them laugh and giggle much, you don’t see them smoking and drinking in sorrow too! This perspective makes you realize that many of your human counterparts and indeed animals. Yes, they wear clothes, they speak well, they drive, they earn money, but they go by life just like those animals. But unlike in the case of animals and birds, you do know that they haven’t been whispered any secret by any god. You know that for sure, you have talked to them, you have been friends with them. You know them. They — given their quality — walking around as modern-humans with cell phones in their pocket and english in their tongue appear to you as yet another irony of existence.
But it’s not about them. It’s about you. If you could have been like them, you would have already been like them. You wouldn’t be writing or reading this line. And for you the fact remains that in a world where we are taught to seek reason in all thoughts, feelings and actions, the perspective that there is still room for dissatisfaction on that ultimate question means the existence is the biggest joke, the biggest irony, the biggest paradox.
Where is the meaning of life?
For one, the relentless search for meaning of life itself is a meaning.
Apart from that, the idea to create a meaning for yourself while you seek the real meaning can also be a meaning. This means, the things you do independent of the ultimate answer can be the penultimate meaning. You can mean to be happy, you can mean to be intelligent, popular, powerful, whatever. If the smell of money makes you get out of bed each day in excitement at the prospect of the day and the prospect of the progress you will make on the ultimate-meaning-finding process, money can be a great meaning. It ticks almost all boxes of human psychological yearns. You just have to ensure this forward-moving meaning isn’t engaging enough to distract you from your real meaning — the search for meaning.
Whether you will unlock the ultimate meaning isn’t that important. The fact that you have lived your life questioning the views that dissatisfy you and searching for your own way is, however, meaningful.
I can still recall how great it felt as a child to perceive natural features like a forest, a river, a dark cloud, or rain. I also felt good at the thought of any stories or games or music. This way, I had a taste for aesthetics and fun.
Those feelings started fading away from me as I grew up. First the aesthetic disappeared and then fun. Dark clouds and rainfalls turned into environmental phenomena that turned me gloomy; rivers were nothing fascinating; trees and forests turned boring. Later, the stories and music I enjoyed stopped being fun and here I am today. There are glimpses of beauty and joy — but sporadic and vague.
I didn’t grow up, I grew dull.
A lot of factors are responsible for this change: the practicality of life, the conscience of adulthood, depressive thinking, anxiety, all have played their respective parts. Very well, in fact.
But this afternoon as I stared out of my window at the impending dark clouds and glimpses of blue sky, I — after a long time felt alive. A feeling bubbled inside me that took my thoughts to the fond memories of childhood, the beauty of the sky above, the fascinating that my future can be, the importance of feeling and the beauty of life itself. I wanted to cry. It was a powerful feeling. Although the feeling didn’t last long it was enough to remind me of what I had been once upon a time and what I have been missing in my life all these years.
We get worried about ourselves a little too much — that’s the issue I think. We get too caught up in what/when/why/how we should be/do which turns us into mere pendulums. There’s success and failure. There’s either excitement or frustration. While that is okay for survival, I don’t consider that to be a life lived. I have stopped considering it to be a life felt. I don’t think a life not-felt is a life understood.
There are such diverse things inside and around us and we have this amazing ability to feel each and every one of those. Some of those are tasteful, some disgusting. Yet we get to know their nature through this ability of ours without having to get physically intimate with them. But we don’t do it. We are too eager to grow up. To mature too early. We want to do things faster. What we miss in all this is life. We get successful, but we overlook life.
Q: What does it take to feel alive?
A: A little reminder once in a while that doing is the means and feeling is the end!
It’s beneficial to step back and observe the human race from a distance, forgetting about your own goals and concerns for a while. In the true Schopenhauerian ‘will-less contemplation’ sense.
The distance has to be perfect. In true Nietzschean sense:
Do not stay in the field!
Nor climb out of sight.
The best view of the world
Is from the medium height.
The view from this distance is worth every sight of it. I mean, just look at us:
The leader of animals, dwelling in this blue marble sort of thing which itself hangs in empty space in a monotonous cycle. Yet, we aren’t inspired by our mother: we don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. We want ‘progress’, we want to grow into something else.
‘Everything has to evolve,’ we say, ‘the earth that you see today wasn’t the same a million years ago!’
We are unique in this sense. We come up with these half-baked theories and understandings of the world and justify our actions. In fact, we come up with particularly those theories that justify our actions. It’s like we as beings only see what we want to see. Our desires are primary. Knowledge comes later. For instance, we don’t say, ‘look how disciplined earth is towards her father…’. We don’t say it because we do not like discipline. We do not want to settle. We want to eat and grow. Eat and grow even if our diet turns us into matricides. But we will come up with some theory to justify that too!
Who are we, by the way?
Some say they have evidence that some god created us, some prove that we are a result of a natural process. But I think both those views are misleading. Distractions. To hide a simple truth: we are nothing!
Yes, we are monsters who like to consume and grow but apart from that, we are absolutely nothing! Kill us now and I don’t think that ‘god’ will even notice. Yes…yes the universe is conscious through us…But what I also get is that it is yet another justification for our existence and appetite.
So the answer to the question above is this: we are nothing apart from greedy monsters. We should have long ago said to ourselves that we are greed manifested in physical form. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Greed is a virtue. It is a virtue because it ensures survival. How else does a creature like this, which believes it has conscience and knows of what it has done in the past, continue on?
Another verification of our nature is through what we worship. Among us, we revere the ones who are the most greedy. While we do this, we are doing nothing else than appreciating our essence. There’s nothing wrong with it. Once again, how else do we go on?
Enough about greed. It’s our driving force. It’s our essence.
Yes, we love science not because we love to learn, we love it because it equips us with powerful guns — and a shot at a good career, of course!
Then there’s entertainment. Our fuel. We of today need it more than the real one. Once we thought the grass was green on the other side and that was our meaning, but then globalization happened. We saw the reality.
If we had meaning other than greed, we would probably be celebrating love and all other feelings. But we have no time nor energy for those things because they consume more. They trigger our imagination. They do things to us. They make us think more. What we need is the emptying of the thoughts. How else do we reset from the exhaustion of constant want? — No, not with a Dostoevskian novel in hand. That’s why, the bulk of us today watch people review movies instead of we ourselves watching one. The former is engaging, the latter stimulating.
‘I watched it, so you don’t have to.’ = ‘I live life, therefore I don’t want you to.’
Humans = Greed + Entertainment. Where everything done for both is pragmatic while if you seek to feel the truth with your flute, you waste your time.
‘What’s your real job?’
Where are we now?
Our biggest achievement is that we have managed to build computers. If we ever needed anything to prove to ourselves that we are superior than the rest, computers have done that for us. They have shown to us that we are capable of creating an entirely new being from scratch. They are our ego inflations. No wonder the most greedy do business on it! And we talk about artificial intelligence now as if we are scared, but what we are actually doing beneath is gloating at our accomplishment. We won’t allow any other being to rule over us! The so-called best among us don’t even allow a normal human being to enter into their territory without years of worship and application.
We have created vessels to take us to the stars. We look at the sight of rocket launches and floating stations with a deep glad sigh. ‘We have achieved so much,’ we pat ourselves in the back. It’s another one of those things that has validated our superiority. One has seen fishes swim and birds fly in the air, who has seen a creature reach the outer space! We try to convince ourselves that going to a different planet will somehow solve our problems where in fact all we are doing with those dreams is trying to fill the void: we are nothing! With a fantasy:
‘May be we will encounter god — who has been sleeping — along the way and wake Him up. Or we will encounter other clever beings like us and life will be meaningful again.’
Meaningful as in new wars, new politics, new golds…
So what else do we aspire to?
Happiness.
What is happiness, anyway?
A neurological condition arising out of the perception that an individual has attained what it set out to attend. It could have meant a lot once upon a time, but not anymore.
What has the individual of today set out to attend?
A piece of cake in this celebration of human coronation. A few more views, a few more likes, a few more subsribers, a few houses, a few more sex, a few cars, a few more countries. A few more hours of forgeting of the existential dread.
What is the lesson humans teach each other?
Don’t kill yourself. You too can eat and grow. That’s the meaning you’ve been after.
Yesterday was the first day of my new experimentation:
Stopping the flow of a regular habit.
The habit = Regularly watching senseless videos on YouTube.
Yesterday, I successfully tolerated all my impulses to touch the YouTube app on my phone or press y + Ctrl Enter on my laptop web browser.
The reasons of experiment were:
I got aware that I was watching way too much senseless videos
I worried about how those videos might be affecting my feelings and imagination
I wanted to find out if watching videos contributed to my constant agitation and anxiety.
The worst part was that I had developed the habit of playing nonsensical cricket discussion videos on YouTube in the background every time I tried to go to sleep. The app on my phone tells me that Monday alone, I watched around 4 hrs of videos on YouTube.
So, yesterday morning I thought it would be a nice idea to go cold-turkey on my video-watching habits and see what changes take place in me.
Achievement: I didn’t watch a single video.
I’ll go over a couple important things I was thinking yesterday. It was surprising how long it had been since I thinked with such flow. It appeared as though my habit of watching videos had turned off my brain.
One major change I would like to express right away is that I slept well and dreamt vivid after a while.
Anyway, here are the thoughts:
Be careful on whom you listen to: Listening to ordinary people on a regular basis can be disastrous to your life. Ordinary people: They are those who aren’t related to us and who aren’t our friends; they are those who aren’t mature in an intellectual and emotional sense. Now, it’s not hard to notice that platforms like YouTube, TikTok and more or less all social media are filled with such people. Regularly listening to them, especially on sensitive topics, means we are being deliberately or unconsciously led by ignorance because they don’t care about us (since they don’t know us) and because they aren’t mature enough to teach us. Which, as you may imagine, is not at all healthy.
People who don’t know us but have have devoted their life to learning— even if they are strangers to us — might have acquired some wisdom to impart. If their hard-earned knowledge might not be useful to us, they might not be harmful either. But any bicky-dicky with an opinion can provide us nothing but senseless information.Even the advice that they give can have serious consequences to our thinking as what they provide aren’t the product of care-for-us or hard-learning.
There are many with the habit of sharing their intimate information on the internet, which gets videod and then commented on by random strangers. My point is, if sharing our feelings on social media (or hearing about your problems there) was to solve our crisis, why would we need friends/families, why would we need art and why would we need education and learning? It won’t work. Our issues work deeper than the level at which social media interactions occur!
Is my video watching, my mental weakness? — Noticing how even a short abstinence from video watching had opened the floodgates of my thoughts, I wonder if I watch videos or stroll around the internet when I am afraid to think for myself or weak to use my own imagination.
When I go on a YouTube video watching binge, I have the choice of selecting from millions of videos, which allows me to skip or fast-forward a video if I don’t find it to be as mind-numbing or enjoyable as intended.
Which may imply that I have been using videos as a means of sucking-up all of my thoughts — to escape from my own head — which I do think is a weakness because, in ideally world, I would want to solve my thought-problems rather than ignore them.
What I did during the break, however, was read books and what I found amazing was that reading a book now feels like a meditation. Now, considering how some thinkers of the pre-internet/TV days condemned too much of book reading as a sign of reading-so-you-don’t-have-to-think, one can imagine how deep they lived than us!
Is video watching a form of manipulation? — When I was younger, I remember learning a common success lesson from my grandfather and from some ‘you can do it’ book: ‘Successful/great’ people don’t spend their time around petty people or gossiping. They dwell in great ideas and deeds. While thinking on my bed, I wondered if any successful person (not in financial/social sense but as in the master of his/her art) of today would spend their time watching senseless YouTube videos. They would probably be either honing their craft or reading a great book on life.
This made me question if senseless video watching is equivalent to spending time around petty people and gossiping. Which would mean such watching is a form of manipulation from the ‘system’ side — to keep you ordinary, to keep you a sheep! Why else would such platforms exist?
That’s it, those are some significant thoughts that I thought during the break of a single day. I will see if I can sustain this discipline for a little longer. If I can do it, I will definitely share what days of absence has taught me. But if I can’t, there wouldn’t be much point sharing.
If I can continue this break, it may teach me the advantages of video watching and I may end up watching even more of them. It may also mean I will quit video watching altogether and maybe, become an activist.
I was out to pick-up a dog cage from a pet shop yesterday. The cage was big and the street was narrow which meant I had to load it in the car in a short time. Motorbikes and taxis were already parked which meant I didn’t have much space to work with. I went past the shop looking for a place to turn around, and when I did, I spotted an empty spot from afar— a perfect spot. It was at the opposite end of the shop. I pressed the accelerator in excitement and went near. But what do I notice when I get there?
A young guy is sitting on his motorbike at the exact spot, leisurely using his phone. There was no point honking so I drove past staring at him and parked the car a little further. It would take more effort and time to bring the cage and load it in the car. But I did that. All the while cursing that young person’s existence in my head.
‘Why is this person even existing?’
‘There’s no use for creatures like these!’
I thought.
Miserable thought. Bad thought. I know. But I ask these too:
‘Why am I even existing?’
‘There’s no use for rascals like me!’
Whenever I get annoyed with someone (including me), I tend to have these thoughts. I tend to imagine the entire cosmos (as much as I think it exists) and judge the value of existence of each and every individual entity. Which is more important, the sun or the moon? The river or the sea?
What a sorry thing to do!
I…I know.
I don’t see much value in the existence of anything at all — including existence — apart from the value of existence itself. I mean, to exist is the only valid reason for existence. The only actual value.
Which means, I have no right to question the value-of-existence of anything or anyone. But I do it. I forget the lesson above.
I am a human and I have been shown and told a lot that existence in itself is nothing significant, its what you make of the existence that matters. So naturally I have grown up judging the value of existence of everything:
Dogs have less value than humans and ants have less value than dogs. Plants have less value than ants while mosquitos are there to be killed.
And then there’s the human world:
Writers have less value than businessmen and cleaners have less value than writers…and likewise. Division of labor. In society like mine — Nepali/Hindu — there’s this caste more valuable than that and that more valuable than that…
Yes, with my own eyes I have seen dead politicians taken to cremation in a parade and I have also seen corpses burnt with no one at all to attend. Division of value. VALUE OF EXISTENCE. Which means, high value people have more right to exist and properly die.
Now, when I saw the bike person, my human ego told me that the person was beneath me in terms of value-of-existence. I may have judged based on occupation or caste. But I judged and thought the person had a lower value-of-existence than me (and my dog since the dog I considered my own). Now, if there was a businessman with his Tesla parked — would I question the businessman’s value of existence?
Instead, I would question my own value of existence!
What a petty, miserable being I am. Why do I forget the lesson?!
Before getting into why I consider physical pain to be the greatest teacher, let me give some background.
I am one of those who constantly and intentionally creates problems for himself. Even when there is nothing significantly alarming in life, I have the habit of questioning and worrying about things such that I miss everything else going on, every emotion flowing in and need someone else to remind me of the absurdity of what I have been thinking and worrying about. That someone doesn’t have to be a highly intellectual or spiritual person. That something doesn’t have to be sophisticated or philosophical. Hearing a ten year old kid react while playing a video-game can do the trick. But such encounters rarely occur.
Believe me, I have read and heard the best of preachers preach and the greatest of teachers teach.
‘Thou shalt not do this…’, ‘You have been viewing the world wrong…’, ‘This is the proper way…’…they say.
But for me, what they preach and teach has always been like listening to some music you don’t like. You can hear the music playing, you understand what’s going on…but it just doesn’t touch you.
That’s my character.
Now I want to share my present situation:
I am going through excruciating pain in my mouth because of a couple of rotten teeth. It has persisted for a couple of days during which it has grabbed my attention, sucked my energy, has made me scream in anguish, has taken buzz away from beer, clouds away from smoke, taste away from food and relaxation away from a cup of tea. It has eclipsed my entire being and my thoughts haven’t been able to focus anywhere else apart from the region that hurts.
Under this situation, however, when I move my mind around things, I am amazed at my stupidity for constantly and intentionally creating problems for myself when there are none!
‘Everything is so simple…why was I complicating them?’ I ask myself.
‘This goes here, this there…this fits here…that doesn’t fit there…It’s all so simple. WHAT WAS THERE TO WORRY?!’ I question myself.
This is why I call physical pain the greatest teacher. While I sit here as a being suffering from the complications of its own body, I don’t have time nor space to get lost in mental forests of gloom. For one, it is because I don’t have the energy. Which makes me question whether my anxieties and mental issues are the result of me not being able to apply my energy appropriately. While all the energy of my being is sucked by the consciousness of physical anguish there is little left for the reveries of mind. This is why, perhaps, the mind focuses on the real.
Other thing I notice is the absurdity of problem-creating itself. While I sit here trying to figure out ways through which I can rid myself of this anguish, my state-of-mind is that of the issues of the body. The body which is real. I think I look at the thing that usually bothers me with the same state-of-mind which crops all unnecessary parts and perhaps, the mind focuses on the real. Here there is no place for problem-creating. Things are the way they are!
I don’t know how long this pain will last. In fact, I am about to go visit a doctor. But I don’t want to forget the lessons that this pain has taught me. Lessons about my reality, human reality. About my energy, human energy. Lessons about attention and conscience. Lessons I could never learn from gurus and philosophers.
This physical pain has given me hints on what I shall do and avoid. What I should try to constantly realize. Some part of me wishes some kind of physical pain always remains in me. But again, it’s not comfortable. I have to get rid of this anguish and this is what matters as of now. I need to go to the doctor for I have tried toleration and bearance but none has worked. I have tried homemade ways to avoid pain killers, hasn’t worked. The pain is real. I need to trust the system now. I need to trust a doctor. I need to focus on what is real. I need to do that which is there — not worry about that which may not be.
Right now, I don’t have enough energy or time to question the morality of medical systems!
You notice your anxiety and it burns such that you cannot help but question why you are feeling that way. By then, you have tried everything: distraction, inspiration, perspiration.
Questioning the reasons for anxiety is the only thing left to do and when you reach to that phase, half of it is already gone. ‘Why didn’t I do this before?’ you wonder. You begin digging, imagining, hypothesizing: what is causing this anxiety?
You go through multiple scenarios: past, present, future. Friends, family, self. Mental, emotional, physical. You trial and error through them. One moment you feel you have found the cause: memory of your bullies from school is causing this anxiety…but something doesn’t fit. ‘I have solved it before,’ you say and move on. Another moment: fear of failure! But still something doesn’t feel okay. The anxiety doesn’t leave! ‘No there’s something else,’ you say.
‘Oh, the absurdity of choosing a career of a writer’
‘Yes…but no not this time…I have dealt with it already. I have ideas about it…I don’t need to be anxious…it’s something else’.
And then you think:…it’s not the cause that’s the cause. It’s the anxiety that’s the cause. It’s the anxiety — which like a python dwells inside you. Yeah, it sleeps a lot too. But when it wakes up…it consumes you. It sees complications where there are none. It feels wrong when there are none. It sees another python when there is none. It may not only be the effect of sharp perception which sees the fragility in everything, It may be the cause of wrong perceptions. It maybe behaving like the way they call quantum particles do. In this case, it is both the cause and effect.
As long as it is effect, you can put the python to sleep (by digging the cause)and move on until the python wakes up again. And then you do it again. But if it’s a cause? What do you do? — Medication? Meditation? Masturbation? But, they’re all temporary!
Since I have mentioned the term ‘quantum’ above, I once read Einstein saying this:
…Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
I don’t know in which context he said it, but he said it good. The anxiety as the cause is similar. It’s some sort of weakness that lurks inside you and creates problem after problem. Time and time again. Why?!
It doesn’t let you have fun with your family, your food, your film. Doesn’t let you be at peace with your pet, your poetry, your plant. Nor does it let you do anything. It lurks and it hurts. Burns and it…It sucks!
It sucks color out of you, joy out of you, love out you, life out of you. And they say it is the sharp perception of the impending threat! I don’t wanna be sharp.
A better question then:
If you are constantly suffering from anxiety, are you shrewd or ill?
HINT:
(I have written this and now the python seems to have gone to sleep. I wonder when will it wake up again? Oh, wait…it’s back! Apparently, my thinking about it woke it up)
After sharing some Random Thoughts, I want to talk about Random Writing.
Every now and then it is a blessing to be able to just sit down to write — without planning, without an idea, without something to say, without anyone to criticize, without dreaming of followers. Without caring about the functions of writing and duties of a writer.
It is something you cannot do all the time and you cannot plan. It just comes. Flows, rather. When the burden inside your chest becomes too heavy for you to even breathe, when the idea of being a writer becomes too impractical for you to even live. When you don’t want to speak anything anymore, when you don’t want to make it anymore!
But it happens because you have to still sit down and write something!
I once heard Anthony Burgess say he’d quit being a writer if he suddenly had a million dollars. But I have also heard Charles Bukowski say that writing was never a work for him. ‘It all flows too naturally for me once certain prerequisites are met,’ said he.
But they are old folks. Long gone! That was their deal. Why do I cling on to the thoughts of these thinkers of yore? After all, they didn’t know how it was like to live here — today — 2022 — …they didn’t feel how it feels to be me, or you.
How did this idea of becoming a writer even get into my head? And Why? Why didn’t I want to be a doctor, or an engineer? Is it their doing?
Q: Why do I have to do it? Why can’t I not-do it?
A: Thoughts. My thoughts.
They may have long gone, but human-thoughts haven’t.
Thoughts
Every now and then it is a blessing to be able to quit old thoughts and patterns of thinking. They are like extremely heavy loads to your fragile imagination. They break your proverbial back.
Why can’t I move on from old identities, old relationships, from old self?
After all, I am living in a new world. Why do old concepts like nations and religion keep bothering me? Why do they buzz in my conscience like a mosquito? This internet thing wasn’t there a while ago. If the internet was there in the age of enlightenment, there wouldn’t be advocacy for sovereign nations. Nations were supposed to be a bridge connecting all of us of different races and castes. And now we are connected. Yet nations exist today —and they themselves are disconnecting you and I! What an irony. I hate nations — I hate my nation — I hate your nation!
I once talked to an old writer, ‘You guys of today are lucky…the computer corrects your grammar,’ said he.
‘You guys were luckier. In your age, not everyone could publish,’ I thought.
Old thoughts! They bug, they bite, they hurt. I want to be new every second. I want to be someone else every new day. I want to kill the yesterday’s me. I can’t do all that with my physical body, but my mind is free. I can do that to my image and self. But, why don’t I do that?
Is it because I have a citizenship with my name on it?
I condemn nations. They all should die. Nations are pathetic concepts infesting our modern souls.
I wonder if someone from Norway also criticizes nations as much as someone like me — who is from Nepal — does?
It doesn’t matter. Nations are like old thoughts. They are old thoughts! They trouble humanity just as my old thoughts trouble me. They should die, just as my old thoughts should!
It’s therapeutic to sit down and write nonsense like this. I wonder if anyone will even read this particular word. And this little jibberish here: hfdaslvnadfkl. If yes, then here’s a small gift from me to you:
Hello, I wish you well for your life. Please take care of yourself.
But even if no one reads, I really don’t care (on this one at least) for I have cured my anxiety for now. That’s what should matter to me!
I haven’t been-to or lived in the United States, or the United Kingdom, or Norway, or some nation similar — which means I cannot tell how those nations will make you perceive about humans, but, I have been born-on and lived in a small nation called Nepal — which means I can tell you that this Nation has made me disgusted with this species called human beings.
Q: Why?
A: People.
Q: What kind of people?
A: In general.
Q: Be specific!
A: Okay, there are two aspects to it. One is the people’s inability to manage and second is their greed.
Q: That’s common in people of all nations. Be more specific.
A: If that’s the case, buckle up!
Management: You wake up one morning fresh and hopeful about the prospects of both the world and your life. To respect that, you want to take a shower. You go to the bathroom and turn the knob of the tap: There’s no water flowing! Even the toilet lid is covered because you haven’t been able to flush the doings of last night. Still, you gotta do the morning deed. It smells bad: You get disgusted with your own smell. You get disgusted with yourself. But somehow you manage to hold yourself together. You change and decide to go out for a short walk. As soon as you leave, you are greeted by a smell. A smell so bad, so pungent, you feel sympathetic towards your toilet. That smell is from the waste that hasn’t been collected for weeks. It gets inside your nose and from there to your blood and soul. If the morning smell disgusted you with yourself, the public waste disgusts you with people. You can’t see yourself or the people around you without that smell. They seem and smell like waste. You get disgusted. You question humans in general. You wonder if other nations are similar. You return home and curse the god that placed you in this rubbish out of all the rubbish in the globe.
Pettiness: You are on your scooter and are about to park in a space. There are already ten other bikes and scooters parked. You spot a small empty space between two bikes. You, dreaming of your future, accelerate towards that empty space — but another bike rudely overtakes you and parks in that very space. You are angry. You look around and see that there are enough spaces left for ten more bikes. Why did this person have to park exactly where I was about to park? I was nearer to the spot? Couldn’t he have parked a little further? Then you argue with yourself that there’s no point blaming others, so you quietly go and park in another empty space. The empty space you saw at first was about a ten metres closer to the destination both you and that person were headed to! That person was just petty! This pettiness creeps on to you. It ruins your entire day. You enter the government office for whatever you were there for. You are already angry and hungry. You take the token and they tell you the official is out for lunch. You wait for half-an-hour — and they tell you the official has left for home. ‘Come tomorrow,’ they say and move away from you. ‘Why?’ you shout. No one listens, let alone answer. Now, they all seem and smell like shit. You get disgusted. You question humans in general. You wonder if other nations are similar. You return home and curse the god that placed you in this rubbish out of all the rubbishes in the globe.
I find myself feeling empty and frustrated during conversations of philosophical nature. By that, I mean conversations that are not gossip, or about success or money and are about the meanings of xyz. The feeling has occurred numerous times with numerous people.
I enjoy those conversations, that is why I get excited at meeting people with whom I can talk that kind of stuff. But every time, I end up disappointed and perhaps the other person(s) does too. Things go nowhere. Ideas go nowhere. Feelings go nowhere. What begins with beats of excitement always finishes with melodies of emptiness and frustration. Like swimming in nothing. There’s nothing to discuss after a certain point, no more to go. A void. A big dark void!
But a few days ago, after I devised a little concept called Contextual Philosophy I have begun to not only learn from but also enjoy philosophical conversations.
Contextual Philosophy begins with a simple premise: Why the hell should I talk philosophy with this person(s)? and goes to these:
I will not talk philosophy with this person because I enjoy it
I will not talk philosophy with this person because this person seems to enjoy it
I will not talk philosophy with this person because we are bored
I will not talk philosophy with this person to boast
I will not talk philosophy with this person because I am a writer
I will not talk philosophy with this person because I have just read a book
I will not talk philosophy with this person because I am frustrated with my life
and so on…
As you can see, this leaves me with not many reasons to talk philosophy with people and hence gives momentum to contextual philosophy.
Why should I really have philosophical conversations with this person?
I have had a couple of conversations after this conceptualization and things have gone smooth. Emptiness and frustrations haven’t been there while fruitful conversations have existed. Philosophical ideas have been relevant.
While I try to think why this process has worked — apart from the questions raised restraining me from unnecessary impulses — I have experienced a few worthy reasons to be having philosophical conversations :
If the ideas exchanged during the conversation make the participants question their desires in life,
If all the participants can constantly question: what new conclusion will we derive from this conversation.
For instance, if we are conversing about the existence of god — and if we deduct all ‘I will not talk ifs…’ from it, we will be making sure all points we reach will be connected to the desires we keep within ourselves and will generate new observations. But, it has to be relevant to all parties. Although this may not seem like much of a change, it ensures the conversation doesn’t go out of hand (mind) and always has relevance to the lives of the participants. This takes away the unnecessary and void from philosophy.
I have found this to be a useful thing which has eradicated the emptiness and frustration.
While this may seem similar to Selective Talking, it is different as it deals with philosophical matters only — while Selective Talking could be about anything with anyone.
This simple experiment of keeping the context of philosophical conversation in mind while thinking up new thoughts and arguments, doesn’t allow philosophical talks to be empty which can also be applied to personal musings and writings.
Philosophizing has now become relevant, in fact the most relevant thing to do in life!
We talk about the world moving ‘fast’ today but Europe in the 18th century must have been faster. Yes, these express technological developments are blinding and who knows how long it will take for us to finally understand what has been happening for the last 20 years or so, but Europe in the 18th century must have been at a different level purely due to the amount of ideas being thrown around — new ideas about ourselves, our world, new ideas about ideas!
It was the time after the Renaissance and giant thinkers such as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz; time of men of science such as Kepler, Hooke and Newton. New interpretations of classic ideas were happening, art was developing, science was emerging and philosophy was changing — humanity was becoming something new!
It was in this mood that one of the definers of that space-time, the most popular interpreter of those years and people emerged: Voltaire and it was in this mood that his classic Micromégas appeared.
I had read on Wikipedia that this particular work of fiction was science fiction but my preconception got the better of me and it told me it was an exaggeration— after all what kind of science fiction could an 18th century philosopher write when science wasn’t even SCIENCE yet!
But I was surprised (and angry at myself at this habit of preconception).
This short story is about an inhabitant of a planet that revolves around Sirius — which is 24,000 times bigger than the Earth. His name is Mr. Micromégas. He is big (24000 geometrical paces of five feet each), he is old (600 years of age). He is a philosopher!
After being trialled for heretical observations he decides to travel the universe:
…sometimes by the help of a sunbeam, and sometimes by the convenience of a comet, he and his retinue glided from sphere to sphere, as the bird hops from one bough to another. He in a very little time posted through the milky way…
He reaches to the planet Saturn and notices that the inhabitants there were mere dwarfs compared to him (about a thousand fathoms high.) There he befiends the secretary of the Academy and they begin travelling together.
They slip from moon to moon and spring upon passing comets and they reach Jupiter. There they learn some secrets and leave. They traverse about one hundred million leagues and see two moons on Mars. They do not stay on Mars because they think it would be too small to accommodate them. So they continue on. Until…they are tired and want to rest. This is where they notice the Earth. There they resolve to land. They move toward the tail of a comet and finding an Aurora Borealis they embark. They arrive on the northern coast of the Baltic on the fifth day of July in the year 1737.
On Earth they encounter whales and think it to be the ruling animals. Finally, they encounter humans who are obviously visible to them only through microscopes and audible to them only through certain creative mechanisms. They do not believe that such small creatures could possess intelligence. They talk to humans and ask questions like — if they were happy, if they were inspired with souls, etc.
A human mathematician, astounded by the questions, measures them which makes them realize that one should not judge things by its external magnitude.
Then they begin conversing with philosophers and learn from them that the Earth-humans fight with each other a lot for leaders who never go to the place of conflict by wretches who possibly never behold the leaders who tell them to sacrifice.
Hearing about the barabarians who rule from their palaces, give orders for murdering millions the Sirian is fillied with compassion for the human race. He then recognizing that there are only few who are wise in the entire species, he asks questions about mathematics and science. Hearing the answers, he is impressed. And then he asks them about soul:
Tell me what is the soul, and how do your ideas originate?
What follows after this question is bombardment of ideas from the philosophers. Some quote Aristotle and some Descartes, some Mallebranche and some Leibniz and Locke. But all present different opinions.
A person tells them he can answer all the secrets (which was contained in the abridgment of St. Thomas) and after he surveys them from top to toe, he says that they too were made for the use of man!
When leaving, the Sirian presents a book to the humans which he says willdemonstrates the very essence of things.
What he writes in that book, I will not write here. I suggest you read, or rather experience the work yourself.
All in all I think this book manages to beautifully illustrate the speed of that age in Europe — the variety, the hope and the excitement from all the intellectual developments happening. We humans tend to get carried away a lot. It is happening today as well, with our scientific and technological progress.
After reading this book I have realized that this is nothing new. I consider 18th century Europe to be crazier and more full of doubts and imaginations than today. It was a dangerous time, for it was a time where ideas and idea-generators were popular. Anything could have been thought, imagined and envisioned. Things could have gone anywhere, but it has reached here. Voltaire surely was influential in all this.
Before getting into selective talking, I want to give present some background.
A few days ago, I attended a small literary gathering. There were different kinds of creative and intellectual people with diversity in profession, career-track, writing styles, etc. The things in common being that all were intellectuals and older than me. Much older. This allowed me to freely be curious as I freely asked questions and listened to them answer.
I introduced myself to almost every one there and keenly listened to them. Everything was going well. I was learning important things and getting to know them. After the event ended, I got to talking with a man in his mid 60s — a scholar who had degrees in Buddhism and Geography. I had started the conversation by asking him what his field was. But what followed from him was quite unlike anyone I had spoken to by that time. HE was both boring and anxiety-inducing for me:
He began narrating his biography: Where he was born, how/in what he was educated, how many surgeries he has had, where lives his son, what he studies, etc. etc.
I didn’t want to be rude so I listened. But I got bored. I wanted to walk-off. I wanted him to walk-off. I wanted someone to come and interrupt. I wanted the conversation to end.
The surprising thing was, I do understand that he was speaking of crucial things. In fact, he was providing me important life-lessons through stories of his own personal experiences. He had educated himself in diverse subject matters, so it was supposed to be very important for me to help balance and cope with my own struggles with balancing variety: BUT something was off in him!
‘This person speaks about important things, but it all feels nonsense to me.’
At first I thought it might have been my issue: attention deficiency and all that. But then, I had been listening to more than a dozen other people and none had bored me to such an extent, if at all. All had given brief and solid answers. It had all been enjoyable and impactful.
But then I noticed something: all of them (who didn’t bore me) were either much older than the person who bored me or were much more productive/successful in literature!
And that’s where I noticed something for the first time in my life: The Skill Of Selective Talking.
And then yesterday I discovered this Voltaire quote:
The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Curious and creative people usually have a lot of ideas inside their head. And I have come to believe that the most nonsense of talkative people are also either one of those. This quality (having ideas) pushes one to express. The most profound ones express with writing or other forms of creations. The not so profound ones have nothing but talking at their disposal. But that doesn’t mean the profound ones don’t talk or the shallow ones don’t write! My point however is: curious and creative people have a lot to express, but bad expression is worse than no expression, hence, selective talking is an important skill to have. And such talking is something that profound ones do. The shallow ones just blabber irrespective of the degrees they have acquired.
By selective talking I mean keeping these elements in mind while talking with someone:
Why is this person listening to me? What should I talk?
When I said above that the older or more prolific ones out there had given me solid to-the-point answers and hadn’t bored me, I say they were the profound ones. And I think the profound ones ask the questions above and answer them carefully to themselves before talking with anyone else. Or they could just be old and too tired to talk.
Anyways, the fact remains that we talk to express and we express to communicate. What is the point of expressing things or expressing in a manner that bores others and therefore deafens them and doesn’t become communication at all? It misses the whole point. Understanding this is being profound.
The person that had bored me and hence taught me a valuable life-lesson (if he wasn’t doing it intentionally to teach me and was therefore the most profound of them all) was not selective talking. He was expressing himself out of his urge without considering me as a listener. He didn’t care about me or why I was talking to him for that matter. He just expressed himself. While everyone doing things for selfish reasons is the norm of life (as I myself was trying to learn for myself), his talking bored me. It was important but seemed irrelevant. It was sensible but sounded nonsense. For me, he made noise the whole time, didn’t communicate. He wasn’t profound or old enough!
After that I have tried to tell myself to practice this skill of selective talking. After all, why do I want to bore others and waste my crucial energy at the same time — at the gain of nothing? I am telling myself to rather be quiet and listen. Talk only when it’s worth it. When it is required of me. When I have something important or entertaining to communicate.
The same applies to videos, cinema, lectures, speeches and writing:
While there may be point in writing things for self-expression, there is no point publishing them if they are not selected carefully. If they are not selective-writings, they just occupy computer and library spaces and achieve nothing. They merely bore others and waste our energy (and time-money resources too).
I don’t think I am alone in this. I am sure I am not alone in this. This restlessness is painful!
When I start a book, I do not want to stop until I have finished it. Yes, I have my Time Management Formula where I divide my day into parts where reading and writing get a certain amount of time each. I have divided in a manner so as to not mix them together. One at a time. It is supposed to help me cure this agitation, this headache:
Read-only from x to y AM.
Write-only from a to b PM.
Yet, when I start a book I want x and y to extend forever, killing a and b in the process. I want to read on and on: for the whole day, days or weeks. Until the book is finished. Done!
I find it difficult to get into the writing mode while I read.
The same happens when I am in the writing mode.
When I start writing a thing or two, I want a and b to extend forever, killing x and y in the process. I want to write on and on: for the whole day, days or weeks. Until I am exhausted and out of writing energy. Done!
I find it difficult to get into the reading mode while I write.
YET:
I have aTime Management Formula. It is supposed to help me cure this agitation, this restlessness, this headache.
This issue drives me crazy. Take this moment for instance. This moment: when I am writing this article, I am writing as if I will never ever read a book in my life. I am a writer, I don’t read, is what’s buzzing inside my head.
But something similar had happened this morning when I was reading a book:
I love to read, fk writing, was what was buzzing inside my head.
If looked upon as action, as a whole, I may have been successfully reading and writing. But during each process the difficulty, the restlessness, the agitation, the ache is real. It hurts.
I am trying to make friends of reading and writing. I want them to be friends. I want them to understand each other. I want them to understand me. I want them to understand the situation. I want them to understand the human irony.
At times, they do understand. But most of the time they don’t.
Yet in the overall context, I do both. But with pain. The Time Management Formula works. It is like a machine which pushes me to do things. It makes things happen. But it is like a machine. It doesn’t make me feel. It pushes me. It just gets things done. Just like machines.
I wish they (reading and writing) understood each other. I wish I could get up after finishing this and read for the rest of the day. But no! Another writing-idea has popped up. It’s as if I want to throw all the books away and just write for the rest of my life. Yet when I start reading, I don’t want to stop. After I finish something I want to read something else immediately. I want to go on and on…
Yet, the Time Management Formula works: like a clock. Like a machine. I want something organic…
What about you? Does this happen to you? How do you deal with this?
The pursuit of truth for human beings (Human knowledge) is often depicted as being a linear affair. It either goes up:
We, evolved from apes, have managed to create computers, peek into our cells and now we have rockets and now we are heading into unknown space, time, and new dimensions and it is only a matter of time until we will discover the truth!
Or down:
The Truth: We, created by God…shall return back to God.
Either way, it’s a straight line. A timeline.
But I am having other thoughts:
The entire existence exists in the form of entanglement in our mind(s). Everything we have known so far, Every religion, science, art, philosophy, Every simple or complex knowledge, All our understanding, All our discoveries: are merely the process of untangling part(s) of a larger entanglement. The entanglement being our knowledge of our existence as a whole.
We untangle a knot, get excited and like a game of crossword puzzle, it leads to untangling of many other subsequent tangles. We then think we have unearthed the truth. Get excited. Oh, the joy of untangling!
Until… we hit upon another crisis…Time to untangle some more! Yet we don’t look at things as being in a tangle. We like to think of things as being linear. It feels as if every untangle is the last obstacle.
There are many who, out of ignorance, out of envy or out of their own self-insignificance-perception will spit verbal poison at you. They will — with their petty mind — carefully locate the thing(s) that matter, strengthen you and derogate it to a great degree and you immediately find yourself facing crisis, feeling weak. Your foundation crumbles. No matter how capable you think of yourself, it is an extremely tough task to remain unbothered by the sting. When a snake bites you, you feel it!
Let the stinger sting. If you don’t feel a thing it might imply you are too malleable, dull or blunt. Sensing the sting means: you have your values and you perceive the sting. Which I think is a healthy thing.
At times there are stings which lead us to an appropriate direction while we might have lost track. Those however are in fact not stings but medicines for us. The difference between poison and medicine is in the intention. We’ve got to be able to spot the intention. Unable to know which ones are which might be detrimental to us.
But the real problem is when one allows the poison to sustain.
If that happens, we find yourself baseless, willess, strengthless — with the poison enveloping us and we thinking only of the person(s) who has stung. There we might even develop an impulse for revenge, which I do not think is a healthy thing. Our mind is supposed to be free, aware and ready for the next truth — thinking of giving a punch back to someone is the last thing we want it to be doing! We’re not that petty.
Worse than that would be: we boiling. Angered, fuming we spitting words back at that person. Words that hurt. Words that derogate. In other words, we ourselves stinging and spreading poison. We don’t wanna do that, do we?
Q: So what do we do then? How do we deal with verbal poison?
A: We rub the wound a couple of times and think of something else!
(What we value is valuable, that is why we the valuable one values it)
…my pleasure is in my own existence, not in those works that would remain of me. If that should be in opposition to the fact that something would remain of me, but I wouldn’t exist, then I prefer that I should remain and my work wouldn’t.
I like his reply, just as I like his cinema.
Career is supposed to be there to make our lives better, not the other way around.
I have seen many people around me and have also read about a lot who approach things in the latter way. Life for them is just a vessel for their career and nothing more. This is not just the case of those avaricious ones or of ordinary ones such as businessmen and jobbers, this is also the case with many artists, thinkers, scientists, philosophers and politicians.
Call it ambition, call it duty, call it professionalism — call it whatever you like, such people get obsessed with their work to such an extent that their life takes backstage and their every meal and breath culminates in the thought of climbing another step in their career ladder.
In arts, when we hear of artists who take such an approach, we tend to call them geniuses — and the more miserable the artist the greater we perceive them to be.
One has to be really really special to be able to rise above the petty dealings of life and devote oneself completely to the related field, we say. And we passionately discuss the stories of their misery and the glory of their art. Our such interpretation of genius provokes and motivates many a talent to burn themselves out — destroying their life in the process — for the sake of their art. Art has weird sources of inspiration anyway!
But my point is: such an attitude towards art or anything as such is an irony. Art is a means to an end and that end is always life — be it life’s knowledge or experiences. Similar is every other activity which we call profession and in an individual’s pursuit sense we call career. Science, philosophy , politics and everything else in between and beyond — are means to an end called life.
Hold on a second there Mr. Stupid, you might say, if everything is a means to make life better, doesn’t excess in means imply excessive betterment of life? Doesn’t excess art, science, philosophy and politics imply a greater life for the practitioner as well as for the receiver?
Yes you are correct, I reply, But that’s exactly where I see the problem. AndI give my own example:
Trying to make a living as a writer I understand the importance of reading. And at times, when I am reading to make my career better, I persevere in spite of anxiety, frustration, agitation and problems in relationships with my loved ones. In those moments, I get obsessed with reading to such an extent that I forget the very reason I have pursued a life as a writer — which is to live a life I think is the best. I forget that career-reading is a means to writing-career and writing career is a means to a writing life which is nothing but a means to a perfect life (as per my perception.) If only I could remember to shut Kant books at a point where they begin troubling my peace of mind!
This is exactly the problem with our educational structure. Education fundamentally is supposed to be something that acts as a means to provide us guidance and an environment for an appropriate life within which grades and such are supposed to be means for a better education. But what did we end up doing? — We ended up obsessing over grades and education and therefore ended up living a miserable student life.
A career obsessed scientist might eventually make discoveries for a better world, but a miserable scientist can equally do things that will take the world the other way.
Oh, if only we all remembered that any type of work we do is done merely to make our lives better : there would be less anxious and miserable of us and there would be more scrutiny in what we do, which could only mean one thing: there would be less anxiety and misery all around — which is after all a good start to provide a good and complete life for everyone! (Which is why listen to that wonderful piece of music anyway.)
a quality that you either have or want to have in yourself
In the traditional sense, this ‘special worth’ of Merriam Webster is socially given. If any qualities in a person of any given time and place is deemed worthy and ‘good’ by the society, that quality ends up being a virtue. But I don’t think that it should be the case. An individual should be allowed to determine what virtue he/she would want in themselves and fight or convince others that the virtue they have selected is more worthy then the one prevalent if that is not the case. It is about fighting for the true against prejudice.
While we’re critiquing traditional thinking, I am reminded of one Nietzsche from the 19th century.
In his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche talks about ideally have only one virtue. Saying how qualities evolved from the maturity of one’s passion is the best route to discovering one’s virtue, he also goes on to say that while it is illustrious to have multiple virtues, it is a hard ask. He says multiple virtues will eventually envy each other as they all vie for the highest position within you.
But I think multiple virtues can be managed together. For that to be possible though, we need generalization and a little act of symbolism.
At this moment, I want to share my virtues with you. (Not what I have, but what I seek in me.)
These virtues as of now are:
Calmness
Strength
Depth
Now, what I did to make sure these qualities I want to have in me won’t fight and compete with each other as Nietzsche warned, I have used symbolism to turn all three into one.
First, let me quickly define what I mean by those words above.
Calmness for me is the quieting of thoughts such that they go about slowly, gently and smoothly.
Strength for me is when your thoughts stop and ignore fearly emotions. Strength is when your own thoughts dominate and beat the hell out of petty and harmful thoughts.
Depth for me is thoughts reaching the root of everything it encounters.
I initially didn’t want to write and publish this article because all this is my personal work in progress and I may not have the same thinking about these things tomorrow as of now. But then I wanted to go ahead and do it, for reasons I do not know yet.
Well then, with that out of the way, I want to talk about the generalizing and the symbolizing.
I searched for a single thing (symbol) that would successfully have all the three qualities I have in it.
What could that be which is calm, strong and deep? — And then I got it:
Ocean/Sea!
Ocean surfaces can be calm. Oceans are mighty strong. Oceans are seriously deep.
Okay, I do know how ocean surfaces are violent and disturbing too! Just like our thoughts. But since we are humans, we can decide how we would want the waters to flow.
Let’s give some background before we discuss what is a GOAT:
The modern scientifically trained democratic man wants to mock and laugh at all gods and kings
‘Haha, gods are dead. It all started with a big bang, duh!’says he.
‘Haha, kings are dead. Long live the market!’ says he.
And yet look at the irony:
The same modern man goes to concerts and worships his musicians. He comes back and tattoos the musicians’ name and face in the most intimate part of his body.
The same modern man goes to football matches carrying flags. He bows to his sports player and imitates the player in every way practical: hair, the way to walk.
And then this modern trend of calling other people G.O.A.T — which presumably stands for greatest of all time.
This term called GOAT which should have actually been used as a satire for such performers and players — who are in most cases the reminder of collective human boredom and insignificance— is in fact a term of reverence.
It is a term born out of the inner urge to see perfection, the ideal in any field. In other words, it is a term born out of the urge to see greatness, because they themselves feel tiny. It is the same urge that gave birth to literal gods and kings — Gods are great. Kings are great.
The word great then is a relative term. You are always great relative to something. The classic Taoist case. But it is an urge isn’t it? You put five random people in a room and there is an urge in you to spot the perfect among them. The best among them. The great among them. And then you put the entire human history in a plane, the urge returns: you want to spot perfection, you want to filter out the best. The great. The great among the great: the greatest. Everytime you choose a great, you are belittling others who didn’t win over your perception. Everytime you choose a great that isn’t you, you are belittling yourself who didn’t win over your own perception.
My question and concern: Isn’t this urge the cause of gods and kings? Isn’t this urge the reason why humans have drawn vague and unnecessary lines between themselves? The same reverence which sustains our weakness, which makes us vulnerable, which makes us mote in the eyes of the greats!
How much have people across all cultures suffered because of this reverence! How much have people across all societies and states suffered due to the blindness and dumbness, force and fear infused by certain religions and monarchs?
When mythology was created, the goal wasn’t reverence for this or that god(s). When people came together, the objective wasn’t to choose a king to be a slave to. Life was supposed to be contemplative, imaginative, fun and organizable. That’s why those things happened. But then those things got exploited because some couldn’t rise out of their self-doubt and those systems got converted into organized systems of power. And people suffered…
People suffered and suffered until the progeny of the same culture and society dared to wake up and ward-off such reverence. And eventually the modern man was born: out of the hatred toward reverence. The modern man was born out of hope in science and democracy. The modern was born out of contempt towards political-religion and monarchy.
The modern man was supposed to enjoy Shiva but not revere him. The modern men were supposed to dance together in a circle but with an empty center.
But why then is the same modern man who has mocked upon literal gods and kings still so passionate about greatness? And that too for mere entertainers! Isn’t he supposed to have moved beyond greatness? Doesn’t the whole idea of his secularism and democracy revolve around anti-reverence? Doesn’t the whole idea revolve around self-belief?
This could only mean one thing:
The modern man has killed-off neither god nor kings, he is merely worshiping and being ruled by new ones.
In other words, the modern man worships and is ruled by his entertainers!
Q: And why does the modern man need such superficial entertainers?
In Nepal, it is difficult to find an intellectual unstained by Hindu/Buddhist or some sort of political ideology. This tendency might be a global phenomenon, yet, in Nepal, it stretches to a nauseating degree, so much so that you can correctly guess an intellectual’s entire idea-set by merely knowing his/hers religious/political inclination. The person I am writing about today is Laxmi Prasad Devkota.
He struggled with both those elements and yet managed to live and create in a way that included and transcended them.
You can’t predict him, you can’t guess him and you get both annoyed and exalted by his spontaneity and randomness: in other words, by his poetic genius.
There’s a lot of myth surrounding the man.
Stories of him giving away his coat to the poor; writing lengthy poems in cigarette packs; struggling immensely with money; being sent to Ranchi (a city in India known for mental treatment) — are abound. It was in this context that he was called a geographical mistake by a Brit whose name I cannot recall.
Yet some had enough sense to recognize him and call him a Nepali Mahakavi (Great Poet). But apart from that, his works and ideas aren’t popular in a folk sense and his presence is mostly limited within dull school-books.
Yes, such is the society of Nepal and such was the man born here: ahead of his time, inappropriately in space!
He mostly wrote poems (epic, short, metered, unmetered) spanning from Nepali Shakuntala to Prometheus. His seminal work Munamadan is still considered to be the greatest work of Nepali Literature. It is a tragedy about a man who leaves his wife and mother to go to Lhasa for a better financial life.
He wrote songs. He also wrote a lot of short stories and a novel.
His essays are brilliant and it is in this context that I would like to introduce his ideas to people who aren’t familiar with him.
A few years ago I published a collection of poetry in English named PARANOIA:
When I reached to the final stages the work — set to publish — I had the idea of using my work as a medium to interpret a couple of Nepali writers — in English. I translated certain lines I liked from Devkota’s essay collection and placed it in.
The translations include his thoughts on a wide array of things: creativity, art, science, philosophy, spirituality, education, life, god, etc.
I now want to quit this rambling of mine and insert those translations/interpretations so that you can judge and hopefully enjoy his ideas on your own.
Heart
Truth shines through feelings…
In the heart lies the luminosity of God.
Feelings or emotions are primary
Desiring and thinking come later.
Beast
Eyes identify
Brain understands
Ears listen
Heart feels.
To be devoid of these four is the sign of being a beast.
Depth
Difficulty doesn’t imply depth.
Difficulty doesn’t mean Art,
Incomprehensibility doesn’t have any value.
Schools are:
Industries
To manufacture machines.
Education system
And the soul desires a thing,
education provides something else.
All I’ve learned till B.A
in three years
I believe,
I can put into little children’s minds better,
reciting stories…
Folly
That we usually call Education
is making man stupid.
Creation Love Art
And love is the chief element of creation
Whilst Art is the chief action of love
Curiosity
I yearn to see:
What lies there in the heart!
Natural curiosity!
Sinner
I want to bow my head
As if the all pervading God is scolding me.
I know that I am a sinner.
Art
The beautifully illustrated Truth is Art
Which springeth from the creative imagination.
The truth lies in our life
and unless it comes from the formlessness to the form:
we do not realize it.
Civilization
Civilization hasn’t yet started.
We haven’t learned to respect life.
Real progress will start
The day our sentiment of brotherhood gets firm
Vairagya
As long as we aspire to become great in this world
or hold feelings to do things
and show our pride,
Vairagya is impossible.
Doubt
To doubt is better,
as it helps understand,
assists searching.
Question is everything, answer is maturity.
Dare
It is cowardice to not move forward in opportunity.
We cannot live in a life devoid of danger.
What Science does not
Science cannot satisfy man’s curiosity
and he searches for glimpses
beyond the Sciences
through the magic of emotional and imaginative world,
where man feels self-satisfied as if he is near the truth.
What Art not
The works done by mathematical formulas,
even though are the works of brain,
do not deserve to be called Art.
Painting is Art, Photography is not.
Where Art springs
When the creative imagination sees new dreams
Rising from imitation
And maneuvers its works in its own manner,
Art springs.
Let’s get small
There is fun in being small
We can see others’ significance dance around.
There is pleasure in the peacefulness of ego;
We can see others’ pretense.
Subtle Conscience
The energy to manufacture Art
Doesn’t come from the mere superficial darshan of objects
nor does it comes from mere intellect and knowledge;
It comes from those subtle consciences,
Which find emotional caressing from divine experience
rising above bestial eyes.
The beast merely looks and remains satisfied,
but man tries to touch the heart of everything.
Teacher and teaching
Science cannot locate everything
and our psychological studies end
within the darkness of the intellect.
This is why no teacher can teach.
Creativity
In the divine talent of the Creator
The word was born
And we,
studying this creation
attain clear messages of
Divine Conscience,
Divine Truth,
Divine Beauty and
Divine knowledge.
In the creative imagination of God,
Totality works and provides beautiful
lines and colors and forms
to the Truth of God.
We realize the ‘beautiful’ through the sensing of Truth
and where there is no Truth there isn’t beauty.
This Self-Illustrating form of God
manifests in artistic creativity such that
truth becoming beautiful descends to the outer forms of the senses.
Imaginative Truth
For me,
practicality is limited and
philosophy, intellect is blind.
I enjoy imaginative truth the most
and through it find the glimpses of God
Gambling
I enjoy gambling,
As I find ample opportunities there
To engage my mind and study.
Why is God silent?
It is the consequence of the
Western Civilization that,
God doesn’t speak in
Wind and Water.
Shadows
I speak with the shadows
For me,
The optical world is merely
The manifestation of the inside
And all solid objects are liquid.
The Poet
In the heart of the poet
The rocks speak
And the leaves have tongue.
Cadavers
Those who say,
The world doesn’t speak
Are Deaf
Those who say,
There isn’t life in the hills and the trees and the stars
Are cadavers.
Human Beings
If anything
Elucidates the affinity
Between man and God
It is Human-Heart and Imagination
In Art
Man seeks to
Show
His identification with the unknown
And in the world of the known
Seeks for the kingdom of the unknown
True Study
For studying the life of any culture
There’s nothing more enlightening
Then the Arts of that culture.
Near
We feel we’ve reached near to the Creator
When that eye in our inner world opens
Which
Can bring to form the unavailable and the irregular
And fill it with colours.
Imagination
A small spark of
The fundamental creative dream energy of God
In humans:
Is Imagination.
Man
He tries to create
Embrace nature
Runs after fresh magic to improve the world
Listens to the call of the unknown,
Ascending beyond sights and sounds
Seeks for the inner sparks and sounds
He turns forms into sounds and words into pictures
He dislikes boundaries
He wants to fly and pluck
Peek from darkness and
Steal the fire from heaven.
Work and Art
In a simple table,
The work of carpentry is done
Not Art.
But,
If a carpenter
Creates a table as if a beautiful dream
Art it becomes.
Dreams
We call those creations Art
Which are within the boundaries of truth and beauty
If they’ve got the natural affect
For the heart of life.
Empty dreams aren’t Art
As long as they don’t get published.
Truth and Beauty
Beauty arises from the prodigious consciousness of truth
I avidly followed professional sports once upon a time — especially cricket. I ‘liked/adored/followed’ teams, players: their style, etc.
And then philosophical interests kicked in and I began questioning the essence of my so-called passion for sports. I found ignorance and vulgarity down there so I resisted and stopped!
Until…last week!
India’s ‘festival’ of celebration of their ‘religion’ called IPL (Indian Premier League) is on these days.
Since I am from South Asia and we have this inherent tendency to compete (psychologically at least) with each other in things that we or some of us value — cricket happens to be in my blood (at least that’s what they try to convince us of). So I decided to let the blood flow freely and follow cricket passionately again.
I selected a team I thought I should like and I have been watching matches on TV, following analysis, news/gossip on the internet and also: thinking about the game. All this after a long-long hiatus.
One major change that has occured to me since this bloody-renaissance is this: I feel satisfied! I have a ‘good’ feeling going on.
There’s this massive wave of wind sort of thing inside my chest and it fills me up every time I think/see/hear of the league and when the team or the player of my choice does well. I then enter the internet and drink in each and every praise delivered for the team or the player(s). The wind drives me to do that. The more I drink, the more pumped I get. Once again, that lump/pump whatever of wind has made me feel complete.
On the other hand, if the team or the player doesn’t do well, I get agitated. A strange dissatisfaction lurks underneath as I constantly find myself not just roaming around the internet trying to justify their excellence but also imagining and playing out scenarios inside my own head. If the success of my choice fills me with a wind kind of thing, their failure fills me up with a stinky gas sort of gas.
Strangely however, irrespective of their success and failure: a general ‘good-feeling’ is inside me its thought form is as follows:
Tonight there’s a match, I will watch.
There’s a match, let’s see what they’re saying.
This is one strange drive for going through the day happily. I didn’t have such drives for a long time.
As I try to interpret the various elements present in this festival that may have been responsible for my changes, I find the following:
Support for a team or player(s): Their success winding and failure gasing me.
Competitive context: The tournament structure, the number of teams and players, the various possible scenarios, stakes mixed with my personal preferences with hearing/seeing what I prefer exciting me and hearing/seeing what I don’t prefer frustrating me.
Aesthetic(?): The jerseys, the style, the video quality creating a kind of attraction and excitement.
The Sheepiness: The number of people following this crazy nuance! Their sheer quantity providing me with justification to be-there and providing me with moral assurance.
The Zone: Everything above taking me to a zone of sorts where cricket and its context becoming an end-in-itself and the most important thing in existence. This generating assurance and warmth.
With all this, I want to look into the emotional spectrum in me — strictly in context of this cricket league.
As I mentioned above, what I have noticed in me is this flapping of excitement-frustration (wind-gas).
Now, this research here lists these as categories of emotions present in humans:
I do not want to get into detail and analyze these. Adding frustration, for my current pursuit, I guess accepting these to be enough is enough!
While following the league, these are the emotions I have noticed in me (in a strictly cricket-following context, I am trying my best not to include the carried over emotions of my life affairs):
I do understand how people might find the emotions absent in me available in them in this cricket context. Some might have sexual, romantic interest towards some player or even umpires.
But isn’t it strange that some people find this cricket thing to be aesthetically pleasing, awe-some, horrorful, romantic?
I mean, this here is van Gogh’s work and van Gogh works with aesthetical things:
Now this is what German Philosopher Immanuel Kant said generated awe in him:
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me — Translated by Lewis White Beck
Similarly, normal people associate things such as death and ghosts with horror; nature, relationships with romance.
Once again:
But won’t it be strange if people find this cricket thing to be aesthetically pleasing, awe-some, horrorful, romantic?
This scenario then is thus:
Following leagues and tournaments such as the IPL takes one to a zone. The zone stands independent of normal reality and its weltanschauung is that the league is an end-in-itself and everything else in existence is a means to the league and its success.
Inside the zone, there are preferences and those preferences generate certain emotions. Limited but nonetheless. Regarding emotions, there maybe two scenarios:
The zone does not contain all emotions of life: My case.
The zone contains all emotions of life: Some cases perhaps.
In the second scenario, isn’t it crazy that something like sports can generate diverse emotions in its consumers? This task is generally limited to arts and life. Come tomorrow with more and more resources, such sports might enhance the experience for its fanatics to such an extent that people will begin to say, romantically align with its players and love them if the players justify their ‘love’ by performing as they want to OR that people will begin to get petrified and afraid if their players do not justify their interest by performing as they want! (Some call cricket a religion in India.)
Now, this I find both weird and scary!
But do you know what I find weirder and scarier? — Case like mine (1) where while such sports aren’t providing me with a complete range of emotions, yet I am spending all of my time not just consuming but also musing them!
There may be a lot of people who follow sports just for a light escape or a switch-off, in which case these sports do no harm at all. They are games and that’s it. Maybe you read/watch a Shakespeare play; live life to the fullest and come to these leagues without taking it seriously. That’s great! But what if you live in the zone so much that you stop caring about feeling the full range of emotions and merely live within the wind-gas?
I mean that’s what capitalist culture with solid support from the scientific mentality is all about isn’t it? Take social media notifications and modern comical superhero movies for instance.
Published in 1848, this short work is where Poe searches for the sweetest-spot of wisdom to look into scientific and philosophical questions.
In his own words, he wanted it to be considered as a work of poetry:
To the few who love me and whom I love, to those who feel rather than think, to the dreamers and those who put their faith in dreams as in the only realities, I offer this book of truths, not in its character of truth-teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth, constituting it true. (Preface)
Apart from physical, cosmological, and spiritual implications, Poe in this work provides us with his epistemology. By that I mean — he provides us the method/way he believes in and has used to observe what he has observed and conclude what he has concluded. In doing so he has also provided us with his own brief interpretation of the history of philosophy.
I have summarized in this manner:
It was the metaphysicians who first came up with singular fancy that there exist but two practicable roads to Truth. Aristotle was the founder and popularizer of the deductive or the apriori method. He started with axioms, or self-evident truths and from axioms he proceeded logically, to results. His most illustrious disciples were one Euclid and Kant. Aristotle and his method reigned supreme until James Hogg preached an entirely different system, which he called the à posteriori or inductive method.
His plan referred altogether to sensation. He proceeded by observing, analyzing, and classifying facts — instantiæ Naturæ, as they were somewhat affectedly called — and arranging them into general laws.
While the mode of Aristotle rested on noumena, that of Hogg depend on phenomena; and so great was the admiration excited by this latter system that, at its first introduction, Aristotle fell into general disrepute.
But he recovered ground, and was permitted to divide the empire of Philosophy:
For many years, it didn’t matter whether the truth was even demonstrably such, for the dogmatizing philosophers of that epoch regarded only the road by which it professed to have been attained. It all ended with the scrutiny of the means, where it was found that the mean fit neither under Hog, nor under Aristotle.
If the crawling system was exclusively adopted, men wouldn’t have arrived at the maximum amount of truth because the repression of imagination was an evil not to be counterbalanced even by absolute certainty in the snail processes. Nor was that certainty absolute. Their method was like holding something close to the eyes to see it better. Which in turn blinded the seers.
The major taint in Baconianism lay in its tendency to throw power and consideration into the hands of merely perceptive men who mostly dug for minute facts, especially in physical science. All they did was depended on facts and closed their eyes to everything else. They gave hard time to those who wanted to evolve from facts through generalization. They called them ‘theoretical,’ ‘theory,’ ‘theorist’ in a degrading manner.
On the other hand, the Aristotleians were blind as they had:
The focus was a lot on Logic. A certain Mill said that the ability or inability to conceive is in no case to be received as a criterion of axiomatic truth.
But their logic was baseless, worthless and fantastic altogether. The two narrow and crooked paths then — the one of creeping and the other of crawling —is where they confined the Soul:
This way, none of them came — even by accident — to the broadest, the straightest and most available of all mere roads — the majestic highway of the Consistent. They failed to deduce from the works of God the vitally momentous consideration that a perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth?
After that proposition, the process of truth investigation was taken out of the hands of the ground-moles and given to the only true thinkers — to the generally-educated men of ardent imagination:
The speculators and the theorizers. The Keplers, The Laplaces, whose theories are corrected/reduced/sifted/cleared of their chaff of inconsistency —
This new method is powerful and it is proved by the fact that Newton’ s gravitation was deduced from Kepler and Kepler being a speculator/theorizer had merely guessed it.
This way, Poe establishes and selects intuition, which he describes as:
A conviction resulting from shadowy deductions or inductions.
Elsewhere, he describes an artist as someone with an exquisite sense of beauty which affords him not only a rapturous enjoyment but also a sense of deformity of disproportion (FIFTY SUGGESTIONS XXII).
Poets (who are artists) have the ability to sense the wrong and they can see injustice where the unpoetical see none. They have a clear-sightedness in respect to wrong which is nothing more than a corollary from the vivid sensation of right. Poets have an irritability towards the wrong.
As I think back on the subjects I was taught at school, I find no subject more general and peculiar than Social Studies.
Other subjects were pretty much straightforward and drew a clear line and scope: Science was about hard sciences; Mathematics about numbers, angles and their relations; English and Nepali tried to infuse command over the language through grammar and literature (although I would prefer literature to be a separate subject, but of that some other day); computer about getting used to computers. But social studies? Was it just supposed to be about understanding social stuff or was it about having a command over society?Was it supposed to be what we call ‘social sciences’? What was it?
I mean, history you can understand. But geography? I vividly remember being taught to look at maps! And at the same time, I also remember studying about the monsoon, weather, climate and all those kinds of things. What were they doing in social studies? If the argument is that they have importance in our social life, then, well each of the sciences and languages do too! Likewise, civics and sociology is understandable. I got my first exposure to the political system of my country through this subject.
As with almost everything, the curriculum I was a part of came from Western Countries. In this regard, it was futile to argue about the subject matters of social studies in Nepali context. There was no point blaming the ‘incapable’, ‘incompetent’ thinkers of this country. I had to blame either the US or UK. And since I am from a ‘developing’ nation, that was futile as well– Anything they did had to be genius!
But it had its foundations in 1820s Britain with the purpose of promoting social welfare within its territories. Developed properly in the US, it started off by focusing on geography, history and civics. As social sciences gained popularity and relevance towards the turn of the 19th century — the social sciences were increasingly viewed as a vehicle for studying and proposing solutions to the problems resulting from a dynamic and evolving American landscape. This value got embedded into social studies and the subject went ahead with the purpose to ‘educate’ democratic citizens on how to live in the modern world. After this economics found its place and its development is all about modifications on history, geography and civics.
Which basically means, it is more a National Studies where each subject matter is looked upon relative to one’s nation. Even International stuff. Otherwise, anthropology, archaeology, geography, philosophy (of all subjects) would want to be somewhere else.
This clears it up for me: social studies isn’t social sciences. The major difference being, social science would want to be more objective in its nature, whereas the purpose of social studies is solely to inject some ‘national sense’ inside the learners head. In the former you could talk about the geopolitical weaknesses of your country, in the latter you had to be proud of it! Therefore, geography fits well inside social studies.
In this way, what I see in social studies is a tool which holds the essence of modern education. While science and mathematics get all the attention and accolades and surely provide the best things in life if done well, social studies quietly lets you know who you are and whom you should dedicate yourself to with all your talents! Telling you whose side you are on.
Proving once again that the things that have the deepest impact are usually ones that are the quietest.
I just hope there won’t be ‘Big Tech Studies’ anytime soon though!
An Euro-American lover-of-money — moneyphile — named Peter Thiel wants to live forever!
While his greed for money and his desire to live forever are his personal choices — what amazes me is his greed for wanting to be a philosopher as well. (Some people need everything, don’t they?) He says something like this:
I think there are probably three main modes of approach to death…You can accept it, deny it or you can fight it.
Now, Mr. Thiel is a businessman, a merchant, a capitalist. He loves money more than anything. And he is proud of it.
…merchant must concern himself with buying and selling, earning money and making a profit. This requires cunning, willingness to enter into disputes, cleverness, constant quarreling, and great persistence. These are things that belong to commerce. They are qualities detrimental to and destructive of virtuousness and manliness, because it is unavoidable that actions influence the soul. Good actions influence it toward goodness and virtue. Evil and deceitful actions influence it in the opposite sense…
…These influences differ according to the different types of merchants. Those who are of a very low type and associated closely with bad traders who cheat and defraud and perjure themselves, asserting and denying statements concerning transactions and prices, are much more strongly affected by these bad character qualities. Deceitfulness becomes their main characteristic. Manliness is completelyalien to them, beyond their power to acquire. At any rate, it is unavoidable that their cunning and their willingness to enter into disputes affects their manliness (adversely). The complete absence of (any adverse effect) is very rare among them.
The character qualities of merchants are inferior to those of noblemen and rulers. This is because merchants are mostly occupied with buying and selling. This necessarily requires cunning. If a merchant always practices cunning, it becomes his dominant character quality. The quality of cunning is remote from that of manliness which is the characteristic quality of rulers and noblemen. If the character of (the merchant) then adopts the bad qualities that follow from (cunning) in low-class merchants, such as quarrelsomeness, cheating, defrauding, as well as (the inclination to) commit perjury in rejecting and accepting statements concerning prices, his character can be expected to be one of the lowest sort, for well-known reasons. It is because of the character that one acquires through the practice of commerce that political leaders avoid engaging in it. There are some merchants who are not affected by those character qualities and who are able to avoid them, because they have noble souls and are magnanimous, but they are very rare in this world.
With this, I want to define Mr. Thiel as having the following characteristics:
Greedy
Cunning
Cleverness
Quarrelsome
Persistent
Cheating
Defrauding
(No wonder he wants to live forever!)
Greed Mr. Thiel…greed! Wish someone had taught you some virtue in your childhood
As these people have both the will and the resource to make life extension happen — once such technologies will actually happen — these people will be the ones who will live the longest or in the craziest scenario: they will be the one who will live forever. With people who are not greedy, cunning, clever, quarrelsome, etc. perishing.
It implies the world will be inherited by people with values such as the ones given above. (greed, cunningness, etc.)
So what about those who are not of those characteristics? I mean what about those of us who are not greedy, cunning, fraud, etc.?
But I have a more serious consideration:
Why do I care if Mr. Thiel and the likes live forever?
Why should I care?
Should I care?
If yes, how can I stop them? OR how can I help establish certain equity first?
You, born in a normal family with normal requirements in life and a normal worldview properly begin your social life with your school.
There you are immediately introduced to rules and regulations. If you break them, you are punished. Your punishments are so impactful to your psyche that — after a certain while — even a thought about breaking them makes you scared. Anxious. If you are thick-skinned enough to not get scared, you will end up a hooligan, a thug.
Likewise, if you follow those rules and regulations, you are rewarded. You are rewarded with claps and medals and praises. This makes you proud of yourself. Your pride is such that — after a while — the thought of gaining more of those claps and medals and praises gets you drooling. You are lured. You want more. You want to achieve more. Hear more. Claps, praises.
And so the same formula of rules and regulations drive you through college and university where — if you perceive you haven’t been up to the rule, you get anxious and at the moments when you think you will achieve or actually achieve some kind of success, you get excited…
And this way, you get into the job market, and you go through your life.
The formula (once again) is simple for you: follow the rules and be happy or break them and be miserable.
Now, if you are lucky (yes lucky!) or crazy you will question who the fk created that system of rules in the first place. Only if you are lucky or crazy! And you will start questioning a lot of things. The foundation of the system, the motive, the people invovled, etc. etc.
There you will be stunned at your first hypothesis of the division. Yes, there is a division!
On one end were you: a normal person with normal wants and circumstances and at the other end were those who made all those rules and regulations.
And then you will realize something that will feel like a slap: a slap vicious and lethal, embarrassing and humiliating than any teacher had ever given you:
What you did or did not was always ordained, controlled, fabricated!
Yes, your entire thoughts, desires and your bloody life was designed to make you exactly the way you ended up. You were never free, you were engineered! And it was never for you, you were just a tool…
And this is where you reach that realm: The Realm of Gods & Kings!
And then you will see them for the first time in a way you had never seen them. Yes, you had always heard of them, known them: but you had never understood them. Now, you understand them. Feel them.
They are the ones who drove you around like cattle. There you will see them and tremble at the sight. Tremble at your ignorance: they are the same kings, priests, philosophers, scholars and merchants that you were taught about. That you were preached about. Who were praised and venerated. Revered. Followed by thousands of you on Twitter!
Yes, you, you do think and talk to your buddies (same as you) about your big ideas — Where did this all come from, where might it be headed; what if life and what is existence; does god exist ; do aliens exist; democracy rules! — wear pendants and tikas, sit on your yogic postures chanting om, close your eyes and pray, sing, etc. but you do that with a vicious unconsciousness. Yes, you may talk and write about Plato, but you do it without a clue, without a sense. You are just a babbler, an unconscious machine. Going bla bla bla. Talking much but realizing nothing!
But guess what: they aren’t! They are your Gods and Kings!
You had once questioned god with your friends while smoking ganja on top of that hill, hadn’t you? Now, here you have it: Plato is your god, so is Buddha, Ashoka, Alexander and Napoleon! And so is Hawking. So are Jobs and Gates: Your gods and kings. For they set the rules. They watch you move. They decide your fate. They are in the realm of gods & kings, and you — you poor normal guy: aren’t! You are just normal. A normal tool. Nothing. You are dispensable. Manageable. Organizable. You, you normal person!
And then you think you are a democratic citizen of whatever your country. You talk of your vote, and your rights, and your activities.
Here’s to democracy:
Only when each and every human individual reaches the realm of gods & kings, will democracy even begin to be practical.
Until then:
Dream on, Run from bombs and surveillance!
Follow on, Praise on!
As to education:
Well, they removed this secret from the curriculum a long-long time ago!
Philosophy’s task is to Understand and Guide Life and the World. That is what Real Philosophy is and should be.
Philosophy in general tends to get a bad rap in our times. Almost to the extent of getting bullied by the scientific community. In fact, philosophy has been getting it for a long-long time. Paraphrasing Kant, ‘she used to be the queen once, but not since long’, Understandably so!
After the advent of the scientific method and its apparent successes in the form of Copernicus’ model, Galileo’s observations and most importantly Newton’s calculations, philosophy in Europe quietly hung its head low and retreated to the back side of the scholarly ‘classroom’. Literally too, the success of science and its use to the states at around the 17th century along with the growing irrelevance of church and theological speculations meant philosophy had no place in what used to be the highest level of learning — which it used to share for a lot of years with theology. Understandably so!
Philosophy had no business meddling in things that were empirical in nature. Things of matter. It never had. The scientific method was destined for that. And once it arrived, philosophy had to retreat.
Yes, there have been philosophical roars and explosions now and then after the advent of the scientific age but they haven’t been intense enough, they haven’t been loud enough, they haven’t been impactful enough. Apart from: in the social, cultural and ‘life’ domains.
An example is Nietzsche. He was good and impactful because he didn’t speculate much on the nature of atoms, or the color of stars. Or even if he did, he wasn’t promoting it as loud as superman. He was a good thinker of human thoughts, nature, culture and understanding — the domains not accessible to science. That’s why he was good. He was doing real philosophy.
Real Philosophy for me then is philosophy in its truest sense: love of wisdom.
And wisdom is the ability and the state of mind where everything (notice the word everything) is taken as a whole and reasonable (notice the term reasonable) observations and conclusions are drawn from it. This is where philosophy is good. This is where philosophy is relevant and this is where philosophy is beautiful. The end goal of philosophy is life. That is: The Everything. Human Life. Animal Life. Machine Life. Whatever life. But Life. Not life in an organic sense but life in a subjective sense. And whenever philosophy focuses on life, it wins. It becomes relevant and it makes bloody sense.
Let’s take Plato. His works have multiple dimensions. He has talked about all sorts of things from Government to God to Education to Arts. I find Republic to be an extremely valuable and life changing piece of work, but Timaeus feels tedious, vague and nonsense. Whenever he talks about how people work or how society should operate; about the types of people present and about the use of art or war in human affairs: he is solid. He is there. Making sense. Changing thoughts and lives. Breaking shackles. Un-ignorable. Same is with the Allegory of the cave. We take something to be true, but what if it isn’t: this is the domain of skepticism, about our tendency to mistake things false as real — it’s about illusions and deceptions. It’s bloody good! False perceptions can have dire consequences in life. One human doesn’t need to experiment by jumping off a cliff to know that one cannot fly. It is common sense. It is pre-science. It is Real Philosophy. It is Plato. But when he starts talking about how the earth — which is our nurse, clinging around the pole which is extended through the universe — he comes un-believable and ignorable.
Similar is Schopenhauer. In his seminal work, The World as Will and Idea, look how bloody genius he is when he is talking about Arts and their use for us in life. And then compare that with his preoccupation with wanting to find the material and ideal source of it all — he goes astray and never becomes the genius thinker again. He seems like a mere copywriter of Upanishads and Buddhism.
Staying with those latter two, my experiences with them too have been similar. They are relevant and working as long as they are addressing life in general. About the misery. About the absurdity of desires, etc. But as soon as they venture into expressing how the universe may be working, how the earth may have come about — they look stupid.
Real Philosophy then is a subject that deals from the most general POV. With Wisdom. About life. Let science rant about The Big Bang Theory, the duty of philosophy is to check its relevance to our lives. Point out the theory’s absurdity for the mind, life and society. Laugh at science’s over-ambitions and faults. Be sarcastic if needed. Bring everything that is overrated back to size.
Real philosophy’s duty is not to compete with science. It’s is to guide and nurture science. An aging grandfather may not be able to outrun his granddaughter who is breaking records in local running competitions — and he shouldn’t try — because it’s not his job! His job is to tell her what she is doing right and what of hers is wrong and guide her appropriately. Tell her what over ambition will do to her life. Share experiences. Tell her what in life is of value at the end of it all. Show her the meaning of race in the context of her life. That’s the role of real philosophy and its presence for humans is eternal. Unlike the analogical human grandfather however, philosophy will only die with humanity and will only get wiser the as humanity ages.
For instance, let Neuroscience or psychology — the scientific embodiments of age old philosophical question of mind-body — do their work. See where they lead. Patiently. If they stumble upon a problem that is not empirical in nature but is epistemological, tell what may have been wrong in the approach. Guide those sciences. Don’t go around forming new speculations about what mind may be. Don’t go around promoting simulation theories. Those will lead nowhere. Science is philosophy’s child, there is no need to be competitive. Without philosophy, science wouldn’t have been born, without philosophy humans might not be around for long! That’s enough of pride for real philosophy!
As humans sit on their rockets and fly above, pump their data into their computers and a new being create, take more and more control of earth and its surrounding: many-many challenges await. Numerous problems will this race and other creatures face. If you leave it all to science, the chances are: either everything will be mechanical or dead. This is where real philosophy shall step in. To keep the real human engine running, to keep things alive. To think about and better life. It should show the significance of various things to people and all beings capable of seeing. It should teach to be critical, skeptic. It should explain the value of everything. It should be able to talk about the impact of learning and knowledge. Importance of virtue. Context of greed, lust and everything of the likes. About the good and the bad.
It is something no university can/should teach. Because it’s no business of organizations driven by various motives to be teaching life to people! Whenever they have tried, they have failed. Let them create their workforce for states and corporations. Real philosophy should be kept away from all these temporary structures. Its work is to contextualize and guide all thoughts and actions.
It is real and it has always come out of real thinkers. Call it Real Philosophy, Philosophy OR Thinking: the choice is yours.
A quick glance of known/believed human history will reveal to us one constant: Learning is essential. Vital. Crucial!
Learning in the sense of:
the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences.
But another quick glance will reveal to us one more constant: learning has never been much popular among the masses. Yes, the populace has gathered a fact here, a fact there, and have been informed, but that cannot be said to be learning. Similarly, learning has had to face obstacles from many sources.
Yet, humans have been — time and again — able to learn and generate new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences with the load of all those people carried by a selected few in all time and place. Those carriers are the people of learning. Therefore, the value of learning and people of learning is constant.
We might never know the individual(s) who first came up with the understanding of the process of bipedal walking, fire production, stone tools manufacturing; language, art— yet looking at trends of how men have learned in recorded history, we can safely assume that there was someone somewhere who first converted an event of natural occurrence into a method. Who first converted phenomenon to knowledge. Crisis into solution. Despair into fascination. Those who did all these were people of learning.
It is those people of learning who first had the idea of viewing natural items as gods. Irrespective of civilization, this has been common. We might look upon that as weakness today, but for that time and place, this was learning: understanding, knowing, the world. You can’t call them weak. If that view didn’t happen, then who knows what would have happened! They had a way to turn fear into some kind of control. Those people of learning!
Similarly, it was peoples of learning who first had the idea of organizing pre-civilizations scattered societies into an order — once the number of folks increased. This too has been a constant in multiple civilizations. You might call it natural, I call it the doing of peoples of learning. Remove them from the equation, and we might not have been sitting here writing and reading on Medium.
And likewise, the peoples of learning came up with centralized power, religious rites, aesthetic buildings, laws, etc. And it was the same people who with their learning came up with the idea of things as diverse as citizenship, republic, and reason.
Indeed the rest is history. History made and interpreted by peoples of learning.
Without the people of learning, there might have been no history. You might say, there might have been a better history, but how? showme!
Irrespective of the moods of the temples, states, monarchs, councils, universities…People of learning have stood and shined.
Here today and heading to the future, uncertainties abound. Anxiety, paranoia, and stupidity reign supreme. That’s just the way we perceive natural things. But of course, here we are people of learning. Let’s understand and DECIDE where things shall go. Where we shall go. These kinds of shaping’s have always been the task of peoples of learning. Now it’s the time for current peoples of learning.
Let’s decide the fate of us all — our mind, life, earth, and everything else. If we won’t, then who will? — — Machines of Learning?
The opening few pages of The First Part of the Tragedy in Goethe’s Faust is where Faust laments and complains. This I call the Faust crisis as it expresses his state of mind – confused, dissatisfied with a willingness to change into something, anything.
This part is what attracted and still attracts me to Faust so I thought I should take this opportunity to understand what exactly is the issue with him – in the process, trying to understand what exactly is the issue with me such that is attracted me to the text.
So, what is his problem?
The situation is thus:
It is night time and Faust is in his ‘high-vaulted narrow Gothic room.’ He is seated at his desk and is restless. And then he begins.
He says he has studied medicine, law and philosophy and worked his way through every school. He has even studied Theology and sweated like a fool. And then he asks himself:
Why labour at it any more?
This feeling of not wanting anything anymore would imply someone has either accomplished something or has realized the incapability of the self or futility of something.
And then he answers:
You’re no wiser than you were before.
Which makes it clear that all those learnings have been futile for him. He pursued them to get wise, but apparently he doesn’t think he has become that.
This has got me questioning: is it because the subjects are futile or it is because Faust is incapable?
He then goes on to reveal that he is a Master of Arts and a doctor too. But he doesn’t value those accomplishments much, as he believes – for ten long years, all he has been able to do is lead his students a fearful dance through a maze of error and ignorance.
And then comes his conclusion after admitting that he is miserable:
There is nothing we can ever know.
The use of we clearly suggests that he is not someone who suffers from self-doubt. He confidently proclaims the fault is in the learner itself. The human inability, rather than the inability of the texts or Faust.
This confidence is verified as he goes on to admit that he is brighter than all relics, professors and doctors; scribblers and clerics. He isn’t troubled by any doubts or scruples and has defied hell and the devil too. But he no longer enjoys self-delusion and says that his search for truth ends in confusion.
His personal affect aside, he is not too positive on the impact of his teachings on society too. He tells himself not to imagine that his teaching will,
ever raise the minds of men or change their ways.
At this point, the Faustian crisis is defined:
We humans can neither know anything nor can develop our minds and change our ways in anything. Yet he has spent his entire life trying to know and do such things.
Now, it is understandable why someone would feel this way when he has spent so much of his time and life pursuing something that he realizes is vain and has led him nowhere. It is like a gate suddenly appearing and closing access to the upper sky for Mr. Bezos and the likes. Devastating!
This is grave pessimism. But why? Why reach that conclusion?
The character of Faust is based on a real life magician who was popularized by numerous authors during the sixteenth century. Goethe apparently took that character and created a symbolic figure who in the section that we are talking about:
Doesn’t think man can know.
Doesn’t think man can change.
The first part was published in 1790, around the time of Voltaire, Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and the likes. Within the European Enlightenment and before the advent of Romanticism.
I do not know much about scholarly implications, and I do not want to pretend to be or be one, but I cannot help but notice a simple pattern here: the character is fed up with a certain type of learning and wants to explore through some other means. That some other means is different from books and theories apparently. Transition from Enlightenment to Mysticism? To Romanticism, perhaps!
This assumption is backed up by what Faust says after his declaration that minds of men or their ways cannot change.
He bashes himself on the fact that despite all these efforts, he hasn’t been able to gain any worldly wealth, or honor or glory. After which he thinks of turning to a magic lore which – he hopes – will reveal some secret knowledge to him: of what makes the world revolve. Here he also says:
No more in empty words I’ll deal –
Creation’s wellsprings I’ll reveal!
He then calls his room and its stuff a ‘torture’ and expresses a desire to flee that place and walk the mountain-tops again. He wants to make his way through moonlit meadows and in mountain caves play. And then comes another bashing, calling the study ‘accursed dungeon’ where even the light of heaven can only pass through the painted glass. This here is interesting to read:
Immured behind a pile of books,
Motheaten, dusty, in the reek
Of papers stuffed in all these nooks –
This is the wisdom that you seek.
These jars and cases row and row,
Retorts and tubes and taps and gauges,
The useless junk of bygone ages –
This is the only world you know!
And he realizes, it’s no wonder he is feeling this way as all these things have sapped life’s energies.
When God created us, he founded
His living nature for our home;
But you sit in this gloom, surrounded
by mildewed skull and arid bone.
He then urges himself to escape into a wider sphere and opens a book of magic writings guided by Nostradamus. He believes now in nature, who he thinks can help us seek the paths the stars in heaven go.
After this…he opens the books and sees the Sign of the Macrocosm, an astrological diagram representing forces and influences linking the heavens, earth and man. And immediately after this, he is filled with an ecstatic joy with youthful passion glowing through his veins and nerves. His raging soul is now stilled and his empty heart is filled with joy. It is as if all nature’s forces are revealed to him. He questions if he himself is a god with his mind now so clear. He then grasps the wisdom the Seer:
The spirit world is with us still,
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead.
Up, worldly scholar, drink your fill –
At heaven’s gate the dawn is red!
He sees everything in a wholeness and the powers of heaven. He sees the universe in harmony. After this, he turns the page and sees the Sign of the Earth Spirit which inspires him more. He feels new energies, with mind glowing. He now dares to finally face the world again, and share in all its joys and pain. He wants to set his sail into the eye of the storm, before he summons a great spirit and the spirit arrives.
This transition of Faust’s mood and perception, gets me everytime. But in all this, the idea remains clear that the character has transformed from the agitations of vain scholarly pursuits towards the beauty and magic of romance and mysticism. Transition from reason to intuition. From books to nature. From vain theories to beauty. From intellectual pessimism to exploration. To try something new. Something fresh. Something joyful. Something complete. From boring philosophers to Goethe – as far as I understand him.
Once again, I am not an academic scholar and I do not mean to be one – but these kinds of things fascinate me. Touch me. Thus my idea!
My initial goal to understand the issue with him is clear. I am sure I will have new perspectives on this as I continue to live on and learn on. As to the case of me trying to understand the cause of my fascination and attraction with this, I think it is similar:
It is me wanting to break the shackles that bind me to things of ‘reason’ (the things that ought to be done) and fly towards things of beauty, to things I love (the things that make me feel alive).
While thinking about the ongoing war in Eastern Europe and its consequences, my thought went to the businesses that are being adversely affected – along with lives in both Russia and Ukraine, with both suffering from their respective problems. How many dreams paused, threatened; how many goals destroyed; how many ideas shattered!
I am just trying to focus on business here.
One can understand how much is at stake in the execution of one. Particularly in modern times of uncertainty in everything. The risk, the hope, the plan, etc. Of course, life has more at stake – which once gone cannot be re-attained – yet business is where my thoughts are as of now. Those that are not operational due to the lack of peace. Those that have been affected by war. What would those businesses be wanting ideologically? Would they be concerned about the realpolitik? What would they support?
This took me to Ancient India, through a book called India: An Ancient Past… written by Burjor Avari.
In ancient India, after the rise of Buddhism, there were multiple instances where Buddhism as a religion was patronized, protected or supported by merchants or rulers. Especially the former.
First, it was during the Pre-Mauryan age, when Buddhist along with Jain monasteries were built which were enthusiastically received by kings, merchants and ordinary people. After that, during the time of the Satavahanas of the Deccan, there were numerous cave sites in NW Maharashtra, which housed Buddhists. There too evidence has been found of religious charities and endowments by merchants. People belonging to other professions and crafts were involved as well. And then there were other monasteries over the Satavahana Deccan, which too were established with endowments from the Andra merchants, who the writer says, ‘were some of the greatest donors.’
During the period in the history of India when the Kushans were dominant, there seemed to have been some kind of alliance between Indian merchants and Buddhist missionaries. At various places, merchants establishing their colonies and missionaries their monasteries went in parallel. The site of Ajanta caves is said to have stood in a strategic point at the merchants’ routes. Here too Buddhist monks and monasteries were richly supported by that merchant class.
Despite some mundane differences, the things in common between those ancient Indian merchants and the modern entrepreneurs are that they both work for profit, are involved in commerce and sell their goods/services. In this way, they both can be put under the umbrella term ‘business class.’
Buddhism as a philosophy – at its root – is one that talks about detachment and salvation from desires. The whole concept then builds towards disinvolvement, simplicity, knowledge, awakening – eventually culminating in nibbana. While at a first glance, this seems to be absolutely opposite to the motives of the business class, and one might ask why on earth would they be protecting and promoting such idea, anyone who knows anything about this philosophy knows that Buddhism isn’t the type of thought that reasons towards fight, ambition and war. Making it a socially passive philosophy too. An example of this is King Ashoka who, disgusted with his actions at Kalinga, adopted peaceful doctrines of Buddhism and went around building pillars and promoting the religion. He even deemed his further conquests religious.
It is quite apparent why certain groups of people in society who wouldn’t want war would want to promote and protect this philosophy of peace. Irrespective of their faith and ideology. And among them would surely be merchants and entrepreneurs – unless dealing with weapons, unless involved in a business untouched by war, or extremely opportunist. Which is a vast majority!
I had this idea to open my laptop and write in short about life in Nepal – the country of my birth and citizenship. Things to write have weird sources and this one is no different.
In regards to the people to whom I may be writing to : I had Non-Nepalese people in mind, especially the open minded and intellectual type – to provide them a glimpse of things from a relatively insignificant nation in the world.
Well, some nations are significant. Extremely significant. While some are utterly not! While their existence and citizens in themselves are criteria for significance, I tend to look at two basic factors to decide for myself on what makes a nation/state significant or even successful:
Surviving
Thriving
Surviving implies survival of the society/nation’s basis and essence: identity and peculiarity. Thriving on the other hand implies strong political, economic, cultural presence along with the ability to generate new knowledge and invent whole bunch of things.
Surviving alone makes a society significant to itself while thriving makes it significant to others as well. Just as in the case of individual creatures.
In this regard, Nepal is a surviving nation but a terribly non-thriving one! (It’s political, economic and cultural destiny is usually guided and at times even driven by agents that are not Nepalese.)
That’s the first thing about Nepal: It’s an insignificant nation. (Ask every single Nepali person that you happen to meet in your country and they will validate this for you!)
Life of mere survival – on the inside – is not too amazing. It is the case of existence without meaning. You are just there existing. Surviving for the sake of survival. Nothing else. While some cases of survival are fierce: where you have to battle against adversity day in and day out; some are ordinary: you are just there because you are so insignificant that no one wants to even hurt you. Nepal is in the latter category. That is why it is the case of existence for its own sake.
And this rubs on to you. You too are just surviving. You feel there is no larger motive and purpose. The evening sun hits you in your face, you feel warm and get drowsy. The sun goes away and you feel cold and lost. This is what happens if you get influenced by your nation.
It is not that life out here is tough. It is dull. That’s the issue, if it was tough, you would have a purpose. If it’s dull, you just want to sleep smelling your own fart. That’s what this nation is doing and I guess that’s what most of its citizens are.
Disposable waste generated each day from households lie shamelessly in the streets just because the bloody government can’t manage a proper landfill site, while sounds of construction equipment bombard your ears all the time from all directions. (They are apparently building houses to house KFCs and Pizza Huts). Look at the irony!
People are obsessed with doing what they have seen Americans and Indians successfuly do in YouTube, Facebook and TikTok. Most young lads who have remained inside the country still find riding bikes at high speed is ‘cool’ and meaningful. You go talk to elderly blokes, and you will notice that their brains have stopped noticing anything in life apart from money. That’s the way it is.
You respect the nation and decide you will live here. You go through your pains and eventually decide to make a living as a writer. No one cares. And then you write in English. You see a platform such as Medium. And when you are eligible, you realize that even Medium doesn’t care! (about your nation)
These are not talks of frustration. This is reflection. A part of reality.
See, I have things to motivate me and give my life direction and purpose. I am okay. I won’t quit and go. But at times, looking at the nation am a part of, I wonder if some nations (insignificant ones) should be allowed to quit and go!???
Unless they can give themselves their own direction to go.
Morning shows the day is a popular proverb. Is it correct, or is it merely a case of a lazy attachment towards mornings?
Let me give some background first.
Back at school, the classes I hated were Mathematics, Science (Physics, Chemistry, Biology), Computer, Dance, and Music. One of my earliest memories of mathematics is nervously queuing up to submit the homework to the teacher. I may have wet my pants on one or two occasions. While I could argue that my hatred towards and difficulties in mathematics – which still persists to this day – was because of that evilesque teacher, who frightened me a lot, I do not remember such intimidating teachers in Science, Computer, Dance or music. Of course, I have never loved math and neither has it been graceful to me. Although I tried my best later on.
This has led me to conclude that those hatred are directed more towards the subjects than classes. Never enjoyed science and computer! Always found scientific concepts boring and sedative. They never managed to trigger the learner in me. And since I never was a ‘love-what-is-right-for-your-career’ person, I never seriously tried. Computer classes were interesting as long as they provided me with the opportunities to play card games. I have never been a dancing person. In regards to music, I can confidently say that the dissatisfaction was more because of my boastful and annoying classmates rather than towards music itself. Later I enjoyed a lot of music alone!
School has long gone but my learning hasn’t ceased. I self-learn most of the time. Perhaps, because learning is the source through which only I can be better at my writing but actually because I love to learn.
I have tried to teach myself all sorts of things over the last decade. I have gone through Euclid, Einstein, Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, etc. etc. Some have been tedious. Some like a smooth ride. Analyzing which subjects have been which, I have realized that: Euclid, Einstein and the likes have been brutally tedious while Plato, Rousseau, Shakespeare, have been fun although not easy. In fact, this adult-age difficulty is the thing that made me think about what I may have loved at school in the first place!
Coming back to school, the subjects that I liked and felt more natural towards were Social Studies, English, Nepali, Environment and Population.
Although I never acquired good marks in anything in any classes, I remember once getting crazy high marks in Social Studies, not only by my standard but also my entire classroom’s!
Whenever it was time to go up a grade and new textbooks were made available, I finished reading (not studying) all chapters in Social Studies, and all stories, poems and essays in English and Nepali.
It is funny when I think about it:
I buy and download all sorts of books. And still to this day, the mathematics, science, and computer books feel very impenetrable and I have to focus incredibly hard to go beyond a quick skim – during which I get seriously doubtful and anxious. But books about politics, society-culture, psychology, philosophy, and literature get consumed with great enthusiasm and ease.
This has got me questioning whether interests are hardwired in childhood itself or whether it’s about the reluctance to get out of the comfort zone?
Before talking about attention crisis, let me share a small story:
Forget quietly being around nature, I am preoccupied with my own thoughts so much that I am now unable to quietly sleep even in the comfort of my bed.
Observing the dynamics of clouds and stars are the things of past now, I can’t even observe the movements of sparrows and pigeons that dwell right in front of my eyes.
But this morning, it all changed as I walked around my room with a cup of tea in hand and stared out of the window. It’s not that I rarely stare out of windows. In fact, I do so a lot. But I hardly see anything outside. It’s always about my own murky reflection of myself. Once again, due to self preoccupation! I temporarily spot houses, their owners, the birds, the street, before going back to the self reflection.
This morning though — after a long long time — my eyes halted at pigeons and sparrows fidgeting around at the roof of my neighbor. And then I started to curiously observe and enjoy their activities. All of a sudden the mirror shattered as I felt a connection with those birds, and my anxieties vanished: allowing the elusive joy to grace me. And then I looked around, and noticed a crow. And then I started wondering what bird-politics might be going around among those three species. I also noticed the bleak morning moon in the western sky.
Observing such I reached to a conclusion:
The ability to understand things in real time is more important than the ability to know facts.
I was lost in these sights and observations, when the mirror came back and THERE: I was back inside my own head!
Obsessive thoughts are gradual, I have noticed. If you have been constantly obsessing over say, your fame-magnitude — and one day you are involved in a recreational activity like swimming managing to be away from those thoughts for a while — when the obsession returns (the fame problems) it won’t appear in extreme. It occurs gradually.
First, they will bring the most common factors between swimming and fame and then gradually they will take you to a point where swimming will seem a futile pursuit unless you take your phone out, take a self photo and upload it with proper tags in your social media. If you can’t do that, the act of swimming will get chaotic.
Similarly, in my case, as I enjoyed the observation, the entry-thought was: You can’t attain this feeling through philosophy. Hence, the latter is sucking the life out of you. It merely talks about abstract things that have no significance in real life. Drop it now!
But thankfully and luckily an argument came up:
It is not the task of philosophy to generate these feelings. You don’t do philosophy for that. You do it to be capable enough to achieve these feelings.
Once in a hilly area, there lived an old man. His wife was dead so all he had was his only son. He took great care of him and pampered him in every way feasible. More than anything, he ensured his son was smart in practical things – especially money and property. As soon as the son married a girl from the same village, the old man retreated from his practical duties and started to live totally dependent on his son and daughter-in-law.
As years passed, the old man’s health deteriorated. Soon he couldn’t even go up and down the stairs without support. Around the same time, his daughter-in-law gave birth to a son. The old man’s condition however continued to deteriorate. He couldn’t even go to the toilet by himself.
A few more years passed.
One day the old man’s son had a thought, ‘All this old man does now is eat. He can’t even walk. What’s the point of him being alive if he can’t even do the toilet stuff himself! How long will he live? Why hasn’t death taken him yet?’
This thought of death gave him an idea –
‘What if I pushed him off a cliff? We will have a good time and this old man will get to Swarga quicker’.
He went to his wife and shared this idea. She was sick of looking after the old man so she agreed without hesitation.
The next day, he placed his father in a doko (Nepali basket made from bamboo) and went to a cliff nearby. The old man’s grandson followed his father. The old man could neither hear nor see properly so he had no idea what his son was about to do to him. He thought he was being taken to a temple, so he remained quiet.
When they reached the cliff and the son was just about to push the doko, the young boy yelled-
‘Father! Father! Hold on!’
The father looked behind to see his son running towards him. He wasn’t amused.
‘What the hell are you doing here? Get back,’ said the father, angered.
‘Are you supposed to throw the doko away too?’ he asked.
‘Why?’
‘I just wanted to make sure you weren’t making a mistake. If you throw the doko, how am I supposed to throw you away?’
‘What do you mean throw me away?’ the young boy’s father asked, surprised.
‘You throw your father, I throw mine. Isn’t this how it works?’ the young boy replied with innocence.
This made his father realize the mistake. He brought the old man home and treated him with great respect thenon. His young son treated him similarly.
Come together with people who are special like you and together – do things special!
Once there lived a hunter. He always lay in woods and fields with his arrow stretched from his bow in a ready position and shot whatever caught his eye. Even gnats weren’t spared. He meticulously killed each that flew near him. Such was his aim! This way he had gained a great reputation as an expert archer.
One day a person who could walk relentlessly passed by the hunter’s way. He walked so quickly that while walking with his friends, even if he took a toilet break for half-an-hour he would be able to catch up with them in no time. He noticed the hunter’s actions and was impressed with him. In fact, noticing someone as talented as him, he proposed to him for friendship. The hunter agreed and so they started traveling together.
During their travels, they once saw a group headed for a wedding. It was hot so the people were finding it hard. Then a man plucked out a huge tree from the ground and placed it near the group to ensure the shade from the tree cooled them. Seeing this, the hunter and the walker were impressed and proposed to the strong man for friendship. He agreed and so the three friends traveled together.
One day they met a man who was able to spot a tiny grain from hundreds of meters afar. They asked him to join in too. He did so and now there were four of them. They had nothing to fear now. They could stay and walk anywhere and at any time. After a few days, they all came to a realization that they could together achieve something huge. One of them said –
‘Friends! We all are talented in our own way. We shouldn’t just wander around without a purpose. We should do something. I think we should go to a different country and see what we can do.’
The friends agreed. And so they set off. They walked across woods and deserts until they reached a deadly river. There wasn’t any bridge or boat. There were people discussing ways to cross it, however. Those people were trying to find a way to cross that river for the last fifteen days. The four men saw this as an opportunity to make some positive contribution. So, the strong one uprooted many trees and threw them in the river. In no time, a bridge formed which was easily crossable. The people thanked them and began going about their usual business. The four men crossed too.
They were forced to spend that night in a dense forest.
‘This forest is too huge and dense. We need to sleep one at a time,’ they agreed upon.
First, it was the turn of the one who could see afar to stay awake while the rest slept. He discovered that there lived rakshas in that forest who came towards them drooling at the smell of humans. He first woke the hunter and then everyone else.
The hunter stepped forward and began shooting. He killed a lot of rakshasas but soon he ran out of arrows. They discussed and then decided that the walker would rush and bring some arrows. During this, the rakshas had already come near them. The strong one uprooted a few trees and threw them at the rakshas. He even picked a few rakshasas and threw them around like cricket balls. The rakshases were scared and started to run away. The walker returned with arrows and so they all together finished the rakshasas off. They slept the night in peace.
The next day they resumed their journey. They faced a lot of obstacles on their way but together they managed to successfully defeat them all. They eventually reached the capital of a different country. They lived in a Dharamshala.
They walked around the country and noticed that the people there were sad. They were told that it was because their beloved queen was ill and was unable to recover despite multiple efforts for a prolonged period of time. Now an old mystic had said that if anyone could bring water from seven seas within two hours she would recover. The queen had disseminated this message and announced that the one who could bring it would get half of her kingdom and great wealth.
The four friends discussed among themselves –
‘Friends! All four of us are special in our own way. We had decided to travel around to do something great. If we manage to save the queen, we will be able to acquire great wealth, honor, and dharma.’
Everyone agreed and went to the palace and met the king.
‘Your Highness! We are ready to bring the water from the seas but we have no vessel to bring water in.’
The King gave them a vessel. The walker carried the vessel and with the guidance of the far-seer, he proceeded.
This news spread around the country. The people were curious to see men who were ready to accept such an absurd venture. They rushed to the palace to meet the remaining three. This soon led to a stampede and the soldiers had to intervene.
Meanwhile, the farseer stood on the roof and watched his friend rush along woods and hills. He communicated this with everyone. Suddenly, he saw the walker get scared off his feet. He had seen a tiger and it was about to kill him. Hearing this, the strong one quickly uprooted a giant tree from the palace compound and asked the exact point at which he was to shoot. The seer pointed precisely. The strong one threw the tree in the pointed direction. It hit the tiger and the tiger died on the spot.
The walker went ahead. The seer commentated his every move:
He has reached the sea. He has filled the vessel. Now he has moved.
The public watched along dumbfounded.
He has reached the sea. He has filled the vessel. Now he has moved. Now he is trying to know the time. He is staring at the sun. He might have realized that he has enough time. So, he is now taking a nap. Now he has fallen asleep. A giant tiger from the forest is approaching him. She has reached up to him.
The shooter loaded his bow and shot the tiger with the guidance of the seer. The tiger died.
The walker woke up after a while and saw a dead tiger. Seeing it, he was pleased and returned back without harm.
In the palace, the queen was handed the water. The queen recovered immediately. Everyone was pleased. The four men were celebrated in the palace. A great feast was held for them. After that, they were allowed to leave. The King opened his treasury and asked them to take whatever they could take. The strong one carried everything. This ashamed the king. He then gave them half his wealth and state.
After this, all four men returned to their respective homes.
It is not about being fast. It is about doing what’s appropriate.
Once there lived a tortoise, a frog, and a snake nearby a river. They were good friends. Their life was normal and good. They crossed the river together early in the morning, ate their respective foods, and returned back in the evenings.
One day while they were on the other side of the river, loud thunder and lightning together with deadly black clouds filled the skies. Realizing that it would soon rain heavily, the wise tortoise said –
‘Hey, guys. Look at the skies. I think it will rain heavily. We should return back. It will get worse if it floods.’
‘Don’t panic. Nothing is wrong. We can cross when it starts raining. There’s no point worrying now. I am innovative enough to figure out tens of solutions even if it floods,’ the frog, who was intelligent, said.
‘Exactly! It hasn’t rained yet. We shouldn’t bother about things that haven’t yet happened. Live in the present, son. Even if it floods I think I am smart enough to figure out hundreds of solutions for us,’ the snake added.
The tortoise wasn’t amused with their way of thinking.
‘See. I am neither fast nor intelligent and smart as you guys! All I know is that it will soon rain heavily and it’s better we cross the river. Else we may not be able to return at all. There’s nothing to lose if we get going now. Let’s go. I am going.’ the tortoise said and started to cross the river.
The frog and the snake smirked and went about their business. But just as the tortoise had anticipated, it soon rained heavily. They were finally alarmed and decided it was time to cross the river. The rain got heavier and heavier until the river started flooding.
First, the snake jumped but he got badly hit on his head by a large piece of floating log. This got him giddy. He lost control of himself. The river violently took him away and he soon died.
The frog, not seeing the snake, thought he had crossed the river. He jumped too. But the torrential river was too much for him to handle. The water kicked him around like a pinball. He couldn’t handle the force and died.
The tortoise saw all this from the other end. There was nothing he could do except wonder why his friends didn’t listen to him in time.
As I sit here with my laptop staring at this white canvas that tells me to write my story, I wonder who I might be writing it for. I wonder who would care about these ‘stories’ — which are in fact nothing but doubts, excitements, half-formed/uninformed ideas, opinions, perspectives and reveries. Yet, I believe such writing has the potential to do a lot if only a lot of people read seriously! I have even derived a quote: Writing is a small attempt with a huge potential consequence.
People who think a lot should write a lot. People who can’t think a lot should read a lot.
Some writer’s books feel like an ocean while some writer’s books feel like a muddy street.
Billionaires going on space trips and ordinary minds becoming writers is like wearing a woolen jacket on a hot summers day: They will only make things worse!
What I have noticed is, the more you write the better your typing gets. I do not know what importance it has on whatever I will end up writing today but I thought it would be a fun thing to share.
If you are like me who doesn’t have a dedicated list of things to write, then at times you must also feel there’s nothing special to write. What do you do then? Yet a feeling inside you pushes you to write, doesn’t it? It is like an addiction. But let’s be good on ourselves and call it a habit. Yet, that feeling is nothing but — the reasons why you write telling you why you should now be writing.
I started this by focusing on what Medium puts in its header: Title and Tell your story…I think it was a good start.
Yesterday I visited a book store and I saw a book written by a person who has participated in mediocre art-works throughout his life. His book was a Self-Improvement book and he was supposedly instructing others on how to live a quality life. IRONY!
If there’s anything in my life that resembles the cat and mouse situation it is me trying to interpret and understand what is causing my anxiety.
Apparently writing during a block is a lot like getting out of bed in winter mornings. Initially, you start imagining you won’t be able to get on with it. But once you decide to do it, you will always find a way around it.
People who have the habit of questioning whether their pursuits are substantial or not are both lucky and unlucky. Unlucky because they can no longer be children-like. Lucky because they can no longer be children-like.
As a writer, you can bend the Universe in whatever way you want. But for that you need strong shoulders. (Thanks Nietzsche!)
Let’s say, it’s 2070 and Humans have settled on Mars or some other planet. What did you imagine them doing there? — — I imagined them quarreling over some piece of land.
My dog is a local Nepali guy. What I realized today is — if I look at him without his name and all other cultural associations I have with him — he is a raw and wild animal living in a manmade world of language and technology.
Sometimes I utter the word Humans and enter a trance.
We humans, in this Cosmos is: a weird situation.Living to figure this riddle out is equally important to Living to make the world better, if not more!
You want to see the power of ideas? — — Imagine a cold dark pessimistic philosophy ruling over everyone’s thoughts!
Without entertainment and art, we would feel cold.
What is Art? — — Art is to humans what humans are to the Universe: Not practically necessary, but you haven’t been able to be without it either.
It is not AI vs Humans. It is Avaricious-Humans (AH) vs Humans.
Don’t be afraid of other people, ever.
These are some random thoughts I wrote when I had nothing specific to write. What do you write when you have nothing to write yet want to write?
Wisdom is difficult to acquire. You have got to be patient and must continue to learn and persevere.
Once there lived a king who loved to hunt. While on one such expedition, he reached deep into a forest. The forest was nothing special in that the king had hunted in its fringes numerous times. He hadn’t reached so deep, however.
When he reached to one particular area, he was suddenly filled with great calmness and peace. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. While he was a spiritual person, he had done nothing special to make him feel that way. So he realized it was not his own doing but of something special that lurked there.
He looked around until he discovered a small hut. He went inside and there he saw an old man who didn’t seem to be bothered with the arrival of the king. He stayed calm and smiled. The king was impressed. He knew why that place had such a vibe. He decided to leave everything he had and stay with that old man to learn the wisdom of calmness and peace.
He came back after a few days to live as a pupil of that old man. However, the king didn’t find life there as convenient and easy as he had thought it would be. The old man never spoke a word apart from commanding the king to do certain works. This way he didn’t let the king sit idly even for a moment. Worst of all, the old man never lectured nor taught anything. The king didn’t dare to make queries.
In a few days, the king found it intolerable. It was worse than his royal duties. He couldn’t take it anymore. So one day he amassed courage and went to the old man and asked –
‘Why don’t you teach me the secrets to wisdom?’
‘You are not ready yet,’ the old man replied.
The King quietly went about his tasks.
After a few days, the king asked again. But the old man replied that same –
‘You are not ready.’
And this continued until the king lost patience. One day while he was out on the spring to fetch water, he decided to walk away. Not had he walked a few steps, he heard a voice say –
‘Oh, look the king is running away from his duties.’
The king was surprised to hear this. He looked around but saw no one. Assuming it to be his illusion he continued to walk.
‘You are running away! The mighty king is fleeing,’ the voice said again
The king was now convinced that it was not his illusion. He looked around carefully and guessed it must have been coming from the pot. He went near and monitored the pot.
‘Where are you going?’ the pot asked.
The king was startled. He had seen nothing like this before. He looked around once again wondering if anyone played tricks on him.
‘Don’t be surprised. It’s me, the pot. Answer my question – Where are you going?’
The king nervously replied –
‘Back to my kingdom.’
‘Why?’
‘I came here hoping to learn wisdom on how to be calm and peaceful from the old man. But he keeps telling me I am not ready. I no longer think he is special. Even the little calmness and peace I had is gone now. There’s no point,’ the king said.
‘To learn even a small thing is difficult my friend. Much more difficult than to rule, you may have observed. You may suffer your entire life yet learn nothing. Look at me as an example, I have suffered much but have remained ignorant.’
‘Really? Can you tell me more about yourself? How can you speak? Why didn’t you speak before?’ the king asked. He now seemed interested.
‘It’s a long story,’ replied the pot. ‘Once a man came up to me with his spade and dug me out of my home. He then took me to his house and poured a lot of dirty water on me. He kneaded me into a dough. Oh, how much I suffered then!
‘But that was not it. He then took me to a shed and made small balls of my parts and placed me on a potter’s wheel until I got lightheaded. When he finally took me out of it, I thought the suffering was over. But far from it. He bear me with a wooden mallet and put me in a burning furnace. He then took me to a shop and left me there. Just like that!
‘There were many like me in that shop. I looked at them and realized that all of them had gone through the same suffering and agony like me. So that gave me some solace. I realized that I was not alone in this suffering. That’s when I was full of pity for other pots too.
‘But tell you what – that was not the end of my suffering. People came and thumped me to see if there was anything wrong with me. I was surprised that an intelligent creature like man would be so indifferent to the suffering of others. I began abhorring humans. After a few days of thumps and lumps, a fellow came and bought me. He then gave me to the old man. Thankfully, I haven’t suffered since then. The old man takes good care of me.
‘You have to understand this, oh mighty king. Wisdom is difficult to acquire. You have got to be patient and must continue to think, learn and persevere. Do not despair and return to your life of power and glory. They are nothing compared to wisdom. In fact, kingship is easy. You have people to do the smallest of things for you. On top of that, you won’t get the chance to contemplate and improve. Such is the grip of power. I have seen you desire and try. I think you have a chance. Very few people get this chance. Count for yourself how many kings there are in this world and how many wise people. I don’t think you will find it difficult to see that there aren’t much around with wisdom. Don’t let go of this opportunity that very few get.’
The pot said and sighed.
The king carefully lifted the pot, filled it with water, and took it back to the hut.
The pot hasn’t spoken nor has the king returned to his palace ever since.
The other day the debate was around the same question:
What is the difference between knowing something and applying that knowledge in life?
After a friend of mine said what he always did —
‘I know all this. The problem is that these things cannot be applied to life.’
I get hit hard every time these things come up. It makes me wonder if all philosophical and literary pursuits are indeed vague and unimportant. I wonder if they are mere luxuries of impractical and privileged people: Fanciful playthings for people who cannot get along with reality.
But I had to answer my friend. Ihad to answer him because for most of the time, I see the importance. On top of that, I had to answer him to prove to myself that I was capable of interpreting almost any thought in words. But more importantly, the solution was lurking not too deep inside my consciousness. I had to bring it out.
‘Thoughts drift. Thoughts are not under our control easily. Applying something you know is just about successfully leashing certain thoughts. After that, it is about maneuvering them in any direction you want!’ I said.
I was relieved. The friend remained silent. Awkwardness reigned for a few minutes.
Read Duration: 2–3days (It is short but requires attention.)
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Year: 1848
Genre: Non-Fiction
Sub-Genre: Philosophy. Cosmology. Spirituality.
Opening sentence:To the few who love me and whom I love, to those who feel rather than think, to the dreamers and those who put their faith in dreams as in the only realities, I offer this book of truths, not in its character of truth-teller, but for the beauty that abounds in its truth, constituting it true.(Preface)
Top 10 Highlights:
‘Now I do not quarrel with these ancients’,continues the letter-writer, ‘so much on account of the transparent frivolity of their logic — which, to be plain, was baseless, worthless, and fantastic altogether — as on account of their pompous and infatuate proscription of all other roads to Truth than the two narrow and crooked paths, the one of creeping and the other of crawling, to which, in their ignorant perversity, they have dared to confine the soul — the soul which loves nothing so well as to soar in those regions of illimitable intuition which are utterly incognisant of “path”.
‘Kepler admitted that these laws he guessed — these laws whose investigation disclosed to the greatest British astronomers that principle, the basis of all (existing) physical principles, in going behind which we enter at once the nebulous kingdom of metaphysics. Yes! These vital laws Kepler guessed, that is to say, he imagined them…’
‘In concluding this letter, let me have the real pleasure of transcribing them once again: “I care not whether my work be read now or by posterity. I can afford to wait a century for readers when God himself has waited six thousand years for an observer. I triumph. I have stolen the golden secret of the Egyptians. I will indulge my sacred fury.”’
A diffusion from unity, under the conditions, involves the tendency to return into unity — a tendency ineradicable until satisfied.
Discarding now the two equivocal terms, ‘gravitation’ and ‘electricity’, let us adopt the more definite expressions, ‘attraction’ and ‘repulsion’. The former is the body, the latter the soul; the one is the material, the other the spiritual principle of the universe. No other principles exist.
…the tendency to the general centre is not to a centre as such, but because of its being a point in tending towards which each atom tends more directly to its real and essential centre, unity — the absolute and final union of all.
The wonderfully complex laws of revolution here described, however, are not to be understood as obtaining in our system alone. They prevail everywhere where attraction prevails. They control the universe of stars.
And that all around them (circular masses of nebulae), on every side, there are volumes of stars, stretching out apparently as if they were rushing towards a great central mass in consequence of the action of some great power.
With a perfectly legitimate reciprocity, we are now permitted to look at matter as created solely for the sake of this influence — solely to serve the objects of this spiritual ether.
Existence — self-existence — existence from all time and to all eternity, seems, up to the epoch of manhood, a normal and unquestionable condition. Seems, because it is. But now comes the period at which a conventional world-reason awakes us from the truth of our dream.
My Blurb:
Poe searches for the sweetest-spot of Wisdom to look into philosophical questions and he almost does it!
Vanity, Stupidity, Greed and Cunnigness: The FOUR Deadly Poisons.
Once a poisonous snake intentionally rested in the middle of a forest road blocking the path to its only river. The animals heading to the river saw her and retreated. Although that meant they had to walk all the way around the forest to quench their thirst, they didn’t dare lock horns with her. Such was her reputation! She enjoyed every moment of all this.
When it was the turn of a thirsty elephant, he was in such haste that he didn’t notice the snake until his feet almost stepped on her. She reacted with a terrifying hiss. The sight of a vicious snake in front of him frightened the elephant off his feet. A few seconds later, he felt humiliated. He fumed –
‘Hey, what the hell do you think you are doing in the middle of the road? Get out. Can’t you see that you are on my way!’
‘I won’t. Get lost,’ the snake replied and looked away.
‘I will stamp on you,’ the elephant threatened.
‘I will bite you to death if you dare come near me,’ the snake said.
The elephant thought the snake would be intimidated by his size. But that obviously wasn’t the case! While it may have been wise of him to either move on or at least try to lure the dangerous snake in some way, he decided to brawl. He lifted that giant heavy leg of his and threatened to stamp her without realizing that one bite of hers would be enough to send him to permanent sleep. His actions angered the snake. She turned around and ferociously hissed. This yet again scared the elephant off his feet. He was so embarrassed that without thinking, he harshly stamped the snake to pieces. The snake died, but not before injecting her lethal poison inside the elephant’s body. The elephant was badly hurt. He couldn’t stand on his feet any longer. He collapsed to the ground. After a while, he died.
A hunter was walking around the forest when he noticed a dead elephant with a shiny tusk. He got excited at the sight of a free tusk. But he was so blinded that he didn’t even bother to be careful. He placed his quiver on the body of the elephant and used a knife to make an incision. After a while, he pulled the tusk with his bare hands. He pulled it with all his might. The tusk came off but such great force was applied that it pierced into his head. He died on the spot.
A few hours passed. A jackal sniffed his way to the three carcasses. He was over the moon at the sight of months worth of free meals. He didn’t want to share these with anyone else. He came up with a plan to erect the man vertically to make it seem like he was alive. Anyone who came sniffing would run off scared at the sight of a hunter. He would then get to enjoy all three for months!
To erect the man’s body, he decided to use the elephant for support. He held the man’s hair with his teeth and climbed up the elephant. He did that until he needed further elevation to make the man stand on his feet. He could then push the man in a way that he would be balanced in between the elephant’s legs. So he stepped on the quiver placed on the elephant’s body. But… he slipped and fell inside – and the arrows pierced him mercilessly. He bled and died within a few minutes.
All four: dead!
After a few days, When local villagers saw this sight, they were stunned. How could this have even happened, they wondered and discussed among themselves.
They couldn’t find an explanation. If anyone else had killed them all, why didn’t that anyone take anything at all! This became a huge riddle for the villagers.
Everyone, every single moment tried to find an explanation. But one thing or the other always didn’t connect. Finally, it reached the king. It was a huge deal after all!
The king too couldn’t think of any explanation so he asked a wise minister of his to figure out how all this may have happened. The minister went to the site and observed all the carcasses closely. He had solved it. He came back and said to the king –
The snake died of vanity
The elephant of stupidity
The man was blinded by his greed
The jackal by his cunningness.
All four were equal fools. No more no less!
It wasn’t difficult for people to guess what may have happened after this brilliant explanation!
We look at others and think they have it all. We wish we did what they did. But, what we forget is: There is a reason why we are the way we are! It’s for us to figure out what we really are.
Once there lived a chameleon who could not just change his color, he was a shapeshifter. He could turn into any creature he desired – however he desired – whenever he desired. But the issue with him was, he didn’t know what to become!
One day while roaming around in confusion, he reached a shed where a milker was milking a buffalo. As he watched the scene wondering what kind of life was best, a drop of milk entered his mouth. He loved the taste! And then he thought to himself – This is so good! If a drop tastes like this, imagine what a hundred drops might taste like! How lucky must this buffalo’s calf be! I think I should be a calf.
And then he had his first transformation – he turned into a newly born calf and sat near a buffalo who had just given birth. The next day, the owner of the shed saw this and was glad that one of his buffalos had given birth to a twin. He happily accepted it.
But life as a calf was not as wonderful as the chameleon had imagined. The milker hardly left any milk for him. All he got to drink was a few drops left behind in the udder. He starved badly.
Then one day he thought – This is not good! Life of a calf is miserable. I think I should become a milker. He is the one who takes all the milk.
And so he did. He transformed himself into the same milker, tied and shut the original at a corner of the shed and took his place.
But life as a milker too was not as wonderful as he had imagined. He had to work tremendously hard – day and night without getting to drink even a drop of milk. It was then that he realized that the milker doesn’t get to drink anything. Everything went to the owner.
Then he decided to transform into the owner of the shed. He transformed and untied the milker. He locked the original owner in the storeroom of his own house and started taking care of business. But hardly a day had passed and he began freaking out. He had to take care of the house, manage workers and other people, listen to harsh words from others, manage loans and credit – And all this gave him no rest. All he did was worry day and night. There was nothing else. Only a constant fear, threat and thoughts of profit!
While he got to drink the milk, the miserable thoughts he had to deal with made the milk irrelevant and tasteless. It was no different from the water he drank as a chameleon – just some liquid entering into his body. He ceased wanting to drink milk after a couple of days.
This is not fun. Not fun at all, he thought one night.
He immediately went downstairs, freed the original owner, turned into a chameleon and ran off the house. He didn’t transform into anything else ever again.
Who the hell do I think I am to be writing about methods of my movie watching!
Am I a producer? No. Am I a director/editor? No. Am I a professional screenwriter or any other movie business professional? No. Am I an actor? No. Am I a critic? No.
Then why should you care about my methods of movie watching?
Let me modify one Rousseau from the 18th century:
I am not a — producer, director, editor, screenwriter, actor or critic. I am none. This is why I make this kind of list. If I was either of them, I would be too busy making movies, not these stupid how’s.
Okay with that aside, let’s begin.
What I mean to do here actually is share a formula of movie watching that I had devised a while back for my personal convenience. This formula has really helped me interpret and understand movies in context, their meanings and purposes — without which my movie watching would have otherwise slipped by as a mere one/two/three-hour pasttime-entertainment.
This formula contains multiple components and each have distinct parameters which add up for overall movie-quality.
I am sharing this for two reasons, firstly, so that it may be useful for someone and secondly, so that I may be suggested and critiqued in this so I can improve on it, hence, improving my movie watching experiences.
Before sharing the formula and briefly discussing the components, I would like to define movies in this context as:
Any fictional-moving-visual-entertainment.
It must be clear that documentaries don’t have anything to do here. But there is a problem, what about theatres and shows like WWE which has both live and TV audiences. For convenience sake, let’s include them as well!
But the main focus is on those 90+ minutes things which we all call — movies.
And there are no equipment and temporal boundaries. A fictional short shot with a cheap phone by a Nepali kid is as good as one by Christopher Nolan.
Here is the formula I use for movie watching —
ARFE-HT
Yes, it’s an acronym.
Each alphabet stands for one component and I mark them on the scale of 10. That is the parameter. Now let me describe the components one by one.
A — Aesthetics:
Technically, aesthetics is a philosophical study and examination of beauty and taste. But how I try to use it in movie-watching is by studying, examining and marking the ‘beautiful’ in a movie as per my taste. I don’t try to use ‘schools’ derived standards of beauty.
What I find beautiful is based on:
The color
The brightness
The set or location and costumes.
The music/soundtrack
The flow of transitions and cuts
The flow of shots and scenes
Synchrony between various components.
The Overall Story (not plots/subplots)
I think all these are self-explanatory.
I try to look at all these sub-components and then try to mark the overall aesthetics on the scale of 10, with 10 being the best and 0 being the worst.
Luc Besson’s Le Grand Bleu is a 10/10 for me.
I don’t remember giving zero to any. But few Nepali movies must have gotten a 1.
R — Reality factor:
While I prefer realism in movies, it is not at all necessary for all movies to be realistic. Yet it is difficult to define realism.
Which one would be more realistic: A movie based on a fantasy setting like say, Star Wars which manages to talk about human social issues and realpolitik or some types of Bollywood movies which deal with real life settings but go so astray from life that it has no resemblance with any part of our lives at all.
So, how I try to determine the Reality factor is by checking whether the movie has managed to show any kind of truth or not, by dealing with important subjects of our lives. Irrespective of the settings and characters. Star Wars gets higher point than this:
I do think that the purpose of movies is to illustrate or show either the realities of life or the world. That is why I tend to mark movies with wisdom – highly. Whether it teaches me something important about our lives and the world or not, whether it challenges my opinions and perspectives or not – is what I try to determine.
Here too I try to look at all these sub-components and then try to mark the overall reality factor on the scale of 10, with 10 being the best and 0 being the worst.
Abbas Kiarostami’s The Taste of Cherry is a 10/10 for me,
The Bollywood movie mentioned above gets zero.
F — Feelings:
Feelings imply the ability of the movie to generate/trigger feelings and emotions in me. While a lot of movies intend to provide some kind of feeling but fail due to various factors, the ability of a movie — through its various players — to do things to me, is how I judge.
I have been using an ancient Hindustani theatre-use-evaluation method for the judgement of feelings. It is called Navarasa, or nine feelings to be played with by contents.
Those nine entities are:
Śṛṅgāraḥ : Romance, Love, attractiveness.
Hāsyam : Laughter, mirth, comedy.
Raudram: Fury.
Kāruṇyam : Compassion, mercy.
Bībhatsam : Disgust, aversion.
Bhayānakam : Horror, terror.
Veeram : Heroism.
Adbhutam : Wonder, amazement.
Śāntam: Peace or tranquility
I do not have a preference for this or that feeling. If a movie manages to hit me hard, I don’t care where I have been hit.
Let me provide my 10/10 movies for each (respective to the list above):
Mute (2018), Borat, (not being able to think of one), Where is my friend’s house?, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Moon/Climax (2018), One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 2001:A Space Odyssey, Stalker (Tarkovsky).
E — Entertainment:
Because entertainment and fun are very very subjective and relative things, I have put my own margin into them. Plot-flow and performance have a great hand in this.
However, there is a limit as to how extreme one movie can go. Too much don’t-cares for the sake of making it artsy won’t do for me. Neither will mundane-repetitive-formulaic stuff nor pure comedy. I do have a guilty inclination — I find suspense/mystery pretty amusing.
The experience for me has to be tolerable. While a movie may have boring parts, every other factor mentioned here should work towards keeping me hooked. If it doesn’t manage to do it. It gets a low point on my scale.
Death at a Funeral (2007) is 10/10 for me, while any Bollywood blockbuster with a megastar is a 0.
H — Heroism:
This particular judgement of heroism differs from the one included in feelings. The heroism feeling mentioned under feelings is one where I appreciate the thought/deeds of character(s) in adverse situations. The toughness, the grit, the suffering, the act, etc.
But this heroism applies to movies where too much emphasis is provided to a character(s), such that they eclipse the story. In other words, heroism is where the actor or the character becomes more important than the movie and its story.
This is why it’s marking is done in reverse order. 0 is for movies with too much heroism such as Hollywood superhero flicks or Bollywood megastar ones. 10 is where the characters behave as characters and fit in perfectly with the story like in Rashomon.
T — Technicality:
This is where I look at the various technical aspects of movies which equally contribute to the overall performance and experience.
I have managed to find following important aspects:
Cinematography or Animation
Direction
Editing
Acting
Screenplay
Soundtrack and Music tightness
Plot/Subplot
Story
Here, the soundtrack differs from the ones in aesthetics in that this is whether or not the sound fits in with the cinema. Vangelis’ work in Blade Runner is absolutely beautiful, I do not find it apt in the movie. I felt Vangelis was more powerful than the narrative. So, it will get a high point in aesthetics but will not here.
All Coen Brother movies are 10/10 for me in terms of technicality.
So, this is how I watch my movies. I observe, analyze, mark and then add all of them up.
It may be a tedious, boring and inappropriate way for a proper experience but I found that it was the only way I could give context to my movie watching and make them relevant.
As mentioned earlier, I wrote this so that I could share the way I do it and also so that I could learn about my correctness and absurdities.
Before talking in detail about bad thoughts, let me give some context.
A terrible nightmare woke me up at 3 AM this morning. After that, I went into a 30 minutes or so of ridiculous post-dream analysis.
I felt terrible. Weak. The dream and its thoughts were miserable!
I restrain myself from using the lessons from Vedic and Buddhist spirituality I once learnt. I dumped them after practicing for a lot of years, because I felt they were limiting my world-view and perspectives.
But this morning I the petty thoughts were intolerable. The more I argued with myself, the more I suffered.
So, after a long gap, I took out that spiritual-weapon. Focusing, drowning and losing myself on a feeling of nothingness!
It helped me fall asleep.
But that episode is still haunting me right now. Like a wound it persists. I don’t know what to do with it. It is injuring and damaging.
I have decided to write about them here to see what happens!
Thoughts are the ultimate entities of this human existence of ours. I have elsewhere tried to justify this statement. Thoughts play a crucial role in our knowing.
True and False are also essential to us.
If I am hiking in the woods and a thought suddenly says — A tiger is approaching, my immediate reaction will be to be alert and then look around. I do this because I want a proof of that thought. If I don’t find any, I relax a tad and walk on. This is because I haven’t found any justified truth to what the thought told me.
But still why my thought may have told me that is a question that won’t let me relax completely. If I can relax a bit, it’s only because I found a certain false in the thought statement.
However, if I notice birds flying or other animals making hasteful noise when I look around, I have found some evidence to support that thought, which increases my heartbeat, gets me sweating and emotionally injures me after which I start to figure out mechanisms of defence. This is because I found a certain truth in the thought.
But the differentiation between true and false is not an easy task as thoughts in themselves do not provide us with any distinction. Thoughts in isolation can be either. False thoughts can be judged as being true and vice-versa. As happened to me this morning, I panicked because I took the thoughts as being true which may or may not have been the case.
This is where a faculty in us called thinking is to be used for — locating evidence.
the facts, signs or objects that make you believe that something is true
In the case of the tiger in the woods, I searched for facts, signs or objects that had to prove to me that the tiger was there. In the case where I did not find any, I relaxed and moved on, whereas when I found some, I panicked and began thinking self-defence.
But figuring out the evidence wasn’t so easy this morning. For one, the dream and the subsequent thoughts told me things that were detrimental which was followed by imaginative ‘evidence’ which then emotionally injured me.
Unlike the tiger-case, I had no way of identifying facts, signs or objects as the thoughts were not about my immediate physical environment. They were about my self-worth and poor-decisions.
I then tried to argue with the evidence it provided by searching for counter-evidences which were again countered…
Now, how do I correctly gather evidence to judge the true or false thoughts that are about things as subjective as self-worth and decisions?
In other words, How do I deal with injurious subjective thoughts?
If my thoughts tell me that I am worthless, justified by an immediate evidence of me not earning money currently, which then injures me; how do I deal with them?
The path I chose was of ignoring — focusing, drowning and losing myself on a feeling of nothingness!
Is that it? The best solution? Is it healthy?
My purpose behind writing this was to just interpret whatever had happened this morning with me. As I have been writing, I have been noticing how absurd but effective the spiritual method is. While it would have been a stupid act in the woods, it does seem to be a worthwhile act in the safety of bed. That is, in the domains of subjective thoughts.
But in the long-term it seems hazardous. Since it is like tucking away an object of discomfort, I think it won’t stop thoughts from haunting you after a certain period. As I said in the beginning, while I did manage to fall asleep, the wound hasn’t left me.
A long-term approach such as that is sure to keep one away from addressing the issues at hand turning one’s life into one with ignorance. It was one of the reasons I had stopped using their teachings altogether because I thought they were limiting my world-view and perspectives.
So what is the solution?
I think I have found a few:
(Please remember that I am only talking about injurious thoughts related to Self-Worth and Decisions)
Be Strong:
Irrespective of the situation and threat, the only thing we can do that will not have any repercussions in both short and long-term and will only help us in dealing with the injury better is to be strong. Come what may I will deal with it could be the best thing to remind yourself during a crisis.
Seek Evidence:
While seeking evidence may not be as easy as in the immediate and physical scenarios, I think we should try to look for real-life proof of the doubts we are having. Trying to answer questions such as — What is the basis of the thoughts I am having? How can I prove it? What may have triggered it? can prove to be helpful as they take us away from the injury into the lands of scrutiny, where we have control (somewhat). This questioning I believe is the apt method to judge the true or false thoughts that are about things as subjective as self-worth and decisions
Remind yourself of deeds done:
This is where every deed ever done comes into play. Reminding ourselves of each act of success achieved, however trivial, can prove to be very useful. Maybe it is a game won, a road travelled, an adventure, an obstacle that had been overcome!
For me the purpose behind writing this was to — firstly, interpret what had happened to me earlier and then to hopefully heal myself through it.
I think I have successfully managed to do it (for now).
Writing for me is very important for many reasons. I am feeling the beauty and reality of one of those right now.
I asked myself about the future of thinking after I noticed how alert I was getting using my phone, laptop and TV.
I tried to understand the alertness and discovered that there was a voice inside my head that constantly reminded me that whatever I do in those devices is being surveilled,monitored and analyzed.
What is happening now is that this alertness is getting contagious. The hangover from device-usage is getting into my head. I am getting alert while Ithink, see or talk sensitive stuff in the same manner.
As if my thoughts and views are being surveilled, monitored and analyzed.
Is this what will happen to our thoughts in the future?
I have often found myself in the middle of philosophical arguments fuming with anger, full of anxiety. Speaking or typing at the speed of light what my fast-beating heart and an inflating ego demand of me.
While my intention behind discussing ‘deep’ things with others is almost always to share and hear things about I have been reading, thinking or writing, I haven’t been able to stop myself from getting petty to the point of attempting to humiliate the other person with all kinds of insults to his/her intellectual capacities.
Thisgot me questioning:
How can I handle such philosophical arguments better?
There are a couple of things I am clear about:
I *want* to have such discussions
I *don’t want* to win the arguments. I just want to learn a thing or two, boast a bit and have a good time at the end of it all!
So, how can I stop such philosophical arguments from getting petty?
How can I handle such arguments better?
Can I?
The first thing is to see what goes on during such arguments by trying to identify some significant factors at work.
We have to remember that Man – being an intellectually advanced (relatively) animal – is very sensitive towards its intellectual abilities.
No normal or dignified human being would ever want to be told that his/her cognitive abilities are of a low-grade. It would be like challenging a python on its strangulation abilities by strangulating it. The python would obviously want to prove you wrong.
I think this factor is at work our petty philosophical arguments.
The dignity factor
What I noticed was, most of us arguers believe that the ability to philosophize is the highest kind of intellectual ability. It’s just the way our culture is set up.
But it is justifiable because the ability to philosophize implies the ability to use our brains for something other than trifles. Everyone can trifle! Something other than practicality. Everyone can be practical! To dwell in the domains of abstractions and values. Now, not everyone can do that is what we believe! The same reason we value science, mathematics and engineering too. Apart from the money.
I think this is why no one wants to lose such arguments. As it would imply intellectual loss. Defeat.
From this angle, it seems as if philosophical arguments are the best test of cognitive abilities.
At this point we can wonder why it has never become a popular sport or a reality show. There is so much at stake!
The other factor I found was Cultural/Identity Sensitivity.
Philosophical arguments touch on areas that form the basis of any culture and identity. Religion, Ethnicity, Nationalism, all these have subjective worldview at their bases. Philosophical arguments are merely debates at core: The nature of reality, Creator, Rights and Wrongs, Why x is better than y, etc.
These are substantial stuff. No wonder people get agitated! Some even kill others for their views…This is a dangerous territory!
The other factor is emotional sensitivity.
If Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra has helped me get over severe nervousness and anxiety, then I certainly would be emotionally offended if anyone calls it merely a reverie of a madman.
Similarly, if Vedic spirituality has helped someone get over an emotional trauma, and if I go and tell that person the whole Vedic system is merely intellectual narcotics composed by addicts drinking liquid narcotics, they are bound to want to pull my tongue out of my mouth!
These are the factors I have discovered as of now. I will update if I find more.
Now, what about the answers to these questions:
How can I stop the arguments from getting petty?
How can I handle such arguments better?
Can I?
The best solution is to stop participating in such arguments altogether.
But as I mentioned above, I do not want to do that.
So, in order to stop it from getting petty to the point of anger and harassment, I should remember that the person in the argument who remains calm the longest has a better intellectual ability. This is self-explanatory.
Of all abilities, I believe that controlling and directing thoughts, desires and feelings are the most difficult. If I manage to remain calm throughout, then I believe my ego will be silenced.
At the same time, I should remember that I always have the option of walking out of such arguments or not participating at all. If I am having an argument it means I have voluntarily participated in it. Therefore, I should be able to reasonably listen to others and calmly defend my opinions and learnings. Even if it concerns me culturally and emotionally. If I can do that, my ego again will surely keep quiet.
Because They Are Travels: Into a Different Space, Time and Identity.
If I am to recall the moments from my childhood when I have felt the strongest in a joyful way Absorbing Stories would surely occupy a lot of headspace!
The stories I read of Sindbad, Gulliver, Panchatantra, or the Arabian Nights gave me some of the most intense and wonderful feelings. I immersed myself in the character, time and the environment of the story with a sense of both nervousness and excitement. The warm feeling inside my chest boiled and tried to explode from the limitations of my physical body. It’s inability to do so being the only thing to remind me that my existence belonged here in this world in this country called Nepal and in this family called…
There were sports, TV cartoons and movies. While I didn’t find them as immersive as reading, they were deeply influential. I played a few video games but wasn’t too fond of them.
I wasn’t a social guy and I do not have fond memories with friends. Yes, there are moments with family that are special but let’s not talk about it here. What I want to discuss here is stories.
The moments I have spent absorbing fictional narratives or creating my own — strolling around my room and the house — are deeply special.
As time has passed, I have tried to understand why stories did to me what they did. I have tried to understand the feeling that arises when I am about to dive into one. The understanding process hasn’t been easy. But what I have come to realize lately is — this is a special subject for not just me but for a lot of people.
There are a lot of theories and a lot of interpretations. I don’t want to get into all that too. What I want to do, however, is share how I currently interpret the feeling generated both from the stories and the nature of stories. This interpretation is neither academic nor professional. It is about the reasons they make you feel that way and is simple:
Stories are a type of travel.
Yes, Stories are a form of travel. A psychological, spiritual, philosophical travel. This is what makes it special.
Not getting into the practical implications, I see three different types of travels we participate in during our immersing in the stories:
Different Space
Different Time
Different Personality
These three factors are together responsible for creating that feeling.
Different Space: Through stories, we travel into different places. Our mind seems to forget that the body it is in is actually in a cozy space — consuming a narrative. This frees us from the burdens of our current space. (Maybe we are freeloading!)
Different Time: Same as the above, through stories we also travel into a different time. This frees us from the burdens of the current time and age. (Maybe we have an installment to clear tomorrow!)
Different Personality: Perhaps the most important characteristic responsible for the joy stories produce — through stories we travel to a different personality. We forget our self-identity and become the character we relate to. We forget our national, cultural, religious, age identity as our mind relates to something else. This frees us from the bondages, headaches— anxieties of our present self. This relaxes us. (Maybe we do not like our present self, situation and society!)
This escape from the identity shackle is what most spirituality is about too!
But I have a question:
Does a person who absolutely loves his/her place, time and personality feel this way with stories too?
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It is in situations such as these, that we take ourselves too seriously, forgetting that we are smart only because we think so.
The point I am trying to get across is that:
No matter how smart we think we are, we all are indeed fools.
Our reverence towards our own fellow humans proves this.
Time and time again, we have been deceived, troubled and subjugated by the very person or the system we hold great reverence towards. Be it the emperors, the religious gurus, democratic leaders, the corporate visionaries, whoever. We have all been constantly well-deceived by those we revere.
Yet, we don’t learn!
Here we are today creating, gossiping, promoting and worshipping modern tyrants (dressed as merchants) only to create more tomorrow.
We humans never learn, do we?
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I had developed a desire-management formula. I have been implementing it for more than a couple of years now. The reason for sharing?
It has proved to be very effective.
Now that I have fully committed myself to a life as a writer, there are a few elements which I think are essential to such a lifestyle.
This desire management is simply an allocation of those elements to the wants and needs embedded in almost all of us.
I had been very random and all-over-the-place with my thoughts, desires, time, work and life management. This particular formula has helped me get a little bit more organized. It may be of help for others as well, irrespective of the profession.
I hereby publicize this formula as The ABCD formula as it contains the (fundamentals) ABCDs of my existence and life.
The ABCD
ABCD = A, B, C and D desires. All four are distinct sets of various sub-desires. Those which are common with each other are organized in the same set. This way, each set is a whole desire or as I like to call it — the wills. Each will is named according to the most generic term that applies to all sub-desires.
Let’s dive into the desire management formula.
A
It stands for Ability.
Ability is the state of being able to do something. It is about skill, talent and capability. It is the absolute means, the foundation without which none of my other wills or sub-desires can be fulfilled.
My desires in terms of the abilities I want/need are as follows:
Ability to Think
Ability to Learn and Understand
Ability to pursue freedom
Ability to love
Ability to experience
Ability to enjoy
Ability for aesthetics
Ability to earn and survive
Ability to be strong
Ability of Wisdom
Thinking, learning, freedom, love, enjoyment, aesthetics, earning and surviving are my sub-desires. All these are grouped in the ‘A’ set.
With the A set, my purpose is — to remind myself that in order to look far, I need a good telescope.
It’s all about maintaining, polishing, updating and upgrading my abilities to do things. It’s about sharpening the tool, so to speak. It’s about the tool. It’s about the lenses and the vehicles.
B
It stands for Being.
Being is about existing in a certain way with certain values and ideals. It is about personal ethics and feelings. It incorporates everything I am, want-to-be and will-to-be as a free-being, human-being, son, father, etc. etc.
My desires in terms of the being are as follows:
Greedlessness
Non-Petty
Love
Good life
Freedom
Strength
Free thinking
Life and World Experiences (including Travels)
Aesthetics
Joy
I want to be as greedless as possible. At the same time I want to ensure I am not petty. I want love, freedom, strength, free-thinking, experiences, travels, aesthetics and joys in life. All these are grouped into the ‘B’ set.
With the B set, my purpose is — to remind myself of things that really make me who I am. My real purpose in life. My being. My essence.
It’s all about being who I am with this. I have settled on these sub-desires after years of hard work. My work with the B set is to ensure I don’t ‘sell-out’ (Whatever that may mean!)
C
It stands for Seeing. But is written C. Hence, C is an apt alphabet. Plus, it makes it easier as it perfectly fits well into the ABCD system which makes it easier for me to remember whatever I am trying to. I hereby use the term C-ing for seeing.
C-ing is about learning, knowing and understanding various subjects and elements of my life and of this existence of ours.
I had earlier mentioned about my life as a writer. My desire to — learn throughout my life was one of the things responsible for this choice. Now, it is also a necessity to sustain that choice. If I want to continue being a writer, I have to try to learn all the things all the time.
All the subjects I find interesting, relevant and important are covered under the C will or the C set which contains 3 distinct subsets.
My desires in terms of the knowledges of things I want/need are organized as follows:
HG-HE-STEP
sPa
POLE™
All three are acronyms.
HG-HE-STEP includes knowledge of things that are somewhat social or humanitarian in nature.
H: History
G: Geography
H: Humanity
E: Experiences (of People)
S: Society
T: Technology
E: Economics
P: Politics
sPa includes knowledges of and via three tools of knowledge acquisition:
S: Science
P: Philosophy
A: Arts
This sub-set includes looking at the previous subset through all three lenses (for instance, looking at technology from a scientific lens as well as from a philosophical one) along with studying the fields themselves and their interconnections.
For example, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Arts, Art of Science, Scientific Art, etc. etc.
POLE™ is all about my subjective, intuitive understanding and conclusions of everything possible.
P: Perceptions
O: Opinions
L: Life-Lessons
E: Experiences
™: Thought Management
Alternatively, I also use: EEEGSSTTPP
which stands for: Existential, Experiential, Economic, Geographic, Scientific, Social, Technological, Temporal, Political and Philosophical knowledge.
But it is difficult to memorize. C-subsets are much more convenient.
With the C set, my purpose is — to remind myself of things I want to and have to learn.
It’s all about organizing, balancing, selecting and choosing the subjects to learn.
D
It stands for Doing.
Doing is all about the actions I need to take and the things I need to do to fulfill the desires of ABC. This is through which I get things done. It’s about setting and implementing goals, objectives, strategies and tactics.
At the point of this writing, my D is threefold:
Write
Publish
Enterprise
I got to write, publish and be active in various activities apart from those two. This part is subject to much change and adaptations.
With the D set, my purpose is — to remind myself and ensure I successfully do what I need to do.
Conclusion
You may have noticed how they are all interconnected. I think this is the beauty of this desire management formula (for me obviously!).
Let us begin this thought experiment by imagining a habitable planet with life. Far Far away!
The planet is revolving around its own star. Its day-night period same as Earth’s.
And on that planet, let us imagine species – Millions. With variety for procreation. Just like on Earth.
Let us imagine one species among them head-and-shoulders above the rest – In intelligence and sophistication. Just like us!
Now let us decide that the planet has had life for more than a billion years. The intelligent species there has been smarting around for more than 2 million years. Just like ours!
Now let us imagine the planet with its peculiar atmosphere, water, soil, forest, etc.
Let us imagine all this with one crucial difference — it’s intelligent species not like humans. Let us imagine them different. Yes, let them walk on two feet and let them look like us physically. But let them not be like us behaviorally.
Let’s make them different.
Let’s not make them build huge buildings, monuments and structures. Let’s not make them political. Let’s not make them national. Let’s not make them create huge corporations. Let’s not make them kill each other or creatures. Let’s not make them adhere to their own mandatory principles. Let’s not make them need any kind of superficial entertainment — Let’s make them wise.
Yes, let’s imagine them greedless, free and wise. It’s just a thought experiment after all!
They didn’t build huge buildings and structures because they are okay with distributed minimalistic settlements and structures of aesthetic/experiential importance.
They didn’t organize politically because they are okay with improvisational organizing. They understand the need of community but also realize the absurdity of politics and power.
Everyone is wise enough to mind their own business and greedless enough to not want unnecessary things. Everyone has their own land and they are fine cultivating what they need and consuming it. Remember, they are not greedy, so it will work.
Now, since they are wise as such, they did not need/want big businesses.
Nor did they have to trouble other creatures for their own amusement. They live at a distance far enough to remain untroubled by other creatures.
Since they are free and wise, they didn’t adhere to mandatory customs and principles such as marriage and children. Their population is well balanced. Whenever it seems to increase, they have the wisdom to understand it, hence, there will always be those who will make personal sacrifices. They didn’t need any forms of superficial entertainment as they don’t have any dissapointments hence anxieties.
So, what will they do? How will they live? How do we imagine that?
I propose the following:
They will spend their time in philosophical, scientific or artistic contemplation and creation. Depending on individual preferences or the need.
They won’t build sophisticated technologies. There is no need — they don’t want to conquer their fellows or the cosmos. They are wise enough to be happy where they are. They will scientific technologies though. For reasons clear! They might have computers and internet.
They have understood that the only purpose of their high intelligence is to experience and understand life and the world. Nothing else matters! All is peaceful and well.
Rahul Sankrityayan was an Indian Marxist thinker who studied, travelled and wrote a lot.
Here I want to quickly share his views on the birth and use of Hindu God Brahman and the Hindu Reincarnation system by the ruling system in ancient India. It is presented in fictional form in his historical-fiction From Volga to Ganges.
Pravahan is a king of Panchalpur (Kannauj) in around 700 BC who has modified the Hindu Religion. His lover Lopa is not very fond of that kind of thinking though.
One day she asks,
‘Why are you involved in things apart from royal duties?’
To which Pravahan replies,
‘You mean my flight towards Brahman? But Lopa, all these things are not separate from Royal Duties. Our ancestors had honored Rishis such as Vasistha and Vishwamitra for the sake of supporting the State. Those Rishis inspired people to follow the command of the king in the name of gods such as Indra, Agni and Varun. Those Rishis made the kings conduct huge and expensiveYagyasso that the public’s belief in them would persist…All this was done to establish people’s faith in divine forces…and to tell them that all we have is due to Gods.’
‘But you already had old gods, what was the need of Brahman?’
‘For ages, nobody has seen Indra, Varun and the likes, therefore a few have started to doubt…I have established the form of Brahman in such a way that no one can ever demand to see it. It is beyond the senses. No one can doubt this concept the way they might doubt gods with forms’
‘…are you doing all this merely to keep your citizens in illusion?’
‘…It is necessary to do all this to keep the state under my control…our biggest enemies are the ones who doubt gods and Yagyas’
‘But you also talk of the existence and philosophy of Brahman…?’
‘If there is an existence then there has to be a philosophy. Not through senses though, because skeptics will talk of empirical proofs — this is why I talk about subtle senses. And now I talk of such methods that people will keep searching for ever and ever without losing their belief…’.
And then Pravahan tells her about his new invention that is greater than Brahman — Reincarnation:
‘Reincarnation is the most useful. The rate at which the wealth of we feudals, Brahmins and merchants is increasing is the same at which ordinary people are getting poor. There are those now who provoke artisans, farmers and slaves by saying, “You are troubling yourself by giving away your earnings to others. They trouble you and tell you that the Suffering, Pain, charity and sacrifices you do here will be repaid in heaven…No one has seen anyone enjoy happiness in heaven…”, to which we have established a narrative. All differences in this world are the result of your deeds in your previous lives…I do not care about Truth and Lies, it (an idea) just has to be useful for me. Today the idea of coming back to this world after death doesn’t seem credible…there will come a time when all of the pathetic citizens will be ready to bear pain, suffering and injustice in the hope of rebirth…’
‘But isn’t it ruining the lives of hundreds of generations just for your selfish wants?’
‘…it isn’t wrong. I am doing such a task that even the ancient Rishis couldn’t do…’
‘You are too cold Pravahan!’
‘But I have merely acted as per my ability!’
I understand that this whole thing has been presented by Sankrityayan in a Marxist mirror. That is, this thing of Metaphysical and spiritual nature has been looked upon from a dialectic-political-economic angle. It has also been presented in an artistic/imaginative manner. It is surely a limited view-point. But, it is a different perspective nonetheless!
It is about questioning the one who said the said.
Once there lived a Pandit who had a beautiful wife. In fact, so beautiful that every man who ever laid eyes on her desired her. The prince, the minister’s son, the merchant’s son, and even the barber’s son were among the few that constantly drooled over her. But the Pandit was strict, so no one ever dared to go near and approach.
One day the Pandit had to urgently visit another country. He didn’t have any money so he went to the merchant and loaned 200 Rupees. He told him that his wife would manage some money by tomorrow and pay him back the day after. He went home and told his wife about the loan. She assured him that she would think of some way. The Pandit left in the evening.
The wife had a habit of bathing at the river at the earliest dawn. While she was coming back from her bath the next morning, thinking of ways to pay the merchant back, the king’s son blocked her way and said –
‘I am really enchanted by your looks. I want to take you to the palace tonight. How long will you keep up with that pathetic brahmin? I will give you whatever you want.’
The woman thought for a while and said –
‘Oh, Prince! Why don’t you come to my house at 10 PM tonight? I will fulfill all your needs.’
The prince said he would and they parted ways.
After a while, she met the minister’s son.
‘I am in love with your body. I want to make you the princess of my heart tonight,’ he said.
The woman told him to come to hers at 11 PM. Likewise, she met the merchant’s son and told him to meet her at 12 PM at her house when he too expressed his feelings for her. A little later, she met the barber’s son and told him to come at 1 AM. After this, she reached her home.
She thought for a long time after which she called and asked four of her close friends to come to hers immediately.
‘Friends, taking advantage of my husband’s absence, the prince, the minister’s son, the merchant’s son, and the barber’s son – all tried to seduce me today. I have cleverly called all of them – one at a time – at my home tonight. I want you to come and help me. I want you guys to tell them I like surprises and then I want you to ask them to hide in the black boxes I have in the other room. Once they enter, I want you to shut it and lock it.’
The friends agreed.
That night, after supper they all got ready and waited. At 10 PM, the prince arrived. The woman hid and the friends cleverly made him enter the box. After which they shut it, locked it and placed it in the garden. The prince yelled from inside.
Likewise, at 11 PM the minister’s son came and they did the same. They managed to lock all four men by 1 PM.
The next morning the merchant came to take his money back.
‘What 200 Rupees? I don’t know of any such loan.’ the wife told him.
The merchant was in shock.
‘What are you talking about! Your husband took 200 Rupees from me the day before yesterday. He said you would pay me back today. You are deceiving me. This is not good,’ he said.
‘I don’t know of such commitments,’ she said.
This terrified the merchant. He swore at her and straight away headed to the King’s court. He explained everything to him. Since the merchant was the king’s close ally, he asked one of his guards to go and bring the woman to the court immediately. The guard did so.
‘Did you or your husband take the merchant’s money?’ the king asked.
‘No your highness. We haven’t taken anything from anyone. We are simple people with simple ways.’ she pleaded.
There was a heated discussion after that. The merchant insisted that they had taken money from him while the woman kept denying it. The king listened to all of it. He was slowly losing his patience. The woman understood that the king would support the merchant and not her if everything failed. So she made a move –
‘Okay! You guys may not believe me, but you surely believe in God. What if I called upon my goddess? If she asks me to pay the money back in front of you, I will pay it.’
Everyone was surprised. The merchant scolded her. But the king was a man of faith and spirituality. He wanted to see if that could really happen.
‘You can bring your goddess here, is that what you mean?’ the king asked.
‘Yes, your highness. I can bring her here in front of all of you,’ she replied.
‘Then do it,’ the king ordered.
‘But she is too heavy. I cannot carry her myself. I need a few strong men to come with me to my house,’ she said.
The king asked four soldiers to go with her.
When they reached her home, she asked the four men to wait outside for a while and entered.
She went to each of the black boxes and said –
‘Listen! If you do as I say, I will set you free at my home with dignity. Otherwise, I will take you to court and expose you in front of hundreds of people.’
Each agreed to assist her.
‘If so then I will take you guys to the court now and when the king asks whether I have taken money from the merchant, you guys should deny. Am I clear?’, she said.
All of them agreed. She asked the four men to come in and take the boxes away.
At the court, the boxes were kept in front of the woman. The King went near and asked –
‘Has this woman taken money from the merchant?’
‘No-No-No, she hasn’t,’ came voices from each box.
This amazed the King. He couldn’t hold himself any longer. He had to see the goddess! For the first time in his life!
He wanted that divine experience. So, he ordered his men to open the box immediately. They did so.
Four men stepped out one after another. It wasn’t difficult for anyone to recognize them. The King although disappointed, was amazed at the sight. He asked why they were shut like that. The woman explained everything. The four confessed.
The king was impressed with the woman’s wisdom and heavily rewarded her. He was sad that he couldn’t see the goddess though!
It was a fun ride. So, I have decided to go on it again. I have manually translated these from the Nepali language. So, it is like the handcrafted version of literary work. Enjoy!
Everyone sees a burnt forest, none see a burnt heart — External problems are easily visible so they gather attention. Internal problems are known only to the sufferer and there are few who understand them.
One who eats ember excretes ember — Your output depends on your input. If you listen to a dictator, you will praise the dictator!
Without carrion, a vulture doesn’t roam — An opportunist isn’t there where there isn’t opportunity.
I will fake a hit, you fake a cry — Let’s act together to deceive everyone else.
A roaring tiger never eats — One who is intimidated, doesn’t hurt.
Poor have no money, the rich have no heart.
A sleeper loses, waker gains — If you are not alert enough, you will lose a lot of things. It will be taken by the one who is alert.
Where there’s lake, there’s water — Lake is a body of water.
Give your ears not your words — Listen freely, do not commit easily .
A single moon is better than a thousand stars — A single person who seriously reads your works is better than many worthless followers.
Only a snake sees a snake’s feet — To know the weaknesses of others, you have to be like them.
Small mouth, big talk! — To talk of things beyond your ability.
Washing an ass with soap won’t turn it into a cow — External change doesn’t mean change in substance.
A barking dog never bites — Threatening things rarely hurt.
It’s dark under a lamp — We focus far and wide and miss what’s beside.
Never ask for directions to places you won’t go — Don’t concern yourself with things that are not important to you.
Everyone is naked underneath their clothes — We all are!
Suffering never comes alone — A single source of suffering hardly exists.
The bigger the pile the bigger the strife — The more you amass your wealth, the more problems for you.
You can hide contentment but not suffering — It is easier to be humble than be calm.
Did you like these wise proverbs?
If yes,
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When in crisis, always remember to stay calm. Try to understand the situation instead of reacting. Make things happen with what you have.
Once there lived an old woman. Her husband had died when she was young. She didn’t marry again. She had neither children nor relatives. She was wealthy, however, and lived in a nice two-storeyed house and had lots of valuable items.
One night when the old woman was deep asleep in her room on the upper floor, four thieves broke into her house. They saw extremely valuable items and grabbed everything they could possibly take. This turned into a noisy affair that woke the old woman. Instead of reacting, however, she carefully paid attention to what was going on downstairs. She correctly observed that there were four thieves and all were young men.
This made her think. It surely wasn’t a good idea for a single old lady to go after four young thieves. One, they could hurt her. Two, even if they ran, they could come back later knowing it was only an old lady. Three, they could divide into multiple groups, where one could come back and steal while she was after another.
But hardships in life had strengthened the old woman. She was tough and wise. She didn’t panic. Instead, she calmly thought of a solution. A few minutes later, she got it!
She had multiple items in her house: Maana, Pathi, Supaa, Daala, Bancharo, etc. (all Nepali utility items.) What she did was modify their names and pretended she was calling her sons aloud –
‘Maanyau, Paathyau, Supaau, Daalau, Bancharau, wake up quick! Four thieves have broken into our house. Hurry up! Bring your weapons.’
She then created a lot of noise on that floor: She rapidly opened and shut the doors. She dropped and smashed things.
The thieves heard all this. They immediately paused and tried to look at each other in the darkness of night. While they couldn’t see each other, they all understood the severity of the situation. They understood that they couldn’t afford to wait even for a minute. Each dropped whatever he was taking, including his bag, and ran empty-handed from the house as fast he possibly could. All were gone in a jiffy.
The old woman went downstairs and saw that the thieves had managed to collect almost every valuable item. The old woman checked their bags: There were valuable items stolen from others as well.
Instead of panicking in the time of crisis, the old woman had shown great resolve and presence of mind. She made use of whatever was at her disposal.
(Translated from NEPALI LOKKATHA, TULASI DIWAS)
SHARE THIS TALE WITH YOUR FRIENDS IF YOU LIKED IT. THEY MIGHT FIND IT USEFUL TOO.
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When we have anxieties and frustrations, our thoughts are stuck at some point in between the present (A) and the future (B). Both being points previously opened by ourselves from a different angle.
In other words, WHEN we feel that way, it is mostly because we are not finding a solid thought pattern that leads us from our present point A to our goal B. This maybe due to newer challenges.
More often than not, the solution comes by itself after a duration of intense suffering. Or we might force things.
Hardships in life are inevitable. It’s up to us to figure out how we come out of them. Grit and Courage are invaluable toolkits!
This story is about one such hardship and grit.
Once there lived a pair of sparrows. They loved each other and didn’t have much to worry about. They dwelled near the King’s palace so food came easy. All they had to do was enter into the palace garden through a small hole and they could soak themselves in grains, seeds, and all that was there. How much does a sparrow eat anyway!
They worked hard for only one day a week, during which they collected enough grains to feed them for the remaining days. Life was simple and good.
But now they had a concern – They weren’t able to bring young ones into the world.
This was because their nest never lasted long enough. Every time they built a nest, and prepared for the hatch, the royal elephant who walked the same route – destroyed them. It wasn’t done intentionally, it was just that his belly smashed the nest each time he walked. This way the sparrow couple never got enough time to hatch the eggs.
Once, while the king went on a hunting trip of 2-3 days with the elephant, the sparrows took a chance, built a nest, and even laid eggs. They buzzed with hope and excitement. But as soon as the king returned, the old story repeated itself – the elephant walked and obliterated the nest along with the eggs.
The female was distraught.
‘This is too much. I cannot take it anymore. Let’s leave this place, even if it means starving or struggling hopelessly for food,’ she cried.
This stirred the male. He couldn’t see his partner in such agony. But he couldn’t accept the idea of moving out of such a convenient place either. He had seen other sparrows immensely suffer for the lack of food. There were sparrows who had to abandon their eggs just because they had nothing to eat. The male had heard and seen all this! He couldn’t leave but couldn’t see his partner in distraught either. So, he decided to immediately do something about the elephant. He went and told his partner about it.
The female wasn’t amused at the idea.
‘What will we do? We are helpless! How can we fight an elephant?’ she questioned.
‘Don’t worry! I will do what I can. If I fail, we’ll move out,’ the male calmed her.
The next day the male decided to follow the elephant and attack when he was the most vulnerable. When the elephant reached near their shelter, he sat on the howdah. The mahout took the elephant to a cliff to graze. When the mahout went away leaving the elephant alone, the male entered into the elephant’s ear and flapped his wings with all his might. This hurt the elephant. He started to panic and restlessly move around. The male sparrow put more effort into the flapping. The elephant couldn’t take it. He lost control over himself and ran aimlessly. The sparrow came out and watched as the elephant fell from the cliff and died. The male smiled and returned home.
They gave birth to many chicks thereafter.
Meanwhile, the king bought a new elephant and, luckily for her, her belly didn’t interfere with the sparrow business!
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Written words are static in nature. Other forms of expression which rely on words such as speech are dynamic.
Written words remain static unless mobilized — which equips the recipient with control over the thoughts and ideas expressed.
This control is crucial because it gives time: A valuable entity.
This available time can be used to imagine, ponder, scrutinize, and eventually decide! This available time can also mean freedom — from haste, from manipulation. Freedom to imagine, contemplate, scrutinize what you like when you like!
You can pauseand zoom on a single word for eons and not proceed without having extracted all the necessary juice out of it.
This observation made me derive a quote:
Written words are static content for dynamic minds while other forms which rely on words are dynamic content for static minds.
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For years she had dreamt of this trip. For years she had energized herself in the darkest of nights — thinking of this journey. The idea jolted her, inspired her — rendered meaning to a life otherwise plummeting towards inconsequentialism.
How much had she imagined herself reaching her destination — The mountains of Annapurna!
She had imagined the moment she would take that woolen scarf off her face, remove her jacket cap and expose her face to the mountain wind — the cold wind would smash itself into her and she would finally rise and shine out of her slumber.
She would wake up to be new! She would wake up from a long long night of dread and frustration — into a morning of vigor, purpose, and action.
She would stare at the dazzling mountain snow as the sun would gleam on her face. She would take a deep breath and get into a meditative state. She would drink in each and every moment and then return home — to dedicate her entire life to the feeling she had mustered there.
Here she was —mere 5 km away from her destination. After this night was done, she would wake up early tomorrow and rush! Bloody run!
But she isn’t able to sleep. It is 2 AM and the old melancholy is back.
‘What are you so excited about?’
‘Wasn’t you arriving here inevitable?’
‘You have come 5 years too late’
‘You were always supposed to reach here. There’s nothing new. So, shut up!’
If you have suffered injustice – exploit and expose the rat and the flawed system. There is nothing wrong with that!
Once there lived a pair of sparrows. They loved and cared for each other until the female got pregnant. The male left her and fled. The female’s life was miserable after that. She gave birth to a chick and raised it in great hardship.
After a few months, the male realized that his child had now grown up and could be of great assistance to him. He came back and demanded the chick. This angered the female. She yelled –
‘What makes you think you can come back and take my child? You left me stranded in time of hardship, what makes you think you can take my child!’
The male wasn’t going to give up. They fought. The male said the chick was rightfully his while the female said there was no such right. They went to the king’s court to settle the issue.
They explained everything to the King.
‘Whose is the chick, your highness?’ asked the female.
‘The chick belongs to the father,’ the King decreed.
‘Then you should write this on an inscription,’ the female said.
The King ordered – ‘A child belongs to the father more than the mother,’ to be written in the inscription. After this, the male took the chick away.
The female was badly hurt. She yelled and cried. She vowed to take revenge on the King.
A few weeks later, she died.
There was a carpenter who worked in the King’s palace. His wife was pregnant. The spirit of the female sparrow transmigrated into his wife’s womb. A daughter was born to them after 10 months.
She grew up endowed with great virtue and talents.
One day, there was a meeting in the palace between kings and the ministers. They were discussing who could grow a pumpkin inside a Gagri (Nepali Water Pitcher). No one thought anyone could.
A Gagri
After a while, one of the ministers spoke –
‘The carpenter is quite wise. He might!’
The King asked the carpenter to be brought to the court immediately and ordered him to do so. The carpenter couldn’t deny so he returned home dejected. He looked disappointed as he entered. His daughter saw this and came running at him. He shared everything with her. She thought for a while and told him to stay calm and go to bed. The father was not convinced but his daughter’s support did manage to calm him. The daughter meanwhile had a plan. (And some special abilities!)
The next day she bought some pumpkin seeds and a clay gagri. She planted the seeds in her garden. It sprang the next day and within a few days, some sprouts emerged in it. She took them and placed them inside the gagri. She took good care of the pumpkin and on the seventh day: The gargri had a pumpkin inside it. She took the gagri to her father and told him to go to the palace and ask the king to take the pumpkin out without breaking it into pieces. The father was pleased. He went to the palace and did as she had asked.
The king was astonished to see this but was nevertheless pleased with the carpenter. He gave some reward and the carpenter returned home.
There was another meeting in the palace after a few days. This time they discussed who could build a house in reverse order. Everyone thought the intelligent carpenter could do it, if anyone. The King summoned the carpenter and asked him to bu
