Tuesday 30 December 2008

Have we forgotten what it means to live!!

Well the recent crisis in my life has prompted to me to pen my ideas down after a long time. After a lot of introspection, I have realised a few things about what I want, about my philosophy and way of living. The heart drenching soul searching that ensued, made me realise the short comings of the mordern objectve oriented way of living. Though I am still not very sure, what it takes to make myself happy, I am convinced of the futility of pursuing this current day self-centred ideology and philosphy of living.

The human brain has come a long way with time and so did human thought. We have built a grand civilization. We have made significant breakthroughs in all possible fields which required human intellect. From mathematics to medicine, from literature to art, from philosophy to music, the breakthroughs we have made are humungous and breathtaking.

But I believe it is "relationships" that defines an individual. When I say "relationship", I mean relationship with everything, from animate to inanimate, from trees to humans, from mountains to animals, and so on and so forth. Any relationship is bonded by emotions, which actually have not undergone any evolution, just that the way they are expressed may have changed. So in some sense, though man evolved a lot in the physical front, he hasnt changed in the psychological front. He still remains violent, insecure, jealous and greedy. Generations of war and crime give ample testimony to this fact.

Since every relationship is bonded my emotions it involves pain, and in this age of fast life we search for quick solutions. Bouyed and carried away by the material success, we have been trying to implement logic, our only tool with which we see this materialistic world, which built our great material wealth, into our relationships.

Happiness is that state where there is no conflict in the self. There is conflict, the moment there is thought and logic. Logic and happiness cannot exist together. Pleasure is all what we can percieve through intellect and logic. Logically emotions hold no value, so none of the relationships make any sense unless there is obvious pleasure involved. Persuaded by the desire to have pleasure, we are very quick to run away from any relationship which starts giving pain. How far and how long can one run from one's true self ?


From chopping down the wonderful forests to killing wonderful animals, every deed of man has been self centred and selfish to the core. Even now the whole commotion about conserving forests and protecting animals is all for our own gain, not beacuse we hurt them. We have lost the empathy towards our fellow beings. We keep missing the bigger greater picture. We keep forgetting that human intelligence is limited and we can never relaise the great interplays between various aspects of nature. By downplaying our emotions, we ar eonly distancing ourselves from mother nature.

On a perosnal note, I have realsied the futility of my various idelogies and philosophies and for once, though in the face of adversity realsied what "K" really meant, when he famously said "There is no evolution of the human psychic."

1 comment:

Paul said...

Amen, Anil! Your entry reminded me of a conversation we had, perhaps around the time of you writing this, about the impossibility of simultaneously experiencing and analysing. Here is a passage by CS Lewis about this phenomenon:

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, ninety-odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.