One Life: Philosophy

The Vapour

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 07:12:00 GMT

There are little unseen tendrils of vapour around you. Yes, now. Look around. No, I didn’t say you’d be able to see them. But they are there. They coil slowly heavenward and return with the rains. They crawl over the wet rocks, float low over the breathing grass after the rain, slip down beaver holes and accumulate in comfortable shadowed corners.

I saw them two years back, midnight, across the highway on an empty patch of grass. It was a sort of misty smoke, arising slowly from the wet earth, hidden but for the occasional truck throwing its passing halogen glare over this mysterious substance as it thundered across the highway. It was beautiful to see this living fume, waving gently over the top of the dark grass, almost inviting.

I know what it is. It is nothing, and it is all. I know where it comes from, and that place is worse than hell, not possible for any mind to imagine, nor for any artist to capture in colour nor for a pen-wielder to imprison in ink. I know what it is. And to understand it, to feel it, to capture it, you need not paint it, describe it, or make fine plays about it. You need only to do the undoable: know it. I have done it, on a wet summer night two years back, when curiosity drove me to grab a light and stroll across the highway at midnight in my nightshirt to know this living vapour.

I fear not allegations of insanity as I relate my beliefs about this ethereal substance, for I know that he who laughs will one day be visited by the vapour and whispered unwanted secrets in the ear, and made to observe the life they have been living, the principles they have been following, and the meaning they have been searching for, gradually unraveled, slowly and inexorably, as torturously unbearable as watching with wide eyes a car run over a toddler who left her mother’s hand.

1Life.

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Mind & Matter

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 06:19:05 GMT

It would be pretty weird if there were no purpose in all this. Think: we are now decoding the mysteries of life and evolution, and wondering about these questions. Could we be mere interaction of particles then?

Even if we were, why in the first place do we view particles and their interactions as something ordinary, as mere? What is ordinary? Ordinary is what we’ve grown used to since childhood, things that don’t respond to your calls, don’t talk to you. What you mean is inanimate. Why would inanimate things be ordinary? Why don’t you see purpose in their existence? When you compare the existence of a grain of sand to the existence of nothing, to nothing itself, to a state that never was, that is neither empty space nor blackness, that is undefined because no one ever came and saw it, consciousness never happened, nothing ever happened, nothing ever began or ended so that the word nothing itself has no meaning because there’s no consciousness to feel it, when you compare the existence of a grain of sand to that, do you find it ordinary?

We can be sure that something has happened, whether it be mind or matter. This me, right now sitting at the typewriter at a plywood desk surrounded by painted walls in a concrete city, this can’t be that dreary nothing. Even if it be an illusion, there needs to exist something to produce the illusion, to work that mechanism. Phew, this isn’t nothing then. Something exists.

What exists? When you view everything, including yourself, as an interaction of particles, when you view the mind in terms of the brain, you’re saying that matter exists, and mind is a product of the interaction of matter.

Fine. Since you’re so hell-bent on establishing that it’s only matter that exists, you must be having a good idea of what matter is. What’s the definition of matter, then? Particles that respond to certain laws and are not aware of their own or each other’s existence, right?

Tell me, how can you be sure these particles exist, that matter exists? How do you know? If you’re just a mountain of nothing but those particles itself, and you’re saying that they cannot feel, how can you be conscious and aware of their existence? How can such non-living particles come together to form an assembly that can feel itself existing? If you then modify your definition to say that consciousness or awareness is inserted in some way as matter comes together to produce living things, or that there is some form of awareness somewhere in the particles themselves, you’re including the hallmark of mind. In the first case, you’re saying that mind and matter are separate, that mind is matter that possesses a certain mysterious property of consciousness, and in the second you’re saying that they are same, that the property of consciousness is inherent in the particles themselves, and is hence a property of matter. But anyway, in both cases, you end up saying that mind exists.

If you still argue, well, how ‘bout the laws the particles adhere to? Why do they do so? What set those laws? If you haven’t got answers, you better go and hunt.

I think that mind exists, and matter is a part of it. It’s called matter and separated from mind through our errors. If you believe that matter and mind both exist and are separate, well, I’ve got no objection to that. But they cannot exist independently of each other. Matter needs mind to feel its existence, or it cannot exist. If you say that matter does not need our acknowledgement for its existence, well then, there could be so much matter out there right now that we can’t feel. You’ll say, of course! Dark matter! It was never detected before it was detected, and before it was detected, it still existed, didn’t it? My reply to that is that you’re able to say that dark matter always existed because you know now that it exists, because it was ever detected. Now if you start supporting the existence of all matter that haven’t been detected yet, well, then you don’t even know what you’re supporting. You don’t know what to believe in and what to leave out. Everything’s possible! If you can’t feel it and you still think it exists, you’re arguing in favour of dragons and fairies and unicorns. Why? Man, they are there. They just haven’t been detected yet.

I’m not against the possible existence of stuff we haven’t felt yet. I’m actually pretty strongly for it. Very strongly, in fact. But that argument is beside the point. I’m trying to say that whatever stuff exists today, is said to do so because we have felt them. And whatever stuff will be found later, would exist because there would be a conscious acknowledgement of their existence. There is no meaning of the existence of something that never was felt as existing. It’s the same as guessing. You either decide that nothing outside your conscious world exists or everything does. Among the ones not felt, you cannot choose to decide which ones to believe in, because you cannot justify why you chose those particular things and not the others, simply because you know nothing about them.

But does mind need matter to exist? According to me, this whole hierarchy is erroneous. Matter is a secretion of the mind. If mind didn’t secrete matter, it could exist very well without matter. But since it has, and since we see matter in such awful abundance all around us, it’s a tough job to deny it.

That’s about it for now. Thinking this stuff makes me conjure up a vision of an infinite black space dotted with a few stars here and there, and eventually a lot of pointlessness. After some time it gets dangerous.

1Life.

The Dream

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 08:03:44 GMT

I looked down. The rough ground stretched from beneath me up to the thin dusty line miles away, a sharp horizontal slice across the landscape in front of my eyes, holding the ground and the sky at bay, away from each other. The desert floor was dry and dead, coarse with rocks littering its lunar surface. It knew no mercy, no forgiving, no soothing drop of cool water from the gloomy skies above, and it had come to accept it thus, and lay rough and lifeless, its interplay of red and hot sand a reminder of anything but life.

I stood on a high perch, looking down at the expanse. It was an immeasurably tall pedestal, an impossible column of the firm desert rock sweeping suddenly out of the level ground and rising high, pointing its audacious finger at the unfriendly cloudy sky. This roughly round structure had a strangely flat, levelled top, and I stood up there, near the sky itself. I felt the high breeze and looking down at the lifeless, bare ground lying all around at my feet, containing nothing of importance but this pedestal of rock, while the colourless dusky sky swirled imperceptibly above me. It was a picture of stark contrast, that single high column of the desert ground rising above the rest, as if the purpose of the entire desert was to uphold this one structure, which was formed of the desert itself, yet which, in its towering boldness and loneliness, threw the desert into insignificance.

I was waiting for someone, or something. It was a vague feeling, but it had expectation in it somewhere. Whatever I was waiting for was being delayed, I felt as I gazed at the sky.

I turned. There was a cave-like formation right in the middle of the pedestal’s level top, slightly taller than my head. It grew out of the same desert rock that formed the rest of this world and had holes very roughly hewn into it, forming one, maybe two windows, and a door.

I went and stood at the entrance to the cave. It was dark inside, deprived of the gloomy glow the sky threw over the landscape, and at the windows, roughly cut pieces of the sky seemed to be hanging on its dark walls, a picture of what lay outside this closed hole. Then I looked down at the rock floor, and wished I hadn’t.

There was a hole dug into the floor, almost as big as the inside of the cave itself. The hole was very deep. And there were steps carved out from the rock inside the hole that descended down it. As the steps went lower, darkness engulfed them, and only a few were visible from where I stood. But I knew, for a split second as I looked down, I knew inexplicably, inexorably where the steps went, how much further the hole stretched through the spine of this proud structure. They went forever, never-ending, descending relentlessly through the darkness, through the emptiness, exploring more and more vacuum as they went, and away to an expanse that was held captive by no boundaries, and farther and farther the hole went, farther than all imagination, farther than the tiny universe; the descent was unstopped, it ended nowhere, not even where imagination fails. And it all was hidden inside my precious solitary finger of rock in my familiar, bare desert that was bereft of all but my pedestal. I had never known.

1Life.

The Point

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 06:22:03 GMT

A point is not an object. It has no weight, colour, nothing, no physical property. It has no dimension. It does not exist.

But it has one property: its position. Although it does not exist, that does not hinder it from occupying a position in its plane.

A point has no idea what it is. It barely exists, come on now. If it could exist beyond its pathetic confined state, maybe it could have known a thing or two about what it is, but it doesn’t, and we can’t do anything about it, can we.

If a point could accept its miserable pointless existence in space and get over it, if it could give up clinging to its single position and actually believe that there’s more to existence than this appointed corner, perhaps if it could question, and want to know, then — I don’t know — then maybe I could tell it a few things.

I could actually tell him that he isn’t as pitiful as he imagines himself to be, that there’s nothing to feel sad about really. I could, you know, actually go ahead and tell him that the big guys he worships and idolizes, namely the Lines, are just collections of points like him, and he could be like them if he wanted to be, and actually have a dimension and all, and have a direction to go towards, be straight or swing around or come around and intersect itself and all that pomp and show those Lines put up.

And what’s more, yes, I am going to tell him that his world, this Plane of which he is an infinitesimal corner, a position, is nothing more than an infinite number of miserable points like himself, defining each position in which this world exists. Forget about Lines, — those arrogant show-offs — I’m saying this world wouldn’t exist without a point to define each instance of its existence. Wake, Point, to reality. This world is a collection of you. You are a part, and you are the whole. You are nothing, for if I remove you, there will still be infinite other points to form this Plane. And yet you are all, for if I remove the Point, what will the Plane consist of?

I don’t know if you listened to me, Point. Perhaps you have not. Or perhaps you have, but you do not believe me. I’m not surprised. You have it in your nature. You are afraid of power and ability. That is why you so few of you can rise to be Lines and have direction, and so few of you are not afraid to unify with the Plane and be one with it. That is why your kind rarely make a mark, in spite of there being an infinite number of them.

I pity you, Point.

ηōVō

Once upon a time

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 07:02:45 GMT

Once upon a time, there was Time.

And an awful lot it was too. There was such an awful lot of Time, you could play cards, then watch TV, go hiking, sleep, drool, and you’d still have as much time as you started off with. It was an endless heap of stinkin’ Time.

Then along came a Mind.

He wasn’t a dude, neither a dudette, so I’ll refer to the Mind as ‘it’. So it came and sat down on the floor and saw this huge heap of Time and was bored from the start. I mean, man, you could pass an hour, or a week, or a lifetime, but forever? Which useless hobby is going to see you through forever? So the Mind started, well, thinking of course. It started thinking about how to pass the Time.

Then after a few days, it created the first grains of sand from the substance of its own thought, because there was nothing else. Then the desert wind. And the desert winds tossed the grains of sand around mercilessly, throwing them here and there, making them run into each other, lose themselves, and all sorts of pointless childishness.

But the Mind was happy, and it could go through a week watching the grains of sand. Next week it could always come up with something else.

1Life.

The Transmission from God

Thu, 07 Dec 2006 06:18:37 GMT

A few decades ago, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) tied up with SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to help intercept cosmic radiations of a particular frequency that scientists hoped would contain valuable information about the beginning of the universe. The project was named NASA-SETI ET Transmission Search Co-operation. After almost twenty-five years of fruitless interception attempts, on 5^th December, 360 radiation receptors simultaneously received packets of radiation for approx. 10.5 mins. Scientists confirmed that the radiation had a timestamp of about 4.7 billion years, the age of the Universe. In other words, the radiation has been travelling unchanged through the cosmos ever since the Big Bang.

On analysis, unfortunately, the radiation refused to yield any scientific information. The received data, however, when passed through a NASA analyzer computer (converts any electromagnetic impulses into binary information), yielded the following human-readable data. Some terms of the transmission were initially unrecognizable, but the logic unit of the supercomputer has traced them down to more familiar units.

A 4.7 billion year old transmission cannot possibly be any foreign military signal. So in a desperate attempt to crack this ancient code, NASA decided to release the received file to the public. In accordance to its decision, the entire transmission is exactly reproduced below. Any aid in comprehending the information it may contain will be valuably rewarded.

#NASA1951.08.26.B#/F:/NASA-SETI ET Transmission Search Co-operation/Received Transmissions/Uncategorized/File1_2006.12.05.

##Beginning of Transmission<

Random Parameter Generator File A/1256D/90A/9312

Unit 9312 [Parameter restriction level 12/1000]

Parameters A Kaya 1

Averagely homogenous

Average density 72 Ghan [1.03 X 10^–23 gcc^-1 #NASA1951.08.26.B#]

Mass 3.56 Kaya [7.225 X 10⁶³ g #NASA1951.08.26.B#]

Volume 1.6 Ayatn [#DataNotInMemory_uncomputed #NASA1951.08.26.B#]

Initiation Parameters A1

Perceptible initiator units (at + .1 Kaal [4.7 billion Earth years #NASA1951.08.26.B#]): 2

Reasoning initiator: Explosion, diversification.

Fundamental ubiquitous quantities: 3.1415 [π #NASA1951.08.26.B#]; 1.618 [Φ #NASA1951.08.26.B#]; Duality [0/1 #NASA1951.08.26.B#].

End: undefined.

Parameters B Atma 1

Multiplicity: 4 (1 x .34, y 1.54, z .96; 2 x .12, y .11, z .08; 3 x 1.01, y .42, z .99; 4 x 1.59, y 2.2, z .01)

Cycle Initiator Atma 1

2 x .12, y .11, z .08 (at + .09989 Kaal [4.699995 billion Earth years #NASA1951.08.26.B#])

Final Nirvana %: undefined.

Parameters C RanParGen Unique Parameter

Type: Nested

RanParGen File A/1256D/90A/9312 intercepted by cycle initiator Atma at + .1 Kaal [4.7 billion Earth years #NASA1951.08.26.B#]

>End of Transmission##

Silence Must Be Heard

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 03:09:16 GMT

Shoptomi

It’s 7:25, oh, sorry, 26 now. Today’s sort of a big day. I have an outing with her. I thought Life of Pi was a book on math. Turns out it isn’t. You know, sometimes the brain becomes so blank and stupid and you can’t extract anything from it and the more you try the harder it resists the production of any idea? That’s my state now. Nothing to write. Wait, then I’ll tell you about those moments.

Imagine you are in the middle of something. Really in the middle of something. Like joking with friends, and you’re laughing so hard your tummy hurts, and one of your friends is going around the room doing silly stuff while another tries to sing a song, and outside there’s the patter of rains and the faint sound of traffic. Downstairs the TV is on and someone’s watching a Hindi soap you hate. You can recognize it from the music. All you have in your mind at the moment is what joke to make next. You are completely immersed, you see, in the person you are. That is to say, the friends you have, the jokes you make, the things you can make a joke about, the sounds of traffic and the rain you know since childhood. Because these are, after all, what a person comes down to in the end.

And then, suddenly, while you were trying to make up that joke, something happens. No, no pop, wham, bang. No ghost, wizard or likewise. What happens is that you suddenly slip from the mental state you were in, into a state I cannot describe. All I can say is that it is pretty high, from where you can see the whole hierarchy, the whole structure and arrangement of ever-increasing complications, shell within shell, that lead to this final conception called yourself.

In a single moment someone just yanks you from behind and you’re receding fast from all the associations, your family, friends, lover, jealousies, prides, regrets, doubts, problems, dreams, into a deep grey void, just like in the TV they sometimes zoom you up from a street scene to the city then the continent and then planet Earth. Just like that. Someone pulls you up from that joke you were trying to make, out through the gripping arms of your life, individuality and self that enclose you. Up, up, escaping shell after shell, till you are so high you can see the whole hierarchy from His point of view, see yourself gripped firmly in a thousand arms of your own life, immersed in the convincing reality of your self, trying to make a joke among friends in a rainy evening with the traffic outside and a Hindi soap that you hate on the TV downstairs.

That’s when you lose yourself. You know at that point with crystal clarity that you are nothing but one of the pieces of coloured paper that float through the universe. Each one around you is a coloured paper. The colours on them are the result of their experiences, their dreams, wishes, their friends, hobbies, their enclosing arms of life and self, and hence each of those coloured papers is unique in the whole universe, unique and unmatched, until they return to where they came from, and He washes all colour off the papers, reducing each to the same white featureless identical rectangle they really are. Then they wait for their next life of colouring, of being someone else.

Then the moment is over and someone just drops you back quietly to where you were, in the middle of trying to make a joke among friends in a rainy evening.

You look around, trying to recollect who you are supposed to be at the moment, trying to recollect yourself like a tornado victim gathering pieces of his happy home among the ruins, struggling to believe again the truth you just realized in the last moment was a lie: that you have a self.

The name I have given to this piece is from an Enigma soundtrack. The name reminded me of another piece which the title would have fitted even better. And then I realized that this piece relates strongly to that one.

1Life.

Missing

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 07:31:33 GMT

I had trusted Reason. Turned out there isn’t anybody by that name, and yet everyone else seems to know him. I swear I had all his contacts right here — his phone number on the directory, his address, his photograph, everything, before I set out for him. They told me to go to the End of Ways where he lives. They told me I needn’t call ahead because Reason would know I’d be coming; that was his job. And yet when I reached, I found his place empty and dark. I looked everywhere, but couldn’t find him. And then I discovered that the End of Ways was not the end of ways at all. It was a blind alley leading up to a wall, and I knew there was another alley on the other side of it. End of Ways was just a wall between two alleys.

So I came back home and told them about it. They refused to believe me, saying they had found out about End of Ways long ago, had been there and that it really was the end of ways. They told me that I had just lost my way. I refused to believe that. And then I came home, and found that all his contacts were gone. There was a blank space on the telephone directory where his number was, his address was a blank piece of paper, and his photo had turned into the picture of an optical illusion I had once known as a kid. It was those three pillars. Each of them had three distinct feet planted on the ground, but if you followed the middle column upward, it sort of disappeared and the three pillars ended in a solid rectangular bend. I searched my mind, and nothing but his name came up. I’ve forgotten his phone number, his address, and what he looked like, although in the past I had all of these by the heart. I’ve almost forgotten that there was such a person called Reason, except that I catch his name being spoken out loud in the street, at work, on the underground train by people who still know him very well. And I feel a vague association with the name, but nothing more. I haven’t forgotten him, because he isn’t a memory. I’ve just stopped believing that he ever was. He has suddenly vanished from my life altogether.

And sometimes, when I’m awake late at night, I think of him, and wish him back. Because he was a father, a protector, a tall unwavering assurance of order and purpose. And then he slips into my dreams and I see his home, the End of Ways, and I see that there’s nothing beyond the end, that the wall is only an end and not a beginning of something else. And I see him smiling at me, and he says ‘I’m right here.’

And I smile too and dwell in the utopia of his purpose and control till I wake the next day.

1Life.

A Tale of Two Strings

Mon, 14 Aug 2006 15:22:28 GMT

Once upon a time there were two strings. They sprouted like fresh spring flowers from two old and mucky holes on a wooden plank. None of them knew what lay beneath the plank; where each of them led; and neither did they care.

Anyways, what is worth mentioning is that these two strings loved each other very much. They cocked their frayed ends up and talked of old times, when they both had been strong and new, not frayed and dirty as they were now. They also liked to think that through all the times from when they were young and strong till now, when they are frayed and weak, they never ceased to love each other. And so lived these two strings, immersed in each other, never caring to know where each of them stretched beneath the plank.

But nature has its rules, and one day she checked her big wall clock and decided that the strings had had their time on earth. So she sent a messenger to pick them up from home. She was a lovely lady named Death, and she came and stood looking at the two strings that were deep in conversation, and for the umpteenth time, she felt a tad bit sorry that their conversation would soon be over.

She interrupted them softly. She coughed — ‘ahem’.

‘Hello there. Good day to you both. I have been sent by a certain higher authority, you see, to give you some sad news. I am terribly sorry that I had to interrupt you like this.’

‘Go on, beautiful lady,’ said one of the strings, at which the other gave him a very narrow stare.

‘Er… you see, I am afraid your time on earth is over. You must come with me now to your true home.’ replied Death.
‘Both of us, surely?’ said the bewildered string, for they loved each other very much.

‘Yes, both of you. And now please close your eyes and think of the life that you have led, while I do my part.’

So saying, the lady made to raise the wooden plank while the two strings closed their eyes. The lady pulled at something beneath the plank and the strings went right through their holes and out the other side, still dreaming of their life together and feeling sad because they would no longer be together.

Had either of them opened their eyes then, they would have seen something they had never imagined before; that beneath the plank stretched a single string, whose two ends sprouted through two holes in the plank like fresh spring flowers, and had loved each other all their life.

— a string.

Tell me something...

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 10:56:07 GMT

I stared at the busy crossing. There was a red light, and the line of cars was whining to get going. The afternoon sun was beating down on the city and the traffic policeman who stood on the stand was visibly tired and in a bad mood. I stood on the pavement with her and I wondered…

Can you believe this is a dream?

Can you tell me what might have been the reason behind setting up such a colossal and complex structure? To craft dew drops on silent leaves, to craft the grey of low clouds, to craft faces, her face, those eyes…

‘I haven’t slept for seven days. My eyes are setting in deeper in their sockets everyday.’ She said.

Whose sleep is this? Whose dream? Whose whim is logic and reason? Whose imagination is this reality? Whose handiwork is this universe? Whose mind are we living in? Where do we find us when we wake?

It must have been bloody hard work, incorporating thoughts and emotions in this dream. Poor fellow, only He knows how much He must have had to sweat over envy and joy and sorrow, and… and love. Wonder how long that took. Wonder how hard He worked behind making it seem important and meaningful. Because He’s done a mighty fine job, I can see. Her face, her eyes…

Maybe my mind is a universe too, with its own little members and processes and structure. But I’m not as good as Him. Mine’s a small world.

Why do I feel so lonely at times that I feel like crying?

Why am I afraid of myself?

Why don’t I listen to me?

Why can’t I know myself?

Why do I have so many thoughts in my head? Why doesn’t someone come and take them all away and whisper softly to me that my troubles are all over?

Why does it all appear so petty to me? Marks, tests, percentage, being a Good Boy…

Why can’t I be who I am? Do I even know how to?

Why am I so old? Why do I feel like I’m as old as Him? Goddammit, I’m only 17!

Why is yesterday so disconnected from now in my mind? Why does my life break up into little fragments in my mind? Like it’s not a single journey, but I’ve started on a new one today and let’s forget about the last one. Last one? When was that?

Do I like to be sad or not?

They say to keep away from addictions. An addiction will have you clinging to it, and you can’t imagine living without it. Isn’t life the biggest addiction ever?

What joy does everyone get from being so narrow in their beliefs, from having only a countable finity of things to believe in and not imagine and believe in ‘impossibilities’? What is impossible in a dream when the Dreamer is one who can weave things like love into it?

What if one day I pinch myself awake and realize all this I believed in was never real?

What is music, and art, and a bad smell, and a bad taste, and pain? What is the rationality of their qualification as the things they are?

Can friendship be an illusion? Doesn’t God have friends?

I’m so, so alone in this huge sea of thought.

Before I end, one firm little footing to stand on, one undeniable, unalterable little thing to believe in: Ich liebe Alis.

1Life.

Thoughts Are Wild

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:22:54 GMT

Thoughts are wild. They may be yours, but they have minds of their own, and can land you in trouble. You call them your own, but you have little control over them, and all the while there is quite a separate world whirring on inside you; it has its days and nights and memorable events and rainy days of sadness but essentially it is an enormously strong clockwork machinery you can only sometimes feel, but never control.

Thoughts can make you suddenly dreamy, or full of emotions, or happy or whatever without telling you why, and you wonder about it; you wonder if you know all that goes on in there. The truth is that you don’t. You never knew that you loved that girl till she had that accident. You never knew that you would be so nervous giving a speech on a subject you love after crying yourself hoarse about it for uncounted months among friends.

Well, that’s not all thoughts can do. They can do more than that; I assure you. They can sometimes make you wonder who you are (if you are that type of person), they can make you sit up on bed in the middle of the night wondering what it’s all about, and they can sometimes — and this is the worst — they can sometimes convince you that you don’t exist, and you may start crying about it, but that won’t make it stop. And all along they are true. This huge world inside you is so much truer than the world outside, its only problem being that it’s much more uncontrollable than the world you live in. It may sound strange, but there it is. The world inside you is much less in your control than the one outside. The reason being — and this applies to you, whoever, wherever you are (even if you are not human, in which case I must admit I’m happy that my blog reaches so many… er… living things. If you want my blog in non-human languages, please drop in your suggestions. Thank you, quack, woof, cluck, roar, meow, and the rest.) — that the world within is a part of a much deeper, and a much, much, actually a hugely bigger thing. That bigger thing contains all of our little inner worlds, and sometimes exerts control over it without letting you know, and that is why you sometimes get surprised by your own thoughts. The reason is plain now, I hope — they weren’t your thoughts. If you want to know what this bigger thing is, I can only give you a vague idea as of now: it’s like the soul of everything, the soul of creation, existence, God. Your soul is just one manifestation of it. Ask no more. You’ll get the answers some day, but by then you won’t have any use for them, for you will scarcely be you.

God, what did I start out to write? Really sorry. Anyways, since I have come this far, just one more thing: the world inside stretches much, much farther away than the world outside. It’s hard to believe, but that’s one essential quality of all big truths. They are all hard to believe. Just like I once refused to believe that the Maruti van had actually a name —Omni.

Until later, unless I die tomorrow, which I would hate a lot, seeing that I have a girlfriend here I actually love a lot, and of course, my untamed readers in the wild. Quack mew. That’s thank you for the humans.

1Life.

Choice

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 12:37:05 GMT

Crossroads

I don’t have too much of an idea about it. I mean, I’m not talking about the normal choices (which colour for the house, which name for the baby and all), but, you know, the great and powerful concept of choice.

It is known from various sources that the things that matter in life are the paths you decide to take, not what really happens in the path. Which means, whatever happens in the whole path is predetermined at the instant you choose it over another. A huge bulk of pre-organized life waits at every crossroad. You do not have to live it, as I have heard. It has been laid down before you live it. The only time you live your life is the time you choose one pre-organized path over one or more alternatives. All of them have already-decided outcomes. What is not known till you decide for yourself, is which one of those pre-determined paths you are going to take, which one outcome will ultimately occur.

Once a path is chosen, it leads you like a moving staircase, and you glide along with it, until once again, it leads you to another crossroad, to another choice. That is when you live your life again, as you make another choice.

I have no basis for this belief, but I have known from more than one source that it is so. The question that remains is which choices are we talking about here? The really big and important choices, like love and family and philosophy, or even the really small ones, like which colour for the house, which name for the baby?

There is a nice portrayal of the nature of choice and destiny in the Sandman Series which I have mentioned in one of my earlier articles. The oldest of the Seven Endless, as they are called — and that includes The Sandman, or Dream — is Destiny. Destiny has a garden, a garden of splitting, diverging paths. Paths which lead to different places, paths which cross and paths which meet, but more importantly, paths which split into more than one path, and you never know which way one of those is going to take you before you actually choose to take that path. It is a garden which you cannot walk without making choices.

But you shall notice that once you have made a choice, you are left with nothing else to do but follow the path till it branches again. The paths of Destiny’s garden are laid out beforehand. Preset. But it is their inherent quality of presenting a multitude of choices, of options, which at the end of it all still lets the journey be yours. You will notice that there are a hundred different ways you could reach from one point to another in a maze like that. All of the paths are laid down before, no doubt, but which ones you take, that is up to you.

“Walk any path in Destiny’s garden and you will be forced to choose, not once, but many times. The paths fork and divide. With every step that you take through Destiny’s garden, you make a choice; and each choice determines future paths. However, at the end of a lifetime of walking you might look back, and see only one path stretching out behind you; or look ahead, and see only darkness. Sometimes you dream about the paths of Destiny, and speculate, to no purpose. Dream about the paths you took and the paths you didn’t take…The paths diverge and branch and reconnect; some say not even Destiny himself truly knows where each way will take you; where each twist and turn will lead. But even if Destiny could tell you, he will not. Destiny holds his secrets. The garden of Destiny. You would know it if you saw it. After all, you will wander it until you die. Or beyond. For the paths are long, and even in death there is no ending to them.”

— Neil Gaiman, Season of Mists (The Sandman series of graphic novels)

Heads and Tails

“Take the example of tossing a coin: it can come down heads or tails, and we don’t know before it lands which way it’s going to fall. If it comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.

“But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. I’m using the example of tossing a coin to make it clearer. In fact, these possibility-collapses happen at the level of elementary particles, but they happen in just the same way: one moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which they did happen.”

— Philip Pullman, Northern Lights.

Take the example of Destiny’s garden. You are faced with a fork, with two paths leading in two different ways. You know nothing about the paths, what they are like, where they lead, nothing except their primary distinguishing quality: one goes right and the other goes left. You are faced with a choice. You choose left, without ever knowing that not only did you choose left, but you chose right too, only in a different universe. The moment there comes a choice in question, and a choice is made, the universe diverges into two, in each of which a different choice has been made, regardless of which choice you actually made: left or right. You only know about left because you were retained in the universe that was created because of the left choice, not the right. Whereas, another version of the universe continues from that point onwards, only with you choosing right. In the end, no choice was actually made, because none of the options were eliminated. All of them came into being, but since a single universe of single space and time allows only one choice with only its consequent manifestation through itself, multiple universes are born, each bearing a different choice with different consequences of the choice through its own space and time. That is the power of choice. A difference means the whole universe from that point forward will be entirely different from what it would have been if the choice were made differently. A fork on your path necessarily means the universe itself forks out into two to allow both the choices to exist.

That leads us to a greater question: who creates these diverging universes, and why? Why won’t any choice be allowed to matter in the end? Who’s sitting up there allowing both choices to exist? Why won’t your choosing left or right ever matter? Why will there always be a different universe with the same you, only making the opposite choice? Well, maybe that’s how the clockwork of reason works, on a greater level. Eliminate no choices, but give them separate rooms to live in so each of them thinks they were the only one that ever existed. Let a person walk Destiny’s garden. He will reach the end by sunset, making a number of choices. He will think he took right first, then the middle road, then the dust-track that led off the garden-path, then the second door in a line of seven, and finally to the end of the garden. He is oblivious that if there were hundred ways to walk the garden, all hundred ways have been walked by sunset, only because he made the choices that gave birth to multiple universes where he took neither right first, nor the middle road after that, nor the dust-track, and neither did he take the second door. His walking the garden resulted in only one thing: the birth of a hundred different universes, in each of which he walks a separate path to the end of the garden.

It’s like giving an incomplete fairy story to ten little girls to complete it themselves. They each give it different endings that merge seamlessly with the beginning. Ten different stories that were born from one because of the sole reason that the girls were allowed to make their own choice as to how it would end. Now tell none of the girls about the nine others, and each will think that her version was the only one that ever existed, whereas you know all the stories.

Now if in real life you are in the position of the girls and are just writing down through your life one version of the story, who is the one who has given you the story to complete and knows about the other versions too?

“It is written.”— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist.

I won’t be surprised if this article fails to make you think. People have read my articles before. Most misinterpreted, lots didn’t understand and the rest who did, didn’t believe. Once again, it doesn’t matter whether you choose to believe me or not. You always do choose to believe me, although in a different universe.

(Frankly, that’s a miserable excuse. I really want you to believe me. Yeah, in this universe. ;-) Please comment.)

<Thanks a bunch to Poushali-di for making both The Sandman series and Northern Lights available to me. Oh, and hey, now I remember, The Alchemist was also a gift from her. So you see, this piece wouldn’t be here without her.

Picture [Destiny’s garden] from the original Sandman series, Season of Mists.>

1Life.

Conversations with G #2

Sun, 14 May 2006 11:57:40 GMT

Dream

I had had a nice weekend. I went over to a friend’s place on Saturday, and then all my friends came over on Sunday. I found a person who had copied all my writing over to her blog, without a note or link. Monday started well. I found some articles on The Matrix and Hinduism. Then Tejal called. I couldn’t talk too well. She talks British English, in the British accent. Yeah, that smooth, soft, vague, hard-to-understand accent. Sometimes she pounces on the words, sometimes she polishes them, and sometimes… oh rats this was supposed to be another conversation. Well I went and settled myself on my bed with Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress in my hand. I wasn’t really reading. I was tired. My eyes were heavy. I was dragging myself on through the pages, through the lines, through each word towards a paragraph of cipher-text on page… I forgot the page number. It looked compelling, enticing, a paragraph of code. I was hoping I would wake up completely when I got to it. I hate falling asleep, which I did, eventually, before I reached it.

And I was there. Oz, or Eden. Infination, yeah. That sounds like a nice name. Electric sky and blue ground. The soft glow, bright as a lightning bolt, lit up everything. I was surprised. I was only admitted there when I needed it for something. It wasn’t the case now. I didn’t have any questions. I was a little scared.

Within a minute G appeared. (Only an assumption that I constructed when I woke up later. That place gives you no sense of time. You can’t figure out how much time is passing. Something just numbs that part of the brain.) He wasn’t in his usual Jeans and T-shirt. He had a black leather jacket on, and heavy black boots. He somehow looked older than me. The haze seemed thicker than usual. Now I was really scared.

‘Sit, N, I’m not gonna assassinate you.’ His voice was slow and suppressed, I thought.

I sat down beside the stream and stayed quiet. I didn’t like the atmosphere at all.

As if smelling the uncomfortable silence, G sat down too. Not as close as he usually sat. He lowered his head and watched the stream flow smoothly.

‘I wanna share a thing.’

I turned towards him without saying anything. I hoped my persisting silence would convey to him my disapproval to the way things were going.

‘You watched The Matrix, did you?’

Now I had to laugh. ‘Seriously, G, you’re asking this now?’

He turned fully towards me and stared into me (like I have described in the earlier conversation). Then he said, ‘They woke up, didn’t they? Neo and the gang? They woke up from the dream, right?’

‘Yeah, they did,’ I said, feeling uneasy.

‘What do you think they woke up into?’

‘The desert of the real?’ I said, quoting Morpheus.

‘Real?’ chuckled G. ‘That’s the problem with you people. You stop too soon.’

‘Why? Wasn’t that real?’

‘Give me a definition of that word.’

I looked at the stream and thought of a good definition.

‘What actually exists.’

‘The matrix exists, doesn’t it? As long as you dream, the things in your dream exist, don’t they? So they should be real, right?’

Now I realized I’d left a little logical loophole. I stared at the stream again and pondered on where I had gone wrong. Then after sometime I said ‘Reality is when everything in actuality is not different from what it appears to be.’

[Think about the definition, fellas.]

‘Good one.’ He stared appreciatively at me. ‘If you hadn’t given a definition like that, I wouldn’t be able to get to the point so quick. Tell me something,’ he looked away at the horizon, ‘who decides if everything in actuality is what it appears to be?’ He turned to face me. ‘As long as you dream, you know only what things appear to be, not what they actually are. You take them for real, when in fact they are illusions. So how can you decide what’s real and what’s not when in both the cases you get to know only the apparent view? How can you define real with that confidence when you are half-blinded?’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘I don’t get you.’

‘Look N, as long as you are in a dream, you take everything as real because that is one property of dreams. You misinterpret reality because the dream induces you to believe that things that are not real actually are. In this respect your definition is correct and may lead us to find the ultimate real, but that definition’s like a hypothesis, you know; it’s logically correct, but you can never find real with its help. When you are conscious, whatever you experience seems real to you because even if they have an actuality that is different from their apparent aspect, you never get to realize it because you never experience the actuality until you wake to a higher dimension that allows you to see that actuality. In other words, you can never tell for certain whether a thing is real or not.’

‘Means I may not be real?’

‘That’s where the concept of relativity comes in. You are real in the dimension that induces you to believe that you are real. For example, a flying elephant is real when you are in the dream that you see it in, isn’t it so? Now when you wake up, you are actually entering a higher dimension that allows you to see the actuality behind the flying elephant and hence you declare it as unreal. So you see, the classification of what’s real and what’s not changes with changing dimensions, although the definition of reality, like the one you gave, may not. That is because the definition itself includes a parameter that is variable: the dimension, the level. Neo and his gang may still be dreaming a dream called the “desert of the real”’.

It took a few seconds for me to take it all in. Finally I said, ‘Where does it all end?’

He smiled. ‘I’ll avoid that question.’

This was so like him. Always left a doorway to admit the nothing that contained the seed of everything, something that made me keep coming back to him.

‘This could be a dream,’ I suddenly said.

‘You mean this meeting?’ He said. ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’

Tremendous thoughts were running through my head. Fast, very fast, like F1 cars. Blazes of colours representing varied thoughts each with its own flavour. I felt lost. I couldn’t be dreaming this, now, could I? Does anyone in a dream know it’s a dream and even talk about it?

‘But…’

‘What’s stuck in your behind now is a very expected pin. You can’t accept that you are talking and thinking about the dream while you are in it, right?’

My mind was racing so hard I didn’t even wonder how he hit bull’s-eye again. I nodded eagerly.

‘That’s the difference between the normal dream you have at bed and this one, N. This is a dream in a higher dimension, blocking the realities of a yet higher one. And if this dream belongs to a higher dimension than your bedtime ones, won’t you expect the rules to be different?’

I stared at the ground for a long, long time. I realized now why I had come here tonight without wanting to. It’s because he wanted me to. This wasn’t an answer to one of the usual questions I have in mind and come to him for. This was a message from him. That’s why he wasn’t sitting so close. A teacher doesn’t come as close as a friend.

‘Who’s dreaming?’ I said at last.

‘Who features in your bedtime dreams?’ he said softly.

‘Me, who else?’

And who dreams them?

‘Me.’

I waited for him to continue but he kept quiet. I looked at him as I ran over his words in my mind. Who dreams them? Me. Who dreams them? Me.

‘I’m dreaming this dream?’

He smiled.

‘Life’s a dream that I am dreaming?’

‘Yes.’

‘But then, why don’t I know it?’

‘Do you ever know, in a dream? You even have trouble waking up from a dream as you slowly float back to reality, don’t you?’

‘Why don’t I know now who I actually am when I’m awake?’

‘Because this is the dream. Do you know who you are, who your parents are, which school you study in, in short your social identity, when you are in a dream?’

‘I am dreaming you now? You are a part of my dream? Wait, if that’s true, then I have no reason to believe in you because you are just one of my thoughts, and so this is not a dream, and so you are real, and… it’s a paradox.’

‘Calm down, N. I’m not something you’re dreaming. Your best friend is equally a part of your dream as you are a part of his. It’s a single dream, and all souls like you, like your best friend, like everyone in the dream, is in actuality the person who’s dreaming it. You’ll know when you wake up.’

‘Who’s dreaming it?’

G stood up, suddenly. He gave me a very, very mysterious stare and said, ‘I can see you have trouble accepting your life as a dream. You know N, anything can happen in a dream. You need to accept the possibilities of your dream-life first. That’s the positive side of this concept. I’ll help you accept them. I promise.’

‘G, you’re avoiding my question. Who’s dreaming it?’

‘I told you. It’s you who’s dreaming it.’

‘I know that. I mean, who am I really when I’m awake?’

‘N, do you remember that you once used to call me Morpheus?’

‘I still do, in my mind.’

‘Do you know who he was?’

‘He was a teacher, but he left gaps open that he wanted the student himself to find out. “I can only show you the door. But you are the one that has to walk through it.” So very much like you, ass-hole.’

‘That’s it? That’s all who he was?’

‘Yeah. What are you hinting at?’

‘N, you really gotta do your homework before you meet me. Especially your history homework. Or, should I say, mythology. Then maybe you wouldn’t be sitting here like a loser whining about who dreams you.’

‘What? Tell me straight, G. What are you talking about?’

‘I can only show you the door. But you are the one that has to walk through it, Neo.’

‘That’s the shittiest door-showing I’ve ever seen in my life.’

‘I haven’t finished. You’ll find the answers a while later, N, when I am not here, or rather, when you are not here, so that you can think about them alone.’

I kept quiet now, realizing he wouldn’t give up.

‘Okay, see you soon, then, I s’pose.’

‘Yes. But I sure do hope you figure out the answers to most of your questions yourself before you come knocking on my door.’ And he turned and started to walk away from me, a solitary figure in black, his outline growing slowly hazy as he moved into the haze, or maybe because my vision was growing blurred, and my brain was slowly shutting down, but through all the confusion and blurriness, I thought I still could hear him singing something as he went. It was a line from a song I knew; I had heard it on the radio. It went ‘Knock knock knocking on heaven’s door’. And I thought vaguely as I heard him sing, ‘What heaven? When I’m knocking on him, I’m not knocking on heaven’s door, am I? This is not heaven. What shit…’

I woke later, in my bedroom. As my field of vision sharpened itself and my head became slowly active once again, I became aware of a very insignificant, but not inconspicuous, thing lying on my bed. It looked like a piece of paper. I could swear it hadn’t been there when I left. I walked over to it slowly, my head still swaying a bit. When I picked it up, I noticed it was an A4 sized paper, and all over it was my handwriting in pencil. I couldn’t read it because my vision was still blurred. So I went into the bathroom and washed my face and woke up a bit more and returned. Then I picked the page up again. I could tell at once that I had never written it, although the handwriting was plainly mine. In an instant, a tiny voice echoed from a tiny compartment inside my brain. I knew that compartment: It was the one that had led me to G. And now it was saying, You’ll find the answers a while later, N, when I am not here, so that you can think about them alone.

Nonsense, I said to myself, and read the paper. It appeared to be a collection of notes jotted down for some research that I had never taken up:

Ancient Greek mythology states that Morpheus was the son of Hypnos, god of sleep, and he himself was the god of dreams.

● Hinduism Source: http://bighominid.blogspot.com/2003/09/hindu-cosmology-and-matrix.html:

“It was early in S. Mark Heim's provocative Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion that I encountered a passage recounting an exchange between a Hindu monk and a Muslim, in which the monk offered the insight that reality is a dream, and we are dreams talking to dreams. Here's the passage (p. 13):

When we are in it, a dream can be extremely vivid, [the monk] told us. We feel its objects, we move in its world. Yet in the instant of awakening we realize completely that the dream was but a veil for our actual place and being. Just so will our present world appear when we achieve moksha [liberation]. One of the Muslim students frankly shared his puzzlement. If this world is like a dream, he asked, then what are we to you, or you to us? Are we illusions, figments of each other's imagination? The monk adjusted his robes with a smile. "We are dreams, talking to dreams." He was silent for a moment, while we savored the peculiar beauty of this image. "But of course," he went on, "you will ask me 'Who is having this dream?' And I will tell you that it is God who is having this dream, and it is God who each of us is when we wake up." ”

My head was swimming again by now, as realizations came too fast for me to catch up with, to believe. I wanted to deny it all, but at least in this case he had left no doorway open. I simply couldn’t reject what my own handwriting said one a piece of paper. As a last resort, I thought: But G cannot interfere with my life. It’s only in that place that we meet. And yet, right now this thing in my hands, it can’t have been written by me. Then how is he doing this? How can he have control over my life?

And at that precise moment, that tiny compartment in my head woke up again. It didn’t say anything, but I felt it. And together with that there were phrases going through inside my mind, jostling and fighting with each other for order, and then, then…

How can G have control over my life?… We are dreams… Morpheus was the son of Hypnos, god of sleep, and he himself was the god of dreams… god of dreams… We are dreams, talking to dreams… Morpheus, the god of dreams… ‘N, do you remember that you once used to call me Morpheus?’… ‘ “Who is having this dream” And I will tell you that it is God who is having this dream, and it is God who each of us is when we wake up.’…Morpheus, the god of dreams…Morpheus, the God…

And I guess my head was closing down again, so tired, so tired, that I went off to sleep.

And dreamt.

We are all here with a purpose

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 07:27:22 GMT

We are all here with a purpose.

n Me and my group, us, all of us, mankind, living world, the Universe.

We are one. Me, my group, my friends, us, mankind, living world, the Universe. All is one. It is a misconception to treat it as plural instead of singular. I separate into We at creation, Genesis, and merge into I at the End. Creation is giving a million different masks to the same thing, so that the different masks induce us to think of creation on the basis of multiple created things, whereas all created things, that is us, as well as the mask itself, is one, the mask-maker.

Are

v Exist at present.

‘Conquer Time, and all you have left is Now.’ — Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

Existence is infinite in space and time. It is unfortunate it has to be expressed through a word that denotes only Present, an idea non-existent in actuality. It may be how we perceive existence that is finite, for our vision changes with time, as all Wakers know, but Existence in itself shall not be bounded by Time, for Time is subordinate. Time exists because Existence does. For if Existence weren’t there before Time, how would Time exist?

All

pr Everything, each thing.

‘Everything is the manifestation of one thing only.’ — Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist.

Every last thing you can think of, even your thinking, and yes, even you, is the same thing. Just as a dustbin looks like a circle, a rectangle and a cylinder from different angles, although all three are the same, so are All things a different angle of the same thing, the only thing.

Here

pr This place, and not that.

‘Conquer Space, and all you have left is Here.’ — Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

When we shed the limitations of the body, all places are the same. We differentiate Here from There because the places are separated by the time it takes for us to be Here and be There, for we cannot be at two places at the same time, thanks to our limited body. The mind can roam all places at once, as all daydreamers know, and hence all places are Here, for thoughts can be everywhere always.

With

prep Association, togetherness.

To be with someone, I need to be different from that someone. Being close requires us to be apart in identity, whereas the higher truth allows only being so close that we cannot be with each other. So close, in fact, that we are each other. An indivisible single identity.

art One, single.

What was before Everything Happened, what remains after Everything has Happened. As Physics works towards unifying all with The Theory of Everything, it is oblivious of the fact that unity totally explained requires a higher medium than our language, our science. But with only one thing and none other, how would that one thing exist? For something to exist, it requires at least a second thing to know, at least believe, it exists. If Everything comes down to One, how can that be made possible? Is Existence the only thing that watches itself exist and hence keeps itself existing?

Purpose

n What needs to be accomplished or fulfilled; reason for being

If All is One, and Everything is the same thing, if Past is Present is Future, if cause and effect are the same, and there is nothing to be achieved or accomplished or completed, where is room left for reason? Purpose, then, has no purpose.

Close your eyes now, and forget about this writing. Don’t be scared. Remember, we are all here with a purpose.

1Life.