every dream ends
so they say
and yet everyone sleeps
sleeps to forget
sleep to hide
all in vain
i had a dream
so vivid
so vivid
so true
in the harsh sunlight
as i was
as i was
standing next to you
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Dreaming awake
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
23 Jan 2008
What is love?
This is a question that has been pondered upon by thinkers and non-thinkers alike for so many centuries. Each individual either writes about it or the lack of it. So many creative expressions have been a result of this is one emotion. I personally as well have been pondering about it from time to time.
So many attempts have been made to classify love. From divine to lustful, there is an entire continuum on which it finds expression. But again if we can these as expressions, then surely these are a mere manifestation. Then the question to be asked is, what lies beneath/ beyond, and what is it that is the root-cause of one of the most powerful and captivating emotion that man experiences.
People say that love is a state of being. If it is so then, love is just another emotional state. And like any other emotional state, transitory and affect based. By definition, emotion is the affective aspect of consciousness. This again brings us back into the cause-symptom loop, if love an emotion then it’s a symptom and now the cause. However, if we accept this premise we find attribute the seat of this emotion rooted in our neurology and hence hardwired in our brains and waiting for the right set of triggers. Instinctual love, as I would like to call it, doesn’t leave very far behind the animals, who in every mating season are compelled to go through the motions of copulation without the least bit of understanding of the whys.
Can love be rational? If love has a rational base then we can break it down to a mathematical equation. We can perform/ apply the rules of logic to it. We can add, subtract, multiply, divide it and find the resultant. This surely is not the case, as this paints a very manipulative picture of love. Yet, ironically, when we come to think of it, in real life this is the kind of love that we see around us so many times. Transactional love, as I would like to call it, involves give-and-take and book-keeping of all that one person does for the other and hence, an implicit expectation of return.
Popular cinema often equates love with sacrifice. The protagonist is portrayed as a suffering hero/ heroine. Love equals sacrifice equals suffering seems to the equation over here and hence. The more you sacrifice and the more you suffer the stronger is suppose to be your love, seems to the premise over here. Is love the same as sacrifice, if one person claims to be in love with another person and gives up everything for him/ her is that love? Sacrificial love, according to me is nothing more than a compromise. We all have our value system and our set of priorities, if one has to give them up, I would look at it more as a compromise rather anything else.
Religion talks of selfless love. Karmakaand (the ritualistic aspect of Hindu religion) and similar practices across all religion often equate social service and charity with love. Selflessness and acts of philanthropy have there own merits, there is no denying of that, but calling it love is something that is beyond my understanding. Selfless love, means to elicit the same response to all things in the world. As a meta-physical concept this is the most idealistic way ahead, however at the worldly level this surely seems to be the least understood and practiced.
There are so many connotations to this single word. Each school of thought tries to capture the essence of this emotion and bring forth there interpretations. As a free society surely there is no harm in doing so, but this starts to create problems when as a group or as an individual when there are attempts to impose these views over everyone else. This leads to a lot of fallacies, like, the government claims if you love your country then kill others on the battlefield, a number of extremist groups brainwash people and ask them to kill for religion and so on.
Love might still be an undefined concept for me, but as I start to think about it I certainly start realizing what it isn’t. And it might be an anti-thesis, but I have also started to realize that it is this very attempt to define and hence confine it to a selected operational framework that has caused so much distortion, and that too sadly, in the name of love.
This is a question that has been pondered upon by thinkers and non-thinkers alike for so many centuries. Each individual either writes about it or the lack of it. So many creative expressions have been a result of this is one emotion. I personally as well have been pondering about it from time to time.
So many attempts have been made to classify love. From divine to lustful, there is an entire continuum on which it finds expression. But again if we can these as expressions, then surely these are a mere manifestation. Then the question to be asked is, what lies beneath/ beyond, and what is it that is the root-cause of one of the most powerful and captivating emotion that man experiences.
People say that love is a state of being. If it is so then, love is just another emotional state. And like any other emotional state, transitory and affect based. By definition, emotion is the affective aspect of consciousness. This again brings us back into the cause-symptom loop, if love an emotion then it’s a symptom and now the cause. However, if we accept this premise we find attribute the seat of this emotion rooted in our neurology and hence hardwired in our brains and waiting for the right set of triggers. Instinctual love, as I would like to call it, doesn’t leave very far behind the animals, who in every mating season are compelled to go through the motions of copulation without the least bit of understanding of the whys.
Can love be rational? If love has a rational base then we can break it down to a mathematical equation. We can perform/ apply the rules of logic to it. We can add, subtract, multiply, divide it and find the resultant. This surely is not the case, as this paints a very manipulative picture of love. Yet, ironically, when we come to think of it, in real life this is the kind of love that we see around us so many times. Transactional love, as I would like to call it, involves give-and-take and book-keeping of all that one person does for the other and hence, an implicit expectation of return.
Popular cinema often equates love with sacrifice. The protagonist is portrayed as a suffering hero/ heroine. Love equals sacrifice equals suffering seems to the equation over here and hence. The more you sacrifice and the more you suffer the stronger is suppose to be your love, seems to the premise over here. Is love the same as sacrifice, if one person claims to be in love with another person and gives up everything for him/ her is that love? Sacrificial love, according to me is nothing more than a compromise. We all have our value system and our set of priorities, if one has to give them up, I would look at it more as a compromise rather anything else.
Religion talks of selfless love. Karmakaand (the ritualistic aspect of Hindu religion) and similar practices across all religion often equate social service and charity with love. Selflessness and acts of philanthropy have there own merits, there is no denying of that, but calling it love is something that is beyond my understanding. Selfless love, means to elicit the same response to all things in the world. As a meta-physical concept this is the most idealistic way ahead, however at the worldly level this surely seems to be the least understood and practiced.
There are so many connotations to this single word. Each school of thought tries to capture the essence of this emotion and bring forth there interpretations. As a free society surely there is no harm in doing so, but this starts to create problems when as a group or as an individual when there are attempts to impose these views over everyone else. This leads to a lot of fallacies, like, the government claims if you love your country then kill others on the battlefield, a number of extremist groups brainwash people and ask them to kill for religion and so on.
Love might still be an undefined concept for me, but as I start to think about it I certainly start realizing what it isn’t. And it might be an anti-thesis, but I have also started to realize that it is this very attempt to define and hence confine it to a selected operational framework that has caused so much distortion, and that too sadly, in the name of love.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
22 Jan 2008
And how shall the end be vain when God is the guide ? - Sri Aurobindo
Read this quotation in the diary that was gifted to me. And there were several thoughts that atonce flooded my mind.
Nature versus Nurture is a debate that is going on forever. Is everything in life pre-destined or does the key to future (and it shapes up) lie in our hand, is a question that is being debated for a long time by various streams of science and religion.
At a personal level, I have been an individualistic and have taken ownership of almost of all the achievements and goof ups of my life. Born and bought up with a certain set of religious values has made me reach to a conclusion that both Karma (actions) and Desity are co-related. Karmic-Destiny is what life is, according to me. Our past definetly has a bearing on our present and the way we percieve the situation. However, if we extend the same logic further, it means that the way we work and think in the present is going to impact our future.
Read this quotation in the diary that was gifted to me. And there were several thoughts that atonce flooded my mind.
Nature versus Nurture is a debate that is going on forever. Is everything in life pre-destined or does the key to future (and it shapes up) lie in our hand, is a question that is being debated for a long time by various streams of science and religion.
At a personal level, I have been an individualistic and have taken ownership of almost of all the achievements and goof ups of my life. Born and bought up with a certain set of religious values has made me reach to a conclusion that both Karma (actions) and Desity are co-related. Karmic-Destiny is what life is, according to me. Our past definetly has a bearing on our present and the way we percieve the situation. However, if we extend the same logic further, it means that the way we work and think in the present is going to impact our future.
Monday, January 21, 2008
21 Jan 2008
Conflict is a state of mind in which mind is a state of duality. A pull between two rights.
Friday, January 18, 2008
18 Jan 2008
I am pretty much in the same mental state as last night. The only difference being that today due to a spitting headache and a presentation preparation this task seems all the more uphill.
I am trying to focus and think through the events of the entire day in an attempt to capture atleast some thought triggers, but this doesnt seem to be working. Then I side-track to analyse the reason for this lull. And what I notice is a silence in my mind. A silence which denotes a void. A silence which is there because there is nothing left to fill that gap in the mind.
This is what anxiety does to oneself. Like a termite it hollows the inner crust while everything on the surface seems just fine.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
17 Jan 2008
Not very encouraging to note that I am facing the clichéd, writers block on the very second day of the excercise. My gut feeling is to use my tiredness as an excuse for not writing anything. But again on second thought I came across an amusing observation, I was only trying to pretend and hide away from myself by making a silly excuse.
There are so many dichotomies that we come across, from petty to enormous in there magnitute. And without realising much we only tend to react. To react in literal sense means repeation of the same action. So every time when we react to a dichotomus situation we are acting a mechanical fashion. Over a period of time we have conditioned our minds to exactly behave is a set manner. This often results in we tending to forcefully fit a situation into the mental framework through which we acoustomed to look at the external world. This is such an enormous waste of the faculty of cognition that we have inherited by being born as a human being.
Unlike the Stone age man who started using weapons for the very first time in the history of evolution, for the modern man, mind is the only tool of survival. Through out our entire lifespan mind is the only faculty that we have at our disposal. From learning to walk, to acquiring language and mathematical skills to more complex social skills, its our mind that is work. And still its so ironical that we devote so little time to sharpen our minds, to keep it in a constant state of alertness and awareness.
There are so many dichotomies that we come across, from petty to enormous in there magnitute. And without realising much we only tend to react. To react in literal sense means repeation of the same action. So every time when we react to a dichotomus situation we are acting a mechanical fashion. Over a period of time we have conditioned our minds to exactly behave is a set manner. This often results in we tending to forcefully fit a situation into the mental framework through which we acoustomed to look at the external world. This is such an enormous waste of the faculty of cognition that we have inherited by being born as a human being.
Unlike the Stone age man who started using weapons for the very first time in the history of evolution, for the modern man, mind is the only tool of survival. Through out our entire lifespan mind is the only faculty that we have at our disposal. From learning to walk, to acquiring language and mathematical skills to more complex social skills, its our mind that is work. And still its so ironical that we devote so little time to sharpen our minds, to keep it in a constant state of alertness and awareness.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
16 Jan 2008
Your happiness is intertwined with your outlook on life
That is what the fortune section on my Orkut profile reads. My very first reaction looking at it in the morning was "whose isn't?". As I progressed through the day and kept visiting Orkut to check for new scraps my attention was re-drawn to this message and the initial reaction kept getting re-affirmed.
There is a dictum that I firmly believe in- You cannot change a situation and that really doesnt matter, what matters is how you choose to react to it.
I have been through a lot of thick and thin in life and every adversity has left a mark on me. But unfortunately for a long period of time there were a set of events that kept occuring and evoking the very same set of responses from me. Without realising I was behaving the Pavlov Dog, eliciting the same pair of stimulus-response again and again. After repeating the process N number of times during a phase of complete exhaustion (physical, mental and emotional) I realised, what I wasdoing was an excercise in futility. It also helped me see the bigger picture of life. Life will keep throwing things at you which are difficult to come to terms with, people are going to be indifferent and situations are going to be daunting. Its not in our hands to change any of this, but what we really can change and the thing that can really make a difference in our lives is how we choose to react to situtations. Not only present situtations but also to the closet ghosts which keep hallucinating the lives of so many of us.
And here something that I keep using frequently to pep-talk myslelf-
"It doesn't matter how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." - Quote from the movie Rocky Balboa
That is what the fortune section on my Orkut profile reads. My very first reaction looking at it in the morning was "whose isn't?". As I progressed through the day and kept visiting Orkut to check for new scraps my attention was re-drawn to this message and the initial reaction kept getting re-affirmed.
There is a dictum that I firmly believe in- You cannot change a situation and that really doesnt matter, what matters is how you choose to react to it.
I have been through a lot of thick and thin in life and every adversity has left a mark on me. But unfortunately for a long period of time there were a set of events that kept occuring and evoking the very same set of responses from me. Without realising I was behaving the Pavlov Dog, eliciting the same pair of stimulus-response again and again. After repeating the process N number of times during a phase of complete exhaustion (physical, mental and emotional) I realised, what I wasdoing was an excercise in futility. It also helped me see the bigger picture of life. Life will keep throwing things at you which are difficult to come to terms with, people are going to be indifferent and situations are going to be daunting. Its not in our hands to change any of this, but what we really can change and the thing that can really make a difference in our lives is how we choose to react to situtations. Not only present situtations but also to the closet ghosts which keep hallucinating the lives of so many of us.
And here something that I keep using frequently to pep-talk myslelf-
"It doesn't matter how hard you can hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward." - Quote from the movie Rocky Balboa
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