Parallel Encounters

Are we made to believe that what we see is what it is or are we used to believe what we see is what it is?

Throughout almost 23 years of my journey till the point I sit here in front of this 17’ screen writing this, is it what it is or is it just what I choose to see? The daring concept of the matrix does linger around somewhere, but I won’t aim at it.

I think, I would love to spend the rest of my life through what I call, parallel encounters. It is the ability to construct the world around you, the reality around you from your experiences from whichever source you can find. This is a very primitive process I believe which must have helped us survive till now, also primitive enough to know that that’s how babies might construct the world around them. Audio – visual perception is such a powerful concept that even the slightest disturbance in the reception can make your thoughts go on a drunken tread.

Richard Dawkins in his book “The god delusion” speaks about the burkhaa that the human race wears through whose slit we look at the world. How the world of the ultra-violets & the infrareds has been cleverly masked away from us. So what we perceive, what we experience thus becomes a benchmark to our perception of our life. Life, a loose word that we throw around, bound by the confines of a system we call the body & trapped in the undecipherable concept of the mind, is I think an omnibus of experiences that we conjure up throughout our living days. The gross thought of trying to figure out what everything is made of, might be the human arrogance that has led to our exponentially successful survival.

I refer to parallel encounter again within my own domain, through my very own burkhaa slit, the world being exposed to, people, books, movies, music, and nature. These media provide such a vast pool of information about the capacity of life, its sheer proliferation through our thoughts and the singular will of man to relate everything to some ultimate conclusion, as if that is where it all came from and that is where it’s going to end. A search for singularity starting from the singularity itself, like a circle.

I am one among the many of us who really want to know what things are made of, and am really sick of my own thought when I come no where close to relate it to some final answer. I fail to realize why do I need to do that. I may read, I may watch, I may learn, I may listen, I may imagine a lot of causal connections to this final answer, but it will always be skewed & limited to my helplessly myopic view towards it.

Through parallel encounters, we can weave concepts, understand the fabric of life through multiple alternatives, multiple visions of people who have tried to represent their own interpretation towards their final answer. A movie as bold as “into the wild” makes you think why is the social class structure so important to us that we constantly try and live for fitting in it? It speaks of how humans are consumed by the passion of career (including me), who are willing to let go of these parallel media to chase an imagined future. Why do we want to cling so dearly to the thought of being accepted by all? Why do we always have to listen to ourselves speaking endlessly about ‘what if’?

Isn’t what we have already, enough? What is enough? Is there anything like enough? The abyss of experience gets even deeper as we grow up. I have noticed radical changes in my thoughts ever since I began reading, which is totally beyond the reach of some people who have been very close to me ever since I was born. The sheer inaccessibility is all due to the singular difference of not having shared my parallel experiences in the exact same order that I have.

The concept is that if every experience is capable of making an infinitesimally small dent into the way we think and perceive reality, then is it possible that if someone shares the exact experiences in the exact order with someone else, will be molded in the same way? Will the two experiencers ever wonder that the thoughts or interpretations that they believe to have spontaneously arrived at are shared by someone else too?

Parallel encounter is a concept in its embryonic stage, I want to read more, watch more, listen to more until I can safely presume that I have been created by my experiences.