A Human's Rant

We humans have evolved into self aware, intelligent beings. This allows us to understand our surroundings. It allows us to question the way the world works & figure out how. This is unlike any other animal which doesn't indulge beyond its base instincts of food & mating. Lets call it an inner biological need. A few reasons that we know which made us what we are, 

1. An efficient way to store energy 
2. Evolution of a complex language to generate, process & transmit thoughts. 

Once this structure was in place we could practically cruise around seamlessly with knowledge learned & retained from previous generations.

But the flip side of it was we started to develop elaborate formal systems around us. Formal systems where the rules of behaviour are standardized. These are our social, political, religious, economic, legal systems. This was perhaps the single handed exercise which has resulted in keeping the majority of us aligned & focused on a shared social goal - multiply our own kind. In all this we very occasionally become aware of the nature around us. We are so engrossed in our formal systems & rules of engagement that we often forget what we actually are at a biological level. We are only reminded of our true origins & our vulnerability when things start going wrong. 

We take a lot of pride in thinking that it is always better to get along very well with our current systems & excel within them. We have pulled a world over our own eyes full of structured, controlled & (perceived) certain outcomes. We indulge in them so heavily that we eventually take our biological footprint for granted. We tend to forget that under our skin of iphones, blackberry's & technology we are the same as other mammals that have been roaming around this planet for eons.

We are so convinced of our survival instincts & ingenuity in creating such systems that we have perhaps started to believe that this is the only right way to live. Whereas there is no such prescribed way of life in nature. There are several models of co-operation & survival in the jungle & all of them have their unique advantages. We perhaps indulge in our own political models of co-operation to suggest that we too have the same system, but it is just a little bit more structured & at a higher level of intelligence. We refuse to live on nature's autopilot & we choose to create our own autopilot systems. This ironically is something that comes very naturally to us. Find a working pattern & repeat. We have been accustomed to this way of living as a standard model of human life for who knows how long.

We have become dependant on it to the point of believing that everything that doesn't evolve into our system is potentially wrong. As some systems become more & more advanced they create aspirations for other primitive systems to imitate them. A successful system is valued more & believed to add more to the average daily life of humans. We go to any developed nation in the world & watch their use of this idea as a standard evolutionary fact. But we never seem to question if this assumption of evolution can ever be incorrect.

With this assumption we start looking more & more inward to seek what we need & try to recreate that need in real life with the use of technology or policy. For instance at some point we decided that we need to carry our music with us - all of it. So we found peace in a little tile shaped box with a round dial on it & a pair of white cables extending from our ears. We walked around with it for about a decade & evolved that idea into a way of life. We create latent needs into actual needs & transmit them as a new & more efficient way to live in the systems that we ourselves have created. It seems almost automatic. This is pervasive at all scales from personal to global.

We have basically outsourced the whole process of outward thought (thought about the world around us & our impact on it) to a small group of people. We call them our scientists. I use scientists as a general term which includes all those people doing any research in trying to understand things beyond the inner needs of humans. They study the space & the universe, they study our biological systems to find better ways of surviving, they study the planet, they study the elements of nature & human nature. They look beyond these systems & hope that the average person gets to acquaint with their world view through their research. All this also for the conformity of creating better systems than what we have at present.

The average person, instead of acknowledging that we are a part of the universe & that too a rather insignificant one, is incredibly busy in trying to cope with the systems that other humans have created. There is perhaps this creationist bias, where only ideas that are created by others are worth believing in. We start getting bigger & bigger in our own systems thru more wealth of knowledge, money, power, anything. We eventually reach a stage of believing that there is nothing greater beyond this. Perhaps religion & theistic beliefs have stemmed from such a latent human need to systematize the uncertainty around us. They have given us a reason to create our systems. Religion did try to bring in the respect for outer systems, but it has failed miserably & ended up creating atheists like me who wish to detach the propaganda from the true message. I see a pious man praying to a river & then throwing a plastic bag full of decaying flowers right in the middle of it. This is not religion.

One thought I can't shake off is what would happen if we started to channelize our latent inner curiosity - outwards? First of all is it biologically possible?

What would happen when we individually start to acknowledge our role (position/state to be precise) in the universe (which is pretty benign considering we are just perishable animals)? Will it change the way we treat our surroundings?

How will it affect our current social structures & would it make us better in relating to the needs of other species which inhabit the same space as us?

These questions push us into a thought which doesn't fit within our system, it seems like a plugin which needs to be installed from the outside. But before all this, we need to ask why should we do all this!

The Island of Incomplete Illusions

It is always easy to get lost in an illusion which we end up believing. We think it is so true that there is no escape from it. We enter it with an anticipation of honesty, fun, thrill & recognition. Sometimes we get what we are looking for, but in small portions & there are those other times when we get so much more that we forget the need for illusion altogether. It becomes us.

(Poster from imdb)

Such was an illusory experience watching Woody Allen's latest, A Midnight in Paris. He is so unassuming about the audience's taste, perhaps that comes with his age, that he clearly forgets that someone else is really going to watch his film. He characterizes himself into a much younger man, with a similar large nose & goes about trotting along the streets of Paris into the night.

He harbours illusions, so strong that even the most objective thoughts about the film & plot quickly dissolve into his imagination. Perhaps thats what really great story telling is all about.  The audience must get so absorbed about asking "why" about the right elements of the story, which lie at its heart rather than asking why about the plot. Immersive. 

But is it really necessary to have any illusions, can we help it? Can we avoid it? I think illusions are like milestones, they show us that there is still distance to cover till you truly reach your destination where ignorance doesn't matter. It perhaps is a product of not knowing what we exactly want from ourself. If we knew completely, in very simple terms what is it that we really want from every single action that we take, it would be pretty close to predicting our own future, minute by minute. I believe the fun in the future is to live it gradually & reach there to find that there is still more of future to cover, like a never ending Escher drawing, but unlike it until the point where we reach the end of our personal road & face a bottomless pit. This edge is our launching pad into the next phase of life, that is in plain english - no life. We leap off that edge without knowing if we will float upwards or sink like a brick. But the best thing is the final glance that we must take at the road walked so far. I would prefer jumping off the cliff with my back towards it, so that I can watch all the things that I have done behind me, good or bad, staring back at me for that one final moment as if to say 'goodbye' or in most cases,  ' good riddance'.

Watching Woody Allen's film shifted me into an alternate tab of mine. Into the tab where another fresh webpage was just loading. This is a tab which lists zero personal accomplishments, pretty similar to the other tabs, but with a slightly different template. It put me in state to reassess all my illusions, haven't been successful at all in doing so. I only realized that what I really passionately believed in, was true & not really an illusion. It was real to the point where I could hack through other emotions & watch these glow. But the illusions were more deceptive that reality. The moment I tried to look for them, they disappeared. This is where life imitates quantum physics. That constant state of shifting focus from one illusion to the next, not knowing where to land as if floating in a hot air brain full of helium like ideas zipping across various lands where sometimes thoughts grew like weeds & sometimes like oak trees. I could at least begin to see where I might want to land. The places where I had landed in the past & took off from were great launchpads & new areas await.

(Photo From: http://battleshippretension.com/)

I was hardly ever inspired so much by a single piece of work, but perhaps it's the Woody Allen effect, whose films I grew up watching. I realized that during my most formative years where I started to realize who I was & what I would like to do, I had laced my thoughts with a lot of ideas, including Woody Allen's works. I might have been looking at his latest work not from the point of view with which he presented it, but the point of view with which I had perceived it. But that I think works most of the time, because other people's thoughts sometimes seem like worse illusions than our own.

But nothing is complete without a satisfactory ending. I think this is where the greatest stories differ from the rest. What thought does the piece of work leave in our minds at the moment it ends. This post is perhaps the thought that I was left thinking about in between shifting the tabs from illusions to reality & back, I feel quite contented about it.

Why is Literature Important?

"If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."

This is a line from Thomas Pynchon's famous novel, Gravity's Rainbow. A similar situation arose from asking questions to businessmen while researching their companies. If the questions that I ask them are not relevant according to them, then they don't need to worry about answering them accurately. Any answer would suffice as long as my sense of curiosity is satisfied. It takes to be a really good financial analyst, to figure out the relevant questions & to be a very good conversationalist in order to put these questions in the right context. Unless these questions are asked properly, the relevant & really important information that we seek, lies hidden.

I think this is also the nature of literature (or fiction, in general). There are questions & there are answers - they are not always pleasing to everyone. But they need to be put into the right context so that their answers will have some relevance to our life. We humans lead contemplative lives throughout which we ask these questions, about ourself, about the state of the world, about nature of things around us. And mostly we fail. Most of us don't get to see the answers the way they should be because we have our own lens to look at the world. The questions are tainted by our own observation & interpretation of things. Things are unresolved in our minds which is usually mistaken as a clear viewpoint whenever it becomes part of a chain of thought. The belief that if its a thought in our minds then it must be a tangible understanding of some concept seems wrong. This misleading judgement pushes us in two directions. The first one is the passive, complacent acceptance of our own ideas as the right version of everything. The other is an unsettling need to find several other versions of the same truth. In our confusion we try to compare our life with how others are living theirs & come up with these hopeless benchmarks of right / wrong ways to live.

Truth is not some abstract understanding of the world, but perhaps a way to frame the question properly so the answer emerges out of it.

Why are these questions important & what is the use of those answers?

The questions are an inevitable part of being human. In our truly idle moments we spend painfully long hours in connecting the dots. Dots that would be any parts of our life. Life is an abstract concept which is only finalized by the reality of death. Such a binary outcome of our existence seems too daunting to go through without some clarity about who we are & what are we doing here. The questions seem to form a part of this process to connect the dots between our existence & its significance. Its significance to us & relative to the world around us.

The job of a writer is not just to create a fantastic world view & an entertaining plot. Its job is to create a world which we can relate to. Once we can relate to this world thats been verbally pulled over our eyes, we start imagining ourselves as a part of this world. We truly connect to the symbolism, to the characters & their relationships amongst themselves. We start seeing things from their perspective, just in case, to understand what we would do in the same situation. This adjustment of worlds leaves us totally vulnerable to these questions & thus we become more receptive to our own thoughts. We start treading cautiously into the unknown territory, we are wary of the imagery & begin to anticipate what might happen on the turn of the page. And when we least expect any looming thought around the curb of the next page, the writer introduces these questions. The very same questions that we ask ourselves, to get to know who, why, how, what we are. Of course they are not so obvious, but they start to emerge from the text. They build anxiety, they build doubt & they build confidence at the same time - that we can at least take a shot at answering these questions. In our fear of finding the ugly truth about ourselves, deeply hidden within a labyrinth of our thoughts, we finally start seeing light. It seems less embarrassing to ask ourselves those pointed questions & make meaning of our lives. It brings us the courage to come face to face with the fact that we have been what we have been so far, does it make sense? Is this the best I can get or do? Whats more? Am I pretending to be someone else?

Countless amount of wealth is spilt on psychotherapy, by millions of people to find the same answers. Or even to be able to face the same questions. Fear of the unknown is a natural part of our thought process & its evolution's ironic gift. It teaches us our limitations & at the same time keeps us from crossing them. But most of the fears that we have can be resolved mechanically, if not logically. But the fear of truly knowing who we are & to be afraid to find out that the answer might be unpleasant - is present in all of us.

The writer & his literature then becomes a tunnel for us to guide these thoughts to the light at the end. The light does not symbolize any clarity or the tunnel doesn't lead to any field of answers to our questions, but it leads us into a light of our own thoughts & our own ability to ask ourselves - 'Who am I'?

But one question remains, which only the reader can solve for itself - If we truly find out what we really are & it's unpleasant according to us, can't we do something about it & change it into something relatively better or do we seek comfort in not finding the tumour & let the cancer spread till it eats us alive?