DABBLER SCRIBBLES

This is night sky

You are a poem, remember

I am you, I am you

Click a picture,

Black and white

We will tell stories

You and I

But you are me

Have you heard of magic?

The picture is blur

Only half of my hand

That I raised to dance

To a different music

I know you, I know you

Take this rope

Climb up to the moon

Or pull it

Like you pulled me

If you like

I will give you 

A part of my earth

Give me a part of your sky

I have picked up dead dragonflies

Walking by the riverside

I have wings, no flight

Take me

I am a feather now

You are me, I am you

This night is a lie

Like every other night

Deep dark lie that I have told you

You are not a sad story

Darling, remember

These are not dark colors

Look at the picture again

A wire against my eyes

My hair is messy

Funny little picture, isn’t it?

I smile

I can hear music, coming

From the photograph

The camera is broken

Pieces by the wall

I open my fist

To throw away dragonflies

We are in a garden

No trees, no flowers

I am becoming you

With every step you move

Towards the ocean, listen

I am becoming you

I was lost

Lost for ever

Walk up to me, walk

I am at the shore now

The ocean was deep

I danced raising my hand

Everyday

In the deep gorges and canyons

Of the ocean floor

I could see everything

Like a man

Sitting on the tallest mountain

I was all what the ocean had

I was what the ocean was

But today is different

I am leaving the ocean

The water runs dry

From my skin

Like clouds rushing towards the sky

I can't move, I can’t move

You are walking up to me

Take me

I whisper again into the sea shells

Take me

Before the earth cracks open again

And all the dead dragonflies

Throw their wings at me

Bring your piece of sky

Take my earth

And let me become

What I should have already been

Alive!

I am you, you are me

Here, today, death meets life

I am leaving the ocean

Our ocean

I am smiling

Remember, the night is a lie.  

Pic source: Google

Poem (c) Dabblerscribbles, Abhishek Kumar 

                         One of the predominant themes in Indian mythology, art and literature has been that of the conquering of demons- external and internal. It is always easier to conquer or fight something that is visible or Dristeya. To conquer the invisible or Adristeya of which only inference is possible poses the real challenge. We as humans have the distinction of intellect and ability to make decisions that separates us from the animals which are driven by instinct. Our ability to choose is what makes us human and since we are able to choose, our actions which have consequences are our sheer responsibility. No action is without a consequence. You cannot throw a pebble into the still water and not expect a ripple. There will be one, no matter how minute and beyond perception.

Perception has been given primordial importance in Indian school of thought. It is claimed to be a reliable source of truth or Sat. although perception has its own limitation of delusion and misperception.  The standard example of seeing a snake in a rope is the most popular. We are limited by this misunderstanding, for however small amount of time. But the end of this misperception is another perception only. You go back and check to realize that it was just a rope and not a snake as you have perceived it to be. A lot of philosophers have claimed that whatever is perceivable is what exists or whatever exists must be perceivable. How do you know that a certain land exists or does not if you haven’t perceived it? Dristeya, at the end, becomes a reliable source of knowledge- of good and of bad.

As much as Dristeya is important, the Indian school retracts no hands when it comes to the Adristeya. Both are important to understand the cosmos holistically. We cannot see a lot of things but that does not negate their existence. Philosophy and science then needs to work in tandem to enquire into them. Similarly, the Indian School also places a great deal of importance on the concept of Abhaav or not-present. A pot that exists at your place is not-present at my place and hence I know of its presence by its absence. Its presence is conceivable even when it is not present. The theory of Cause-effect relationship says that a lot of things are present in latent form that is they are present by their sense of absence. Like a pot is not present in the clay at the moment but there is a potentiality and that’s what makes it present in the clay which when molded will form into a pot. Without Abhaav it is very difficult to know what to look for. What you lack is more important than what you need to acquire. We are directionless without this sense of missing. But as Emanuel Kant has put, “our knowledge of what we cannot and do not know is limited”, it is very difficult to always point out what is missing.

Sankhya and Yoga School of philosophy claim that we could find liberation (freedom) by Gyaan only that is knowledge about what is true. When you realise who exactly you are, you are free. Nothing can bring you down or disturb your equanimity. The School obviously put a lot of emphasis on realising the essential or spiritual you free of the Prakriti (or Maya) but that can be narrowed down in the modern times to understanding who exactly are you? This has been a very difficult to answer but the source of the problem and the solution to the same lies in what the western philosophers have claimed to be the Mind.

Indian School of thought does not classify brain or mind as a single entity working in tandem with the physical body to exist and perform action in the world. The Indian school divides the thinking seat into atleast four categories.

.Buddhi or Intellect which helps in analysis

.Manas or Memory

.Ahankara or Identity or personalistic ego  

.Chitta or the eternally pure thought or intellect

Our Buddhi or intellect allows us to make decisions and analyse situation. Manas, which is a bundle of memory of experiences from the past acts as feed data to Intellect. These are value neutral. They have a cause-effect relationship. Like you touch the surface of a hot lid. The sense of heat is fed into intellect and Manas provides the information that this has been hurtful in the past and you take the decision of stop touching it. But what if you are a psychopath who loves to burn himself. You will experience this pain as pleasure. This is a where the Ahankara comes as the locus of your interests, likes and dislikes. Whatever you identify yourself as, your actions or thoughts will produce an effect on your chitta or the locus of sensitivity. You will either like or dislike a certain thing depending on the identity we create or have. When our thoughts or actions (through manas and buddhi) are aligned with Ahankara, we feel satisfied but when it does not then there will be conflict of conscience. This conflict of conscience is the source of internal turmoil which is nothing but an enhancement of Dvesha or dislike in Chitta which always tries to be in equilibrium. When you are clear about your identity or what you identify yourself with, any kind of action in the environment that does not align with your personality will not bother you. Picture this, if you are teetotaler and were standing in front of a liquor outlet, the bottles will create no ripple of craving in you. This certainty of self is difficult. We are almost always sure about the gross nature of substance or things that can affect us. The external things. But what about the subtle ones? Which feelings or thoughts align with my identity or the professional, personal identity I want to have. We have often never pondered about them. Most of us haven’t. And the day we figure out this at the subtle level that is at the most internal levels of self-identity, we will know what will and what will not affect us. We will stop being reactive and start being proactive. All those thoughts or feelings that don’t align with our identity, we will treat them as agents of the great “Mara” who sent his army to distract Buddha from attaining Nirvana or Enlightenment.

The Bhumi-Sparsha Mudra (Touching the earth) of Buddha is the epitome of Enlightenment proof where Buddha is seen touching the earth which quakes as a proof of Buddha’s enlightenment. Mara and his agents which are nothing but agents of worldly pleasures and sensual cravings are seen standing on one side of the Bodhi tree unable to falter the reaches of Buddha’s enlightenment. Buddha, in the simplest of terms, was certain about what he wants to be or had his Ahankara fixed. And when that has been achieved no matter of Mara’s distraction can destabilize him.

We are all trying to align our thoughts and actions with our identity every day since we gained conscience. The agents of Mara have presented themselves in several ways of sense pleasures along the years and rather than we shaping their existence according to our self-identity, we have somehow allowed them to shape our identity. If we have not been very cautious about what we acknowledge, for how long we acknowledge them, we are always at a great risk of finding our identity being shaped by external factors and alien thoughts. Forming a strong personal identity is the root essence of an authentic existence.

Jaina philosophy talks about two kinds of influx of karmic matter (or karma). One when the action is performed and the other when the thought of the action arises in the mind. The sense experience feeds information into the intellect and the manas tries to associate a sense of pleasure or pain as a future feed data depending on how we allow our identity or self to be shaped by that experience. Jaina says that the real withdrawal begins in the mind and then it happens in the action. The karmic influx ends in the head. If we remove the austerity of spirituality from the philosophy and look at it objectively trying to figure out a way to explain our habits and choices and associations, we will all come to a conclusion that we allow certain things to happen to us, knowingly or unknowingly, because we have over the years started to believe in a certain kind of self-identity. This keeps changing, as it always has been but we feel that the intellect or buddhi takes precedence in forming a certain attitude but in reality their agreement with Ahankara is what makes the difference. We will never be contented till we have a conflict of conscience and when Shankya and other schools of thought claimed knowledge to be the source of liberation, they probably meant this that realizing the reality of our identity automatically helps us filter the influx of experiences of the world and their effect on us.

As Buddha has rightly pointed out, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world”

Parmarthik Satya are eternal truths. Something immutable. Let’s say the universality of 2+2=4 or red rose is red. This is true now and was true in past and will be true in the future too. Vyaharik satya is something that we experience in our everyday life. We consider the world and it’s entities around us to be true and real and this is vyaharik satya. This truth has spacio-temporal existence and are not eternal or non-mutable. For example our pot. If I had the earthen pot in front of me now, it would have been a reality for the time being. Its existence is justified by the sense of perception, touch and also by the sense of purpose it achieves that is it holds liquid in it. But the pot will not be a pot forever. If I break it right now it will no more be a pot but just pieces of baked clay. The existence of the pot as an entity has ceased to be and so is the credibility of the phrase “This is a pot”. But the phrase was true at a certain point in time and hence it is a vyaharik satya. Moreover, since vyaharik satya is mutable and contingent, forms the object of our knowledge and helps us understand the world. The things that are not changeable do not inspire purpose and add no new addition to our knowledge. The western philosophers have termed such unchangeable and non-contingent truth to be tautologies and nonsensical (nonsensical but not non sense in the way that they do no good in terms of understanding the dynamics of the world but they are essential nevertheless)

Now what is pratibhasik satya? Well, this third kind of reality talks about our perception of the vyaharik satya. Let’s take a popular example of orientalist philosophies. You walk into a dimly lit room and find a piece of rope coiled in a corner. In a haste, you assumed it to be a snake and are startled. Now let me just clip those few seconds from your life and look at it as if it was an independent truth dissociating it from what we knew before and what we realize later. For those few seconds you believed that piece of rope to be a snake but your belief of it did not change the essential nature of the rope or did not turn it into a snake. It essentially is a rope but you think it is a snake and for whatever small period of time, it became your truth or reality. This is the pratibhasik satya. The assumed satya.

On a large scale of time our vyaharik satya aslo becomes the pratibhasik satya in reference to parmarthik satya. How do I know that what I am perceiving is actually the truth about the world and that it is the unchangeable truth in itself? Those 30-40 seconds of assumption of the rope to be snake if put against an average life of 70 years is a tiny time period but it still had an impact, for we startled and were afraid. Imagine putting our 70years against the billion years of existence. How do I know that it cant be a pratibhasik satya? But we should not venture here as our time period here is limited and walking in this direction will lead to skepticism which is not conducive for world harmony and human progress. But this understanding of relativity can be an essential tool in the post-modern subjectivity and tolerance towards the same. It is a constant tussle between your truth and my truth and the real truth.

We are all limited by our undertstanding and the capability of our logics to give us a holistic idea of the world around us. Prejudices, judgments, past experiences, all contribute to our limitations and we can never approach anything entirely free of our previous understanding. What we can do is have faith in what other is trying to believe because eternal truths are not entirely in capacity of understanding but can be a subject of category of faith. How nonchalantly we employ faith is understood by the fact that we inch every moment in our lives clinging to the faith that we will make into the future and hence we need to act accordingly. I, writing this post has the faith of posting it online later engrained in it. Life would become so difficult if we did not put faith in what we understood or perceived in the vyaharik satya. But to deny any other truth against yours is not a justification for faith.

Change is a sign of existence and purpose. Change is the only constant is a thought that has walked centuries from the Greek Philosopher Heraclitus to Gautam Buddha to the present time. Our truths are our truths (an example of tautology as it added no new understanding about the subject matter “truth” but the statement in itself is true) but should it be considered as immutable or Parmarthik? No and yes!

No, because we know that our truths are temporal and they are true in the present context of time and space leaving a considerable room for doubt. But we should also consider them immutable to avoid the trap of skepticism which inspires apathy and indifference.

This temporal truth that we wish to consider permanent are at liberty to do so must be tested on the grounds of logic. We must at our best try to reach to the vyaharik satya through logic or experience. I do agree that we are not all similar in the way we employ the faculty of logic or have our own limitations and hence it begets even more tolerance towards the people who cannot employ such strong logics and understanding as others can who have been bestowed upon with the same through either education or culture. But logic should not be the end of our pursuit but only a means to appreciate the subjectivity endowed with faith.

Faith, logic, beliefs are all tools to comprehend the type of reality that we are capable of and the stretch of one form of reality over the other form gives a purpose to intellect and life. We have around us people who are perpetually delusional (Pratibhasik satya) about the world and the ones that are practical (Vyaharik Satya) and finally the ones who have transcended these two realms into Paramarthik satya. We can accommodate them all with tolerance and understanding and sensitivity towards their limitations as they would against ours but to force one’s truth on others as the only truth is to negate years of cultural knowledge of tolerance that has been so humbly bequeathed upon us by our ancestry and their repertoire of wisdom. Tolerance must be the order of the day for harmony.  

 What is the locus of our existence? I am not trying to delve into metaphysical enquiries as it may sound but trying to address something this worldly. I know that or at least I put my faith into the concept of dual existence.  Not entirely the way Descartes has conceptualized it in his mind-body dualism but on similar lines.  Here the I that is thinking is the Personal Ego, mind or “soul". It is the essence of my existence but the one which is writing it all down physically is the body which has appearances, a physical definition in which change is more conspicuous. 

Imagine yourself as a third person viewer of your own self. Dissociate for a moment yourself from your physical body and think of yourself as sitting on a chair across your body and watch yourself go about the day. What are you going to see? The body. Its appearance.  Of course the body has no essence now. It cannot personally think or judge for itself. But the you that is independent of it now can look at it as a person not you. Like you look at yourself in the mirror. Now you might find yourself pretty or not depending on the standard of beauty you adhere to or are acclimatized to. It is the body wrapped in skin and the Ego is categorizing. One common way in the adult world to judge the parameters of beauty is to see the amount of attention you garner without the personal ego coming into picture that is solely on the spectrum of attractiveness. Your personal Ego or Mind or Soul is the essence or the philosophy with which you react or interact with the world but your physical existence is the locus of all such interactions. 

To give you clearer idea let us consider a basic art piece of Dadaism, “The Fountain” by Marcel Duchamp. In reality it is just an inverted urinal placed in a gallery. You look at it devoid of its essence or what it stands for. You see just an urinal and depending on whether you find such off white urinals attractive or if your culture finds such urinals attractive just by the looks, you tend to either have a sense or attraction or dislike. You still have no clue about the philosophy behind the art work or the movement at large and your entire premise of emotional judgement is based on the external look. When you know the philosophy behind it you may have a stronger affinity or dislike based on the appeal of the philosophy.  But the piece of ceramic in the gallery, if had a personal Ego, would be tormented to be judged only based on the look without being able to contribute philosophically. Our bodies are just so. 

There are some standards of beauty. Few are universal too. Rationalism would claim that they pre exist in our minds and empiricism would say that our experiences give us an understanding. How to judge beauty is a difficult question but for me it is something that should inspire motion in the one perceiving. Either physical or emotional. That’s why beauty is subjective as what moves me may not move you at all. 

Let us now go back to the self that is sitting across the body. Now you are observing and based on the inherent spectral understanding of beauty you are meticulously calculating the short comings. The features aren’t sharp enough, either too skinny or too heavy or whatever. You either like yourself or don’t and if you would now move back into the body, you are either happy about it or not and that influences a plethora of actions and emotions that will manifest through the physical body eventually. The body as such has done nothing but our own perception of its physical existence has created an essence that we tend to Perpetuate until there are conspicuous changes. So the pertinent question here is who am I in essence? This is the dilemma that Oscar Wilde's Dorian Grey faced having his essence splattered on a canvas hidden in the attic. He was a very handsome man in the outside while his soul rotted in the painting. 

This philosophy is nothing new. The Indian school of thought of Nyaya-Vaisheshika has tried to make a similar distinction, rather an enquiry into what is really inherent. For example, let us look at an orange. What do we see. We see the color, the roundness, the texture of the peel etc. To put it simply, the orange we perceive is the combination of these attributes. For Nyaya-Vaisheshika there are layers to this viewing. First is the physical perception of the outward qualities. All the ones I just mentioned. Then the second layer of viewing is the viewing of the attribute independently.  Like the orange color as a color independent of the orange and the third viewing is the viewing of the “ideal orange color" that is the perfect color and based on the knowledge of that color we judge whether this orange color is pretty enough or not. In short the universal ideals of beauty. But now we have gone to the level of looking at the essence of the color and the roundness. It is like trying to look at Aristotle's Idea of Justice as an entity and not looking at the examples of justice that tell you what justice is. You look at the essence. Seldom we go so far and this essence and their inherence in ourselves is the bundle we call the personal Ego which eventually inherits in the physical body. So looking from outside, the path is: physical orange to the present color and shape to the ideal of orange color and shape which are universal. Looking from inside it is starting from the ideal attributes to the inherent attributes to the physical manifestation.  The problem is the physical manifestation is all we see unless we look deeper. 

           This is something that is scientifically enriching as it gives validity to the Theory of Relativity of Einstein where he claimed that huge masses curve space through their gravity and hence also dilate time as we know it. Imagine a heavy ball placed at the center of a piece of cloth. The weight of the ball is going to warp the space around it and make the cloth curve towards its bottom center. If a light as wave was travelling parallel to the surface of the cloth as it would normally do, it would be now curved and travel a greater distance bypassing the ball. So an observant on the other side might receive the light ray later than he could have if the surface was not warped. So an increase in time or a dilation. Although I have very limited knowledge of the matter and I present it as I understand it, my aim for the article is not to delve into the pedantic of the phenomena but draw a parallel in our socio-political life.

         The fact that huge masses can warp space and black holes can capture light tells me that the absoluteness of things are only a reality in small and un-warped spaces. Something that gives precedence to post modernism and subjectivity found profoundly in the Abstract Expressionist art. A civilization by its sheer weight of existence has always warped the fabric of culture and society and given us understanding of how emotions are to be felt and understood. Degrees of freedom and expression are all the spaces warped by the cultural heavy-weight of a civilization. Emanuel Kant has consciously mentioned about our limitation to understand extra-terrestrial realities and has been carefully censured through the ideology that to know that we have a limit is to know that there is something beyond the limit. To know that I have travelled only halfway is to know that there is an equal distance left. But limitation of knowledge presumes an end point that is not in sight, again only present conspicuously by its absence.  How far we are from truth question presupposes that we know where the truth is, which is not always the case.

   Reality, truth and lies are those massive things which have and will distort time and space and we will get to know which is which only when the light has finally travelled to us. Distance is an important factor astronomically as the sky we see at night does not really exist in real time but is just a memory that has travelled millions of kilometer to give us the assumption that it does and we are not a bit hesitant in assuming that it is the reality. We are mostly looking at the thing that has ceases to exist before we realize. To draw a parallel in our private lives, in our love affairs, I would like to assume that a couple r a set of lovers are nothing but two stars hanging and revolving endlessly in a dark space of emotions, producing and reflecting warmth through affection. But as the universe is expanding, the space between the duo most often than not, expands and creates emotional distance. Some term it as comfort zone. A space where we know the intensity of heat the other star is capable of producing.

        This growing space creates an illusion of past emotional stability and if one of them is not observant enough, the light from the other might come as a memory of distance past while the upheaval in the star in real time will be an understanding of future. The other star might even have collapsed ages ago but the distance is so huge between the two stars now that the death of emotions are only perceived ages later when it is already too late. Very rarely it happens that the stars with time grow such healthy emotion positive-ness that they warp the expanding space and pulling each other closer and reducing the distance in real time. This is a proactive thing. It is not going to happen passively and probably this is what is termed in the relationship sphere as “Putting in efforts”.

   This analogy is not limited to an external affair alone. This can be extrapolated to internal affairs as well. Looking at yourself from a third person perspective we can see that the “we” that we see in real time and the “we” that we thought that we would be are also like two stars around in the space of time.

     We all have had a desire of how the future should unravel itself and how we would be in certain relation with self and society. This idea of self and the reality of self are those two massive stars. But the dynamics don’t remain the same as they were when we began. Either the self that I assumed is closer to the self that I am or I am not what I thought I am. This is not a standalone issue. Society, culture, civilization, self are quite obviously involved. Self, we can see, but the rest are only present conspicuously by their absence. This gap will grow with time unless I assert myself with the ideologies that I think are conducive for reducing the distance and stemming the expansion.

           Great personalities around the world have created this huge self-masses of their existence finding an equilibrium between what they think they are and what they actually are and this equilibrium is something that will let you know about your internal self in real time and not make you collapsed star which will get noticed ages later when all the light inside you will go missing in the huge black hole of emotions.