Its not loneliness you see, its being with yourself. Its not about forgetting everything else around you, its about giving yourself a little more thought. For some, life is about trying to figure out what life is about, the joy of which is not the, perhaps inexistent, answer, but the journey itself.
Have you ever had a revisit of a very old but unique feeling, just the pure feeling. Sometimes even associated with something very simple, like a childhood fairy tale book. I remember this very unique feeling, this feeling of innocent fascination mixed with subtle dreamily vague recollection of blurry images or scenes maybe, this thick book of fairy tales and its old cover and stories from within it and mother, who probably read some of these stories to me. There is a television in a shelf stand. and underneath the television the shelf opens, and in it is the fairy tale book, and the room is dim... How young was I?
How we say things that we regret, how we do things that we come to regret, instead of cherishing those little moments of mysterious pleasure, simple yet profound in their own little ways.
In one way life is about appreciating the little gifts it brings us.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Thursday, December 01, 2005
...However...
(cont'd from Pessimism)
there is the need for pessimism. for if there is no pessimism, there is no virtue in optimism, just as there is no reckoning of sweetness if there is no understanding of bitterness. if there is pessimism there is the battle to cross the frontiers of pessimism to enter into the realm of optimism. if there was one that came and kept coming throughout the continuity of time, saying what is it all about, then there would have been no motivation to move on forward...
it is indeed the lack of his coming that fuels the expedition from pessimism to optimism, for if he was ever present, then those states would have lost their relevence. so would have many other human emotions and feelings...
for those that harshness is a sad reality, pessimism is the worst enemy, and optimism is the only friend.
but there lies nothing new in these sayings, save another remembrance, another realization...
...strangely enough, in this repitition is his presence, in this remembrance is his proclamation of what it is all about...
there is the need for pessimism. for if there is no pessimism, there is no virtue in optimism, just as there is no reckoning of sweetness if there is no understanding of bitterness. if there is pessimism there is the battle to cross the frontiers of pessimism to enter into the realm of optimism. if there was one that came and kept coming throughout the continuity of time, saying what is it all about, then there would have been no motivation to move on forward...
it is indeed the lack of his coming that fuels the expedition from pessimism to optimism, for if he was ever present, then those states would have lost their relevence. so would have many other human emotions and feelings...
for those that harshness is a sad reality, pessimism is the worst enemy, and optimism is the only friend.
but there lies nothing new in these sayings, save another remembrance, another realization...
...strangely enough, in this repitition is his presence, in this remembrance is his proclamation of what it is all about...
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Circle
He's tired of walking the circle. Sounds and colours that he tries so hard to distort into fragments of incoherent pitches and hues. His mind is in schism - should he be afraid of the wholeness of those that best remain fragmented and obscured? Or should he refuse to be afraid and concieve of them as a whole?
"Ignorance is like a two faced coin," he said to himself once. But he can't decide which side to look upon, for he had already taken a peek.
He walks around the circle coming back to the same unwanted spots over and over again; sometimes tired of anticipating the desired spots and passing them by. And he wishes hard to stumble upon the next circle, and for that one revolution, where all the shapes are new and all the colours and sounds are new. But the closest thing he can do to get to the other circles is to wish. So he wishes, sometimes as hard as he can, until it comes.
He wondered once, about how the best thing and the worst thing about going to another circle was the fact that you could never tell when it would happen, or what you could do to make it happen, or whether it would happen at all.
He mostly walked, sometimes tired and wishing, but mostly he walked.
"Ignorance is like a two faced coin," he said to himself once. But he can't decide which side to look upon, for he had already taken a peek.
He walks around the circle coming back to the same unwanted spots over and over again; sometimes tired of anticipating the desired spots and passing them by. And he wishes hard to stumble upon the next circle, and for that one revolution, where all the shapes are new and all the colours and sounds are new. But the closest thing he can do to get to the other circles is to wish. So he wishes, sometimes as hard as he can, until it comes.
He wondered once, about how the best thing and the worst thing about going to another circle was the fact that you could never tell when it would happen, or what you could do to make it happen, or whether it would happen at all.
He mostly walked, sometimes tired and wishing, but mostly he walked.
Thursday, January 20, 2005
...alley...
Threw it behind as he walked on, slowly blending into the darkness of the alley. He looked back once, despite the warnings: "those that look back can't leave it behind"...
He couldn't leave it. He got consumed as well. At times when he wonders why he looked back, he comes very close to believing in a destiny...
He looked up and asked. "It doesn't end does it?"
The voice says, "It wasn't meant to be made any easier than before was it?"
"He was looking for something." they said, "Couldn't find what he was looking for. You could never find what he was looking for, for what he was looking for couldn't be looked upon."
And he was lost to those voices again, wandering around, blindfolded, bouncing from one wall to the other, looking for space; and when the ground below gave in and the walls expanded endlessly, he tried grabbing desperately on to something that could be grabbed. And at those points maybe he felt how irrelevant it was to want or find. When existence escapes you by, do you wonder why you didn't want to exist?...
... he often wonders how nothing would make sense without existence, yet we are tired of making sense, some of us that try to, nevertheless... we wonder what is the point of these actions and mechanisms... why does one have to suffer (or not suffer, for that matter)... How luxurious non-existence seems when we are faced with the unanswerable "why"
Everything made sense to him when he walked halfway out of the dark alley. Maybe not sense, but a feeling of pleasure. And when they asked him what pleasure was, he vaguely remembered saying, "All those things that make you want to exist."
He forgot that feeling.
Once in a while he still gets close to throwing it behind and fade out of the dark alley. But till now, he had always looked back. He has also felt hatred towards those that want to exist. And that made him hate himself, for he never wanted to wish ill. "But this is how it is in the alley. You go around in circles," they say "and you want to cease to exist..."
They don't know why.
Some say ... "its because the alley robs you of some act that belongs to the other side of the darkness... something, failing to grasp which, he looks back every time..."
He couldn't leave it. He got consumed as well. At times when he wonders why he looked back, he comes very close to believing in a destiny...
He looked up and asked. "It doesn't end does it?"
The voice says, "It wasn't meant to be made any easier than before was it?"
"He was looking for something." they said, "Couldn't find what he was looking for. You could never find what he was looking for, for what he was looking for couldn't be looked upon."
And he was lost to those voices again, wandering around, blindfolded, bouncing from one wall to the other, looking for space; and when the ground below gave in and the walls expanded endlessly, he tried grabbing desperately on to something that could be grabbed. And at those points maybe he felt how irrelevant it was to want or find. When existence escapes you by, do you wonder why you didn't want to exist?...
... he often wonders how nothing would make sense without existence, yet we are tired of making sense, some of us that try to, nevertheless... we wonder what is the point of these actions and mechanisms... why does one have to suffer (or not suffer, for that matter)... How luxurious non-existence seems when we are faced with the unanswerable "why"
Everything made sense to him when he walked halfway out of the dark alley. Maybe not sense, but a feeling of pleasure. And when they asked him what pleasure was, he vaguely remembered saying, "All those things that make you want to exist."
He forgot that feeling.
Once in a while he still gets close to throwing it behind and fade out of the dark alley. But till now, he had always looked back. He has also felt hatred towards those that want to exist. And that made him hate himself, for he never wanted to wish ill. "But this is how it is in the alley. You go around in circles," they say "and you want to cease to exist..."
They don't know why.
Some say ... "its because the alley robs you of some act that belongs to the other side of the darkness... something, failing to grasp which, he looks back every time..."
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Nab's take on the the question
Here's a link to Nab's own take of the question adressed in the last writing. (The question was originally asked to me by Nab):
Seek and ye shall find
Seek and ye shall find
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Questions to Answers to the Cycle of Questions and Answers
A close friend of mine all of a sudden came up with, what I considered to be, quite a thoughtful question, which likewise triggered a decent amount of refelction in my mind. He asked, "If you are looking for an answer, you go to someone who is higher in knowledge than you, right? But what if there is noone higher in knowledge than you? Who do you go for help or advice?"
Intensely provoked by the philosophical nature of his question, and various other little thoughts thats started to set forth small sparks in my mind, I answered, probably quite inadequately, "You go to yourself, you go through yourself, but before anything else, never stop searching."
Later on I discussed this idea and certain other ideas with another friend that very night, And as a result, I found some food for thought, that I am anxious to preserve, so that I could look upon it from a different perspective at a later, perhapes more mature point in my life.
The initial question or questions before I adress the reasoning behind my answer is, how, or at what point of endeavour does a person become convinced that there is nobody else more knowledgable than him/her on a particular issue? Or more generally how does a person evaluate the knowledge of someone else or oneself, and in relation to what?
Let us assume that there exists a hypothetical method by which the evaluation of someone else's knowledge, in relation to one's own is possible. How would the nature of such endeavour be? At first there must be an input stage, where all the relevant characteristics required for evaluation are gathered. Then comes the evaluation process, where the characteristics are judged against some criterion (which here would probably be, or be related to, the knowledge of the person performing the evaluation). But to conclude that there exists no person who is more knowledgable than oneself, one has to evaluate every living person, and possibly the accounts of every dead ones if they exist. But this process is not only tiresome but in its ultimate form it is quite impossible. This is becase it would take the evaluator, a huge amount of time to go through every possible person, and by the time he/she has gone through a considerable amount of people, more people will be born and grow and there will be more people to evaluate. So it seems that this proposed process of evaluation can only be approximated (and even that, not so closely). Besides this temporal barrier there are various other factors including communication (e.g. language), and geographical isolation that limits a person from evaluating every possible person.
It seems that one can't really tell whether the world has run out of people who are more knowledgable than oneself. And before one could actually stop looking for a superior one, ones lifetime expires. Hence, ideally, can one ever reach the level where one could ask this question that started off this discussion?
I guess in my obsession with describing the mechanism of this search, I have ecaped the bigger question of, whether an evaluation of knowledge is, at all possible. If, by the word "knowledge" we just mean awareness of information then I guess, a simple search and compare method is adequate: One finds a person, learns what this person knows about the issue that is in question, and compare ones own knowledge with it and comes up with a simple a conclusion of the form: this person knows more than me or this person knows less than me. But when we are looking for answers that beg for reasoning (rather than the data), really, is there any proximate answer? Isn't every different answer an answer? What will one accept over what? Or would one accept any answer at all. In the case that one isn't happy with the other people's answers one just has to look within oneself, one just has to appeal to ones own creativity. But needless to say, ones own reasoning is related to how many such answers one comes across. I will come back to the idea of creativity, but let me beacon attention at another idea related to this discussion.
When do we ask questions to begin with? Is it when dont we understand something? When don't we understand something? Is it when we see a pattern? Or when we dont see a pattern? And having seen a pattern, do we ask questions to find the reason behind that pattern?
Well maybe its a pattern that we try to see in things. Maybe the answers we seek involve recongnizing some sort of a pattern that we can assign to an observed phenomenon. And maybe the pattern allows us to code the information about the phenomenon into our brain. Then these patterns are not really ultimate answers. They are just aids to what we call understanding. Maybe the act of understanding is not such an ultimate act anyway, and maybe there is no such thing as finding THE answer. Hence comes creativity. The more creative a person is the more successful then he/she is in finding an answer. The ultimate source of a new answer then is the self. At any rate the pattern then has all to do with ones mind, whether someone else understands your reasoning is probably dependent on how successful you were to make that person identify with the pattern that you have seen. And another aspect of this pattern is that, if this pattern is not ultimate, and if it is relative to the human mind (or even a few or one individual's mind) only, then can we even approach a level where we can try to understand ultimate causes of phenomenon. But wait; phenomenon that we percieve* are dependant upon the means which we have available to percieve them: our brain and our sensory apparatus. So it seems more than probable to me that an ultimate understanding of anything around us is close to impossible. However what is interesting to me is that, despite our limitations, we can think about the realm of ultimate, we can think in terms of the realm of ultimate.
We as living beings, have one unique limitation (perhapes among other things), and that limitation is perception itself. Since we percieve, we are subject to limitation. The act of perception would not lead us to ultimate answers, for I would argue that perception itself is relative to its machinery. Food for more thought: Maybe there is some act bigger than perception that can render an ultimate or close to ultimate asnwer. Maybe the act of existence is a closer aid to render an ultimate answer. But then again the consciousness of existence can be argued to be a perception, in which case existence itself is not an ultimate state or truth.
Intensely provoked by the philosophical nature of his question, and various other little thoughts thats started to set forth small sparks in my mind, I answered, probably quite inadequately, "You go to yourself, you go through yourself, but before anything else, never stop searching."
Later on I discussed this idea and certain other ideas with another friend that very night, And as a result, I found some food for thought, that I am anxious to preserve, so that I could look upon it from a different perspective at a later, perhapes more mature point in my life.
The initial question or questions before I adress the reasoning behind my answer is, how, or at what point of endeavour does a person become convinced that there is nobody else more knowledgable than him/her on a particular issue? Or more generally how does a person evaluate the knowledge of someone else or oneself, and in relation to what?
Let us assume that there exists a hypothetical method by which the evaluation of someone else's knowledge, in relation to one's own is possible. How would the nature of such endeavour be? At first there must be an input stage, where all the relevant characteristics required for evaluation are gathered. Then comes the evaluation process, where the characteristics are judged against some criterion (which here would probably be, or be related to, the knowledge of the person performing the evaluation). But to conclude that there exists no person who is more knowledgable than oneself, one has to evaluate every living person, and possibly the accounts of every dead ones if they exist. But this process is not only tiresome but in its ultimate form it is quite impossible. This is becase it would take the evaluator, a huge amount of time to go through every possible person, and by the time he/she has gone through a considerable amount of people, more people will be born and grow and there will be more people to evaluate. So it seems that this proposed process of evaluation can only be approximated (and even that, not so closely). Besides this temporal barrier there are various other factors including communication (e.g. language), and geographical isolation that limits a person from evaluating every possible person.
It seems that one can't really tell whether the world has run out of people who are more knowledgable than oneself. And before one could actually stop looking for a superior one, ones lifetime expires. Hence, ideally, can one ever reach the level where one could ask this question that started off this discussion?
I guess in my obsession with describing the mechanism of this search, I have ecaped the bigger question of, whether an evaluation of knowledge is, at all possible. If, by the word "knowledge" we just mean awareness of information then I guess, a simple search and compare method is adequate: One finds a person, learns what this person knows about the issue that is in question, and compare ones own knowledge with it and comes up with a simple a conclusion of the form: this person knows more than me or this person knows less than me. But when we are looking for answers that beg for reasoning (rather than the data), really, is there any proximate answer? Isn't every different answer an answer? What will one accept over what? Or would one accept any answer at all. In the case that one isn't happy with the other people's answers one just has to look within oneself, one just has to appeal to ones own creativity. But needless to say, ones own reasoning is related to how many such answers one comes across. I will come back to the idea of creativity, but let me beacon attention at another idea related to this discussion.
When do we ask questions to begin with? Is it when dont we understand something? When don't we understand something? Is it when we see a pattern? Or when we dont see a pattern? And having seen a pattern, do we ask questions to find the reason behind that pattern?
Well maybe its a pattern that we try to see in things. Maybe the answers we seek involve recongnizing some sort of a pattern that we can assign to an observed phenomenon. And maybe the pattern allows us to code the information about the phenomenon into our brain. Then these patterns are not really ultimate answers. They are just aids to what we call understanding. Maybe the act of understanding is not such an ultimate act anyway, and maybe there is no such thing as finding THE answer. Hence comes creativity. The more creative a person is the more successful then he/she is in finding an answer. The ultimate source of a new answer then is the self. At any rate the pattern then has all to do with ones mind, whether someone else understands your reasoning is probably dependent on how successful you were to make that person identify with the pattern that you have seen. And another aspect of this pattern is that, if this pattern is not ultimate, and if it is relative to the human mind (or even a few or one individual's mind) only, then can we even approach a level where we can try to understand ultimate causes of phenomenon. But wait; phenomenon that we percieve* are dependant upon the means which we have available to percieve them: our brain and our sensory apparatus. So it seems more than probable to me that an ultimate understanding of anything around us is close to impossible. However what is interesting to me is that, despite our limitations, we can think about the realm of ultimate, we can think in terms of the realm of ultimate.
We as living beings, have one unique limitation (perhapes among other things), and that limitation is perception itself. Since we percieve, we are subject to limitation. The act of perception would not lead us to ultimate answers, for I would argue that perception itself is relative to its machinery. Food for more thought: Maybe there is some act bigger than perception that can render an ultimate or close to ultimate asnwer. Maybe the act of existence is a closer aid to render an ultimate answer. But then again the consciousness of existence can be argued to be a perception, in which case existence itself is not an ultimate state or truth.
Saturday, August 07, 2004
Pessimism
If one day someone came and said "this is all there ever was, this is how it is and this is all there would be, therefore this is what you ought to be, this is how you ought to live and die and re-live..." and then came back and said the same, over and over again, and showed what it was all about over and over again, then, maybe there wouldn't be the need of the title of this post...
however...
(to be continued...)
however...
(to be continued...)
nothing much and a lot of shit
The title does, what I would say, a fairly decent job to express what my perception of the world is, at this particular moment, where the term "shit" is meant to be used figuratively. Any literal interpretation of this word or any such words in this blog, by anyone, would be taken as a note of the reader's understandable incompetence that seems to be the characteristic of 90% of the human population, which brings us back to the point.... its just a pile of shit (again figuratively)
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