Sunday, July 8, 2012

Thinking on the move - A blotch of ink


Money, relationships, food, people and places - they all get gobbled up, assimilated and spit-out without  making even as much as a blotch on the answer sheet. I continue to wonder if this is nothing but a passing phase in the cycle of development and ruin of the mind. Did my parents feel this same way at some point in their life? "Of course they did", I tell myself. Or could it be that I have been gifted the liberty of this thought, the price for which my parents paid with priceless sacrifices?

And what of the multitudes of unfortunate folk that struggle still to fill up their family's plates, once a day? Are their minds stuffed stiff with worries and numbed by the coldness this world shuns them with? Do they feel happiness? What is their motivation here? Screw that! What is MY motivation here?

Semi-anchored to a quasi-stationary continuum of time, kept afloat by a source-less desire to learn and tied down by material and emotional bonds alike, what the hell am I supposed to be achieving now? Given the blunt truth that points to the sheer cliff of purposelessness, am I supposed to find a way up and yonder? Am I just an incremental change in an extremely long series of mutations that will one day create an all-knowing being, at the culmination of evolution? Is there something more to me than the throw-away trinket that time makes of me? If this is indeed the way of the world, where do expectations, love and emotions fit in?

Giving it some thought, I am led to believe that these are all implements devised to goad an individual to push oneself harder and harder, sometimes against all odds. Maybe these are all a means to an end, just like my salary, my job and status in society. Society in itself being a continuously evolving contraption, a social structure that dictates norms, urging the majority to fall in line on one hand and at the same time, stirring deep a rebellious potion within some, to construct a recursive, ever raising bar of desirable achievement.

If this is indeed the truth, I must set out on a quest immediately. A quest for perfection or something like it, of the mind. And to give my mind all the time I can, I will probably need to keep the material body, now a mere carrier, healthy and capable. But I forget about the worldly distractions that hound me incessantly, that smile at me from the sidewalk, ever enticing me to digress. Soon I will have to discover a meaning and purpose for all these aspects of life that I now conveniently yet unwillingly label as distractions. Until the time that I am able to do so, I must think, read, question, whet my brain, and revel in the joys of learning. This for now must undoubtedly be my immediate and unwavering goal.

2 comments:

maverick said...

I suggest you read Richard Dawkin’s – The God Delusion and The Selfish Gene. Some astonishing facts roll out. One I found really shocking was, after 20 years the entire atoms inside one would have been replaced except for the bones. You are not really you!

We are seminally defective as organism. Was I right? The canonical argument went on inside thus. I say so because of the ever present, ever ongoing inner turmoil, the chaos of the mind, the confusion in the end. From the age you start thinking and arguing within, you set some aims and goals. You reach them or not, it keeps changing over time. There is no one single goal in the entire gamut of your life that would sustain you for ever. Everything is temporary or in the long run boredom gets you. It may be a pessimistic line of thinking. A positive outlook would be to stop thinking or worrying about purpose and be busy.

Many million light years into the future, the Sun would collapse along with it the entire life systems. Unless humans find a way out to live on other star/planetary systems, we are doomed. Or probably even earlier, the way we have mismanaged the environment. A catastrophe may strike anytime. Or an asteroid or a meteorite might wipe out the present living beings. A new forms may evolve over eons of time.

Or we may lack the ability to grasp the meaning – as one line of argument would go.

Or given our ability and thinking, I was suddenly peeved by another line of thought. Given a Creator et al – what sort of purpose or meaning one could give? Coming to think of if, I found it so hard to give any meaning or purpose. Granted that all have sufficient food, health, money and intelligence, would all be happy still? What is happiness? Would that have any meaning or purpose? The Garden of Eden or the utopia meanwhile is no guarantee of any salvation.

The constant flux inside, keeps undoing everything. It is a chaos inside and outside as well. From the elementary it would go on relentless. Accidentally more and more complex things might emerge. Is the carbon atom line with thought? As a Bellow would exclaim is another muse.

The mystery is alluring, mind boggling and frustrating all at the same time. The pursuit fills time usefully or not One has go on parallel with the hope that one will stumble upon the meaning serendipitously in one’s life time and try remain in occupancy with a mask of sobriety without violating the freedom.

maverick said...

your comments were nice the other day.

Go in pursuit, I really do wish you would find some meaning or grasp something different.