Tag: Existential angst

The Essence of Nominalism

Is happiness, love – sadness, hatred just the names we have given certain things? Is that why after achieving something great we fill empty and become clueless about what’s next? Is there something common, universal, essential characteristic shared across things that create reality? Or are we just putting labels on things so we can put them in our brains effectively?
Nominalism says that there is nothing common shared between all the objects existing in reality. Love could be anything for anyone, you cannot pinpoint an object absolute, consistent and repetitive nature across reality and put it in a box and call it love. Same for hatred. Nominalism thus sheds light on how things are more than just their labels and why it is dangerous to chase things if their labels/ tags are the sole motivation for you. There is more to reality of things we are chasing than meets the eye.

Are we just chasing labels, tags in life until we die?

Question- What does Success, Love, Happiness and God mean to you?

Is Reality Same for Everyone?

Do We Share a Common Reality?

Human intelligence is one interesting thing. We can perceive things in better ways, classify them, observe them and use all those understandings to predict the outcome of events in satisfactorily good way, we can create non-existent things out of current given resources which elevate the ways we carry out our living – our lifestyle. The ability to develop various fields of knowledge and understand the reality is the basis of human civilization.

So, we can say that anything which gets distilled down to a specific understanding – an understanding which is consistent throughout our existence can be called as knowledge – knowledge with experience further gets distilled down to wisdom. Even though the knowledge of certain things is not consistent we at least know why it isn’t consistent or we have a well-rounded explanation that ‘this’ is an exception with fair justifications. Knowledge helps us to perceive how the things, ideas around us can be used to build things, the life we want.

The ability to see commonalities and differences between things, objects, ideologies is one important part of how we build our understanding about reality in which we exist. We have notions of right and wrong, black and white, past, present and future, tall and short, thick and thin, good and evil, strong and weak. These attributions help us to identify certain common aspects in things and certain uncommon aspects in the same things.

So, when I am saying Rose – you will understand that I am talking about a flower which looks red, has a particular fragrance. Words thereby names are at the core of how we build knowledge of the surrounding and the reality.

There is one more interesting thing happening here –

When I would say Rose – it is a possibility that someone would understand it as a girl he/she knows, someone would imagine it as a color which somewhat is red but richer in shades, someone would imagine the prickly thorns instead of the gentle nature of the flower.

What’s happening here? The moment I am trying to specify something – some object with a word – a name which shows some common attribute that object shares with others, in that same moment I am failing to describe that object, that idea in its complete capacity.

In our example, the word Rose on surface seems to indicate just a flower, but Rose could mean almost anything to anyone. Rose is just a simple object we are talking about; now imagine how would we define the reality we live in? The reality is multifaceted. People have different experiences, meanings, understandings of reality based on their personal experiences. Does that mean that there is nothing common between the reality we live in? Do we live in our own realities?

Does that mean that words assigned to the things are not what the things are? That the name of objects are just names? Everything that is there is one and only individual rendition of its own? If nothing is same then how do we agree on something common and set our lives to that way? How come we agree to certain religion and follow that? How come we agree that certain things are bad and we should avoid those? How come we appreciate what is happiness and try to achieve that in our existence?

I mean what if happiness is just of name something and goodness is name of the other which does not exist in reality and we are just blindly chasing it? (and we don’t even make out of it alive in the end!) What if we are just chasing names and “there exists nothing like it” – is our realization when we actually achieve that?

Is “the reality” really made of something very fundamental and shared qualities? Or are we just carrying our lives in the chaos of dissimilar (but seemingly similar on surface) things? Even though we call ourselves as humans how come some humans create examples out of their lives that they don’t deserve to be called as humans? How come some humans are so great that calling them humans is disrespecting their life?

Is there something really common among everything or are we just labeling things on whim (or intentionally) to solve the confusions of our minds? Are we living in a matrix and reality is totally different place than where we exist? Are hell and heaven more real that the earth we are living in?

Have we been robbed of the real understanding of reality and cursed to live in an illusion called life?

I mean I could have called the Rose an egg right from the beginning and everybody would have been fine with it. It’s just that now the egg is a flower, has red petals, has thorns and has fragrance. (Shakespeare would have also used egg for Juliet’s dialogue and everybody would have been fine with it. As everyone now knows and agrees what an egg is!)

Now you should appreciate how strongly we are conditioned right from the beginning. Calling an egg a Rose feels unnatural but if someone right from the beginning of the beginning would have called it an egg, we would be comfortable with egg in Shakespeare’s dialogue.  

Is there really anything like “Red” color, “Grey” color?

A simple experiment

Look at the picture below:

It’s easy to tell that the cube has one white and one grey colored side.

Now see what happens when I put a blind along the edge of the sides:

There is no manipulation in this image, I have just put a colored box to hide the edges. You can blind the main image with finger and see the same result.

This is popularly called as “Cornsweet Illusion” or “Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet effect”. This illusion works because our brains try to fill the unavailable information to make sense of the things observed. In this case of the cube example our visual interpretation system tries to determine the edges/ sides of the object by the sudden changes in the illumination of the surfaces.

From this example, you can appreciate how our brain tries to fill in the gaps between the information we are collecting.

Does that mean that there is nothing like what I call grey or white? that there is something totally different for which I am yet to assign a name just to make its identification easy. If that is the case, then are we just naming things in the name of knowledge and don’t have actual hold of the reality? Are we just pretending to be smart just because we can name the things?

Keep in mind we are not simply talking about naming things. If my brain tries to fill the gaps by itself to create a sense of understanding, some part of truth or reality which I carry in my beliefs – are they real or were they some gaps filled by my brain itself?

Following the same train of thought, here is an important question –

Obviously, no one by birth knows what is the “real” nature of reality is? (Otherwise, we would not be discussing all this). You will see that people know reality for how their life experiences turned out to be. They know what reality is, but not all have one singular, absolute concurrence, alignment and unanimous opinion about the nature of reality.

An important idea in philosophy called nominalism tried to question reality in this way (there is a part when the opposite of Nominalism is Realism! I will cover realism in next post). For that we will try to understand what Nominalism tries to solve.

Is there something common characteristic shared across things that create reality? Or are we just putting labels on things so we can differentiate?

Nominalism – There Are Just Names No Essences

William of Ockham is the guy responsible to popularize Nominalism in philosophy although he is not the originator of it. Ockham’s Razor is one very mainstream idea still useful in our pursuits of knowledge. I have covered Ockham’s Razor in separate post.

I think, it is a high possibility that Nominalism and Ockham’s Razor have strong connection not just because they were popularized by the same person but how they align themselves with each other to create a consistent argument.

Ockham’s Razor goes like this –

“Plurality should not be posited without necessity”

In simple words, do not interpret, do not deduce unnecessary things unless they are presented or experienced. (I have somewhat twisted the meaning to align the Ockham’s Razor to align with the train of thoughts and there is hardly anything mistaken here.)

My purpose to rephrase Ockham’s Razor is to connect our brain’s habit to fill unknown gaps with our pursuit of the real nature of reality we live in.

Nominalism thus calls out for the reality which individuals experience for themselves. There is nothing common between the life that we are sharing. Every object existing is an individual, special object in itself. Objects never share something common between them, it may be just our brains filling in the unknown gaps to make sense out of reality and have peace of mind. The labels like Red, Love, Justice, Truth, Loyalty, Happiness are not physical entities, absolute entities which exist in reality. We have created these labels so that we can sort certain thing in certain groups to create a model of reality in our energy optimizing brains.

This is really important point – that things we call real are just labels given by us. A Rose could have been an egg from its creation and nobody would have objected it.

Consequences of Nominalism

Nominalism – in simple words says that there is nothing common shared between all the objects existing in reality. Love could be anything for anyone, you cannot pinpoint an object absolute, consistent and repetitive across reality and put it in a box and call it love. Same for hatred. Same goes for the notion of beauty, fear, justice, truth and what not. Justice is not some type of molecule or an element which can be physically hunted, mined, rigged in reality. It is a label we have created for certain way of things. But, upon full magnification we will see that that certain way of things grouped together are highly individualistic – seeming that they are not same in any way.

Nominalism pointed one interesting observation – the things exist in their individual ways; we are just labeling certain aspects of them so that they can be grouped together or compared against one another.

Do you understand what this leads to? For me it is chaos.

It means that there is no such thing like love, justice, joy, happiness, affection, truth, utopia, passion, enthusiasm, redness, whiteness.

It also means that there is nothing like hatred, unfairness, fear, sadness, fakeness, lie.

These are only labels we are chasing in some scenes and in some scenes running away from or avoiding.

This leads to the conclusion that there is no pivot to the life we are living and the reality in which we exist. This is unsettling – this unsettling feeling leads to existential crisis.

One can here say that Nominalism bridges Phenomenology and Existentialism in better ways in philosophy.

Phenomenology talks about objectively understanding and interpreting reality through subjective experiences. (The one where objective and subjective appear in the same sentence!) It calls for the truth to be one which is realized through personal experiences – phenomenon happening with the individual.

Existentialism talks about the idea that there is no center or pivot to the reality we live in. This is a freedom in such an intense dosage that if we are not creating our own pivot for our own life the sheer possibilities emerging from freedom will overwhelm us concluding that there really isn’t such meaning or sense to life.

Nominalism says that there is no real common thing which can be distilled down between seemingly same things, things were never the same – there is no “essence” which exists across certain seemingly same things. There is no such thing like “universal” which is consistent across the objects in reality. Everything exists individually on its own. One has to experience things for themselves to see their real nature.

It is just your urge to rationalize things so that your brains will save energy. Rationalization is all about making sense of the things, and if everything has its own way of being our minds cannot store each and every aspect of those individual things all the time, thus we have resorted to the pursuit of “essence”, “universality” and hence “labels”.

Conclusion

William of Ockham’s Nominalism from medieval philosophy is reiterated in modern philosophy through Existentialism, Absurdism.

Jean-Paul Sartre – the French Existential philosopher thus talks about how labels are always fooling us. We think our life made to be defined by the achievements of certain labels where upon deeper inspection we see that the labels are mere a creation of our minds, they are how we interpret reality. They are not reality in themselves. Reality was already there even when labels were not there.

This is how Sartre call out Existential philosophy – “Existence precedes essence” and not the reverse “Essence precedes existence”. The later one is just a construct of our mind to create meaning in this meaningless world.

The very freedom granted to us becomes our enemy because we are clueless when we realise that we can do anything. This is where Absurdism peeks in.

Boundaries of Nominalism

There will be different reactions to the explanation of nominalism and that itself will show you how varying types of people exist and their individual renditions of the reality. But interestingly you will find “type” of reactions in people.

One will not immediately agree but everyone on deep inspection will accept this that we always crave for justification for everything that happens with us, it could be in our favor or against us. We crave for justification which will bring peace to our mind, in happiness this peace will amplify happiness and in challenging situations it will give us something to blame.

Once you start appreciating our habit to justify every damn thing you will suddenly see that Nominalism is pretty much good concept in philosophy. Nominalism when says that essences, shared attributes are just labels and nothing real, it warns us that the justification you are trying to give for your situation might just be your construct of mind and not real. Nominalism feels attractive because it feeds attitude of skepticism, which is the first tool of the person in the quest for the absolute truth.

On the other side, nominalism has its innate limitations too. If nominalism is true then it is not there as nominalism itself is our “labeling” to the concept of “not labeling everything together”.

This is where paradoxes begin. If there really was nothing common “essence” among certain grouped things, then it was impossible to group them in first place. So, essence must exist already (this feels even more paradoxical.)

We will search for resolution of these paradoxes in next post on Realism.

Related reading:

A Trade-off Between Simplicity & The Reality

Minding The Gap Between Ego & Reality

We are so tied to our minds, our self, our ego that we can only see what our mind is conditioned to see; and the expanse of mind is so vast, that we consider the inability to gauge its limit to its infinite-ness. But, in self-observation we will see that reality is far bigger than our mind. Mind cannot be bigger than reality although it can create a perfect illusion of it being bigger than reality. When we realise how reactive our mind is, how conditioned our mind is we see that it’s the reality in which we are existing and not the mind. Mind is just a facilitator to create a sense of security. The real creativity thus begins when one lets go of their minds, thoughts and observe reality for what it is.
The real intelligence is to be able to see how you are fooling yourselves and how it is twisting your world view. This is possible only when we let go of the self. Love is the fastest and the most direct way to let go of self. Love is the way to get rid of the ego. Loving something, loving someone is the first step towards rejecting the very ego which is responsible for self-deception.
Jiddu Krishnamurti thus encouraged everyone to let go of their egos through self-less love; this itself is enough to solve all the existential conflicts inside us and out there in the world.

Part 3 – Jiddu Krishnamurti’s legacy of self-knowledge

“What do you do when you realize fundamentally or deeply that thought cannot end itself? What happens? Watch yourself. When you are fully aware if ‘this fact’, what happens?

(‘this fact’ here refers to an observation that ‘discipline’ doesn’t destroy the self, rather it strengthens it because ‘the self’ created that discipline in the first place)

You understand that any reaction is conditioned and that, through conditioning, there can be no freedom either at the beginning or at the end – and freedom is always at the beginning and not at the end.”

– J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

We, the humans are driven by curiosity. The curiosity to survive – to put in few words. One might say that people are driven by fear, greed, envy, anxiety, power, love, money, fame, glory, sacrifice, humility, honesty, trust, legacy, mania, chaos, terror, and what not. The list is never ending. If you start questioning the origin all such attributes, you will see that humans can be driven by anything, I mean any anything. There is no connecting link per say; the only common thing between all the things which drive people is the people themselves. So, in the last question (possibly the last one) we end up questioning ourselves. We see that along with physical survival we are highly conscious of our non-physical survival. Some may call it the mental survival, some may call it ideological survival, some may even call it spiritual survival. In the end, what we are trying to preserve is the eternal existence of our consciousness. How to preserve this? becomes the question then. That is why in final question we see that we are curious to preserve our own being. That is the ultimate survival. Whatever can facilitate that preservation is the driving force for our existence. If you are scared of something, the fear of that thing will create a curiosity to look out for the ways in which you can avoid it.

Now you will realise that the attributes which are many and driving people in different ways are highly related to the ways people think about themselves and about their surroundings. The identities, the consciousness which we are trying to preserve forever is highly the function of the society we grew up in, the religion we followed, the ideals we admired, the enemies we despised, the culture we cultivated and carried over to the newer generations.

I might be making an overstatement here-

Only those who have undergone unlearning, un-conditioning or at least appreciated the process of unlearning can clearly see how badly we are tied to our thoughts and ultimately our minds.

Death of thinking is death of mind. When they say that ideas live forever – it is also an attempt to ensure eternal survival of a certain type of mind, for mind is not a physical entity to us. Realizing the perishable nature of our body, the mind becomes the most potent entity to ensure the survival of our being.

Then, what’s wrong in ensuring the eternal survival our consciousness?

We will see how Jiddu Krishnamurti showed the reality of our existence. As I have already said, he is the perfect person at perfect time to ask the perfect question.

Short answer is – we are so tied to our minds that we can only see what our mind is conditioned to see; and the expanse of mind is so vast, that we consider the inability to gauge its limit to its infinite-ness. But, in self-observation we will see that reality is far bigger than our mind. Mind cannot be bigger than reality although it can create a perfect illusion of it being bigger than reality. When we realise how reactive our mind is, how conditioned our mind is we see that it’s the reality in which we are existing and not the mind. Mind is just a facilitator to create a sense of security. The real creativity thus begins when one lets go of their minds, thoughts and observe reality for what it is.     

In Part 1, I have explained J Krishnamurti’s views on our urge for safety thereby happiness, how we use our thoughts to conveniently justify anything and everything to create that sense of safety, the ways in which our thoughts are stealing the actual reality holding multitudes of possibilities.

In Part 2, I have explained how thoughts originate, how curiosity drives them. It contains Krishnamurti’s observations on how we try to separate thinking to glorify ‘our version’ of wishful reality. Krishnamurti shows us that the moment we reject the separation of our thoughts from ourselves, that is the moment we see that we were just reactive to everything around us. We become observer of the reality for what it is, once we let go the glorification of ‘our thoughts’ – the self.

Now, we will question the very originator of the self – our Mind. Krishnamurti’s observations were revolutionary about the mind. This Part 3 will focus on that and also tie up the previous 2 parts together with it.

Existence Of The Mind – What Is The Mind?

“When you observe your own thinking, you will see it is an isolated, fragmentary process. You are thinking according to your reactions, the reactions of your memory, of your experiences, of your knowledge, of your belief.”

–J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

When we are truly in the territory of observation without any preconception, prejudice, we see what thoughts actually do. Thoughts just try to hook on to something that we are familiar with – it could be good or bad. Thoughts literally create a chain. One link creates sense – logic – connection to another, one train of thought after another. Then we create the whole understanding. Thinking is always reactive. Keep this in mind – thinking is always reactive. If you let thoughts build on themselves, it is amazing to observe what world we create just by our thoughts. The moment you inject certain intent, desire to this world, it immediately deviates from the reality. But, as this world of thoughts has your intent, your desire, it creates that world of safety; we don’t want to lose that familiarity, that comfort. Now as this world contains our desires it becomes our second identity. As the thoughts keep building on, you start associating these set of your thoughts as who you are. This is your non-physical identity now. You now strive to make sure that this non-physical identity lives till eternity.

After seeing this you will see that the mind is the custodian of thoughts, desires, wishes. A wish to be safe to prolong survival, desire to make that prolonged existence happier one, thoughts to support those wishes – desires. Mind is thus picking desirable ideologies, disciplines which will keep feeding the train of thoughts, the chain of thoughts. Thoughts want to ensure their own survival because we have assumed survival of our thoughts as our survival. (Keep in mind we haven’t even started the discussion about reality.)

So, mind is a sieve which keeps on separating the desirable and undesirable parts of reality. There is nothing wrong in that. What happens here which is problematic is our tendency to lean towards the desirable reality only. When mind would see desirable reality, it will start using the power of compounding of thoughts to create a wishful reality which we call as our identity – our self. We want to preserve self to ensure that things that we desire survive. Whatever is not the self, it is the others – the undesirable. The moment mind makes this separation – ego intensifies.

“Our whole tendency is to be separated. Can the mind do anything else but that? Is it possible for the mind not to think separately in a self-enclosed manner, fragmentarily? That is impossible. So, we worship the mind; the mind is extraordinarily important.”   

–J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

Without separation, our mind fails to recognize itself. If it is not able to separate itself from rest of the things, it cannot feed the desires. If desires are not fed, we will be constantly looking cluelessly for a sense of belonging, a place of security.

Here, I see one tragedy of being human rather an animal. I will explain it:

See there is a possibility that we are free from all the desires. One can be free from all the desires of the world. So, it is a real possibility that man is free from the cage of thoughts, mind and desires and fully observant of the reality around him without any imposition or prejudice right from the birth.

What is the tragedy of every animal is that they are born with the tendency to live (otherwise how would they get in the world in first place, maybe the baby doesn’t even know what is required to survive, so possibly the sense of survival naturally gets transferred from parents to the baby). Have you seen a baby who wants to die the moment he is born? Rather the baby starts crying the moment it senses absence of parental presence or absence of security. By birth we have a survival urge. Evolution has pushed this urge in us from physical to non-physical one. As we have better chances to ensure physical survival we now care more about the survival of our non-physical version. Mind thus becomes very important, thereby consciousness becomes important. That is why if physical survival is not guaranteed, we wish that at least our consciousness lives forever. That is exactly why we praise the minds we have.

Over the time, our desires take over this mind and we then keep on conditioning it with culture, religion, society, community in a certain way. The familiarity of physical body gets further amplified in familiarity of certain way of thinking, certain religion, certain philosophy, certain profession, certain degree, certain community, certain country. The more we find ideas, thoughts familiar to ours the more we want to cling to them. The more we want to reinforce that version of self. We are always separating what reality shows in terms of whether it is favorable to us or not. That is why even if mind and consciousness seem infinite, you will observe that our thoughts have compounded in such an extreme way that we are unable to measure their limits. We have attributed this inability of those compounded thoughts to the infinite-ness of our mind.

If our mind truly is infinite then we should be able to predict the reality or at least handle the undesirability that reality may present in better ways. We all know how disappointed we are with the reality. This shows how strongly we have conditioned our minds towards certain way – that certain way we call our identity, our self, our ego.

“Until we understand how to transcend this separative thinking, this process of giving emphasis to the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’, whether in the collective form or in individual form, we shall not have peace; we shall have constant conflict and wars. Our problem is how to bring an end to the separative process of thought. Can the thought ever destroy the self, thought being the process of verbalization and of reaction? Thought is nothing else but reaction; thought is not creative.”

-J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

Now you will appreciate what un-learning can do to our life. It opens a completely different and real world in front of us. Un-learning is the rejection of what we assumed to be true to support our identity. Although it feels uncomfortable, sometimes completely hostile but there is no bigger freedom than the acceptance and implementation of unlearning. It is renewal, evolution of our very being.

The key point is to understand that we are not our mind, we can be bigger than our mind. That needs the rejection of the idea of self. Once we are observant of how dangerously conditioned, prejudices, favored our minds are we will see how we through the agency of our mind are twisting the reality to create the sense of security. The more we twist it, more deviated we are from reality.

And as I already explained that somehow this sense of separation and thereby self-preservation is in our genes by birth, we have to train ourselves to get rid of that sense. Keep in mind that this does not mean self-jeopardization. This plainly means that not imposing our ways on reality to create the sense of security thereby higher chances of preservation of self. That is why unlearning is extremely important.

Reactive Mind Vs Objective Reality

“Do not superimpose what it should do, how it should think or act and so on: that would amount to making mere statements.”

-J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

Once you think that you have full control of your mind, the mind will use this sense of its separation from you to build chains of thoughts to support itself. In the end, it all started from you. The moment you see that you and your mind are the same, you accept its conditioning. Now you have a baseline to see the reality. Now you know how your mind is bending the reality. This is the freedom, to see things as they are. 

Now that we are understanding that sense of safety was the goal of everything that we are doing all along, we see that our conditioning thereby our thinking and thus our mind in the end are the reason behind all the suffering we go through. Once we see that our mind was the main culprit, we realise that it will be difficult rather impossible to punish my mind, discipline my mind because the more I try to control my mind – more I try to discipline it, the more it reacts, the more it creates thoughts and evades away from the reality. It tries to preserve its identity.

Only when you observe that you are your mind conditioned in certain way to preserve the non-physical existence then you understand the reality you live in. You still have those conditioned thoughts but now you neither want to promote them or suppress them. You are now an observer of the reality. This is an interesting observation.  

“When I want to understand, look at something. I don’t’ have to think about it – I look at it. The moment I begin to think, to have ideas, opinions about it, I am already in a state of distraction, looking away from the thing which I must understand.”

–J Krishnamurti, Can thinking solve our problems?

There is one important confusion we must address here:

If I am rejecting the thoughts that I have, the mind that I have, the consciousness that I have – what remains of me? Wouldn’t I end up in an existential crisis? Won’t that shatter my compass? If I am not associated with certain things, how would I make sense of my actions? If I am not able to make sense of my actions or at least the things happening around me, how would I prepare myself to survive in this world? This will completely jeopardize my existence.

The answer is pretty simple if you have read till this sentence:

Rejection of mind as a separate entity is the answer. Unlearning the process of isolation to understand the reality is the answer. Wishful observation is the key problem in the ways we are trying to live the life. Thinking is the second name for wishful observation. You are expecting reality to become something in your ways so you attach certain justification to extract that desirable meaning from the reality you are observing. You are doing this to generate sense of safety, which further ensures eternal survival.

So, it’s not about rejecting mind or the thoughts. It’s observing how our mind, thoughts are already conditioned before we are trying to understand the reality. It’s like we are seeing the reality with certain tint of prejudices and expectations. We have to let go of that filter. We are so attached to this filter because world looks the way we want in this filter, that this tinted illusion has become our reality. The moment someone shatters that filter we end in existential crisis.

You must appreciate that it’s not about hating the prejudices, conditioning or sacrificing yourselves completely to a selfless act. It’s being aware that you have those prejudices when you are observing reality. This self-awareness is what Krishnamurti focused on.

The moment you will try to reject certain thing and accept the another i.e., your mind – you will create certain framework of justifications and you will deceive yourself.

The idea is to know how you are fooling yourselves which is preventing you from understanding the reality.

Delulu is not the solulu. Rather delulu is the best way to reject the very life you are living.

“To have blank mind is to be in a state of stupor, idiocy or what you will, and your instinctive reaction is to reject it. But surely a mind that is very quiet, a mind that is not distracted by its own thought, a mind that is open, can look a t the problem very directly and very simply. And it is this capacity to look without any distraction at our problems that Is the only solution. For that there must be a quiet, tranquil mind.”

–J Krishnamurti, Can thinking solve our problems?

Love – Cure To Self-Deception And Surrender To Reality

You know that moment in any pop culture media where the final answer is love? Let me spoil everything for you. The answer to everything is love.

(Be cautious while reading next part, it’s not just that type of love and I am definitely not conditioned to prefer love as the answer. Even for a skeptic, love being the final answer has worthy support. It also guarantees that we can understand the reality for what it is.)

I always had this cringe feeling when everything grand in the narrative ended up with a justification of love. Even the great authors, logical authors, great scientists, great atheists never feel shame to express the power of love and it being the answer to everything. Trust me, I have made every attempt to find the evidences where love might not be the final answer to everything. But turns out that I would never find any evidence against love being the final answer.

The core reason is that we ourselves are the final problem. Let us see how Krishnamurti came to the conclusion of love being the ultimate answer:

“When you realize that any reaction is a form of conditioning and therefore gives continuity to the self in different ways, what actually takes place? You must be very clear in this matter. Belief, knowledge, discipline, experience, the whole process of achieving a result, or an end ambition, becoming something in this life or in future life – all these area process of isolation, a process which brings destruction, misery, wars from which there is no escape through collective action, however much you may be threatened with concentration camp and all the rest of it.”

–J Krishnamurti, The Function of Mind

Now that you have come to the last part of the discussion, it is not a new understanding when I say that our sense of self is reinforced by the desire to support certain way of our conditioning. This steals from us the ability to perceive reality in the way it presents itself. We are always seeing the reality with certain conditioning and trying to change it so that it favors our ways. But as we have illusioned, conditioned understanding of reality, the reality rarely presents itself in the ways we desire it to be. Then we end up in sadness and sorrow and start questioning the futility of our existence. That is why ‘what is the purpose of my existence?’ is the common format of the existential questions for all of us.

What Krishnamurti tried to focus on is different question –

Why am I not experiencing life the way it is?

What is preventing me to live the life the way it is, living the life to its fullest?

The answer is pretty simple now. It’s our conditioning which urges us to prefer certain ways and reject the others. This brings the happiness and sadness. In the efforts to maximize happiness and minimize sadness we have created a system of mind and thoughts to alleviate the pains of suffering – thoughts justify everything. We deceive ourselves with justifications.   

“So long as we deceive ourselves in any form, there can be no love. So long as the mind is capable of creating and imposing upon itself a delusion, it obviously separates itself from collective or integrated understanding.”

-J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

What does the love do in all this confusion?

Love is the direct way to let go of self. Love is the way to get rid off the ego. Loving something, loving someone is the first steps towards rejecting the very ego which is responsible for self-deception. Even if you are delusional, your actions influenced by those delusions towards the things you love, the people you love will yield unwanted outcomes; and if you truly love them, you will be compelled to let go of the delusion for the benefit of your loved ones.  Thus, being selfless through love in true sense ensures real freedom.

Conclusion – Why Is Love Answer To Everything?

“We see the ways of the intellect but we do not see the way of love. The way of love is not to be found through the intellect.”

-J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

We saw in Part 1 how and why we crave for safety, familiarity. It ensures our physical and non-physical survival with better odds and most importantly with better satisfaction.

We saw in Part 2 how we dissociate ourselves from our mind and thoughts to create a false sense of safety if the reality does not turn out the way we want. We may delude ourselves if the reality is hurting us. We use thoughts to justify unfairness the reality presents. Our religions, politics, our ideals, everything that we have created now has an innate purpose of creating a safety net. We want to remain in this net because we don’t want the happiness to end. We have intellectualized our minds in such a way that we have justification for every ridiculous illusion and tragedy is that we call it the limitlessness of the mind, infinite nature of the mind.

I am not erasing the idea that the mind is limitless. If our minds – we – ourselves are truly limitless then we should immediately be able to see beyond the seemingly adverse revelations of the reality. Which is the holy gist of all these detailed inquiries of the self.

Then what was the problem with the mind?

The very limitless nature of reality would enable us to become limitless. But is it our delusional clinging to certain way of life for safety which is stealing the real understanding and appreciation of limitless reality. We are clinging to highly complicated and highly compounded thoughts, the way of thinking just because it reinforces the ego.

The real intelligence is to be able to see how you are fooling yourselves and how it is twisting your world view.   

After going through what Krishnamurti made us observe, you will realise that whatever must be said has been said already. We have just accepted our delusions because we are fully clung to the way have been living our lives, the way we have been conditioned.

When you are loving someone, there is very slim chance that they will be exactly the way you want them to be. There is plausible reason to say this because the infinite possibilities of reality mold people in different ways. There may be many things in common but the more you know the sooner you will realise that people are filled with different types of conditioning. This will first push you to reject their point of view naturally, then you will try to impose your way on them, your ideologies on them, your conditioning on them. In the final analysis, you will see your ways of worldview failing on them. This is the moment when you will reject your own world view, thereby your ego. Now you will neither reject or accept other people’s worldviews nor will you cling to your ego. Now for the sake of love, you will objectively observe the reality for what it is.

This is how love compels you to let go of your ego. That is why love is the answer to everything because you are the last question of all the investigations of the existence. You will let go of the concept of the self once you start to appreciate things other than you and accept the reality the way it is. What a beautiful way to live!    

“Only when you discard completely, through understanding, the whole structure of the self, can that which is eternal, timeless, immeasurable, come into being. You cannot go to it; it comes to you.”   

-J Krishnamurti, The function of the Mind

References and further reading:

  1. Truth is a pathless land – J Krishnamurti
  2. The First and Last Freedom – J Krishnamurti
  3. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge : Part 1 – The Liberation From Thinking and Thoughts
  4. Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge: Part 2 – Being Watchful Of The Ebb And Flow Of Life
  5. Featured Image of Phantom Galaxy M74 by James Web Space Telescope

Freedom = Courage (Now + Here)

When it comes to psychology – people consider Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as the de facto rock-stars of the field of psychology. One unnoticed person whose findings deserve equal attention rather more attention was Alfred Adler. He introduced the Individual Psychology to the world which is relevant still today and is way more sophisticated to solve the “so called” troubles of our life. Individual psychology makes a successful attempt to reach to the roots of our suffering and allows us to become truly free.
Alfred Adler’s philosophy is beautifully explained in Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s book “The Courage To Be Disliked”. It talks about the feedback loop of self-acceptance, confidence in others and contribution to others to live a real and fulfilled life. The great thing about individual psychology is that it urges us to break the notion of causality and thereby determinism to come out of the painful, suffering inducing cycles of life & death, cause & effect. It shows us that we live in the universe with infinite possibilities and one needs courage to break the logic of determinism to truly appreciate themselves and the infinite possibilities universe has to offer. Individual psychology given by Alfred Adler thus asks us to bear the courage to lose the false-comfort given by causality – predictability and decide our life on our own terms fearlessly and with freedom. It teaches how one can be completely involved in everything but not attached to them at the same time.

On the book – The Courage to be disliked

‘The world is simple, and life is too.’

I have a question for you,

– How is life treating you right now?

Everyone knows that the responses to this question are diverse and dynamic. The answers obviously will be subjective and so it is normal to expect huge variety.

But you know what, deep down everyone (mostly the adults) know the most frequent type of the answer to this simple question. There is innate predictability about what the answer could be.

Life is not treating me fair

Life has become too complicated for me, life is suffering, there is no hope, why can’t I have a single moment of happiness to savor for some time? why do bad things happen to only me? what have I done wrong to someone that ‘everyone’ has turned against me? what should I do – now that I have not achieved what I was supposed to achieve in spite of putting all honest efforts? why is ‘everyone’ – the society always against me when all I have for others is good will?

Deep down we have this undeclared, unexpressed notion that something wrong happened to me which I didn’t deserve. I tried so hard but couldn’t achieve that thing. Trust me every one of us is an expert of hiding these unsettling feelings, overlooking them to move ahead. But it is important to understand that unknowingly they become part of who we are. When we truly and honestly would start inspecting ourselves, we will find these feelings being the reason for the bitterness we carry inside. That is why life is suffering for most of us, being free then is out of the question. First let me be happy for now!

Psychology has always been on the quest of resolving the model of how our mind works. A bigger portion of psychology directly or indirectly works towards understanding how we see happiness and suffering. Because, end goal of how we feel, how we think, how we decide, how we interact, how our personality is created is emerged from either a happy event or sad event which affect why our psyche is in a certain way.

When it comes to psychology – people consider Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as the de facto rock-stars of the field of psychology. One unnoticed person whose findings deserve equal attention rather more attention was Alfred Adler. He introduced the Individual Psychology (Individualpsychologie) to the world which is relevant still today and is way more sophisticated to solve the “so called” troubles of our life. Individual psychology makes a successful attempt to reach to the roots of our suffering and allows us to become truly free.

I appreciated this in deeper sense when I came across a book called “The courage to be disliked”. A single book can change your life. Although I have been changed many times before, I couldn’t help but overstate the importance of this special book. 

This is my attempt to reorganize the ideas from the book to instantly simplify the core ideas. So, the next discussion may spoil the book for you. (Although it’s not a story book having a climax at the end but the ideas are written in a conversational – dialogue format so, you peel out one layer at a time to reach to the core ideas of individual psychology.)    

I am actually spoiling the whole book and my writing on the same heron with these few sentences:

The whole thing boils down how you honor this current moment and not let it be influenced by the fear of past and the anxiety of the future. This complete dedication to the current moment is only possible if you honor yourself first, because only you can experience how this current moment will turn out for you. The moment you start to respect this moment here and now – you will be free.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first

Carl Jung

Now that I have already explained what life ultimately boils down to, it will be important to understand why these sentences hold some gravitas. So, thanks for continuing with me hereon.

Deny trauma – Deny the comfort of causality

The core of individual psychology is the rejection of the causality. Our complete understanding of ourselves and the world we live in is based on the notion of cause and effect. It does immediately feel silly to reject that exact notion thereby making individual psychology illogical.

You will appreciate that not everything in whole can completely be justified or predicted with complete precision using the logic of cause and effect. There will always be some information that cannot be completely known for the given system (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal points in the same direction). Our mind always makes decision, assumptions based on the current information, experiences we have till date and every one know that it is impossible to have all the information and all experiences that are there in the world for a person to understand his/her own existence.

So, in simple words – ‘who we are’ goes beyond the logic of cause and effect. You can be free once you break the chains of cause and effect. In the universe filled with infinite possibilities, there will always be something wrong and illogical, totally disconnected justification to the things happening to you and around you. It will be an injustice if you let that illogical justification define your whole upcoming life.

When we say that I became a person like this because something happened to me in past where I learned my lesson and changed myself into something else, we are just trying to convince ourselves to do things in certain way so that we will have less resistance to get things done in our ways. That is exactly where problems start emerging.

We crave for causality because it grants value to past; because it taught us some valuable outcomes and same causality can help us to predict what would happen in future. We always crave for certainty. But all of us know this by experience that we are rarely good at predicting our future. This furthermore unsettles the mind.

So, trauma is the pre-side-effect of causality (the post-side-effect of causality is the anxiety of the uncertainty of the future). We carry our traumas as badges to flaunt because these traumas feel very personal thus exclusive. The ways in which we carve out our personality from these traumatic experiences gives us a sense of special-ness. These bad experiences, traumas are a big part of our personality maybe due to a survival mechanism implying ‘I should be able to cope up with similar thing if they happen to me in future.’

See, the point is that if we stick to our traumas and fixate our personality on the same, we will never be able to explore the concepts that had better potential to improve our personality (and probably not be traumatic, bitter). We will be stuck in that loop of experiences related to that causality. Given that there are infinite possibilities, there is fair chance than we can be even better than what we were and what happened to us in the past. We are just better at finding reasons to justify our current position because we know we are comfortable here.        

No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.

It might seem that when we are rejecting causality, we are choosing a non-nonsensical path. In reality, we are just avoiding the ways in which we are always fooling ourselves to remain in comfort of predictability. Using the excuse of causality, we are actually ‘inventing’ non-real reasons which hide the realest reality we can actually live.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard P. Feynman

Once you deny this causality which you think made you who you are, you will immediately see who you really are. You will leave that burden behind. You will accept yourself for who you are. You will see that you can instantly detach yourselves from your past and your future too. The untapped possibilities open up.

This is self-acceptance in individual psychology.

Once you see how important you yourself are to live your own life, you will say –

“Before past and future let me at least appreciate my own current moment”.

That is now and here. Once you come to the terms with yourself you will realize how everyone is just like you even though we are separated by many aspects of life. Then you will appreciate how others have their own current moments to live and experience in their own ways.

All problems are interpersonal relationship problems – others have their own current moments to experience in their own ways

It is fundamentally impossible for a person to live life completely alone, and it is only in social contexts that the person becomes an ‘individual’.

Nobody can deny the fact that our surroundings make us who we are. Our baselines are our surroundings. A human being is the most basic unit of any society. Our understanding and awareness of self is impossible without a response from surrounding. How would you understand who you are if you never received any reaction, feedback from your surrounding? – It will be a delusional existence. You would have had an idea of who you are but would have been far from what is real.

Thus, when you start seeing that your surrounding will always be interacting with you, you will be able to see every reaction – feedback from surrounding especially people can never be completely cut off. This again feels senseless. If you are born alone, leave this world alone then why couldn’t me being alone throughout my existence be more justified? It is because we never had any sense of absoluteness right from our birth and this sense of absoluteness always remains un-achieved, it is just an ideal condition we are always trying to reach. Our core understandings are only possible with the relativeness, comparison of baselines.

That is exactly why even when you are trying to live your life alone, that ‘loneliness’ itself cannot be justified if there is no understanding of what being ‘together’ means. So, there will always be something connecting you to your surroundings. That is where relationship comes in picture. You cannot run away from interpersonal relationship. You will be surrounded by people (or at least what made them you even when you are sitting lonely).    

So, when you are appreciating your current moment, it is natural that others will be respecting their current moments. This understanding will make you appreciate the importance of everyone’s being.

This will make the world around you seem less hostile. You will be filled with kindness for others.

So, you must first accept yourself first otherwise you will not come out of the hideous cycle of comfort of predictability, once you accept yourself to remain in now and here you start seeing here and now of others. You start valuing their here and now. That is why you start allowing people to be who they are, you stop expecting from others. You stop expecting your recognition from others, you stop pleasing people for your own good in the end.

Now that you are free from the burden and pursuit of desirable and predictable, anticipated feedback from surrounding you become tolerant of criticism and even dislike from others. That is truly when you are free. I want to focus on my now and here and nobody can stop me from experiencing that. Then you see this as the basic requirement for others too. This is exactly here the person becomes tolerant towards others. People start putting confidence in each other to create that safe space – the real safe space. People start respecting each other’s boundaries because they themselves have understood that they have their own limitations. This creates the sense of camaraderie – society.   

It is precisely because we lay a foundation of unconditional confidence that it is possible for us to build a deep relationship.

This is confidence in others in individual psychology.

Discard other people’s tasks – reject the desire for recognition and accept that you being disliked is not in your hands

When you are appreciating your own now and here to its fullest, you will notice how important it is to reject all other distractions to honor this moment. You will limit these distractions to focus more on this moment. This is where you will see that even though we are molded by our society we have limitations and so do the others. So, it is better if one sets boundaries.

Setting such boundaries helps everyone to focus on their ‘now and here’ in deeper and richer ways.     

If you are not living your life for yourself, then who is going to live it for you?

When one develops this understanding, they will clearly see what lies immediately in their own control and what not. If you are busy in trying to control what cannot be controlled by you, how would you have enough resources to appreciate your ‘here and now’? That why it is important to not focus on what you can’t control. Those will be someone else’s to control, that is not you task. That is exactly why you cannot pressurize people to do things in your ways. People can have their own reasons, limitations to not do things in your ways. It has to come from their side.

Forcing change while ignoring the person’s intention will only lead to an intense reaction.

Building on this understanding, you will start appreciating how doing what you love and not expecting anything in return is more than enough. You did what you love. Whether to appreciate it and recognize it, praise it is in other’s control not yours. Now that you have accepted yourself, you do it for yourself, then you won’t crave for attention from others, then you don’t crave for superiority, dominance. You come on level to level with your surroundings. You appreciate that whatever one wants to become that journey has to be completed by only them. Then you appreciate how we are trying to please others to get things done in our way when they were never in our control. You let go of the things which you cannot control and start focusing on what you can. That is why it is normal that some people (who were trying to get things done from you in their ways) will dislike you for not doing them in their own ways. This shows that you are honoring your ‘now and here’   

The cost of freedom in interpersonal relationship is that one is disliked by other people

Once you understand that it’s normal to be disliked, rather that indicates that we are doing our own thing you will appreciate what it really means to be genuinely be appreciated by society. Then you will feel like transferring this feeling to others too. Now that you have experienced this feeling for yourself, you would genuinely want others to feel that to. The things then you will do for others will have no intent of return because you very well know that returning favor is other people’s task.

If one’s means for gaining a feeling of contribution turns out to be ‘being recognised by others’, in the long run, one will have no choice but to walk through life in accordance with other people’s wishes.

The feeling and act of contribution has to be selfless and this selflessness is possible only when you are valuing your ‘now and here’. If you still are not valuing your ‘now and here’, it is very easy for you to get swayed by the likes of others and then you will end up in pleasing others and whether others will be pleased by what you did for that recognition is not in your control. This means the most probable fate is misery.

So, self-acceptance builds courage to do it in your way whether others like it or not. This detachment from opinions of others pushes you to do the things which were impossible before – what else is freedom them?  Then you understand the value of self-acceptance. You will then have the selfless feeling to let others experience and understand this. This selfless act for others will feed back into your sense of own being. This will support your feeling of self-acceptance. Once you close this feed-back loop, you will see what others are missing. You will help others in the real way. This will create the sense of belonging for you which further creates the real sense of meaning in life.

 This is contribution to others in individual psychology.

Where the center of the world is – there is no absolute cause and effect – there is no such thing as the first start and the last end

If you are ‘the center of the world’, you will have no thoughts whatsoever regarding commitment to the community; because everyone else is ‘someone who will do something for me’, and there is no need for you to do things yourself.  But you are not the center of the universe and neither am I.

Adler’s individual psychology thus focuses on a feedback loop of three key things:

One – Self-acceptance – you are who you are ‘now and here’, not what made you who you are

Once you accept yourself you give yourself better chances to live an earnest life 

Two – Confidence in others – now that you have appreciated how valuable, irreplaceable and incomparable living in ‘now and here’ is, you let people do their own thing because they have their own ‘now and here’. You put confidence in others, you do it not because you want something in return because returning the favor is in their control. This builds the real sense of community, belonging, safe space.

Three – Contribution to others – Once you start believing in people just like the person you are you appreciate what it means to be felt accepted. You try to support this feeling by contributing back to your safe space. You want it to be done by yourself because you now know that contributing back is in your control – your task. This further crystallizes your sense of self-acceptance.

Now that you have appreciated what it means to become truly free, it is normal to reject the false sense of superiority, false sense of being special. Every moment becomes same to you. This does not mean that you become numb to sadness or happiness. It just means that you appreciate that this too shall pass, all I have to live and experience is ‘now’. You lose the idea of a goal to be achieved and accept the real goal, the real target is to become the process.

Life goes on

For a human being, the greatest unhappiness is not being able to like oneself.

Although our existence is bound by birth and death, cause and effect. The reality filled with infinite possibilities does not follow that logic and we fail to notice that difference. Just to make the sense of the infinite possibilities we resort to certain assumptions, prejudices, reasons, past events, future expectations. We never question them with complete honesty because questioning them will bring existential crisis. We all know that our foundations really are not pure or absolute. Once you accept this you will see that it is very easy and important to accept who you are now. This further induces kindness for others. This creates the community. This is called Holism in individual psychology.

You must appreciate how causality brings in determinism in our lives. This determinism is kind of responsible for the lack of freedom in our lives. When we are suffering it is this exact determinism imparted by causality that builds helplessness. One must carry the courage to break out of this determinism. The courage is necessary because we never want to let go the comfort of predictability which determinism offers.

We resort to certain version of our life story when we are completely aware that we can totally change our life story. We are always taking the support of ‘I am like this because this happened to me’. This is how everyone’s story is. There are very few people who have dared to say – ‘I have gone through this for long but not anymore.’ This requires for you to appreciate yourselves first, when you accept who you are you move on to the path of improvement whereas when you are trying to act according to the like of people around you, you are actually proving the point that you don’t like the version that you are that is why you are ready to become the one which people would like and tragedy of this path is that the task of being liked by others is not in your control.

That is why whining about why we didn’t reach there would never help us to reach there or even embark on journey in that direction. We are hesitating to make our own move.

As long as we postpone life, we can never go anywhere, and will only pass our days one after the next in dull monotony, because we think of here and now as just a preparatory period.

Be real, not a hypocrite

People want to like themselves. They want to feel that they have worth. In order to feel that, they want a feeling of contribution that tells them ‘I am of use to someone’. And they seek recognition from others as an easy means for gaining that feeling of contribution.

The main reason Adler’s individual psychology didn’t receive enough attention is because it feels completely self-contradicting and hypocritical on surface level.

You will find these seeming contradictions everywhere in Adler’s ideas. It will say that we are social animals and are defined by society but in next moment it will say that you need to have the courage to be disliked by the people around you.

One time it says that you should not interfere in other people’s tasks and next time it says that you need to have a feeling of contribution for the same people.

One time it will say that you have to sever the relationships where others are not realizing their own tasks and making life difficult for you and on the other hand it will say that you should be unconditionally confident in others endlessly.

One time it will say that you should completely focus on yourselves and then it will say that you are part of a bigger family, bigger universe and you will be happy when you contribute to this bigger community to create a sense of belonging.

If I am being disliked then how the hell would I be happy?!?

If you inspect each of these seemingly contradicting ideas you will find one simple fact – the fact that we are walking living paradoxes and in spite of that we demand sense and logic about who we are.

The sense of self or individual cannot be appreciated well if you never know what it means to be surrounded by people. And there is always some interchange happening between individuals which makes it a society. We often see society as a group which is everything minus ‘I’. We fail to recognize that if I fix myself in certain way the others around me will fix themselves in response to that way and then most of the individuals who constitute the society will fix themselves in certain way. Means even a single person can effectively change the society.

What people actually miss when they come across the ideas put forth by Alfred Adler is the possibility that we can truly reject causality. I would call this unawareness the curse for the humanity. Our sense of ‘being’ inherently originates from some non-absolute attributes, relative references that we have to accept them as the ultimate truth right from our birth to make the sense out of all these infinite possibilities.

We are so entangled in the suffering and happiness waving between the life and death that we ignore that we are born, dead and again reborn every moment. The trick that causality plays in our life is that it tries to preserve the previous step to justify our current stage thereby freezing our present. Whereas what we should do is to just be in now and here which needs courage because there is no guaranteed layout, map to guide you. You have to walk your path all by yourself.

What people fail to notice is that the comfort of predictability is just in this moment but this sense of comfort has no control over future rather it intensifies the pain due to the randomness of the unpredictable future.

The secret to happy life is to be involved in everything and still not be attached to them.

Dune: Psychology in Science Fiction

Our identity is heavily influenced by the surroundings we live in. A healthy understanding of the gap between ‘labels given to us by our surrounding’ and ‘what we consider ourselves at core’ defines how we perform, how we behave in given situations. Frank Herbert effectively used these ideas of human psyche in his Dune Saga. The antihero story of Paul Atreides indicates psychological ideas of cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, and Pygmalion effect. It is interesting to understand how our minds are so sensitive at the levels of self and group simultaneously.

How Frank Herbert used human psyche in the creation of Dune’s antihero?

We saw how some fantastic philosophical ideas come alive in the character arc of Paul Atreides. The discussion hereon is the extension of the previous philosophical one, now we will dive deeper into the psychological aspects of Dune Part Two.

There will be heavy spoilers for Dune Part Two hereon!!!

Existentialism in Dune Part Two

As Paul gets more and more involved in the events on Arrakis with Fremen, he finds out what needs to be done, he finds clarity and purpose. He is renouncing the leadership in the early part because he does not know what to do with it. The moment he decides to become the Lisan al-Gaib, the moment he finds the purpose of his being, he gets the clarity.

According to Existentialism, there is no other meaning to the life but the meaning you give it yourself. Existentialism says that man is born free and can chose any actions to live but in the end he/ she will feel like they lived for nothing. They will remove this ‘existential angst’ only when they decide what they want to do with their life. The moment people consider themselves responsible for the events and consequences in their lives, take deliberate actions to achieve them that is the exact the moment where they find the meaning in life. Then everything, every action every decision starts to make sense. You feel like you exist for something.

This existential journey of self-discovery is exactly what we see in Paul’s journey to become the Mahdi. Avenging his father’s life becomes the ultimate goal of Paul in early moments but later on things take different turn. This is existentialism on personal level.

Fremen of Arrakis are the best example of existentialism in masses. The Fremen people are able to sustain in the hostile environment of Arrakis not because that is the only choice. They also have a strong belief, a hope that someone from outer world will save them one day and make their planet the Paradise, the Lisan al-Gaib will come to save them. Although Paul and Jessica know that it is a story properly planned by Bene Gesserit, although there are also Fremen who oppose this prophecy (Chani is one of them) still it gives them all hope, a reason to live for, a reason to survive for. Everyone makes sense of this prophecy in their own ways, their own belief systems.

Do you see what is happening here?

There is one group who is religiously putting their faith in the hope of the messiah for their survival and on the other hand there is a group who dismisses this idea and think that they themselves have to take care of their survival. The messiah will be one of them, not someone sent from the outer world.

We know what happens in the end. But from an objective point of view we see that people create there own perspective for survival. It doesn’t matter who was right and who was wrong in the end. What matters is whether is guaranteed the survival of Fremen. No wonder Jessica considers the artificially planted faith for Lisan al-Gaib among Fremen as an act of giving them a hope.

In either way, some sort of meaning would ensure survival of the Fremen.

The meaning of the life given to us is the meaning we assign to it.

The Prophecy – A Perfect Example of Confirmation Bias

The Prophecy plays key role in deciding the fate of key characters in Dune Part Two. Although we are aware that the prophecy a highly detailed plan to get the hold on Arrakis there are certain moments which fool us in believing that the prophecy might really be true. There is one justification for the correctness and validity for the prophecy. Somehow any powerful member from Bene Gesserit could have unlocked the exact power to see the future like Paul or Lady Jessica this person who could have seen the future and made this prophecy. We get no such signs in the narrative, but the story has enough resources and reasons to make it a valid point.

The event of Paul riding an elder worm, the worm stopping for Paul and Jessica in Dune Part One while crossing the dessert, Chani’s teardrop bringing back Paul alive (although she is manipulated to do that) are such events which confuse us when we try to reject the Prophecy. Either Bene Gesserit were too good to plan the people and resources for making the prophecy a reality or the person who made prophecy also unlocked the powers which Paul unlocked.

It is very interesting when Fremen come in one-to-one contact with Paul and Jessica. They are so influenced by this prophecy that whatever Paul may do, they attribute it to the prophecy. In early part at Sietch Tabr when Stilgar (who is one of the fundamentalists) is having discussion with the Fremen elders, we are given a hint of this strong Confirmatory Bias in Fremen, especially the fundamentalists.

Stilgar – I saw things.
Elder – Stilgar, your faith is playing tricks on you.  

This is an indication to how a blind faith could drive people into looking for signs and making sense from anything that supports that faith.

You must understand that, the existentialism makes life as a meaningless affair – we try to calm our mind/ our senses by assigning a meaning, a perspective to make sense out of the creation. Cognitive Bias lies on the negative extreme of such existentialism. An existence where we are only accepting the events, signs which support out beliefs. This also the transition region where spirituality is converted into pure religion. Stilgar is the perfect example of one such religious follower suffering from Cognitive Bias.

It is also very understandable for the people like Fremen who have nothing hopeful to live and nothing to pivot on, the idea of savior from outer world fuels them to continue the fight for survival.  

There is subtle hint that Paul may not be the only messiah that Arrakis might have seen. The Emperor in his discussion with Princess Irulan mentions Muad’Dib as “some new Fremen Prophet”.

Confirmation Bias is the prejudice where we try to accept the proofs which support our beliefs and reject those which don’t. Fremen people demonstrate such high levels of confirmation bias because Arrakis is the only reality they live in. People living outside the Arrakis like the emperor, Bene Geserit very well know that this is an intentionally planned act. And they very effectively implant such prophecies over the generations. It also shows how difficult it is to reject and go against the conventional beliefs especially the religious ones.

Did you ever have had an encounter with people who tell that this was already written in the older documents, scriptures? When we made certain scientific breakthroughs only then we are seeing them clearly mentioned in older writings, how is it possible? It feels counterintuitive but I would say going by the data instead of the intuition always helps to break such biases.

It feels against our mind because our mind only accepts that which will support the current beliefs. If the current belief gets falsified then our mind will start looking for another belief system which is much more like an existential angst – the existential confusion and the sadness that comes with it. If one meaning is falsified the mind must stick itself to a newer one otherwise life will feel worthless.

Image source: sketchplanations.com by Jono Hey

Cognitive Dissonance and Identity – What Makes Paul to Seek the Ultimate Power?

The confirmation bias is more powerful when it comes to the questions like ‘who you are?’, ‘what is your identity?’

Generally speaking, you are the best person who knows who you are (except your parents and some people close to you). What would happen if you are presented with the data, proofs which indicate that your parents are not your parents, your friends are not really your friends? They are just some paid actors (just like in the movie Truman Show).

Paul is portrayed as the Prince belonging to the House Atreides which is powerful and believes in fairness, justice, and the truth. The ideas associated with House Atreides support constructiveness, upliftment of those who are getting used for others’ benefits. Paul also strongly associates himself with these ideas even when his house is attacked by Harkonnens. He never tries to take advantage of the Fremen beliefs for personal gains. That can also be explained by one of the reasons he has to reject the Fremen Prophecy.

Then what makes Paul to accept this prophecy even when he knows that there are more proofs to reject the prophecy than to accept it?

It is when he knows the truth about his identity. The moment when he drinks water of life.

Upon understanding the ultimate truth, we come to know that Paul’s mother Lady Jessica is the daughter of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Paul understands that he is as Harkonnen as his villainous cousin Feyd-Rautha.

This is where his identity of Atreides filled with justice clashes with the cruel and much more powerful identity of Harkonnen. You can see him telling his mother that this is the way they survive – by being a Harkonnen.

When a person goes through such uncomfortable events where his/ her beliefs clash it creates a in harmony. These are the events where the person is confused about what exactly he/ she should believe in. As the early beliefs which were true for him, on which the person lived whole life were inherently false what defines him now?

Paul faces this cognitive dissonance about his identity. He himself is a Harkonnes – the Harkonnes whom he was considering the villains of his life and the lives of the Fremens.

What identity would Paul chose makes him the hero or the antihero in the end.

And Paul chooses the Harkonnen identity which make him the antihero. Please understand that he could have chosen a fair Atreides or Fremen ways to fight for the cause. The circumstances created around Paul supported him to become as ruthless as the Harkonnens. The Emperor and the great houses denying his ascension further fuel his wish to remain ruthless to justify the actions. The moment Paul associates himself with the Harkonnens, he justifies his urge for power as a valid one. Paul forgets his Atreides roots which could have made him the hero of the Dune’s story.

The Pygmalion Effect – Is Paul Really the Messiah?

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

One factor in Paul’s journey to become the leader of the Fremen and ultimately the Emperor can be largely credited to the support system created around him. It is clear that he goes through many hardships and sacrifices to achieve his goal but you cannot deny the inherent public support he receives through Fremen. It only because of the support from the Fremen people you will see Paul build the confidence even though in Dune Part One this was the exact person who tried to deny future leadership in front of his father.

How a person refusing leadership of his own house later accepted the leadership of the most controversial group, that to in very adverse conditions? Leading house Atreides was Paul’s birthright, an easy one. But, leading Fremen in clear opposition of the House Harkonnen, the emperor and the great houses was one very daring act to follow. What gave him all this strength?

The answer is – Pygmalion Effect

In psychology, Pygmalion Effect is the effect where high expectation from a person lead them to perform highly and effectively even in adverse condition.

Pygmalion word comes from the story of a Greek sculptor called Pygmalion who falls in love with his sculpture so much that the statue comes to life.

It’s like worshiping the rock can make it a God which could ultimately is believed to fulfill wishes.

The Bene Geserrit propaganda very smartly takes advantage of this idea. They create such support system around Paul which create one powerful leader in the universe who in his early life was not considering himself worthy.

Pygmalion effect highlights how the environments in which we live, how the people around who put their trust in us can boot our performance. According to Pygmalion effect, if a high performing person can deliver poorly if the environment and people are not supportive, it also is true the opposite way, any low performing person would deliver exceptionally when he is trusted by the people and the environment around him.

Pygmalion effect is also known as Rosenthal Effect in psychology.  Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson conducted a study on classroom students where they found that the students who are inherently reinforced to be the smarter perform better whereas students who are told that they are worthless already show under-performance.

Pygmalion effect shows us that we internalize or identity based on the surroundings we live in. No wonder they say that when you want to be a great man be in the company of great people. This internalization of or beliefs lay the foundation of our performance. That is exactly why so many Fremens believing in Paul gave him the power to stand against the Harkonnens, the Emperor, the Great Houses – entire Universe.

This is exactly why Pygmalion effect is highly associated with the self-fulfilling prophecies. The declaration of such prophecy irrespective of the knowledge of the future conditions people to create ways for such prophesied person; the person who show some signs aligning with the prophecy gets a boost which ultimately follows the prophesied path as the environment now completely supports that path – that is the path of least resistance leading to the glory.

Supporting environment creates high performers

Paul could have chosen another path to fight just like Chani chooses in the end but the Pygmalion effects kicks in, leading him to become the antihero – a high performing powerful antihero.    

You should appreciate that Pygmalion effect also shows how the opposite and downgrading environment will create a villain. A famous and itching question can be answered using this explanation. If baby Hitler was killed way before, would it have prevented the occurrence of the future world war? The answer is – NO. The conditions were developed in such way that even after killing baby Hitler someone else would have risen among that much hatred who would have led to the end effect, the name would have been different but the acts would be roughly same and inhumane. That is why our environment is an important part of our identity, even if the environment is hostile, what we consider ourselves at the core is equally important.

Nonsupporting environment creates low performers

(You can see that, even in adverse nonsupporting conditions of cognitive dissonance and identity crisis, a person can chose to remain good, can choose one identity over the other. I have discussed such scenarios in pop culture before. Read more about that here.) 

The Prophecy – Does ‘Free Will’ Really Exist in Dune?

The identity which Paul chooses after a cognitive dissonance about his origin and the Pygmalion effect from his environment make his the prophesied Lisan al-Gaib. Now it feels like it truly was the plan all along. This goes against the idea of free will.

Existentialism is based on the idea that as man is born free. It is in his mind, his responsibility to assign the meaning to his/ her own life. The ways and reasons for which Paul consistently rejects the prophecy is because he knows he is not ‘the one’. He knows that he is the son of Leto Atreides and should avenge his father’s death, hence his only purpose was to use the ‘desert power’ to defeat the Harkonnens and the Emperor.

Paul despises everything that is connected to the Prophecy. It is his interest in Fremen people and purpose of completing the vision of his father which drives him into becoming one of the Fremen. You will see Paul rejecting the idea of him being the Messiah in the early discussions with Chani.

The creation of prophecy and instilling the faith into Fremen for Paul indirectly always pushes him into doing what is expected. Paul never makes any decision out of the box. There are chances where he could have created other opportunities but the people around him, his blind followers could never let that happen. Paul is center of attraction for everyone that is why he is always bound to do what they want, otherwise he knows that he will lose that advantage and desert will immediately consume him like any common outsider. The advantage of being the center of attraction of your followers is that your followers will justify your every action; But in the end, you will also be bound to their expectations.

The powers of Bene Gesserit to manipulate people to do what they want, the unfolding of events leading to the war during the Fremen rebellion against the Harkonnen, the necessity to prove injustice with Leto Atreides to the Great Houses ultimately make the realization of prophecy possible.    

That is exactly why Paul gets tied up in the expectations of Fremen, his own self-respect and his own duty as a son. He knows he can avoid this path but chooses that path because that is how he will have ultimate power.

On the other side you will see Chani, she is fighting the same war but can chose her own ways to accomplish that goal. Remaining out of the focus of the religious followers gives her more freedom.

Lady Jessica also falls victim to the prophecy. Stilgar informs her in Sietch Tabr that if she doesn’t become the Reverend Mother she would have to die and Fremen people won’t save Paul. Even when she knows that the prophecy is false, she accepts it as a way to get things done according to her wishes. But again, the pressure from the faithful Fremen followers force her to follow the prophecy. Things doesn’t go right for her in the end. Lady Jessica also faces the cognitive dissonance like Paul about her origin as Harkonnen and chooses the predefined path of being the Reverend Mother.

One must appreciate how Frank Herbert created the story of Dune where the psyche of person drives the narrative. Frank Herbert was heavily influenced by Carl Jung’s archetypes and Dune reflects those archetypes. Dune also gives the psychological justifications behind the blind hero worship through some important character arcs.

It becomes very important to notice our end goals and whether our surroundings, our people are supportive of that. We as humans, are the beings of infinite capabilities, what we consider ourselves internally at core becomes very important in the end. Otherwise, the world is already prepared to overwhelm us with its preconceived notions of living a life.  

References and further reading:

  1. Confirmation bias sketch from Sketchplanations by Jono Hey
  2. Cover Image by Johannes Havn from pexels.com
  3. Dune: Philosophy in Science Fiction
  4. The Pygmalion Effect: Definition & Examples by Ayesha Perera on Simply Psychology.org
  5. The Batman- The superhero who ‘unlearned’ – Journey of a person through cognitive dissonance
  6. Existentialism – Zima Blue and Existentialism
  7. Biases and Delusions – Steering on the borders of rationalism and insanity
  8. Answering the questions on existence of “the existence”
  9. The Existence – Why? How? And What?
  10. Dune’s Ornithopters and Biomimicry

Time in a Bottle – Making The Finite Life Last Forever

The moment we realize that we are in a possession of something truly valuable is the moment when we start fearing for its loss, even the idea of losing it haunts us. The urgency created by the finiteness of our lives is the reason why we could and should truly appreciate the people and things around us, it is the same urgency which pushes us to dare to live the life we want. Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle exposes this vulnerability as well as the strength of human beings in his song “Time in a Bottle”.

Remembering one the soulful artists – Jim Croce

Sometimes what poets, writers wish for is weird, quirky. Through this weirdness they are trying to overcome the realistic limitations we have as the human beings. Poets, songwriters are very well known to express their flights of imagination through their writings. They can make a man walk barefoot on the surface of the sun or make an elephant fly in the air making it light as feather or make a wild beast fall in love or make donkey sing like a tenor and list goes on. What makes these imaginations or these wishes special is that the imperfection these wishes’ originator wants to remove from the reality. When the poet makes a person walk barefoot on the sun, he/she wants that person to be able to tolerate and experience that hotness of the sun, when the poet makes the elephants fly, he/she wants them to have the bird’s perspective towards the world and there can be many interpretations depending on the core idea to be conveyed.

Wishes are one integral part of every person’s existence. Facts represent what the reality actually is and the wishes represent how we expect the reality to be. That is why every fact can be a wish but every wish cannot be a reality – a fact. That is where ideas like wishful thinking, false hope originate from. Even though wishes might not be the exact representation of reality – sometimes really far or exactly opposite it, they represent a hidden dimension of how we think and manage our expectations in day-to-day life. In simple words, we always wish everything to happen according to our ways but at the same time, we are also aware that “That’s not how things work in reality!”. And funny enough or given that our stubbornness to have control over the course of our lives, we still keep on wishing things to happen in certain way – our way.  Wishes represent the bridge between how we understand the world and how the world really is (and trust me very few or almost none of us have real understanding of how the world is!) You wish a thing to be like this and exactly that happens, now that reality originated from your wish is your understanding of how the world is. When this wish does not come to fruition, the exact opposite of that wish is how the world is for you.

In simple words, a wish is the most powerful tool of how we want our world to be; practical or impractical, it still exists for us through our wishes. Even when it does not come to fruition, it the only existent and personal thing that brings us calmness, peace in the world full of uncertainties. Having too many unrealistic wishes makes one delusional and having too much realism makes one emotionless, mechanical; so there exists a spectrum of how we manage our expectations.

Now that we have established what wishes mean and what should be their dosage in our daily life. Let us move on to a special wish a man had for his loved ones – especially for his baby and his wife. This guy was Jim Croce, an American folk and rock singer-songwriter. The date 20 September 2023 marks 50 years since we lost one of the most original and soulful artists and human beings. Jim’s “Time in a Bottle” song is the embodiment of the tragedy of his life which also point towards the tragedy of being a human; furthermore, it also shows an optimistic and truly important perspective towards living a limited, fragile but fulfilled life. Jim’s words – Jim’s wishes in this song are simple, just in exactly enough quantity but the ideas and thoughts expressed transcend the borders of the infinity.

If I could save time in a bottle 

The first thing that I'd like to do

Is to save every day 'til eternity passes away

Just to spend them with you

Jim wants to have total control over the time he can have. The moment he will have hold over time of his life he wishes all that time to be with his loved ones. Using as simple object as a bottle to contain such an intangible, uncapturable and extremely powerful object like the time shows how desperately he wishes to have control over the time just to have the company of his loved ones – his wife and his son.

It is only the daring of the songwriter’s imagination to make the concept of time as the ‘one with ends of start and finish’ thereby making it finite and “contain”-able in a bottle even after knowing that it is impossible.

The wish to save every day, to have hold over the time to spend shows how time is the most valuable currency we have as the mortal beings. Jim’s wish to transcend even the eternity furthermore intensifies his wish ‘to spend the life with loved ones’.

They say time is an illusion, but we know how treating time as an illusion or as an expendable item can make our mortal lives suffer even more. Even though we have a grasp on the theory of time travel, we have barely scratched on the surface of how to perceive time and control it. This inseparable and highly influential impact of time on our lives make them fragile and irreplaceable too. Jim knew this; that is exactly why when he says that he wants to contain time and eternity to spend them with his loved ones. He is realistically implying that he does not want to waste even a single moment of his life. It’s a good advice for every one of us too. 

If I could make days last forever

If words could make wishes come true

I'd save every day like a treasure, and then

Again, I would spend them with you

When Jim will get complete hold on eternity, he would still use that time fully with his family. The repetition of the idea expresses the urgency to not even waste the immediate next moment.

There is innate purpose in Jim’s wish to get hold on the things like eternity and time; things which do not have any boundaries or limits, things which cannot be contained into finiteness. The intent is to signify the incomparable value of the finite time we have in everyone’s life. Spending these moments in doing things we love, have passion for, and with our loved ones is the highest value one can extract from such an incomparable asset. This also a simple way to express how intensely and passionately Jim loves and cares for his family.

But there never seems to be enough time

To do the things you want to do once you find them

The wishes and imagination expressed by Jim show how immediately he wants to live his life lying ahead. The moment he introduces the word “but” here brings all of us from his imaginary world into the harsh reality of life that we live in. He expresses a common yet unexpressed feeling all of us carry inside every one of us.

We are always trying to find the perfect timing, perfect moment until we realize that the time we have here, is finite. There is no option but to make every moment count. If you look at the words of people who have realized that the time they have on this earth is really limited, you will understand how the value of time for them shoots up exponentially.

The moment we realize that we are in a possession of something truly valuable – the moment when we appreciate what an important thing we own, is the moment when we start fearing for its loss, even the idea of losing it haunts us. The moment we find the true happiness is the exact moment when we start doubting that this happiness will instantly perish and something bad will start happening. This is human nature, there is nothing wrong in it. It also highlights how loss of certain thing actually makes us appreciate the true value of that lost thing.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Steve jobs, Stanford Commencement Address, 2005

A true artist is an expert of bringing out such very common yet unexpressed emotions out to the masses through his /her creations. It creates this common ground where people from different walks of life – different levels of life share their common personal, intimate experiences. Jim beautifully puts down the tragedy of the finiteness of life and the urgency to live it, experience it thoroughly, inside -out. It is really heartbreaking to know that you won’t be there around your loved ones forever. And most importantly, the feeling of loss is more intense, dreadful than actual loss itself but that is what the reality is.

I've looked around enough to know

That you're the one I want to go through time with

Now what Jim says here is about how you can express your intense love, passion with practicality. He assures his loved ones that even though the time he has, the time all of us have is finite, we can still make it worth of our life by being with the people we love, by valuing them. This finiteness of our existence pushes us to appreciate everything, every person we have close to us.

You can see in the early part of the song, Jim expresses naïve, highly romanticized and somewhat foolish thoughts of being eternal forever to express the passionate love, affection towards his love. This early part of the song also indirectly reveals how carelessly we handle some important aspects and important people in our life, in our youth where we literally feel like immortals with infinite energy.

There comes a moment when we have to actually make decisions solely by ourselves which would alter the upcoming course of our very own life and there is no escape from these choices, at that same moment we understand what we hold dear to us, what actually matters, what is noise and what illusions we were following till that moment. Some would say that we become mature and more realistic. The perfect veil of illusions drops down showing the imperfect, crude reality. This is the moment we understand that even though the illusion was pleasing, the reality is where we actually exist and what could be more worthwhile than being with those who are special to us in this good and real time even though it is finite.

If I had a box just for wishes

And dreams that had never come true

The box would be empty

Except for the memory of how they were answered by you

The realization of the value of people, things, and moments in which we interacted with them makes us appreciate their real beauty. The time we must live may not be infinite but even in this limited time the memories we create with our loved ones make us truly immortal. These memories are the linkages which get carried on from one person to another sometimes from one generation to the next one.

When a person is granted with immortality but if he/she has no one to love, to care for or nobody cares for or loves him/her, then what realistic purpose does this eternal life serve? It is exactly equivalent to death.

Our existence is valid and real only when other people recognize it. It is a tough pill to swallow. Many would argue that the life comes from within, you are a whole universe existing inside you, you don’t need others to validate your life – your existence but please understand that these statements are valid only for the people whose value of life lies with the opinions of others. When I am expressing about the validity of our own life upon the recognition of others, it is the value creation and upliftment of the humanity inside of us due to the interactions we get involved into. You are a universe into yourselves but if you are not making other people’s lives better, affecting the objects, people in a constructive way you are an isolated universe which is exactly equivalent to living in your own imaginary world. It will still exist as a sole but that is one selfish way to live. Many undiscovered wonders are revealed when things interact with each other.

It might seem overly philosophical but when faced with the “existential crisis”, “existential angst”, “chaos of the reality and its imperfections” everyone needs an identity, a pivot to stick to make this life worthwhile. This feeling of making our life worthwhile is created only because of the urgency to live. And this urgency to live to its fullest is created due to the finiteness of the life.

Jim expressed this philosophy in his very simple yet powerful song. He appreciates that every purpose of his life found a direction towards completion, every wish he had was fulfilled at the exact moment when he decided to create memories with his loved ones. You must appreciate that most of the times our wishes create an illusive, deceptive reality in our head where everything is perfect, it is only upon exposure of these wishes to reality when the facts are revealed. These facts may not be perfect but they are the only real thing. That why memories are really very important.

Memories have similar nature to the imagination and wishes we have but they are the outcomes of we passing through the time. So, our memories are the next best things we have to the reality in which we live and not our imagination or wishes. Memories are the embodiment of the realistic imagination and wished realized. That is why we can make these memories eternal by creating them with our loved ones and engaging in the doing thing we love.     

But there never seems to be enough time

To do the things you want to do once you find them

I've looked around enough to know

That you're the one I want to go through time with

The needs and wants are less important than the moments we have with our loved ones. It is this irreplaceability of any other materialistic thing with the memories and moments in the company of the loved ones which Jim wants to highlight through his song.

There is one important story attached with the song “Time in a bottle”.  Jim wrote this song when he came to know that he was going to be a father. He was a struggling artist enjoying the artwork he created with the support of his wife. You can say that he was in the bliss of his artistic creations which he loved creating. When he understood the start of his fatherhood, he came to truly know and appreciate the reality of life and the finiteness it has. This made him serious about his art which inspired him to create his world-famous album “You don’t mess around with Jim”. Next time when you will listen to this song with the knowledge of what actually inspired him to write this song, then you will appreciate how deeply he loved his son and his wife. He wanted every moment from thereon to be filled with their memories and that was enough to justify his finite life, finite yet truly invaluable. One can call it poetic, sad, tragic or poignant- Jim died in a plane crash aged 30. It feels like Jim had some foresight about his upcoming life when he wrote “Time in a bottle”. Even with the lifespan of mere 30 years, you will appreciate his life through this song “Time in a Bottle”. His life, thus becomes an example of creating a long-lasting life – finite yet long lasting, eternal and irreplaceable life.   

The urgency created by the finiteness of our lives is the reason why we could and should truly appreciate the people and things around us.    

Who knows, in coming eon or maybe in coming millennium we might actually be able to contain time in a bottle, then Jim’s all wishes might become a reality. Until then let us appreciate what we have as this incomparable precious life.

Bedshaped by Keane – On Yearning, Melancholia and Intimacy

We are really great at understanding our happy, feel-good emotions and we are masters of enjoying such emotions but when it comes to the negative, grievous, melancholic emotions we fail to acknowledge them. Sad moments involving the loss of loved ones are incomparable to anything, anyone in the world. But awareness, acknowledgement, acceptance of such emotions can surely help one to justify meanings to their lives in newer ways.

The song – Bedshaped

Sometimes words fail to pinpoint the emotions one is going through where poetry and music are proven to be the strongest tools. Loss of the loved ones is one such feeling which is purely subjective thus is difficult to generalize. The melancholy from the loss of an intimate person, the feeling of a big void in existence and the irreplaceability of that person are such emotions that are very difficult to trade with other things. A song called “Bedshaped” written by Keane taps into such types of emotions.

“Bedshaped” is a song by English rock band Keane, released as the third single from Hopes and Fears. It became their third consecutive top-10 hit on the UK Singles Chart, after “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Everybody’s Changing”, peaking at number 10. The song also reached the top 20 in Denmark and the Netherlands.

For oversimplification, although not recommended for such a fine piece of art – this song highlights how we are always looking for that emotional pivot in our life and what happens when one loses that pivot. 

The Lyrics

The lyrics is written by James Keith Warnock Sanger / Richard David Hughes / Thomas Oliver Chaplin / Timothy James Rice-Oxley © CTM Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group

Many's the time I ran with you down
The rainy roads of our old town
Many the lives we lived in each day
And buried altogether

The poet is reminiscing the days he has spent with the person he is missing right now. He wants to remind this person that he misses that they lived those day together to the fullest and in such a way that every new day was a new life, everyday brought something new with it. These memories are not limited to the liveliness of the experiences from each days start only. They are also connected to how those moments disappeared at the end of those days. Whatever the days were, they both were together to witness those moments. This remembrance by the poet shows his longing for that special person – man or woman whoever they were. It is about a vacuum created by the loss of this important person.

Don't laugh at me
Don't look away

The poet is scared that there is no one left who can understand his state of mind. Now that there is no person left who were closer to him, intimate with him, who could care for him – he fears that the world will make fun of his confusion, directionless condition. The poet pleading to not be laughed at, not be ignored indicates that he is aware of the bad condition which he is going through but is helpless as nobody closer to him now exists.

The poet has become so self-judgmental that he has surety of people making fun of him instead of consoling him for the loss. One must understand why the poet has this innate fear and strong surety for the reaction of world for his loss; it is because he knows that the person he lost only and truly knew his personality – rest of the world will draw some conclusions instead of understanding the reasons behind his behavior.

One may call this emotion as the feeling of self-loathing because there is no one left for the person to reflect on the emotions of loss he is going through. The person has started to hate himself.

But there is some hope!

You'll follow me back with the sun in your eyes
And on your own
Bed shaped
In legs of stone
You'll knock on my door and up we'll go
In white light

The poet is so much consumed by the feelings of loss that he expects that this lost person or here we can say his spirit will come back to retrieve our poet to the after-world where they can coexist. “Bedshaped” indicates that this loss has made the poet so sick, immobile that the bed on which he is lying has become an extension of his body. The “legs of stone” indicate the disinterest poet has developed. He does not want to go anywhere. One must understand that this was the same person – the poet who had lived every day as new life with his beloved and now lost person. These are the feelings of depression due to the loss of the loved ones, but the poet hopes that their spirit may come back to rescue him.

I don't think so
But what do I know
What do I know

The poet expects that the strong bond of love may truly help him to recover from this loss but he is now so lonely that there is this uncertainty that this might not actually happen. The poet now moves on the boundaries of reality and illusions.

I know you think I'm holding you down
And I've fallen by the wayside now
And I don't understand the same things as you
But I do

This explains how the presence of a having loved one, and intimacy with such person can boost the self-esteem, confidence rather the whole personality of that person.

Now that the poet has lost such loved ones, he knows that he may not be the same confident person he was before. This makes him feel that he is not worthy of what that person made him. This feeling of becoming worthless again points to the emotions of self-loathing.

Now you should also understand that the poet is somewhat aware of what is actually going wrong an has this urge to recover from all this grief. He still bears the hope to come out of this alive but there is very fine line between the meaninglessness of his life and mere survival.

The Video

The video is stop motion animation directed by Corin Hardy. Which itself is fine piece of art.

The story conveyed in the video of the song actually deepens the meaning behind the song and amplifies the mixed emotions of grief, loss, self-humiliation, meaninglessness and most importantly the hope for liberation.

The video shows some short events in the day of a roadside naked drunkard who has lost the sense of his surroundings.

He misses the company of person he loved, the only person who truly understood him. He is miserable to pass this life on his own and alone.   

We can be sure of this meaning because the rest of the world is completely hostile environment for him now. He is running away from people. Hiding himself.

Running away from the people, he grieves in a restroom. The restroom here indicates the privacy he has, the shelter of some comfort with his intimate thoughts and the memories of his loved ones. We metaphorically, are inside his mind where he is trying to understand this loneliness. He wants to recover from this misery and feel liberated. Hope is the only thing that he relies on, hence we see him contemplating his ideas in this restroom.

The thoughts written on the wall indicate the chaos, the confusion that person has in his mind as he has no close person to show the direction, the ways. The isolation in the restroom with his thoughts with his degraded condition indicates the urge to find someone who truly cares for him and the meaninglessness in life created by the loss of the loved ones. 

You will notice that a cat brings him clothes from somewhere which somewhat lifts him up and that is also why he gathers the courage to revisit the world and blend in with the people in it. He tries to free his mind by letting go off the thoughts of misery.

Imagine what could have happened if a person would have given him the clothes instead of the cat. If a person would have offered him the clothes, then the chances for his recovery from grief would have been extremely high. Simple support from a non-human being gave him the hope to come out of his grief. Which is powerfully conveyed in the music video.

When this guy wears the clothes and tries to face the world, tries to vacate his mind the stares of unknown people again haunt him thereby pushing him again into his now chaotic and directionless mind.

This shows how sensitive a person is when he is facing the loss of his loved ones. The urge for the longing of the person who can truly understand you is strong in most of the people and there is nothing wrong in it.

Closing remarks

In the end of the music video, you will see the restroom the private room getting shattered and penetrated by ‘the white light’ this person was longing for. He is finally liberated. The song thus leaves at poignant and melancholic note where we are left to find out whether that liberation was his death or him losing all the control over his mind.

I would ask what’s the difference between them anyways? Does that difference really matter?

Longing for intimacy

Human beings are social animals not because they form some groups for mutual benefits so that everyone can survive, grow, prosper and leave something extra for the upcoming generations. A person cannot become aware about his existence without interacting with his surroundings. The crude awareness comes from the interaction with the materialistic things around the person but the core awareness of a person’s existence comes from their interactions with the people around them. That is why I think human beings are called social animals. We always assign our own value, our own worth (physical, financial, psychological, intellectual etc.,) relative to the things and people around us.  

It is also true that absolutely nothing is required to understand the existence of one’s being but that is only possible when one has understood what is means to exist relative to the things in their surroundings. You can say that the person who has achieved the topmost levels of spirituality won’t need anything to define themselves thereby becoming truly liberated, they are free from longing for anything but even these people have to go through the event of understanding their meaning for the existence through the relativity with the surrounding objects and most importantly people.

So, in every sense we as a human being always need some person with whom we can comfortably compare our worth – please understand that this comparison is not for competitiveness. Because when a person is actually seeking the meaning behind their existence – the words like competition, race and superiority have microscopic worth as if they don’t even exist. When the person understands where they actually stand with respect to this person then it justifies the purpose, the meaning of their being. This person becomes their pivot for the life lying ahead.

As the quote goes:

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Lao Tzu

Actually, it is not the power of love, it is the influence of having someone to justify our existence which brings out the best of the person. And who doesn’t want to be their best version? That is why love and its influence are powerful for human beings as social animals.

This is where intimacy comes in picture

Please note that intimacy is not limited to what lies between two people madly in love and neither is it limited to physical one. It can exist between two best friends, between a teacher and his pupil, between a manager and his subordinate, between an old grandpa and a young boy who are not actually related. Some people may call them soulmates and in most cases these relations are far from the blood relations although such intimate relations are possible in blood relations too. Also, understand that the intimacy can also be limited the self only but general examples are uncommon.

In very simple words, intimacy is that place of comfort where the person can be who they are without any judgements, benchmarks, and comparisons (although the basic logic emerges from relative comparison but it is not a competitive comparison. This is like the comparison where one realizes the similarity and differences in constructive ways)

So, when a person loses such intimate person in their lives the whole pivot of life, the center of the meaningfulness of their life gets destroyed which brings this existential crisis, the chaotic void, the unfilled vacuum. This loss of person and the feelings which come after that loss are difficult to express to everyone as intimacy can never be generalized.

In the first place, even before finding their intimate person people are always searching for their ‘go to’ person, they long for such person. Now you must understand how one feels when they lose such person they already have; being alive without their person is already a burden for them.

This might be my overthinking on a good song which just expresses how one feels when they lose their loved ones and how they consider their life completely meaningless in such cases. As the ability of words to express the exact emotions is practically limited and very subjective; whatever I have written may be meaningless to many and meaningful to a few or no one.

I think we are very great at understanding our happy, feel-good emotions and we are masters of enjoying such emotions but when it comes to the negative, grievous, melancholic emotions we fail to acknowledge them many times. I understand that such very intimate and highly personal losses are incomparable to anything, anyone in the world but awareness, acknowledgement of such emotions surely helps the person to justify meanings to their lives in newer ways because life itself represents boundless ocean of opportunities/ possibilities. Who knows someone might be needing exactly the same person you are. That surely will help the both sides. And that truly justifies we – the human beings as social animals (in a way). That is why songs expressing such emotions are very important.