Tag: Literature

A Trade-off Between Simplicity & The Reality

In spite of being originated from medieval philosophy, the law of parsimony which famously goes as Ockham’s Razor still remains practical in the modern times of AI and the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. Ockham’s Razor asks to cut all the unnecessary things while understanding any system to reduce complexity. This idea is a part of creating efficient ML algorithms. The tool of parsimony has its limitations too and these limitations can create an objective fake picture of the reality, and can be used to twist the facts.
People most of the times miss the point of parsimony which is to make a realistic attempt to check how and why our understanding of things which we have and the real nature of things differ, how can we fill the gap between what we theorize, what we can test and what real there exists.
Context thus plays very important role in every pursuit of knowledge, even in the knowledge of the self. It is important to understand the boundary conditions of our knowledge. One should know where their beliefs (even if they are true) can be limited, can be challenged, can be difficult to prove. That is why parsimony in any pursuit of knowledge needs to be handled with utmost care while studying the real nature of things.

Medieval Idea of Ockham’s Razor For The Modern World

Craving for Simplicity

One of the key driving factors for humans is to have complete understanding of how things work. The reason behind this is to maximize the chances of survival. Now in modern times those odds have become better. The urge to understand the working of things has been evolved into improving the quality of the survival or the existence.

The key events in the quest to understand everything that is there could be summarized as follows:

  1. There is some unexpected event which causes pain, suffering, loss (it can be opposite too, like extreme favorable growth, happiness, high gains. But the human tendency is to be more concerned about uncertain losses.)

Curiosity actually emerges from the urge to control everything that can be controlled and identifying what cannot be controlled and then working towards how to control uncontrollable things by understanding them in depth.

This is how we try to assign meaning to life, our very existence.  

  1. Then we try to observe similar events associated with such experiences, record them. We try to recreate them until we have clarity on the factors which are responsible for such events. We experiment the events repeatedly so that we can have a proper theoretical understanding or a concrete reasoning behind such events.
  2. The key factor for the reasoning to be accepted as the practical one is its consistency with another unconnected or remotely connected events. There is some “universality” in that reason or that theory.

This is roughly how we try to understand the existence. If one asks why we are always on the quest of understanding the existence the answers are diverse.

The simple answer I think is that our brain prefers simplicity so that it can spend the saved energy to maximize its chances of survival. Our brain hates complexity because once the complexity is accepted the uncertainty has to be accepted and then the brain would start to invest its energy into those things which won’t even get materialized but could get materialized because of the non-zero probability.       

Our brain craves certainty of survival.

This trait of brain to prefer simplicity might not be the nature of the reality in which it exists and tries to survive but if doing so maximizes the chances of its existence then it is a pretty much the best way.

In epistemology, the philosophy – the theory of knowledge this trait is investigated in depth. We will try to see one dimension of this thought which goes popularly as the law of parsimony and even more famously as Ockham’s Razor   

William of Ockham and Ockham’s Razor

William of Ockham was an important medieval philosopher, theologian who brought the law of parsimony into the focus. Although the idea was already in existence from Aristotle.

Aristotle believed that nature always works in efficient ways possible and thus the explanation for the events in nature ought to be the efficient ones.

Although Medieval, Ockham’s razor is one crucial idea in the age of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Ockham’s Razor emerges from his writing called “Summa Totius Logicae” exactly as:

“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” meaning “Plurality should not be posited without necessity”.

In modern Science, philosophy, the idea “simply” goes like this:

“Do not mix unnecessary things”

OR

“All things being equal the simplest solution is the best.”

Consequences of Ockham’s Razor

The principle of parsimony (lex parsimoniae in Latin) thereby Ockham’s Razor helps us to not complicate things when we are investigating them. It is used as a thumb rule or heuristic to generate theories having better predictability. The moment we are saying that the preferences should be to ‘the simpler theory with better predictability’ is the moment when people most of the times misinterpret the Ockham’s razor. Razor implying that chopping off everything unnecessary, if not chopped would contribute to the increase in the complexity thereby compromising the predictability. We will see how Ockham’s Razor affects positively and negatively when we are trying to understand the things around us.

Good consequences:

Search for the theory of everything

Aristotle’s belief that nature always chooses the efficient route to decide the fate of anything reinforced the idea that the theories which would explain the nature are the best if they involve the least possible variables.

Einstein’s theory of relativity and the equation of energy connecting to the mass is the best example to explain this. An elegant equation with mere 1 inch length encompasses all the big secrets of the universe.

The theory of relativity is elegant in a way that it covers Newton’s understanding of motion and gravity and furthermore extends it to the understanding of the black holes where Newton’s same theory would become limited.

Quantum mechanics explains everything that atom can create. It justifies why the earlier models of atoms were perceived in those particular ways (like atom being a solid sphere, a plum pudding, a thing with nucleus at center and electrons in their orbits).

Quantum mechanics thus is the most efficient way to explain what we observed and why we interpreted those observations in a particular way. Please note that the goal is not to falsify something, prove something wrong; the goal of knowledge or science is to understand why we theorized something in wrong way and why it doesn’t align with the reality we are trying to observe and understand.

Efficient Machine Learning Models – Generalization Error

In the age of AI, the efficiency of Machine Learning Algorithms is one crucial decision maker of the investments to be made to evolve it further. The key goal of any Machine Learning algorithm is to create a mathematical equation (or layers of mathematical equations) which would understand the data provided, make sense of it and now predict the outcomes after understanding the data.

This sounds simple while establishing theoretically but the real-life data one provides ML algorithms is filled with variety of noises – unwanted, unconnected, irrelevant data points.

If the ML algorithm would try to fit the noise too, it would add too many variables in its mathematical equations. Now the model would fit each and every data point but at the same point it loses confidence to predict the outcomes because the noise is not really connected to the system one is trying to define.

That is why a complex ML algorithm fitting all the data points (R2=1) is an ideal situation – ideal meaning practically impossible because it is exposed to a very limited dataset. An ideal ML algorithm has a “generalized” idea of the data points on which it was not trained. Meaning that this ML algorithm has such an effective understanding of what is happening in the dataset with least number of equations that it is now able to understand what could happen if something is to be predicted outside of its training dataset (Q2 – algorithm’s ability to predict the unseen data – should be maximum). L1, L2 regularization techniques used in ML are example of that. Now the ML algorithm is not just interpolating proportionally the points in between, it has its own mathematical justifications to decide whether and how to interpolate aggressively or not – in order to predict the realistic outcome.

Ockham’s Razor thus proves to be important in the age of AI to select efficient algorithms, efficient algorithms ensure efficient use of power, resources thereby the investments.

Parsimony in Psychology – Morgan’s Canon

In very simple words, I would say three words to explain what this means – “Life of Pie”.

The movie Life of Pie has a moment when Pie’s father tells him that the emotions which Pie is seeing in the Tiger Richard Parker’s eyes are mere the reflection of how Pie feels the tiger would be feeling i.e., hungry in that specific case.

In animal psychology (Comparative Psychology) researches, Morgan’s Canon asks scientist to not over-attribute any human quality that humans possess to animals without any concrete basis.

“In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development.”

The scene from Life of Pie strongly resonates with Morgan’s canon.

There is a reason why Morgan established this idea. We humans have a tendency to see human form in everything that is not even human – this is anthropomorphism. While studying animals, these anthropomorphic tendencies would mislead each and every study because other animals and human share many common things. Unless there is no strong evidence to justify the human like intelligent behavior the simplest explanation should be selected to justify the behavior of the animal in their psychological studies.

These are some of the examples where Ockham’s razor proves to be very valuable.

Bad Consequences (limitations of Ockham’s Razor)

There is other side to simplification of things, we will now see how people misinterpret the principle of parsimony thereby Ockham’s Razor.

Universe might prefer complexity to exist

In the pursuit of the theory of everything, Einstein himself was confused that “how could God play the dices?” How can one bridge the gap that exists between the theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics. One explains the heavenly objects and the other explains what lies at the bottom of the bottom of particles which make the universe existent.

One will realize that there is more than what we are using in current theory which needs to be considered to explain the reality in a better way.

One reason why Einstein was genius of all times is because he knew that something was missing in his theory. He was not ashamed of the complexity the theory of everything may carry. Even while speaking about his elegant theory of relativity Einstein had this opinion:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Those who are actually working in the field of AI would explain this to you that how difficult it is to create an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Even though we have some of the greatest chat-bots, AI assistants, AI agents, they are experts in executing specific tasks only. They can immediately get biased, they can be fooled easily, bypassed easily.

The key reasons behind these shortcomings are many. The AI tools perform the best when they are designed to perform specific tasks, they lack common sense like the humans do, they lack the emotional dimension in the decision making (one of the important aspects of how humans generalize the understanding of their surrounding), they cannot directly build the bridges between their algorithms unless enough data is provided. AI doesn’t have intuition which humans have developed over the thousands of years of natural evolution.

It is also important to understand how greatly we underestimate the computation and decision-making capability of our brains and how much power it takes to replicate the same in machines. 

So, maybe complexity is prerequisite for AGI and thus the enormous number of resources that will be required to achieve it.

Human like intelligence in Animals

The story of Koko and Robin Williams could be good example to explain this. Koko – a female gorilla was trained in American Sign Language (ASL) by Francine “Penny” Patterson. Penny called this language as Gorilla Sign Language (GSL).

Penny with Koko

There is a very famous video of the meeting between the movie actor Robin Williams and Koko. Soon after the death of her gorilla friend Michael, Koko met Robin Williams and she laughed after a long time along with Robin, she played with him, she even recognized Robin from his movie cassette cover.

Robin Williams having fun with Koko

When the instructors of Koko told her about the death of Robin Williams, she expressed her grief by signaling the instructors if she could cry, her lips were trembling in grief. See the emotional depth she had just like normal humans do.

Dolphins are also one good example to demonstrate human like intelligence in animals.

This means that Ockham’s Razor, Principle of parsimony or Morgan’s canon are of no use. What is happening here? What goes missing during the oversimplification? What are we misunderstanding?    

What goes missing in simplification?

The main problem with Ockham’s razor or its any other equivalent philosophies is the convenience they bring. Just like by collecting a biased data you can actually prove anything wrong which in reality is right, in the same way people misinterpreted the principle of parsimony.

The key reason for William of Ockham to support the principle of parsimony was because he was a nominalist. “Nominalism” says that there is nothing common between anything and everything that is there in reality. Everything has its own individual nature and what we see common in many things collectively are just the ‘names’ given to them. The red which we see in blood and in rose is just the name of the color and there is nothing like red which actually exists on its own.

This means that the color which we see in things, there is no such thing as color in its absoluteness, it is just some signal our eyes generate to tell brain the difference between the light absorbed and light reflected or the temperature of the surface of the object.

So, William of Ockham posed that as everything has its own attributes individually, when you are trying to create a philosophy for a group of things, you should consider only those individual attributes which are necessary to create a theory.

(William of Ockham himself drifted away in his ideas of Parsimony and Nominalism; I will discuss that specifically in the Philosophy of Nominalism next time.)

What people still misinterpret today when they talk about Ockham’s razor is “to select the simplest explanation to things”. This is not what he meant actually.

Same is the story with Morgan’s Canon. Morgan’s main intent was to have a concrete justification when someone is explaining human-like behavior in animals. His idea was that the conclusions should be reasoning-based and not based on the observation that animals in the study had that specific type of intelligence. The idea was to observe without any preconditioning, prejudice or any impression or expectation.

I have already explained how Einstein was a genius; he was very well aware that during creating the very elegant understanding of the universe he might have missed something on the expense of simplification.

The standard mathematical model in particle physics looks like this (maybe sometime in future I will be able to appreciate and explain it to its core):

Context is everything

Now you will be able to appreciate why Ockham’s razor is a tool and not the final truth. People exploit Ockham’s Razor to demonstrate their philosophical grandeur and simplify the meaning to their favors consciously (sometimes unconsciously).

What people ignore is the purpose of the chopping unnecessary parts in any process to develop understanding, philosophy or theory. The goal was never to simplify things, the goal was to remove things which would interfere in the process of testing our hypotheses.

People most of the times miss the point of parsimony which is to make a realistic attempt to check how and why our understanding of things which we have and the real nature of things differ, how can we fill the gap between what we theorize, what we can test and what real there exists.

Context thus plays very important role in every pursuit of knowledge, even in the knowledge of the self. It is important to understand the boundary conditions of our knowledge. One should know where their beliefs (even if they are true) can be limited, can be challenged, can be difficult to prove because what we know is just a drop, what we cannot know is ocean.    

I think what people miss in simplification or parsimony is the context and context varies from situation to situation.

Scientifically, Newton’s laws of gravitation have no problem when we are talking about our solar system. In fact, they are so accurate that modern space missions still rely on these laws. There rarely is any need to use the science of black holes in most of such missions.

The context is the precision of deciding the trajectory of objects in solar system.

But, when it comes to Global Positioning System (GPS), the theory of relativity becomes important. The bending of space time due to earth’s mass and the slowing down of time for navigation satellites from it and the time adjustments for atomic clocks at these two points matters a lot. Newton’s laws cannot explain that.  

The context is how precise can the time be measured and how the difference in time can be connected to the understanding of the position of the object around the globe.

It is very easy to demonstrate how Ockham’s razor still remains important in scientific community and how scientists are aware of its limitations.

It becomes problematic when we try to understand and justify life with it.

The problem is that we get to decide the context (most of the times)

Call it a blessing because scientific community is always in the state of its own renewal because it relies on objective evidences, but it is still not immune to missing context or wishful context. (The falsified biased scientific studies published to create confusions are best example of that.)

The best example of losing context while still being scientific or unbiased is the Debates on News channels or any debate (sadly) that exists on popularity. Soon you will realize that the context of most of such debates is to entertain people, create controversies and not find the ultimate truth or facts.

In the very opening of this discussion, I had explained how our brains try to optimize processing to save energy for better tasks to guarantee better survival. The death of our own beliefs, our identity is also failure to survive. Psychological, ideological death is as equal as the actual death, maybe it is more painful than real death for almost all of us. Religion is one stream of such ideologies where people are ready to die physically just because the religious beliefs, they live for should remain alive. Most of the people are scared of mathematics not because it is too complicated, they fear math because it shows them the vulnerabilities in their process of step-wise thinking, same people can be expert dancers, master artists, master instrument players which involve rather more complicated mathematical manipulations – music in a simple way is manipulation of certain sound wave-forms. The music theory, harmony, color theory, physiological manipulation of body with the rhythm, and sound are all purely mathematical concepts. It’s just that we don’t want ourselves to remain in the states of vulnerabilities for longer times. It’s equivalent of exposing cover to our enemy thereby reducing our chances of survival.

The thing is that the tendency of nature to choose the path of least resistance gets reflected in our own nature too. Which is why simplification and Ockham’s Razor seems attractive. But at the same time, we forget that it is the same nature whose deliberate and continuous actions against the adversities made us who we are, made impossible things possible for us.

Daniel Kahneman has explained the two cognitive systems our brain uses in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.

System 1 is fast and intuitive good for repetitive tasks but bad at finding biases, errors, hostile to new and complicated scenarios.

System 2 is slow and deliberate for analytical and reasoning-based tasks but is not effective for routine tasks.

The people who exploit Ockham’s Razor (even William of Ockham himself! –  this story will show up in post on nominalism!) are oversimplifying things because the belief they have is justified through it. It will stand some limited tests but the moment it is exposed to universal tests they fail. And that is how religions, sects, faiths operate when they are blinding people from the real truths. I am not saying religion is bad, I am saying how objectivity in religion can be used to show its scientific nature and still fool the people. Same can happen in scientific communities, all of the pseudo-scientific concepts are one great examples of that.

Now you can see the problem. People want to create understanding of the surrounding not because they really want to understand it. They want to do it because it will feed the beliefs they already have and Ockham’s Razor or the principle of Parsimony is a great tool to facilitate that. In the end, it is just a tool. How it impacts the creation is solely based on the intent of the one who is using it.

That is exactly why when you are questioning something or are standing against something or supporting something ask yourself this one question:

Are you doing this for understanding the reality or to feed your own wishful picture of reality?

So, whenever you are trying to understand something make sure that your context is to really understand the thing and not expect it to be in certain thing you wish. Remember, you are the controller of the context and it is very easy to fool ourselves.

Further reading:

The Essence of Nominalism

Suffering – The North Star of Existence

People have tried to justify their existence with happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, service, love, hope, devotion and what not. But those who have existed in full spirit, lived it to the fullest have realized the effect of sufferings on our lives and even after overcoming them are ready to endure them again in the hope that they will become better than what they were before. These are the people who might have solved the query to justify the life. Overcoming the sufferings in life and continuing the journey ahead could be the answer.

On Charles Dickens’s short story –  A Child’s Dream of A Star

The Impact of Suffering in the Pursuit of Happiness

Question- what would you choose of the following?

A short life filled with happiness and satisfaction? or A long life filled with pain and suffering?

I will assume that you have selected one.

Charles Dickens’s short story – A Child’s Dream of A Star

I came across a short story “A Child’s Dream of A Star” by Charles Dickens which shows what it means to pass through the suffering of the lost loved ones.

This is a story of a boy who loses many loved ones throughout his whole life. Whenever he is losing someone, he dreams of a star where he sees the souls of his loved ones meeting and coming together. First, he loses his little sister in childhood, then his baby brother. When he grows young, he loses his mother, while being adult he loses his own daughter. Every time, when the boy loses his people, he dreams of the same star and wishes that he too could join them. But, when grown adult and losing his daughter he is somewhat soothed that his daughter is not alone, she has the angels of his sister, mother and brother to accompany her.

When he realizes the arrival of his last moment, he accepts the death for the joy that he will join the souls of his loved ones now.

The Suffering of Watching People Leave

Charles Dickens in a very impactful way shows what it means to live life. On surface analysis, one can say that this short story of a boy dreaming about the people he lost and asking for his own death in the hope to join them is about the pain of losing the loved ones and dissatisfaction of not getting enough time to spend time with them and love them. Deep down it is about how one endures pain and I think the only way to endure such pain is to pass through it. Any attempt to alleviate or even control it, leads to more pain.  

Enduring the Suffering

The great thing about this story is that it delicately captures what a beauty that life we live in is and how we connect same attributes of life to the afterlife (even when we are unsure whether it truly exists, even when it exists in our minds and dreams) also how fragile our existence is.

Charles Dickens used the innocence of the child’s mind to show how we carry that innocence throughout our life to use every chance to stay closer to the people we love. The opening of the story also talks about the sorrow that is felt by everyone when someone dies.

“They used to say to one another, sometimes, supposing all the children upon the earth were to die, would the flowers and the water and the sky be sorry? They believed they would be sorry. For, said they, the buds are the children of the flowers, and the little playful streams that gambol down the hillsides are the children of the water; and the smallest bright specks playing at hide-and-seek in the sky all night must surely be the children of the stars and they would all be grieved to see their playmates, the children of men no more.”

It shows that even for children the suffering had a bigger meaning not even when they had faced any such suffering from loss in their tender age.  It shows how by default we are hardwired for the sensitivity towards suffering. Maybe we are more sensitive to suffering than love.

Then we see that the boy is exposed to multiple losses and you will see over the time his dreams are evolving gradually. In early childhood loss of his sister, he is totally devastated that he could not join his sister, then he is again agitated with the thought that his younger brother has to join her in the starry heaven. Then when he is young, he is somewhat settled that his mother could join his sister and the brother.

Now when being adult and losing the beloved daughter, the same boy has made peace with her death in the thought that she has enough people to take care of her and maybe love her more. Now he has made amends with the death.

“My daughter’s head is on my sister’s bosom, and her arm is round my mother’s neck, and at her feet is the baby of old time, and I can bear the parting from her, God be praised!”

You must understand how the boy from childhood till his old-age sees the death in different ways. At first, he has intense sorrow for his sister but over the time he sees that even after death the people he loves have each other’s company.

He cannot do anything to join them in the afterlife and death is the only way to join them. Please note that there is not even single mention or any indirect indication that boy wishes to end his existence just to meet his loved ones in afterlife.

So, it’s a story of how a person builds himself towards the suffering. You will see that the boy never gets numbed because of the series of losses, he is hopeful that at least someone is there in afterlife for them to love each other. Death along with love is the only constant in this story.

We are well aware of the love from the very beginning of our existence but it takes time to appreciate that just like love, death too is eternal. It’s just that our minds find it difficult to bring together the idea of eternal nature of love and never-ending series of death in single thought. Maybe that is why not everything exists at exactly the same time and ends at exactly the same time, otherwise there would be no one to witness and appreciate what one existed in and carry that forward.

The Eternal Curiosity, Innocence and Love

I am adding the concept of eternity, endlessness in this story of involving series of deaths, ends and sadness with it, because that is how the life is. The symbolism of star used in this short story by Charles Dickens also points to that idea.

You should notice that in the opening it is about how everything that is there in existence will feel sad for loss of the children of men. The boy feels that sorrow in his childhood; later on, we realise that he holds these unfulfilled emotions, feelings of not getting enough time to spend with the people he has lost. These emotions are continuously getting reflected in his dreams. In the end, we see that he is dying happily while feeling that he can love them again in the afterlife.

But you should now notice that the dream is limited to the boy only. What is real is the star in this story; the star shining on little sister’s grave and was still shining on her brother’s grave who died at old-age.

Just like the children’s curiosity about whether the nature grieved for the losses in the beginning of the story, we can say that the star (being the child of nature) would also grieve for the people he saw dying. But that is not where the story is going. The boy had learned to handle the grief over time and that is why is mature emotionally with the death of his daughter and even his own death. This became possible because his love for his sister increased multiple folds, got intense over the time.

The maturity that comes to such sorrow is worth noticing, the boy now an old-age man is not sad because he will be leaving his children behind. He is neither happy that he will join his loved ones in the afterlife (although what he says while dying means that he is eager to join afterlife).

The star was a construct of his mind to move over the grief and be assured that no one – not even him will never be left unloved. He had a strong belief that at least love is eternal in some or other forms. The star still shining upon his grave in the last sentence of the story is thus the symbol of the child’s innocence and love.      

The last words of the boy/ man are these:

“…My age is falling from me like a garment, and I move towards the star as a child. And O my Father, now I thank thee that it has so often opened to receive those dear ones who await me!”

We all can appreciate that the afterlife’s notion is only in the boy/ man’s dreams but that does not invalidate his feelings. He is grateful that he had someone to love (although he couldn’t love them to the fullest while living). The childhood innocence and curiosity he carried throughout his life helped him to endure the suffering. Curiosity because of the urge to understand what would happen to the people who die gets materialized in the dreams of the boy and thus he builds his understanding around it. This curiosity emerged because he cared for them so strongly that he was concerned about what would happen to people after they die. Innocence because from childhood till old-age he deeply believes that just like the children of nature, everyone and not only him cared for people, loved them in some or other ways.   

Conclusion

Most of the existential queries on human life point to one single question of meaning or purpose or at least worth of the life. Once started, if it is destined to end then why is this everything existing? And this question is not just about life. It is about everything attached to the life itself. If everything in existence is attached to something and everything at any time will be lost forever, disconnected forever then why does everything exist in first place? Once you appreciate this question, you will see that existence is majorly a series of detachments, losses – literally and figuratively. It is just that some things detach faster than others, some things stay for longer time but are lost in the end; we are just existing in these gaps of losses and detachments. Maybe how we felt about those things especially the innocent emotions we had for everything that is there (which are neither good/ bad, pure/ impure) are eternal. If not eternal, I would say that they evolve in better ways, get refined, gain maturity and get transferred to our next generations through our legacy. Maybe they too would have an ending but what can we say about the human spirit! The spirit to exist in spite of the sufferings! The ability to exist in full spirit and endure multiple sufferings over the time while maintaining that innocent child alive inside you is what justifies our existence in the end. And even that is to end in the end, I have no complaints.

So, when I asked to select one of options at the start, if you felt that selecting only one of these is foolish (or difficult/ meaningless) then welcome to the club!

People have tried to justify their existence with happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction, service, love, hope, devotion and what not. But those who have existed in full spirit, lived it to the fullest have realized the effect of sufferings on our lives and even after overcoming them are ready to endure them again in the hope that they will become better than what they were before. These are the people who might have solved the query to justify the life. Overcoming the sufferings in life and continuing the journey ahead could be the answer.

Feminine Side of Masculinity

Most of the times, we are forgetting that when we are promoting and asking for individual freedom, individual expression, individual identity we have ignored what it means to reserve the same rights for others. Ernest Hemingway’s short story called “In Another country” from his collection called ‘Men Without Women’ shows what men lose when they have no one of their own to open up, express, share. Hemingway’s writings although were heavily influenced by his personal experiences of war, the ways in which his men handled emotions is exactly same as how modern men are still handling their own emotions. They are not handling them at all, they are suppressing them, running away from them.
Men are so strongly conditioned with the trait of showing themselves unaffected by whatever life throws at them that now they have accepted it as their second nature. There is a specific psychological term called Alexithymia which literally means “a lack of words for emotions.” You can see alexithymia in Hemingway’s “so-called” masculine characters.
The remedy to all these complications is creation of more open spaces for men. We need men to open up at least among themselves, at least a man needs to treat other man’s emotional, expressive side, others will eventually follow.

Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women

The Paradox of Individualism

It is always interesting to question what would happen if we were not exposed to certain things, experiences especially the people. What we would be of us if those events, those people had not crossed our life path? We definitely would have been someone else. In a sense we are what is happened to us and where we lived and with whom we lived. One can say that man himself is enough to justify his own existence, he doesn’t need anything else or anyone else to live through his life, to pass through it and there is no denying in that.

One must understand that people can spend their whole existence as an isolated being, a person unaffected by the surrounding and molded completely by his/ her own being, not by others and without the influence of the surrounding. You will see that what I explained in the last sentence seems illogical. How could a person be completely be detached throughout his whole time on earth filled with many things, events, people? The answer to this confusion is that the person assumes that he/she was alone all along the time thereby mentally erasing every instance where they had a company, such people have mastered the art of removing every influence their surrounding had on them. Human children are anyways some of the weakest off-springs among the many species on earth. A new born baby continuously needs support from parents/ surroundings to finally become self-dependent. Now, one cannot deny the fact that even if you can live on your own, what you call as “your own” which substitutes for the void of the external influences is ultimately created from that very surrounding you are trying to deny to prove your individualism. This “your own” internal support could be anything – your identity, your habits, your religion, your mind, your way of thinking, your way of seeing things. Now you must appreciate that even though we can control what we are, once we are matured/ independent we cannot completely erase what brought us here.

The concept of individualism itself needs supporting justification, there is nothing like an isolated being. In order to define isolated or individual, you have to define what it is not and that invites everything that exists out there.

The whole point of starting the discussion with the idea of futility of individualism is one short story I came across, rather the book’s whole point is the denial of individualism. It shows that even if one justifies their individualism, it immediately rips them from their real version. The person creates a defense mechanism to avoid certain unsettling feelings just to satisfy their version of self. Men need safe space of women or at least a feminine side of humanity to express, to vent out or at least to acknowledge what they are feeling in front of other human being. If men are not given such space, they are no longer men, not even human.

The book I am talking about is Ernest Hemingway’s collection of short stories called Men Without Women. These stories show how men are flawed when they try to erase or are forced from external factors the influence of women from their lives, how it steals their true masculinity, true humanity. I will deep dive into these aspects as discussion evolves.

The short story from Men Without Women which intrigued me is “In Another Country”. I like this story because is direct reflection of who Ernest Hemingway was. It is written in first person point of view and the factual details of Hemingway’s biography overlap with the locations, events mentioned in the story, so the Hemingway’s fiction brings a realism.

In Another Country – Summary

I won’t go into every nook and cranny of the story, because I want to invite you into reading that 15 min short story all for your own interest.

Even if I spoil the story here, reading the details of the story and building your own interpretations are one personal and exquisite experience. This is because of the iceberg theory attributed to Hemingway’s characteristic writing style. He will not explain everything or show everything that is there in the story. The limited narrative and limited details make the reader to evaluate multiple attributes and possibilities and thereby interpretations so Hemingway’s writing create a very subjective and personal experience in readers. I think only a piece of great art, only a masterpiece can create subjective experiences in people. And that is exactly why art is important, it makes people see what they already had but always denied because they were busy in creating something totally irrelevant – the irrelevant which they didn’t even want in first place.

So, here goes the summary –

The narrator talks about his routine to a hospital for a therapy session for those injured in the war in Milan. He is American but fighting for Italy and is decorated for his sacrifice. He is accompanied by three decorated Italian officers and one more boy who was disfigured on the very first day at the front of the war. They go to this therapy session to somehow restore their original physical functions. The narrator is always made aware through the surroundings and people around him that even though he sacrificed himself for the people he still is an outsider. It is just because he was dutiful that he deserves respect from the localites. In his therapy he is accompanied by a Major who treats the narrator good and is also helping him to improve his Italian. One day while casually discussing what their future would be, the Major gets triggered by the mention that the narrator wishes to get married. He aggressively suggests the narrator to not get married because it will bring the pain and suffering in the end. He suggests that if one knows that he is going to lose something then one must turn away from attaching to it in first place.

The Major then immediately leaves the discussion and goes to make a phone call where he receives the sad news of the demise of his wife. The major apologizes to the narrator and remains absent for few days and rejoins the therapy session although he has no expectation to fully recover from this therapy session.

Deep Analysis of In Another Country

As I have already mentioned that Hemingway’s stories are like icebergs, they reveal very little than what they carry below. I would invite you to explore Ernest Hemingway’s biography to understand why it might be so. He faced multiple injuries, illnesses, traumas throughout his whole life. If you see the list of the illnesses Hemingway went through you will definitely say that the life loved him. Tragically he ended his life by himself. On surface reading you will see that Hemingway is a strong proponent of strong masculinity but deep down just like an iceberg he was not what he showed. I have reasons to prove that just through this single short story. Just keep in mind that there is more to what Hemingway said and showed to his readers and it was truly an imagery of what was going in his own mind.

Lack Of Warmth

The ways story opens, the narrator talks about the cold season of fall in Milan. The meat of hunted animals is hanging and the foxes were just there in the snow. There are three canal crossing bridges along the path to the hospital. The narrator would prefer the bridge where woman who roasted the chestnut used to sit. The narrator mentions that her charcoal fire and the roasted chestnuts ensured enough warmth before reaching the hospital.

This is Hemingway’s way to tell that the surroundings were completely hostile for the narrator, the short-lived warmth of the charcoal fire and the hot chestnuts in pocket thereafter thus highlight how much the narrator valued warmth. Even though narrator is not ordered to go on war and perform his duty now it was not a better situation too. There was no one to provide ‘that’ warmth of familiarity, relationship, love to the narrator. If it wasn’t for the duty, he would not have got into this.

Duty murders the true identity and the ambition of men to become their true version

We are told that the narrator is accompanied by four Italian soldiers for a therapy session in the hospital. They are practiced with some machines to improve their physical movements which were the result of war injuries. A major with hand injury is also undergoing physical therapy to recover from war injury.

Three of the Italians who accompanied the narrator wished to become something different before the war started. One of them wanted to be a lawyer, one wanted to become the painter and third one wanted to become a soldier. The Major suffered from hand injury was the greatest fencer in Italy – a technique where the dexterity of hand is crucial.

There was one more boy whose face was disfigured the very first day he was sent on the war front. He had lost his nose.

You must now understand it’s not just a character introduction or description in Hemingway’s short story. Hemingway very subtly shows how men sacrifice their own ambitions to carry out their duties. Two of the three Italian soldiers wished to become something totally different than what they are now just because war demanded the sacrifice of their own ambitions, dreams. The Major sacrificed his precious, skillful hand while carrying out the same duty of war.

The boy with disfigured lost his identity even before understanding what he was entering into. The disfigured face is not mere description of the grave injuries. Hemingway shows readers that men lost their identities in the war. 

Men sacrificed their wishes to carry out the duties given to them, they did it because that is what every man should do.

Men are loved just because they are dutiful and not for who they truly are

I really appreciate how Hemingway maintained subtlety in his writing while making us feel like he is just describing the characters of his story.

The readers are now well aware that this is about a group of well decorated, brave, dutiful soldiers who were undergoing rehabilitation in the hospital. They are not some losers who just suffered because of negligence or disinterest towards going to war. Rather even though against their will and wish, they went all in with the sense of duty. Then Hemingway tells us about how the localites treated them.   

People from communist quarters of Milan actively hated them. After the therapy sessions, the group has routine to visit the café, where the narrator comes across the locals. When the narrator is asked about his medals by the locals, he is somewhat happy that people care for what he had done for them. This happiness is short lived for him and not really a happiness. The moment localites see that he is an American, they immediately changed their behavior towards him. He is immediately made to feel like an outsider.

You must understand how painful this feeling is. The moment people see treat like you are not one of them even after you sacrificed yourself for the same people is a betrayal for such man, a man of honor and duty. It’s equivalent of death for such men.

This is also one way of Hemingway to show that generally society appreciates men, loves men for what they can do for the society. Society in deeper sense never appreciated men for what they are. The moment men stop the duty towards others they are worthless. The moment men will try to show what they are very few will be appreciated for what they are, very few men are loved and liked for what they are. Hemingway also shows how the war crushed the human-ness among the people.

Together But Lonely – Alienation Among Men

Hemingway effectively shows how the military instincts or trainings have conditioned men of different personalities to come together and work toward a common duty.

“We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital”

At first narrator shows us that there is some sense of collective-ness in this group of soldiers. Even people from the communist quarters hate them collectively.

But soon you will see that they are not quite there for each other, it’s just that the circumstances are in that way.

This is evident when the narrator calls three of the decorated officers as “hunting -hawks” and denies to be one of them.

You will also see that the narrator craves for meaningful company when he mentions how his group has to “jostle” through the crowd of men and women from the wine-shops.

For now, the only meaningful connect he has with his group is the trauma of war shared amongst these soldiers. You will see that the narrator finds it difficult to relate to the mainstream crowd – the crowd from wine-shops and the streets of the Milan.

“We felt held by there being something that had happened that they, the people who disliked us, did not understand.”

The narrator has this subconscious feeling of being unliked by the people around him. This is some sort self-rejection, self-loathing because even after sacrifice he is made to feel like an outsider.

Self-pity And Surrogate Sympathy

You will see that the narrator feels some authentic connection with the boy with disfigured face and the fencing master Major who is undergoing therapy for his hands. The reasons to feel this connection are actually not that authentic, it’s just the narrator’s psyche which is trying to find a pivot of relatability to create a sense of belonging.

You will see this when the narrator mentions that while he sees the three Italian soldiers like “hunting hawks” not counting himself like them, he feels a connect with the one who has his face disfigured. The justification is purely intellectual. It’s because the ill fate that boy faced at the war front and he wasn’t even decorated for anything. The narrator sees this as an ill-fate for the boy because he didn’t get anything in return for what he sacrificed. The narrator at least got some recognition so he sees himself in better condition than the boy. It’s that feeling where the person himself sees him in a poor condition but when he sees others in even worse condition, he creates a sense of satisfaction just because others are living way worse than they deserve. There is nothing wrong in this feeling. It’s just how a person going through trauma tries to find a sense of belonging through pity and sympathy.

Men’s Inability To Communicate And Express Emotions Clearly   

Hemingway’s iceberg style writing peaks here.

The narrator is seen to make an attempt to speak in Italian with Major. He feels that he is able to speak Italian fluently but the moment Major asks him to speak with the awareness of Italian grammar, the narrator feels that speaking Italian is difficult.

It is an indirect indication how men always fail to express their emotions as they are. The “mainstream definition” and “perception” of what masculinity prevents men to sacrifice their real version just to demonstrate superiority in the dominance hierarchy. If you cannot dominate others, how would you establish control? How would you prove your manliness?

So, men subconsciously develop a tendency to distance themselves away from what they are feeling, because they know there is no way they will get any sympathy towards such emotions. Instead, the moment they express their true emotions, it’s like blowing up their cover, exposing themselves. Society is ready to devour them, forget about dominance.

Narrator’s struggle to speak in Italian is thus a metaphor to show how men are continuously challenged when they want to express something freely. You must understand that even if they do it, every man has some bad experience of how they were betrayed when they tried to open up. Now you can only imagine how this feeling gets amplified in men with trauma. Over the time, men have trained their minds to intentionally cordon off such feelings because they know and they have experienced this before that nobody care about how they feel.

Emotional Numbness – Alexithymia – Hemingway For Today’s World

In the last part of the story you will see that the Major gets triggered the moment narrator expresses his wish to get married once this is all over. He is unsettled not out of jealousy or the pain due to the war. He is restless due to even worse pain – the pain of the loss of the loved one.

“If he is to lose everything, he should not place himself in a position to lose that. He should not place himself in a position to lose. He should find things he cannot lose.”

And in the end, we come to know that the Major always feared that he is about to lose his beloved wife. He was always scared that he will lose his beloved wife anytime and he cannot do anything about it. (Understand that this man is a disciplined and War-seasoned major who has tricked death now is feared of something).

He stood there biting his lower lip. “It is very difficult,” he said. “I cannot resign myself.”

Who says that men are rigid, tough, insensitive to emotions!

This is a tight slap to those who say that Hemingway was a strong supporter of the masculinity. People twisted Hemingway’s character to convey what they wanted for themselves.

There is a specific psychological term called Alexithymia which literally means “a lack of words for emotions.”

You can see alexithymia in Hemingway’s “so-called” masculine characters. The narrator himself is unable to express his emotions to his group in Italy, even though he is with his acquaintances he feels alienated. You will see he craves for warmth from his observations on the roasted chestnuts. The warmth is not just a matter of temperature.

The three decorated soldiers have murdered their personal ambitions for the duty to serve the nation in the war. Each of them had their own plans about their future. Hemingway gives us one detail about one of these guys. One of those three soldiers who wished to become lawyer had three medals for his valor in war, was a lieutenant. Hemingway through narrator shows us that he had seen so many deaths in war that he was isolated from his surroundings. Note that this guy had a company of at least two native faces who had gone through somewhat similar hardships. The trauma of war and in addition to inability to express what he was going through detached him. He had familiar faces to do so because of the relatability, but the trauma prevented him from openly expressing what he felt.

The narrator also shows us that these three Italian soldiers were like hunting hawks. It is a way to show how they showed off their valor and medals to prove their worth to the society. You must understand that before going to war, their ambitions were completely different than earning medals. But as the conditions forced them to show up for duty, they helplessly gave up on their dreams and accepted the life for what it was. This hawk like attitude is the reinforcement of the masculinity assigned by the society through the medals, decoration which society gave them. As they have no one intimate to open up to they assumed this display of manhood as the means to show strength.

The boy with disfigured face, who didn’t even get recognized for his sacrifice is another story in itself. You will see that there is very limited mention of his presence in this story. He is just their as an additional character. For me, upon a very meticulous style of Hemingway’s writing style – I see it as an intentional limitation. Hemingway shows us that how some of the greatest sacrificing men will always go unnoticed, how society won’t even care for them for the reason that they cannot provide back to the society. The great sacrifice of identity by this soldier feels worthless.

This is Hemingway’s way to show that a man who cannot provide is a worthless man in society, societal structure will make sure that he is perceived as worthless. There is no single person to blame why it happens in this way. People especially men are nurtured to subconsciously assume it in this way. Society will only accept men for what they provide and not what they are.

The Major has no hope to recover from his therapy session for his hand. The narrator gives us surety of that through the discussion between the Major and Doctor. The Major has suppressed his nihilistic attitude by submitting to the routine of physical therapy. This is an active indication of Alexithymia. Him trying to help the narrator to learn the Italian in proper grammatical way is his conscious choice to cast away the real emotions of his worthlessness after the injury. Narrator mentions that even though Major has no hope from the therapy machines he showed up regularly. This is definitely indicative that major rejected his real feelings with the distraction of the therapy routine.

The moment Major gets triggered by the awareness narrator’s plan to settle with marriage he realizes that he too had this suppressed wish to settle with the woman of his life. He senses that he too had same wish as the narrator but now is scared to lose someone he loved with his life. He immediately rejects that feeling by speaking “angrily and bitterly” with the narrator to not get married.

It’s not the Major despising women – some people may call it toxic masculinity. It is actually rejection of reality of the sad emotion of the loss of the loved ones to avoid the trauma and pain that follows after that. But Hemingway lets out some sadness through him to show how helpless men are.

“He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. “I am utterly unable to resign myself,” he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door.”     

His Woman Is Everything For Any Man True To Himself

As the title of the book suggests, this is Hemingway’s attempt to show what a man loses when he has no one of his own to open up. Why women are important instead of men here? Because men are so strongly conditioned with the trait of showing themselves as unaffected by whatever life throws at them that now they have accepted it as their second nature. If you are swayed easily by hardships, you are not ‘man’ enough. If you are not able to provide, you are not ‘man’ enough. If you whine at every adversity, you are not ‘man’ enough. If you express your vulnerability, you are not ‘man’ enough, in addition to that the society will make sure that you are made joker out of your vulnerability because it is the survival of fittest.

So, the best shortcut men’s minds have started taking is to become completely numb to the sensitive emotions, expressions of those emotions and have resorted to divert to something which looks ‘manly/ masculine’ or rejecting the emotions they are having.

Now imagine how would a man would open up to another man who he knows would already be numb to what he is expressing. For that you should see how group of women discuss their personal problems Vs how men discuss their personal problem in a group of men.

That is exactly why a comfort of woman’s emotional sensitivity is important for a man to get rid of their numbness to emotions. Otherwise, men without women are not truly men, rather they cannot even become human in first place. As the times are evolving, a man may not solely need exclusively a woman to open up but the fact that men are always forced to numb their emotional sensitivity to demonstrate their masculinity still remains the fact.  

For any human being’s personality – identity, absence or withdrawal of certain aspect of life is always traumatic, insecure and unsettling. If this aspect is immediately linked to a person, then the effect is very strong. To cope with that insecurity the person undergoes rejection of the very version his/ her self which once was associated with the person they lost or the person they wished they could have been with.

For me the tragedy is the ways in which men are exposed to the world experiences. Almost all of the men have subconsciously trained their minds to ignore such exact unsettling losses, emotions under the label of masculinity.  

Conclusion – The Feminine Side Of The Real Masculinity

I would take this part to connect the Hemingway’s writing to the modern times in which we live. It is a curse to us humans that we cannot understand things unless we differentiate between them, the very process of differentiation in order to understand nature steals certain characteristic attributes of those things which made them really special.

Same happened with what society first called as masculinity, modified it to something totally different then calling it toxic masculinity – that is why men (true men) now became just the providers – not even humans in modern times.

Hemingway’s men are not that different from the modern men. The older ones suffered from the trauma of war the modern ones are suffering from the responsibility to carry forward the skewed definitions of masculinity. Nobody sees that changing times disfigured the definition of what it really means to be a man. Then there is a group who calls out that new definition as a toxic one. No wonder some people see Hemingway as a proponent of toxic masculinity.

The key thing to understand here is that it’s not about whether feminism is lesser or masculinity is getting redefined in toxic ways. It is about how fast we are losing the touch of humanity to support and justify one of these sides.

Now you will see that this is Hemingway’s lament, a call for help in a way that if there were women for such helpless men, their lives would have been completely different. You must understand that this was his silent call for help or an unexpressed, suppressed feeling when you look at Hemingway’s biography.   

That is exactly why when I am connecting the link between Hemingway’s short story “In another country” with Alexithymia, I am neither promoting masculinity and denying feminism. I fear that if this continues the world will see even worse versions of toxic masculinity. Imagine a human which has rejected what he feels, it’s not a human anymore.

Most of the times, we are forgetting that when we are promoting and asking for individual freedom, individual expression, individual identity we have ignored what it means to reserve the same rights for others. Hemingway’s writings although were heavily influenced by his personal experiences of war, the ways in which his men handled emotions is exactly same as how modern men are still handling their own emotions. They are not handling them at all, they are suppressing them, running away from them.

The remedy to all these complications is creation of more open spaces for men. We need men to open up at least among themselves, at least a man needs to treat other man’s emotional, expressive side. Women will eventually fall into it as they are naturally and also societally more open to it (e.g. see the group of ladies and their discussions). There is nothing wrong for a man to cry like a sissy.

(I know it’s hard to do than to say it in few words. Men are more comfortable in rejection of sensitivity that to be made fun for the same. But once one sees that there is nothing like only feminine or only masculine in real nature of how we pass through this life we would see that it’s better to let it flow than to accumulate it like a stagnating trash. And someone has to start somewhere even though the journey seems impossible.)

Ernest Hemingway – the greatest manly man world would ever see again. (At least he let his own emotions, expressions – whatever they may be flow through his writings. Trust me, it takes courage. You will appreciate this when you notice how unaware you are about the very man sitting next to you is going through and is successfully masking it. I hope that we will start crossing that barrier for the good of all.)    

Further reading:

  1. Alexithymia

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

The Lullaby of Eternal Rediscovery of Existence and Identity

Being social animals, we compare our lives with the lives of the others, we create our baselines and set our targets based on what others have achieved and done in their lives. In our current times when the life expectancy is better than ever, when we have a better cover of social safety than ever, the primitive instinct of survival from natural predators has been replaced by the modern instinct of philosophical- ideological survival which is the ‘preservation of our identity’ – the idea of our own image. The realisation of the philosophical death of our being should come with the awareness that your idea of self, your consciousness was just created by your desires and after this philosophical death you are returning to the fundamental forces of what made them. The endless possibilities for your becoming are opened in this point. This is the true eternal existence – to get broken down into the fundamental blocks of being and be recreated again. Juliet Ivy in her song ‘We’re all eating each other’ beautifully brings the sense of life that is made up of eternal creations and destructions.

Juliet Ivy’s song “We’re all eating each other”

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood

– T S Elliot

There exists a special category of songs which sound very jolly, full of life, giving the impression of the light hearted joy, calmness, relaxation everyone desires; on close inspection you end up realizing that the lyrics of that same song is so dark that one would question the mindset in which the song was written and composed. These songs are the songs to which people would dance happily due to its music but the moment lyrics of this songs is opened for discussion you will end up questioning your existence. It feels ironic.

There are many songs to name which fall in this category, I stumbled upon one such song by Juliet Ivy called “We’re all eating each other” from her album playpen.

The song is written by Lucas Sim and Juliet Ivy Ortiz.

playpen album by Juliet Ivy

The great thing about this song is the way its melodies try to befriend you. It’s so simple yet effective and the song’s rhythm is not continuously varying which creates an impression of safe and calm space of familiarity. 

What's the point of living without dying for an ego?
So we validate our fantasies to feel like we are special inside
You know we love to lie

I was literally shocked when I started digging into the lyrics. How could one simply state a brutal fact of life as if someone is asked to simply pass salt and pepper on dining table?

For me it creates an impression of life being so simple at its core yet we always choosing the complicated version to justify “our” way of life and “our” ways of truth. Juliet beautifully and very clearly puts this observation in few words of wisdom.

The life we are living, the identity we carry is all we have when everything is taken away from us. This identity is created and molded into a specific shape and size from the life experiences we have. They are mostly subjective and are created from inside. That is exactly why we are completely attached to our identity. This identity has two facets – the identity we truly know ourselves and the identity we project on people around us to show them who we are. Trust me both could be totally different. We are always trying to preserve our identity. This is what Juliet is calling the ego here.

In order to preserve our identity – our ego, we let go of the objective truths and accept certain illusions, fantasies. This is done to create a sense of security otherwise our mind would keep running everywhere in panic. We create some lies, ignore some painful truths to calm our mind down; no wonder they say ignorance is bliss.    

The biggest lie is the lie we tell ourselves in the distorted visions we have of ourselves, blocking out some sections, enhancing others. What remains are not the cold facts of life, but how we perceive them. That’s really who we are.

– Kirk Douglas

We like grabbing onto anything to feel like we're important
Not a moment that is shorter than a hiccup or a blink of an eye
You know we're scared of time

Here Juliet shows how the limited span of life brings in the urgency to justify our existence so that we will be satisfied with the feeling that we are special. But we chose to ignore the fact that the ideologies, things that we are clinging to justify our special-ness also have limited lifespan just like the lives we are living. Even though we want to live for hundreds of years, on the grand scale of creation we are not even a blink – not even blink of the blink!

This is more than enough to leave all those false things which we are trying to justify our life, our special-ness with. The moment we let go of the feeling that we are something superior than anything in the world is the moment we lose the fear of not existing. The loss of this fear of not existing would make one eternal. We don’t want to lose the identity we created when we became conscious of our existence. That is why dying without getting any recognition, remembrance is a painful idea for all of us. But that remembrance, those memories will fade away. This should humble everyone.    

The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we’re afraid.

We fear we will not find love, and when we find it we fear we’ll lose it. We fear that if we don’t have love, we will be unhappy.

– Richard Bach

But we're all gonna die
Decompose into daffodils and dandelions
The bees will use our flowers for whatever they like
Make the honey that our grand-kids will put inside their morning tea
It's the thing of life
We're all eating each other
The thing of life
Nobody lives forever
The thing of life

The urge to ‘consciously’ exist forever is the only lie we need to let go to become truly eternal, free. We are so attached to our so called “self-created identity” that we consider everything going against is as a potential threat to our existence – the existence which eventually will fade away into nothingness. It is way better to accept the finite-ness of life and be useful to each other rather than carrying that false sense of superiority, higher ego to justify our lies of life.

Juliet puts higher perspective to sooth our confusion of “conscious existence”. We are justifying our egos because we don’t want to die, we don’t want our identity to die, we don’t want our memories to die, we want to be remembered by people even when we are not existing in the world. The urge to preserve our conscious identity thereby our personality becomes the ultimate goal of life.

I am using ‘conscious’ word here to show that we are scared of losing the “I”, “Me” from our life because that is how we experience the life. We create the sense of existence from inside that is why sense of “I” is very important for our existence but if you closely observe the way things exist in the nature it is really difficult to pinpoint what makes that “I” – the “I”. Is it my brain? Or is it my body? is it my property? is it my super-car? is it my villa? is it my designation/ salary? is it my family? What exactly defines us?

You will get the answer once you accept that this thing that you have assigned your identity to – your existence to will not remain forever. When we say it will not remain forever it means that the combinations which created that existence. The existence would crumble down into nothingness.

Now here is an interesting part. We call the crumbles of nothingness “nothing” because they do not immediately affect, improve or help the existence we were trying to hold on to – our identity. We forget that it was the same set of some “nothings” which came together in a specific way to create “something” – this something became our existence.

Juliet beautifully brings in this perspective by saying that we will end up into flowers then into the honey that our future generation will put in their morning tea.

While we are trying to hold onto our special identity which is short lived, which would disappear in a blink we are forgetting the fact that the nothingness from which we were created is more eternal than the identity we are trying to maintain. This nothingness is the truth, its that something which is getting recycled all the time. On the other hand, we are in this constant battle to justify our falsely created, mortal identity.

We should understand that we are actually eternal but this false sense of ‘being’, this false sense of ‘conscious’ steals the real eternal existence. 

We don't know how to accept we're just a product of a chance
And less like gods but more like plants
Who can't stop making up reasons we're alive
(We're alive, we're alive, we're alive)
You know we love to deny
(To deny, to deny, to deny)

Juliet is again waging war with our falsely created sense of “special”. We intentionally highlight the facts that justify our superiority and ignore the facts which actually show that we might be the result of few overlapped coincidences. Even if we have not come out of chances and coincidences our existence is not that grand in the whole scheme of existence. On the level of creation, we are as close to plants than the powers which created all of us.

So we paint our face with intellect
Pretending we're not curious
Too busy, super serious
Don't have the time to do what we like
(What we like, what we like, what we like)
Baby look at the sky

In spite of knowing that we are insignificant, knowing that the creation is way bigger than what we are trying to justify ourselves, we are always in the race to prove our superiority. Why does that happen? Why are we always trying to justify our superiority with some lies while we call ourselves the smartest species? Why ‘we’ the smartest ones fail to recognize the objective truths of the world when we know that there is not meaning to chase everything all at once? Why we are always trying to win the race and justify our worth with something?

The reason is that we think our existence is limited, our time of remaining conscious of our being is limited.

We very well know that we will die someday, that is exactly why we try to justify every moment of our conscious existence to something, some idea, some object which we call our job, duty, faith, passion. We don’t want to die with the regret that we have nothing that will remain forever after we die. We are so wound up in justifying the life, memories after our death that we have invested our present into the pursuit of lies which are creating the illusion of our specialty.

Our heads are so engrossed down into the pursuit to create that false identity of worth-ness that we are unable to look up and appreciate the beauty around us, the reality around us.

The urge to lookout for the meaning of life and then assigning that meaning to something so superficial will eventually end into the pain and regret of not enjoying the time we had to its fullest, the moments we had to fullest. We are always trading the real awareness of “present” to gain the illusive comfort of safe “future”. That is how we justify meaning.

The real meaning of life should come with the understanding that whatever it may come next, one will never attach the sense of being to something which amplifies ego. Ego too will perish in the flow of time. The rejection of ego comes when one lets go of their sense of identity being special.       

'Cause we're all gonna die
Decompose into daffodils and dandelions
The bees will use our flowers for whatever they like
Make the honey that our grand-kids will put inside their morning tea
It's the thing of life
We're all just eating each other
The thing of life
Nobody lives forever
The thing of life
We're all just eating each other
The thing of life
Nobody lives forever
The thing of life

The rejection of ego will make you free, will show you what your real worth is. Even though you are not special – in the end, you are something of value when you synergize with others. Even though your conscious being is not eternal, the things which made your conscious being are eternal and that awareness should free you from all the urges to justify your identity, your specialty.

You are given a chance to experience the universe in the most sophisticated manner possible which many of the other species might not even have. What more could sooth your existential confusion! Once you realize that you are already made up of eternity, you will let go this mortal identity which you are always trying to preserve with some subjective perspective and lies. This is the real freedom and it requires innocence. Innocence is one of the basic indicators that the person has no ulterior motive to achieve something, it brings in the sense of acting on things without expecting anything in return. Please understand that innocence does not mean that the person should become a fool. Remaining innocent in spite of knowing everything is really hard, that is how you will know that you are not fooling yourselves. This song shows us that innocence. 

Conclusion

Juliet Ivy very beautifully brings the sense of life that is made up of eternal creations and destructions. We attach the meaning of our lives, the purpose of our lives to certain things while realizing that they too will perish in the flow of time – this is what would unsettle even the dumbest person. This feeling is also experienced by the highest specimen of humans. In order to come out of this unsettling fear of unjustified – worthless living, we take support from our surrounding. We selectively choose certain aspects that will create an illusion of safety and comfort. Being social animals, we compare our lives with the lives of the others, we create our baselines and set our targets based on what others have achieved and done in their lives.

You know what? Even after achieving such goals which we defined based on our surrounding we are not happy. Even after those material victories, we see that the happiness is short lived. So, we shift our goals to something which is immaterial, something which is spiritual. Something which we think is more eternal than the material things. We make certain ideologies the meaning of our lives. Religion is one of such examples.

René Girard – a French philosopher coined the concept of Mimetic theory where he tries to answer how we decide what to do and why to do. Mimesis roughly means imitation, trying to resemble. When we are stuck with no information or loads of information in either cases, we will be overwhelmed. The best way to come out of such conditions would be to see what others are doing around you. We set our standards based on the baselines of our surroundings. We create lies to justify these baselines and goals we want to achieve. Our ego is thus created to ensure that we maintain the sanity in the times of clueless-ness. It will prioritize survival of body in materialistic races and survival of its own sense of existence its identity in the spiritual races. In the end, both victories will fade away. (That also should not mean that one should not engage in the pursuit of certain victories. It should imply that the non-eternal nature of everything should humble the person.)

The most important point to understand is the ways in which everything great (also everything worse) will be broken down to their most fundamental building blocks. The idea is to not get attached with what you created which got destroyed.

In our current times when the life expectancy is better than ever, when we have a better cover of social safety than ever, the primitive instinct of survival from natural predators has been replaced by the recently created – modern instinct of philosophical – ideological survival which is the ‘preservation of our identity’ – the idea of our own image. (Social media is the booster for such way of life. It is also how the mimesis is happening strongly.) Philosophical death seems more painful than actual death. That is why in certain cases people gather courage to do self-harm. The best way to come out of such mentality is to question the very thing which brought this philosophical death; I know it is difficult to pick on the injury which already is painful to bear. The idea to work in such confusions is to notice one important behavior every one of us maintains when we define our life. We always strive to amplify things which bring happiness and ignore things which bring sadness. We define our life selectively on such choices in spite of knowing that both hold same potential to realize in actual life. This desire to selectively attach to certain aspect brings pain in life.

The moment we accept that there is no end to the cycles of creation and destruction (of both good and bad) we will see that we are nothing but a recycled versions of everything that is there in the existence.

The realization of the actual death of our body should come with the awareness that you are returning to materials which made you.

The realization of the philosophical death of our being should come with the awareness that your idea of self, your consciousness was just created by your desires and after this philosophical death you are returning to the fundamental forces of what made them and thereby what made you. The endless possibilities for your becoming are opened in this point. This is the true eternal existence – to get broken down into the fundamental blocks of being and be recreated again.

Juliet Ivy said all this in one simple sentence “We’re all eating each other.”  

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

― Carl Sagan

A Hindsight For Better Future

Morgan Housel – the famous author of ‘The Psychology of Money’ has another important book called “Same as Ever” which gives insight into things which have never changed over the course of time. Same as Ever drives the motto of objective flexibility and subjective awareness of every event happening around us and with us. It also highlights that our mind is the first and the easiest one to fool, which leads to false sense of superiority over others and creates biases. Once we accept that nothing is perfect, no one is perfect – it injects humility and forgiveness. It also makes us to be grateful for what we possess today. The ability to see every event at the same level is a superpower any one of us can have.

An important book from Morgan Housel called “Same as Ever”

Somebody, make me a time machine

Life would be easy if we had a way to accurately predict the consequences of the events/ actions.

Scenario 1 – what would be your reaction if some random person hands you a $1,000,000 lottery ticket and, in few moments, you realize that you just won that lottery?

Scenario 2 – what would happen if an ambitious project that you worked on tirelessly for many years while sacrificing your other priorities – ends into a big failure because of a seemingly impossible and insignificant event/ error?

For most of us these two scenarios are practically impossible but the odds are still non-zero. They can happen in reality.

How can we be sure that they selectively happen to certain person? Scenario 1 for ourselves and Scenario 2 for our enemies especially… (Just kidding)

If you closely observe the lives we are living right now, you will see that we are always oscillating between such events which demand certainty of outcomes even before the are realized. We have this innate urge to remain ready for such events; it is what we are always striving for.

Now, one question – are we living in a matrix? Is universe a simulation?

If the answer is ‘YES’, then it means that every outcome should be predetermined. If everything is predetermined then why things don’t happen the way we ‘want’? Does that mean that we lack the computational capabilities to precisely calculate the outcome? OR is what is destined to happen different from what we ‘want’?

If the answer is ‘NO’, then everything explodes into meaninglessness. The answers are nihilistic.

Looking at the both outcomes of this question we see that we need a baseline to make our decision making effective. Is there a formula to systematically put all the things happening around? What are somethings in nature whose knowledge will ensure our satisfactory existence. (I am being very optimistic while writing ‘satisfactory’ word here.)

In simple words, what is the formula to live a good life? whether it is predictable or not.

 Morgan Housel the famous author of the Psychology of Money wrote one important book called Same as Ever which tries to answer this same question. Same as Ever drives the motto of objective flexibility and subjective awareness of every event happening around us and with us.

This is a deep dive into Morgan Housel’s book “Same as Ever”.

I will try to keep this short. Here are some instructions:

Those who have read this book – each idea in this book is numbered in the sequence Morgan explains in the flow of the book. So, #1 is Hanging by a Thread as mentioned in book and #23 is Wounds heal, Scars last

Those who haven’t read the book – I have given short summary of what Morgan discusses in each of the 23 ideas. That should help you to wrap you head around my distilled down version of this book.

(I apologize for putting that part in the end and spoiling the conclusion/ discussion on this book.)

I would say this book has been one of the most important books I have come across. (I am an average book reader by the way. So, not sure if same would be the case for other people.) While going through each idea, you will realize that something keeps on repeating; and even though it repeats, it brings new perspective into that specific discussion. My attempt to summarize this book focuses on picking what is common but connected to all the facts mentioned in the book and also their connection to the reality we live in.

Discussions

The discussion is in 3 steps, so adjusting our understanding to previous step is key to understand the next step. The illustrative images in each step of the discussion connects the ideas from the book to a common central idea. It will be handy if you read this with the book in your hand or you can jump to the point-to-point summary (the part after conclusion) in a neighboring tab of your web browser.

Step 1 discussion:
Figure 1. Finite and recurring cycle of compounding processes

You will see in the figure 1 that reality is ever changing process of infinite real events. The key to understand what is happening is to see every event containing same potential at first. Keep in mind – same potential – neither good nor bad. Once you assign every event with equal potential you will see that compounding accounts for that single event to build on and create the next event. Sometimes two big events will compound together to create an enormous event.

Now comes the fun part – the enormity of every compounded event will always be in favor of someone and against the favor of the complementary population. This makes that event good or bad for people. Some will suffer some will rejoice.

A person who knows how the world, nature or universe works will not have preferences, favor-ability towards such events. The answer lies in the cyclical nature of such events. Keeping a single event sustained for long duration demands to go many things to work in supporting ways and as every event has same potency in the infinite possibilities, it surely will lead to the downfall of that process. It’s just matter of time.

Talking about matter of time – the game of life is not about winning, rather it is about remaining in the game longer as the compounding pays off and decomposes into new start.

Our limited life span intuitively doesn’t allow us to wait till the compounding pays off. That is exactly where we make mistake. That is exactly why we are devastated by a single seeming insignificant event causing destruction of our favorite things.

Step 2 discussion:
Figure 2. Reality is far from perfect

Our urge to predict everything to ensure survival demands perfection in every entity considered for precision and accuracy of prediction. As reality is made up of many real possibilities, this count of possibilities and the errors associated with their measurements require huge resources which render the prediction process impractical for the possible outcomes.

(Keep in mind right now that we are only talking about those variables, events which we can understand; we haven’t even entered into those variables, events we don’t even understand or know in first place.)

The moment we introduce poorly known, immeasurable but significant variable – the whole game of predictability crumbles down.

That is exactly why instead of striving for better predictability, it is a smart choice to be prepared for everything. Knowing that this too shall end soon should comfort us to prepare for such things/ events. The rejection of the urge for perfection, absoluteness and full efficiency will immediately prepare us for everything that reality unfolds.     

Step 3 discussion:
Figure 3. In the end, we are only human.

Now that we know how every event is potent and can immediately contribute to a cyclical process of compounding, it is important to understand how we comprehend that compounding. As everything that we do is directly linked to our survival we are by default born with preferences. These preferences get eliminated or amplified based on the life experiences we have. Even though our urge for predictability demands objectivity we often forge the subjective parts of every narrative. The subjectivity is important, because the reasons to survive are different for different people.

Conclusion – Human behavior and laws of nature

Our mind rarely understands anything as a flow of entities. Almost all of the fundamental entities existing in nature are flow – continuum entities. But in order to understand them study them we break them into pieces which makes is practical to quantify and predict. For time as an example – we have past – present – future; we need this separation to comprehend the flow of time. This slight arrangement of separation of events just for the convenience of communication and comprehension for our minds has now become such a second nature of our realities that we could hardly come out of the idea of past and future. Past keeps on haunting and future creates anxiety due to the uncertainty. Nostalgia from past brings us joy and what advancements future will present inspires us to work harder today. We rarely notice that this works both ways.

It is really difficult and impractical for our mind to let go of this past-present-future mentality. This convenience of separation for the sake of improving our decision making and survival has imparted a sense of time being a set of discrete isolated events, independent events. This steals the feature of hyper-connectivity in our understanding of reality.

Once we come out of the discretization of time as past-present-future we will see that every event is equally important and highly interconnected and multidimensional (in the sense that it creates multiple real effects on multiple entities) Our mind being biased for survival and in energy optimization mode, it always focuses on what is required to remain alive. This sense of remaining alive now has evolved into intellectual survival – as in what things we define as our life. So, even though from objective point of view all events remain exactly the same, on our personal level certain events are highly important because they change the things we are attached to in a drastic way – in most cases our life. We are now scared to die intellectually – a mental death – the death of our truths – our identity. And trust me, this happens frequently.

Morgan in this book very beautifully noted down the factual version of the reality we live in; it is beautiful because it shows how our human nature is always affecting the seemingly objective reality of the most of the things.

This is my ultimate distilled down version of the book “Same as Ever” by Morgan Housel.  

One point summary of ‘Same as Ever’ by Morgan Housel

 It also highlights that our mind is the first and the easiest one to fool, which leads to false sense of superiority over others and creates biases. Once we accept that nothing is perfect, no one is perfect – it injects humility and forgiveness. It also makes us grateful for what we possess today. What else could be more important than this to be justified as a human being?

These points ask for detachment from predictions and end results. A sense of responsibility for the actions could be the best version of any person – this exactly is invoked when we are trying to prepare for the future instead of striving to predict it.

I think we need more ideas like this when we are fighting for survival for such unimportant things where we already know the real, practical answers but have decided to ignore them.

The ability to see every event at the same level is a superpower any one of us can have.

For those who haven’t read the book here is the point-to-point summary of the book “Same as Ever”:  

#1. If you know where we’ve been you realize, we have no idea where we’re going.

Here, Morgan gives many real-life events where a single decision led to catastrophic events causing loss of many lives and valuable resources.

When we study history even when we know what exactly happened, it is tricky to pinpoint the trigger for that event. There will be why and how behind every small-small event and when we will reach to its origin it becomes really difficult to wrap your mind around that petty thing which had led to such a big and historic event.

The absurdity of past connections should humble your confidence in predicting future ones.

#2. We are very good at predicting the future, except for the surprises – which tend to be all that matter

In very simple words, Morgan highlights the extents of our imagination and thinking. Even though they are infinite, the nature in which we are existing is equally or rather infinite in bigger and greater sense. That is exactly why even when we think we are prepared for everything, nature will always have something new in its pocket to reveal and not being ready for that exact new thing makes that event overwhelming for us because we were not ready for that exact new reveal.

It’s impossible to plan for what you can’t imagine, and the more you think you’ve imagined everything the more shocked you’ll be when something happens that you hadn’t considered.

This itself should humble us. That is why preparation is more important than forecasting.

Invest in preparedness, not in prediction

#3. The first rule of happiness is low expectations.

The most important observation Morgan puts here is in the ways we gauge our resourcefulness – it is always relative – material or immaterial – objects or emotions. We always have a baseline which is created by comparing ourselves with those around us. That is exactly why we rarely appreciate what we have at our hands.

We always crave for what ‘they’ seem to have instead of appreciating what we already and really have in our hands. Even when we are unsure about whether others actually have those things, still we crave those things for us, which is tragic!

Morgan expresses that almost all of the truly precious things in our life don’t come with a price tag that is why we never care to evaluate their importance – like good health, freedom. Same is the case with expectations.

When Morgan is asking for low expectations, it is not omission of the motivation to improve ourselves. Low expectations ask for realistic expectations. One must always be observant of the gap between what we wanted and what happened in reality.

#4. People who think about the world in unique ways you like also think about the world in unique ways you won’t like.

Here, Morgan talks about the role models, heroes, leaders we consider the best of us all. It is very important to understand that they are the best among us all because they did something in very exceptional manner which made them stand out of the well-defined ‘boring’ and ‘average’ structure of the society. If they would have followed the same paths that other followed, they would have been just like others.

In order to stand out of the masses they did something different.

Now be cautious! This different could be seen as good or bad as per the average crowd level. And keep in mind this specialty in that person is because others don’t have it in them. So, in order to create and develop something special out of the same average crowd one has to overcome a resistance of the masses where a trade-off is done with other aspects of their personality. Sometimes the exceptional conditions create exceptional personalities which many people fail to recognize.

Of course they [successful people] have abnormal characteristics. That’s why they’re successful! And there is no world in which we should assume that all those abnormal characteristics are positive, polite, endearing, or appealing.

Simple words, there is always some trade off to achieve something truly exceptional.

You gotta challenge all the assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after

#5. People don’t want accuracy. They want certainty.

A common trait of human behavior is the burning desire for certainty despite living in an uncertain and probabilistic world.

Morgan discusses how we are always trying to alleviate the bad results, pain in all life scenarios. The urge to survive supersedes everything. Our brain always wants a confirmed trigger on whether to fight or flight for given problem. It is always in energy optimization mode and in the uncertain world filled of infinite possibilities it wants something to act on immediately. Otherwise, brain knows that it won’t survive. The urge for certainty – that clarity of whether to fight or flight is the most important information than how precisely we are assessing the reality. It’s like brain takes a shortcut to ensure survival. That is exactly why huge load of information especially numbers overwhelm us.

The core is that people think they want an accurate view of the future but what they really crave is certainty.

#6. Stories are always more powerful than statistics.

If we continue the train of thoughts from previous point, soon we will appreciate how dearly we appreciate stories instead of boring numbers. Even when stories would tell a lie and numbers would tell the real, pure truth we would always choose a fake story over realistic numbers. Our brain doesn’t want to overwork itself to ensure survival.

Good stories tend to do that [evoking emotions and connecting the dots in millions of people’s heads]. They have extraordinary ability to inspire and evoke positive emotions, bringing insights and attention to topics that people tend to ignore when they’ve previously been presented with nothing but facts.

Stories create an emotional, empathic bridge between people which our brain already knows since the childhood. The very first think a baby does to start breathing is crying not counting. (I know the analogy is lame but it works here) we are implicitly trained to actively process emotions first and then numbers. Stories enhance this ability on next level.

That is exactly why emotional-ity will always be preferred over rationality.

We live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to grasp scenes.

#7. The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured.

Morgan brings here more clarity on the objective nature of the numbers even when they are showing the truth, the reality. The point that our reality is made up of the infinite possibility itself shows that the sheer limitation of our computation capability will create a partial picture of the bigger reality. This happens because many of the factors which influence our reality are beyond quantification.  That is exactly why whenever we are making any decision based on objective and true data (like truest of true numbers) we should bear in mind that these numbers are not accounting for those unmeasured factors which also affect the reality we are trying to understand.

Some things are immeasurably important. They’re either impossible, or too elusive, to quantify. But they can make all the difference in the world, often because their lack of quantification causes people to discount their relevance or even their existence.

In simple words, our story loving brain is driven by intuition and safe/ familiar information which is unquantifiable most of the times.

#8 Crazy doesn’t mean broken. Crazy is normal; beyond the point of crazy is normal.

Morgan is trying to point out how we understand what is means to be at the top. He established that most of the tops we experience in life are to because we have experienced falling down from them and we would have never understood that we were at top unless we have had fall down from them.

The only way to discover the limits of what’s possible is to venture a little way past those limits.

We never appreciate summit of something unless we start climbing from down or fall down from that summit. That is exactly why what made you feel at the top will make you safe and that attachment to safety will lead to your fall, the pain of fall will motivate you to climb new heights and again the cycle will go on.

#9. A good idea on steroids quickly becomes a terrible idea.

Morgan here explains how evolution created the species around us. There was always some trade-off while evolving because of the forces of nature. In nature nothing has absolute competitive advantage otherwise a single species will take over everything that single species alone will lead to its downfall and destruction due to the lack of diversity.

Most things have a natural size and speed and backfire quickly when you push them beyond that.

In simple words, anything that is burns bright, goes out fast. Resources behind every process are limited and even if they would be available in surplus, extent of their utilization affects the outcome and overall integrity of that process.    

#10. Stress focuses your attention in ways that good times can’t.

The urge to survive makes our brain to push to its untested limits. These limits are there just for the optimum behavior so that our brain could actually use the reserve energy when it is the question of life and death. When it come down to do or die – people have always delivered in surprising and shocking ways.

The circumstances that tend to produce the biggest innovations are those that cause people to be worried, scared, and eager to move quickly because their future depends on it.

Morgan points out here that this stress should be healthy because there is always a natural size of everything as explained in point #9.

There is a delicate balance between helpful stress and crippling disaster.

#11. Good news comes from compounding, which always takes time, but bad news comes from a loss in confidence or a catastrophic error that can occur in a blink of an eye.

Growth always fights against competition that slows its rise.

Morgan here shows how things that exist today as our reality have gone through multiple iterations. They have already failed many times and started again long ago; its just that the compounding imparted grandeur and power to fight against the adversities of the life which made their realisation possible here in front of us. There will again be some simple, seemingly insignificant event which will destroy this creation and things will start again.

To enjoy peace, we need almost everyone to make good choices. By contrast, a poor choice by just one side can lead to war.

#12. When little things compound into extraordinary things.

Here Morgan points out from the examples of history how in order to avoid a big calamity people ignored some small incidents which led to even bigger calamities. It is ingrained in our mind to overlook big events because the smaller events which lead to their realization are “small and insignificant”.

Small risks weren’t the alternative to big risks; they were the trigger.

#13. Progress requires optimism and pessimism to coexist.

Morgan here talks about how our preferences for each and everything have stolen away the realism in our lives. Instead of favoring one side, life is more about appreciation of the spectrum. It was never about who wins or who loses because both are short lived. It is always about who survived and stayed in the game longer. (Simon Sinek calls it the infinite game as explained in Game theory.)

The trick in any field – from finance to careers to relationships – is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth.

Whoever lives to see the end wins but that victory is just over those who couldn’t survive. There will always be some room at the top because conditions never remain the same.

#14. There is a huge advantage to being a little imperfect.

The more perfect you try to become, the more vulnerable you generally are

The idea of perfection immediately steals the flexibility from any given system. Because of the perfection the system is bound to certain thriving conditions and exactly when you expose this system to the reality of infinite possibilities there will always be some ‘seemingly’ trivial event which will take down that whole system.

A little imperfection makes the system to bend thereby giving place to perform in unimagined conditions and as we have already learnt that the reality is full of unimaginable but real events.

Morgan beautifully explains the ways in which natural evolution has worked out.

A species that evolves to become very good at one thing tends to become vulnerable at another.

…species rarely evolve to become perfect at anything, because perfecting one skill comes at the expense of another skill that will eventually be critical to survival.

Nature’s answer is a lot of good enough, below-potential traits across all species.

#15. Everything worth pursuing comes with a little pain. The trick is not minding that it hurts.

The really important and actually valuable things in life don’t come with a price tag and that is exactly why we are not ready to pay any price. This makes our minds to wish for such things because of the false sense of entitlement. This same entitlement blinds us from the real actions which can lead us to this achievement and we keep on whining about not achieving these things. A wishful thinking!

A unique skill, an underrated skill, is identifying the optimal amount of hassle and nonsense you should put up with to get ahead while getting along.

#16. Most competitive advantages eventually die.

A we have now already understood that even a small event can lead to collapse of any grand creation and how easy it is to undermine any event we must now accept that nothing big will stay as it is now. Same goes for any competitive advantage. As things keep changing the advantages which made their impact big will become irrelevant with the changing things. One has to keep on reinventing in order to remain relevant and effective with the changing times.

Evolution is ruthless and unforgiving – it doesn’t teach by showing you what works but by destroying what doesn’t.

#17. It always feels like we’re falling behind, and it’s easy to discount the potential of new technology.

Morgan highlights how the innovations which we consider ground-breaking, world-changing were result of multiple small-small events creating synergy to coexist.

It’s so easy to underestimate how two small things can compound into an enormous thing.

#18. The grass is greener on the side that’s fertilized with bullshit.

You never know what struggles people are hiding.

As we have already seen our urge to compare our conditions with the conditions of others and always consider ours to be the worst most of the times, it is evident that we are experts in judging everything in its entirety based on very little information. Our biases and basic mentality feed this tendency furthermore. But reality is always like the iceberg.

Most of the things are harder than they look and not as fun as they seem.

#19. When the incentives are crazy, the behavior is crazy. People can be led to justify and defend nearly anything.

Morgan here shows that beyond envy people are driven by incentives. You can make people do almost anything, make them believe them in almost any thing if their interests are aligned in that. This is strong when people are helpless and when it is about their survival.

One of the strongest pulls of incentives is the desire for the people to hear only what they want to hear and see only what they want to see.

The beauty that Morgan points out is that this can also be used to bring good out of people.

It’s easy to underestimate how much good people can do, how talented they can become, and what they can accomplish when they operate in a world where their incentives are aligned towards progress.

#20. Nothing is more persuasive than what you’ve experienced first-hand.

As we have emotional beings and we have already seen that we will always prefer emotional clarity of falsehood over the numerical, arithmetic truth it shows that every part of our understanding of life is tied to our own individual experiences. We rarely appreciate the foretold truth. But we will appreciate all those things which we experience on our own.

That is also why there are certain truths which very few people have experienced but are not generally accepted by the masses because there is no part to connect personally. We can only connect personally only when we have passed through those experiences.

That is exactly why it is difficult to convince people of something really exceptional and extraordinary personal experience, that also why it is also easy to fool people.

The next generation never learns anything from the previous one until it’s brought home with a hammer… I’ve wondered why the nest generation can’t profit from the generation before, but they never do until they get knocked in the head by experience.

#21. Saying “I’m in it for the long run” is a bit like standing at the base of Mount Everest, pointing to the top, and saying, “That’s where I’m heading.” Well, that’s nice. Now comes the test.

In simple words, Morgan shows us that we rarely will ever know what we have signed up for. Most of the times our simulative experiences and thoughts will be broken down by the unimaginable possibilities of the reality. Instead of craving for that summit one must try to stand strong while they have started this journey and remain faithful to this step they are taking ahead. This attitude has to be kept with every step which very few people maintain.

Long term is less about time horizon and more about flexibility.

#22. There are no points awarded for difficulty.

Almost all of the times people appreciate certain things, certain people because they couldn’t not have or become like them. This crates a mysticism. We are always attracted to mystical things because the urge to know better (to improve chances of survival against unknown) is our hidden trait.

Complexity creates this mysticism instantly. That is why we most of the time reject truths which are so obvious and in front of our eyes and accept that intellectually stimulating complicated lie. The complexity makes our brain to actively engage in that thing which creates an attachment just because our brain was invested in it.

Complexity gives a comforting impression of control while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.

#23. What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I think about the world like you do if I experienced what you have?

Morgan points out that our lives even though we have common experiences, we associate ourselves to certain groups, certain ideologies on deeper levels and at core we are totally different and individual.

Many debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.

References:

  1. Morgan Housel’s book “Same a s Ever”.
  2. Morgan Housel

The Body Snatcher – Weighing Intent Against Action

Robert Louis Stevenson is known for his world-famous novels ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ . His short story called “The Body Snatcher” throws light on the mentality and evolution of the dangerous psychopaths. The false sense of greater good, the ability to ‘suppress destructive thoughts’, ‘destructive actions’ to justify superiority keeps driving certain types of criminals to cross the limits of humanity, ethics, morality. It shows that even though the consequences of wrong actions may not get punished due to the limitations of the laws of the respective times, the punishment of wrong thought is almost instant which is the degradation of the person’s psyche through ‘guilt’ and ‘fear’ – and most of the time it goes unnoticed and builds over time resulting in even more grave dangerous acts. It shows how thought and action are equally important in the overall personality. The wrong act may not get punished but the wrong thought has already punished the mind.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous short story “The Body Snatcher”

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Robert Louis Stevenson

In storytelling, especially in visual storytelling media, there is an expression – “Show! Don’t tell.” It is very impactful because it makes the viewers to put their minds consciously in the narrative thereby it increases their engagement in the story; this makes them to consider the narrative as their own story. The emotional impact is very high. It is furthermore potent if the story is horror or thriller. More the viewers feel engaged, more scared they will be.

But there are some stories especially, some unconventional crime stories where there is no point of relatability because not every one of us is a criminal, not every mind thinks the way given psychopath, criminal is thinking in the story. 

Now the impact of such stories is solely dependent on how they are written, expressed. The mastermind depicting, writing such stories knows that being a human we have all the tendencies of whatever good there is in the world and whatever bad there is in the world. It is just matter of which of those we give chance to flourish and which of those we suppress to make our ultimate personality. The master author uses that fine thread of slight ‘unnatural’ tendencies we have suppressed to make us simulate the real horrors the villains of his story would commit. These stories create impact and relatability through our urge to simulate the events to understand the end truth of the narrative. Inspiration from real events adds further more spice in such stories. (That is exactly why “Based on real incidents’ has remained an impactful (but still a cliché) opening for any horror story. We know that it’s a cliché but it creates a space in our minds that there could be a possibility of this happening in real life)  

R L Stevenson wrote one such short story which feels like a normal depiction of a crime but in the very last sentences the horror of the story unfolds thereby leaving the readers shocked and scared. We will deep dive into this famous story written by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Body Snatcher – Synopsis

This is a story of two young men who studied in the school of medicine in Edinburgh in early 1800s.

Macfarlane is now a Doctor and Fettes – old drunken but literate man was his companion in the past academic times. The main story starts unfolding as Dr. Macfarlane and Fettes see each other after long time unexpectedly which revives the memories of their wrongdoings in their shared past at the school of medicine.

Being a good and sincere lad, Mr. Fettes gets the job of maintaining the dissecting room held by Mr. K_, the teacher of anatomy. Macfarlane was assistant to Mr. K_. So, Fettes and Macfarlane were responsible for ensuring the smooth demonstrations of anatomy to the class by Mr. K_. In order to ensure the duty and credibility, Fettes and Macfarlane had crossed the limits in the ways they would source such dead bodies. There comes a day when Fettes is shocked to find out that the dead body he received is of Jane Galbraith – a lady he met in a good health just a day before. He tries to bring sanity in this matter by asking Macfarlane but Macfarlane rejects that idea of identifying and informing Police about the possible murder because that suspicion opens the possibility that all the dead-bodies they receive for dissection in the class of anatomy are results of crimes thereby making them immediate criminals.

Here we come to know that whenever there is shortage of dead bodies, Fettes and Macfarlane went to dig out the graves in the graveyards around Edinburgh.

One day Fettes discovers that Macfarlane has one acquaintance called Gray who has some sort of control over the behaviour of Macfarlane as if Gray knew something really dark about Macfarlane and revealing it would jeopardize Macfarlane’s reputation. Gray uses this trick of black-mailing to have a feast on Macfarlane’s money even though Macfarlane was not into it.

Upon the passing of night, Fettes understands that Macfarlane took care of the Gray Problem when he sees the dead body of Gray as a new subject for the dissection class. Macfarlane himself delivers that body to Fettes and it is now clear that he himself murdered him. But there is no chance to inform authorities and bring more trouble for Fettes. Macfarlane is not bothered by all this and rather feels free as the axe of Gray no more exists on his neck. He ensures Fettes that its just a matter of time that these dreadful memories will fade away and they both will be on their way as if nothing happened.

Fettes feels the same but both Macfarlane and Fettes have the event of Gray etched on the back of their minds as they now consciously avoid any direct or indirect conversations leading to Gray.

One day due to the shortage of subjects for dissection they go on the ‘resurrection’ hunt to a graveyard to dig out a dead body of an old farmer lady. They take a halt before going on to the main task of ‘resurrection’. They are caught in rain and darkness when they start to remove the dead body of the lady from the grave. They load that body in their small, congested cart in darkness. The body lies partly on their shoulders, is bothering them and is shifting continuously due to the uneven roads.

The uneasy dark and rainy environment, the dogs following the cart makes Macfarlane uneasy as if someone, something unnatural is watching them. So, Macfarlane asks Fettes to light the lamp so that they can at least check the dead body and keep it, adjust it properly in the cart so that they would continue the journey. Upon lighting the lamp both Macfarlane and Fettes are shocked to discover that the dead body they retrieved from the grave of the old lady is a dead body of Gray – a dissected dead body of Gray.

Inspiration From Real Incident

William Hare (left) and William Burke (right)

Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story “The Body Snatcher” was published in December 1884 and was based on infamous and real “Burke and Hare Murders” in 1828. Burke and Hare were owners of a lodging facility. Burke and Hare committed 16 murders to supply dead bodies in exchange of money to Dr. Knox who used them for dissections. This event led Dr. Knox to lose his credibility and fame. Dr. Robert Knox was a famous anatomist of his time. He was not convicted because he was not directly involved in the dealings of the dead bodies from Burke and Hare. Burke was hanged in public and Hare got immunity because he supported the state’s evidences and testified against Burke.   

The way in which R L Stevenson knitted the story is what made the story interesting. He calls the anatomist doctor Mr. K_ when the readers had an informed notion of Burke and Hare Murders and Dr. Knox in those times. So, it makes the readers to find out themselves that mystery around “Mr. K_”. Mr. K_ of the story is no other than Dr. Knox of Edinburgh.  

Psychopathic Tendencies – How Criminals Justify Their Crimes

For any average person, committing single murder is a huge, seemingly unnatural, inhumane and in the end an illegal act to fully commit. The consequences are dangerous. Then how come Burke and Hare committed 16 repetitions of this crime? They were just some small business owners.

In similar sense, Mr. Fettes and Mr. Macfarlane were just students of medicine and were doing their duties to ensure the supply of subjects for dissections. What made them to go on the streak of multiple illegal activities in the story? They were just doing their due diligence to Mr. K_.

Upon looking at the depths of the investigation of Burke and Hare Murder Case we will find that the first time they sold a dead body was for totally different reason. One of their lodgers died of old age while leaving a debt of 4 Sterling Pounds. Burke and Hare decided to sell the dead body to settle the debt. Note that dead bodies in those times were scarce for dissection and demonstration. They sold the body to Dr. Knox’s Private Anatomy School. Professor Doctor was not directly involved in the dealing. Burke and Hare received 7 Sterling Pounds for the body.

From hereon they decided to take the control of people’s lives for such beneficial business of dead bodies and started murdering the people who lodged in their facility. They killed 16 people in this way to deal for money in exchange of dead bodies. The careless murder they committed was to kill a beggar with clubfoot and his dead body was easily identified by a student due to this disability which made him to limp. Knox is said to make that body unidentifiable by removing the head and feet.

They had differences in their partnership which made them to split these acts for themselves. During an attempt to forcefully shift the lodgers to Hare’s establishment, Burke killed a lady and the lodgers who were shifting found the body while they returned to retrieve their belongings from Bare’s establishment. This was reported to Police but the dead body was already sold.

Looking at these events you will see that it is the rejection of morality and false sense of greater good and self-betterment which drives the criminal to commit the crime again and again. Burke and Hare got involved in these acts for the monetary benefits where it was easy to bypass the system and provisions like Dr. Knox’s anatomy demonstrations. Dr. Knox was driven to improve his credibility by flaunting his skills and demonstrations of dissections in the medical community.

R L Stevenson took this fine thread of reality to create Mr. Fettes and Mr. Macfarlane in his story. We will see that Mr. Fettes is shocked when he identifies a dead body of the lady he just met, that too in good health. Mr. Fettes had raised concern to Macfarlane but as Macfarlane was experienced and conditioned knowing that dead bodies once dissected were beyond any identification and legal jurisdiction. Actually, being a student of medicine, Macfarlane was expected to have a sense of the importance of life for any human being. The false sense that this will not get discovered by anyone practically and all of this was being done to maintain the reputation of his teacher thereby improving his credibility created a false sense of greater good in Macfarlane.

There is a section in this story where Macfarlane expresses how he feels about all these matters of dead bodies and Gray’s murder. He expresses following to Fettes in the story –  

“The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don’t want to hang-that’s practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities- they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them. Here’s to the memory of Gray!”    

The way he says all this shows that his mind has developed a false sense of greatness to justify his wrong-doings. Now he wants to prove his manliness. It’s like a defense mechanism to cover all the guilt which comes from committing such crimes. The criminal considers the motivations behind his criminal acts are way superior than the moral weight of what is right and what is wrong. (The word ‘CANT’ use in expression “for all cant” means a criminal act, deceitful act, falsehood. Macfarlane very well knew that what he was doing was a crime.)

In case of Burke and Hare it started with settling the debt for ensuring proper monetary gains for stable business of lodging. Then it snowballed into series of murders because they were never caught in action and had a way to come out of the murders. They created that ‘ecosystem’.

Same ecosystem can be seen in this story.

What could have actually made difference is the sense of reality and integrity. Integrity is the behavior which we carry when no one is watching. Fettes had chance to expose all this system when he discovered the young Lady’s dead body. But only because he felt that this action came with lot of difficult consequences and impossible to favor him in the end, he keeps mum.

Fettes found that exposing Macfarlane and Mr. K_ and getting them punishment is the most impractical and impossible event – the inevitable and that is where he made his first mistake. He went with the flow, the wrong one.  

The same would be the case for Burke and Hare. They could have asked authorities for the settlement of the debt from the old dead lodger. But, considering it a tedious route they considered the ill- route to sell it.

However difficult it may seem; impractical it may seem there is always a right way to do right things. The environment in which you are deciding your action is also playing a huge role in your choices. First helplessness shows you the path, then guilt follows and in order to mask that guilt the person creates a sense of greatness which demands sacrifices. This is real and constant in every generation of humanity. Most of the times right things are the toughest one to act on and accept.   

Stevenson beautifully brought these human tendencies in his story which go hand in hand with the reality we live even today.

The Ending Of The Story – Real Or Supernatural?

What hangs people…is the unfortunate circumstance of guilt.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Many readers argue that the ending is supernatural and spooky.  Robert Louis Stevenson in a masterful way maintains the realism of the story till the end. And in the last few closing sentences he mentions dead and dissected body of Gray which was completely destroyed many days ago in the reality of Fettes and Macfarlane. It is practically impossible for a body completely dissected to show itself in deep grave at completely different location. So that body definitely was not of dead Gray.

There are evidences to support this. Before going to the ‘resurrection’ job, Fettes and Macfarlane had stay in Fisher’s Tryst where they had drinks. So, it’s pretty much possible that whatever happened was under the influence of alcohol.

There is one more doubt that if it was real then at least one of them would have noticed the reality of the dead body. How can two men would have a shared delusion? A shared delusion can only be explained by a supernatural intervention.

The justification to opt out shared delusion is the shared guilt Fettes and Macfarlane had. It is a human tendency to make sense out of bunch of things which don’t make sense collectively when conditions are hostile. This sense is heightened when one is in hyperalert state, when one is in full fight or flight mode. Deep down Macfarlane knew the acts he is performing. The surrounding events just fuelled this sense of guilt and Stevenson beautifully created this environment in the minds of the readers.

You will notice that Macfarlane is completely unsettled and repulsive of minor things happening to him once they load the dead body. He hates the jumps that the body makes while going on an uneven track, he hates that ice-cold sackcloth flapping on his face, dogs following the cart on the road is unsettling to him (in reality we all know dogs would follow every vehicle going through their territory, especially in night), he also feels that the body has grown in shape (how would he know this if there was not enough light, as the lamp was not working?).

In this exact moment Stevenson injects this sentence for us readers which is a money shot –

“…and it grew and grew upon his mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear of their unholy burden that the dogs were howling”

“The unholy burden” they both were carrying was the guilt they had suppressed long ago and not acted on it in rightful manner.    

This guilt and intoxication are the main reasons behind the spooky conclusion of the story.

What Should Be Punished – The Action Or The Intent?

The Body Snatcher as a story and even the reality of Burke and Hare crime to which it is associated poses a very interesting question. What are the limits of judicial system, law and order?  

As this statement from Kant goes, in order to be called a criminal in the eyes of the public, one must be seen to perform the crime or the evidences should support so. Thus ‘Law’ becomes more of a sociological term – ‘to arrest the degradation of human as a society’. On the other hand, Kant beautifully highlighted the unitary role of a person in the society. Simple logic says how a society is made of many ‘individuals’ coming together to interact for mutual benefit. Kant consciously asks for preservation of rights of others while achieving benefit otherwise society collapses (what is beneficial for one will not necessarily always be beneficial to others.) Which is why ethics prevent the degradation of the person on individual level. That is exactly where morality and integrity become more influential.    

So, even though our generalized and biased, conditioned thinking makes us to weigh the wrong acts heavier than just their thinking about doing them, in the end they both weigh the same. Sometimes, even though these thoughts don’t get in the fruition of realised actions, they keep on affecting minor, seemingly insignificant decisions we make which ultimately create our personality and our psyche. Act of crime and thought of committing the same crime are same.

Friedrich Nietzsche posed this same dilemma of “what weighs heavy – action or intent?” in his book “Beyond Good and Evil”. I have discussed that in depth in the section “The Freedom of Actions” in my other blog post “The Free Spirit – Beyond Good and Evil “.

The gist of the things is that we will be able to appreciate the crime of ill-thinking when the stakes are really high as in any decision would have grave dangerous scale of destruction. If we will wait for the actions to be presented as wrong while we already know that it leads to wrong then even the thought of doing that action was wrong in the first place, even before the action’s ends were realized.

The Real Punishment – Where And How Does It Happen?

So, now that I have established that even the thought of doing wrong action is a crime then, one would definitely say that I must be a fool.  Every one of us is always thinking of such ideas all the time – consciously and unconsciously. (Not of murdering someone obviously. Just recall the last time you cursed someone because they made your life miserable, or the thought that why bad things always happen with good people – especially ME!)

The answer is “It is really easy to fool our mind”. This is also where the core of the fiction in Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story The Body Snatcher and the reality of ‘Burke and hare Crime’ is overlapping.

Burke and Hare thought that their crimes were justified because of the profits of their business. Fettes and Macfarlane thought that their acts were justified for their survival and reputation.

Deep down they were completely engulfed in the guilt of their wrongdoings. So, if we follow the before-explained thought of Immanuel Kant, we will see that real actions from law will ensure realistic punishment but the punishment of the mind is instant, the guilt is injected immediately. This guilt if is “real”, it will immediately start eroding your personality and psyche. Which will eventually lead to unnatural events and acts of crime in real world.

I am saying the feeling of guilt to be “real”, because (again) it is really easy to fool our mind. One has to train mind to distinguish the difference between impulses, responses and their encouragement or suppression. One will realize that whenever there is suppression of wrong thought like guilt in this case, it leads to the defense mechanism – creating a cover up with false sense of greater good or the false security of not getting caught in action, on not having enough evidences. Even though they are not caught in society, the guilt has already passed its sentence on their personality, their self-image and psyche. Now such persons have just accepted what they have become. (This is how a psychopath would start their journey to justify all their crimes).  

I am posing this also from the other perspective of ‘false-guilt’. Sometimes we consider ourselves guilty when in reality we were not responsible for those events. This false guilt will start taking even the good things you have.

The only way I see to handle any wrong thought is to not let it grow out of its own boundary of creation, not to feed it further. Not to mask it or suppress it but just let it remain there. The overgrowth and flourishing of good thoughts will eventually diminish its influence. It’s natural to have right or wrong thoughts for given stimulus. Response, reaction lies in our territory. You must understand that even the act of suppression demands extra efforts which requires extra involvement, this extra involvement is unconsciously feeding that wrong thought, thus suppression on mental level is not suppression rather it’s a feed. Which exactly what we keep on missing when judging between an action and its mere thought.    

Egg Or Chicken? – Action Or Thought?

You will appreciate the dilemma created due the practical limitations of the world we live in. As it is really difficult to enter immediately into the mentality, psyche of the others – we have to always go by the external attributes of everyone around us to measure the rightness or wrongness. That is why act imposing guilt must also be supported by the thought of guilt. This is very important when the psyche, the mind of person is not normal or completely evolved. So, one may think that the importance of ill-intent is less important, it also plays equally important role in judiciary decisions.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea – “the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty.” That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

William Landay, Defending Jacob

Conclusion

Robert Louis Stevenson is known for his world-famous novels Treasure Island and Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The short story called “The Body Snatcher” throws light on the mentality and evolution of the dangerous psychopaths. The false sense of greater good, the ability to ‘suppress destructive thoughts’, ‘destructive actions’ to justify superiority keeps driving certain types of criminals to cross the limits of humanity, ethics, morality. It shows that even though the consequences of wrong actions may not get punished due to the limitations of the laws of the respective times, the punishment of wrong thought is almost instant which is the degradation of the psyche through ‘guilt’ and ‘fear’ – and most of the time it goes unnoticed and build over time resulting in even more grave dangerous acts. It shows how thought and action are equally important in the overall personality of a person. The wrong act may not get punished but the wrong thought has already punished the mind.    

References-

The Roadmap For A Creative & Fulfilled Life

The ten letters from an Austrian poet, novelist – Rainer Maria Rilke to a young poet undergoing the fear of mediocrity and criticism laid down a roadmap for a successful artistic and creative life. The beauty of Rilke’s letters is that they are not limited to those strictly in the creative professions; rather it is a roadmap for every person who want to live a fulfilled life involving continuous transformation of inner and outer riches. That is also why art is important in our lives. Rilke through his ten letters, implores the reader to cultivate authenticity, empathy, and patience to pass through all events of their lives.

In today’s times the written communication has become so handy and easy that you can send millions of sentences from one end of the globe to the another within few milliseconds. This convenience of communication has stolen away the sanctity, sanity and strength of the words and emotions they invoke which were actually supposed to transform our worlds in better constructive ways. After reading these letters from Rilke you will appreciate how effectively he distilled down the divine wisdom of life in few pages. A book costing less than one time meal can transform your whole life. This is the power of a true artist.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet

One of the biggest fears any budding artist carries inside them is the fear of mediocrity and the fear of the criticism. Creative pursuits can be followed by anyone and everyone but very of few them are able to rise-up as the real artists. At the same time, it is also true that a great master was once a starting novice. This is where lies an ambiguity; how could an artist develop his art to the greatness when today he/she is unsure about its end fate? This may feel a complicated question but the answer is simple or at least someone has already simplified the answer for us. Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet is the one of the artists who truly understood what it means to create an art or become a true artist.  

The reason to mention Rilke out of the other artists is the way he provided that answer. Very few artists carry so much artistic power that even when they would sneeze or yawn, it feels artistic. Rilke was one of those effortless artists. Pardon my example of artistic yawn, for Rilke deserves far superior analogy for his works. A true artist’s life itself is an expression of art. This is only possible due to the authenticity. Authenticity is the core of great and true art.

The reason to choose Rilke to solve the riddle of the true artistry is the letters he wrote to a budding poet for giving feedback on his poetry. You will see the inner workings of Rilke’s genius artistic mind through these ten letters. You can call these ten letters as ten advises, ten rules to become a great artist rather a great human being. You would wish that someone would have given you exactly similar advises in your journey when you will read these letters. What strikes me the most in these letters it the relevance they still have today, that is what is an attribute of true art – it stands the test of time. I will throw some light on the key moments from these ten letters and would encourage you to read them for yourself. You will understand that very few pages of paper are enough to change the way you live your whole life.    

Letter 1 – Art should fill the gap between what is felt and what is expressed

Criticism of art

Franz Kappus – a recruit in military academy felt the need to have an opinion on his poetry which is why he wrote letters to Rilke asking for his feedback. Rilke once studied in the same academy. Rilke writes following in response to Kappus.

“Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endured alongside ours, which passes away.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

It is very interesting to see how Rilke found out the gap between the expression of any art and the interpretation of its observer, admirer. And that is exactly why art should exist and function. That is also why it is very easy to criticize given art but difficult to replicate it. Most of the pure creations of art, however fictional they may be have somehow emerged from some real-life events and are very personal. This fuels the pure artistic creation but it may also steal the perspective from the observers who haven’t gone through that real life experience in their own lives. That is exactly why criticism is the easiest task in any artistic journey. Rilke thus encourages the new poet to not worry about the criticism of others in this journey. Actually, bringing the intangibility into tangibility, unsayable and unseeable into comprehensible reality is the exact job of the artist. He would anyways face the criticism as he is the first one to bring them into the reality; others are yet to pass through the same experiences on their own level. Fear of criticism should not stop the process of artistic expression. 

Artistic style is effect of the art not the cause behind it

“Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deep regions of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Many artists try to copy the style of other famous artists to create their own art because it is already proven technique that others are appreciating. It is the safest way. Some try to force things so that art would be created. Art should not force you to do certain things. The style created by these routes becomes pretentious and ‘cringy’. People will like it; it will become viral but it will be short lived.

Rilke thus advises the young poet to look for the reason he has chosen to walk this path. He wants the poet to make sure that the reason to go on this journey is to express the deep sayings of the heart. The art created from this deep urge of the heart will have its own style.

Rilke was very well aware that the emergence of style is directly linked to its uniqueness of expression which is very personal thing. Hence, he suggests to go inwards. Every one of us lives their life in unique ways and if the art reflects that uniqueness, then it can easily create its own style. This is possible only when one has the urge to honestly put his own life in his art instead of copying or imitating the lives of others. This is also why one cannot separate the biography of a true artist from his art. So, study of an art is in a way the study of that human who created it, his philosophy of life.

“A work of art is good if it has risen out of necessity.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Letter 2 – Art is more about depth than its aesthetics

“For under the influence of serious things irony will either fall away (if it is something incidental) or on the contrary (if it really belongs to you in a native way) it will gain strength and so become a serious tool and take its place among the means with which you will be bound to create your art.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Art most of the times is meant for pleasure or to stir up the emotions. That is why aesthetics are one important part of any art. So, it is natural for any artist to work on improving the materialistic attributes of his art, the way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it smells or the way it feels to the skin – the way it triggers the senses. Rilke wants the young poet to care less for such aesthetic attributes and focus more on what needs to be said which was not said by others before. This is possible only when the artist shows his personal depth, his honest intent while expressing his emotions, thoughts, ideas through his art. If there is depth in the expression, the aesthetics would be automatically be built around it to fulfill that honest expression.

This shows why Rilke’s simple writings feel so artistic and pure to the core. Even his normal letter communication has an intent and depth.   

Letter 3 – Solitude engenders the art

The solo journey of authenticity for the creation of true art has its shortcomings (I won’t use the word ‘disadvantage’ because Rilke explains the power of such solo journey many times in his future letters). The shortcoming is that as you are on your own, you may cross the paths which others have already passed, you may commit the same mistakes which others already committed. This wastes valuable time and resources. So, anyone would obviously think that at least if they start with some preconceptions of what others have already done, it would prevent them from potential failures in their own artistic journey. Rilke prohibits the young poet from embarking on such journey. There is a reason.

“Trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time lead you to other insights.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The single most common attribute of any great artform which is the authenticity is possible when the artist successfully pours his/ her unique perspective into their art. This is only possible when they go on their own journey in their own ways even if others have already done that. Rilke focuses more on how you grew out of your failures, the failure which other have gone before but never learnt from them. For an artist, failures are less important than the personal journey of gathering personal unique perspectives and insights which world has never experienced before.  

Solitude is important in such journeys because it demands the artist to go in his own ways without getting influenced by others. This isolation from the surrounding ensures the true expression of what was suppressed by the very surrounding itself. Being a social animal, we try to suppress certain aspects of our identity to melt and fit into the corners and molds of the society. Rilke implores the importance of solitude so that those hidden, personal and unique aspect will bring out the authentic perspective out of the artist.   

“It is a lesson I learn every day amid hardships I am thankful for: patience is all!”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke knew that failures shatter anyone completely and that is exactly why asks for patience in this journey.

Letter 4 – Artist must be careful about the limitations in the expression of art due to the tangibility of its materialistic media

Rilke cautioned the young poet about the media of the art. The media are purely materialistic which are expressing the immaterial, intangible ideas and emotions. So the chances are high that the limitations of the media will not successfully communicate the intangible expression of the artist. The art could immediately feel mediocre because the media failed even though the artist had an impeccable picture of that piece in his mind.

“…for even the best of us get the words wrong when we want them to express such intangible and almost unsayable things.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Many of us are pursuing certain arts because it gives us certain type of pleasure, enjoyment, and entertainment. This is also one of the aspects of the materialistic limitation of the media of expression in art. The materialistic media excite our physical senses and also the intangible parts of our personality. Most of the times the goal is to excite the physical, materialistic aspects of our personality. Rilke advices to not focus on such materialistic pleasures during the creation of the art. Such art would excite physically but as physical things have materialistic limitations these limitations will restrict the expression of intangible and truly pure, authentic attributes of given artform.

“Physical desire is a sensual experience, no different from pure contemplation or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit sates the tongue; it is a great and endless feeling which is granted to us, a way of knowing the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And that we receive this pleasure cannot be a bad thing; what is bad is the way almost all of us misuse the experience and waste it and apply it as a stimulus to the tired parts of our lives, as a distraction instead of as a concentration of ourselves into climactic points”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

(It’s like even though loud music excites you that does not mean that you will keep on listening to it forever; it will surely feel boring after some time. This ‘boring’ feeling is due the material aspects like your eardrums getting tired after repeated exposure.)

That is why Rilke asks to ignore the materialistic pleasure while creating and expressing the art. The pleasure is the byproduct of authentic art, it should first invoke that which was not realized by the person who is consuming that art. Even though the person might have gone through that experience before but it was the artist who showed this person what the observer didn’t felt before.

Letter 5 – Art is one of the very few things which could last forever

“…and you slowly learn to recognize the very few things in which something everlasting can be felt, something you can love, something solitary in which you can take part in silence.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke here was writing about his time in Rome, Italy. You will see that he describes Rome with hot weather, empty, difficult to settle in, lifeless and museum-like dead and still feeling. But Rilke then pointed out the creations of Michaelangelo which are still beautiful in this dead stillness. In a smart way Rilke shows that the art which is created in pure solitude, silence and love could still remain relevant and still express that authentic expression of the artist. Even though Rome was boring for him that day, Michaelangelo’s art inspired Rilke to redefine the artistic venture to inspire his young poet. That artistic creation in Rome was alive and inspiring people around it like Rilke. It is true still today.    

Letter 6 – The ‘final’ destination is solitude and only solitude

“What is needed is this and this alone: solitude, the great inner loneliness. Going into oneself and not meeting anyone for hours – that is what one must arrive at.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

You will find Rilke reiterating the great importance of solitude in his every letter to the young poet. And there are important reasons behind it.

Solitude makes the artist to look inwards which prevents him from copying other styles, it prevents him from mediocrity.

If the artist would depend on other external techniques for artistic creations; once these techniques fail for any reason unknown to the artist the whole journey is futile and great failure.

Failing inwardly is way important to recover because artist would know each and every reason for its end fate into failure. This creates new opportunities for improvements and learnings which lead to unique style of artistic expressions.

Solitude makes the art more personal. Even though we are all same inside and outside on human level what separates us are our unique life experiences and the unique personal perspectives created from those experiences.

Solitude prevents the artist from the hesitation of expression thereby making his art more potent. Any artist who can shake the people to their core rarely hesitates, this is possible only when he has detached himself from the influence and opinions of others. This strength comes when one submits himself to solitude.     

Letter 7 – Only solitude can create ‘real’ love.

“I believe that love remains so strong and powerful in your memory because it was your first deep experience of solitariness and the first inner work that you undertook on your life.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Most of the art is revolving around love. There is a reason why it is so. Love allows the person to appreciate the very reason of being himself. Many would say that love makes the person complete because his other half part in his lover empowers him but that is not the case in reality. You should appreciate how Rilke points out this fantastic observation about our human nature and its definition of love.

The love which we feel for others and consider it as a fulfilling in the form of the other person who loves us back is solely a result of – we carefully and intentionally working on ourselves inwardly. We consider love as a completing emotion not because others make us feel special through it; rather it is because love inspires us to willingly work on ourselves so that our lover would appreciate our love for them and love us back.

True love inspires a person to love themselves, to work on themselves, improve themselves so that their loved ones would love them back. This is only possible when one has completely appreciated solitude. Solitude is the ultimate and authentic form of love. When you would start loving yourself honestly you would appreciate what your loved ones are looking for when they are looking for love.

So, however paradoxical it may seem, our love for others starts with our love for ourselves and only ourselves. (bear in mind that we are not talking about selfishness) Rilke pointed out this observation.

Letter 8 – Sadness is the blessing in disguise

Letter 8 is my most favorite letter. Not because it glorifies sadness or pain which is a common tool for any great art. (Some newcomers, wannabes are ready to harm themselves mentally, physically to invoke such feelings for creating true expression of their art – I feel its too pretentious and inauthentic.)

I like this letter because it asks the artist to observe his sadness in greater depth instead of running away from it. The mere nature of life as a pursuit of happiness prevents us from appreciating its other lesser known but glorious aspects which are hiding in plain sight behind sadness and pain. Rilke knew this hence he implores the young poet to study and appreciate sad experiences constructively.

“If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and a little beyond the outworks of our intuitions, perhaps we should then bear our sadness with greater assurance than our joys. For they are the moments when something new enters into us, something unknown to us; our feelings shy and inhibited, fall silent, everything in us withdraws, a stillness settles on us, and at the center of it is the new presence that nobody knows, making no sound.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

What a pure and real thought!

Rilke beautifully convinced us that we learn more, develop better, create better if we let new and unknown things inside ourselves. Sadness is highly associated with unfamiliarity, uncertainty which is also why it is invoked in such conditions but that is the exact reason for an artist to explore the unexplored territories of humanity. These new, unknown experiences actually develop and amplify the artistic attributes in better ways than any happiness, joy or pleasure would.

“The quieter, the more patient and open we are in our sadness, the deeper and more unerringly the new will penetrate into us, the better we shall acquire it, the more it will be our fate, and when one day in the future it ‘takes place’ (that is, steps out of us towards others) we shall feel related and close to it in our inmost hearts”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke strongly proposes the creative person to not be swayed by the sadness and get carried away with it. Rilke demands patience. For patience will make the person to study this feeling of sadness and what it is actually pointing to. As we are the creatures craving for happiness and running away from sadness it is natural to consider sadness as a hostile feeling. But this less acquainted sadness is actually carrying the gifts of our better futures for when we pass through them, we are transformed. A true artist is always looking for a new perspective towards the world we are living in. And transformation is a coal mine which holds the diamonds of creative, new, and radical artistic perspectives with immense depth. Rilke wants the young artist to capitalize the sadness with the tool of patience to learn a totally different perspective towards the world.

“Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke also showed that the very thing we are scared of is also scared of us for it too is clueless about the unknown. The way Rilke said this shows how important empathy is for any artist. Empathy will help any creative person rather any human being to make amends with the uncomfortable, sad feelings. So, patience and empathy are the most important tools to live a life full of transformations. These transformations, especially the inner transformations will fuel your art.

“Do not think that the person who is trying to console you lives effortlessly among the simple, quiet words that sometimes make you feel better. His life is full of troubles and sadness and falls short of them. But if it were any different, he could never have found the words that he did.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke then turns the face of inner patience and empathy outwards. If you are this much careful about your inner world in a creative pursuit, think how others are feeling when they pass through similar emotions, feelings. People in your surrounding world are also transformed by such events. Especially, people who are always nice to others, extend hand to others in need, create a safe space for others to get comfortable. They are not doing it because it is nice, it makes them look good or because they want that greatness of good deeds. They do it because they know what it means to be helpless, sad, being thrashed by the events out of their control. Only because they kept their inner world alive, they underwent this constructive transformation which made them a better human they are today.

Rilke wants the artist to appreciate such people living around him. I might be overstating here but only an empath with a strong inner compass can see these qualities in all people. He can look through the people for who they are. This is important aspect of any creative journey.

Letter 9 – Life is right, whatever happens

“All feelings are pure that focus you and rise you up. An impure feeling is one that only comprises one side of your nature and so distorts you. Any thoughts that match up to your childhood are good. Everything that makes more of you than you have hitherto been in your best moments is right.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke beautifully explains what is right and what is wrong. You have to appreciate that this idea of right and wrong is not based on some religious ideas or some scientific evidences. Although most of the times people resort to either of these given ideologies. What Rilke explains is the way of inner judgement born out of pure solitude. When you isolate your inner world from the external influences, you will realize that the inner child filled with all the curiosity, intrigue and innocence is still there waiting to explore the world. You will find that this is what you are actually but the outer influences made you to twist and morph your core. You will understand that you feel things differently when you are looking inwards. The feelings will remain the same but how you respond changes drastically.

In order to appreciate this I will pose an example: look out for the authors who wrote murder mysteries, psychopathic thrillers or some melodrama with tragedy. The thing to observe is how they are in real life; some actor who played a deadly sinister villain and then look how he/she is in real life. You will see that most of the times the gap between how they live and what they portray is totally different rather polar opposites. This way of artistic performance is only possible when one is aware of what emotions they are going through. They know why they are feeling this and are masters of artificially creating them too. This awareness is possible only if the person has cultivated his inner world deeply.  

Feelings are one inseparable part of this inner world. They could be of sadness, happiness, pleasure, anger, anxiety, or jealousy. On surface, it may seem that feelings emerge from external factors but what people always forget, is that one can consciously recognize those feelings and select a constructive response towards them; especially when the feelings are negative. Feelings if mishandled could be devastating and if recognized properly can bring about a revolution in the inner world and the external world thereafter. The very volatility of feelings is their strength and weakness simultaneously. What Rilke wanted is to acknowledge every such emotions for they are not there to remain forever. And that is exactly why he defines the right-ness and wrongness of feelings in completely radical ways. That is also why the childlike innocence is very important for there is no prejudice when one is passing through given emotions. Feelings are the response to reality and not a way to become sad or happy. Rilke wants every artist to use this in their creative pursuit. This is the secret of authenticity – to feel everything that you are feeling instead of getting flown away with it, let it pass but don’t get overwhelmed by them.

That is exactly why life filled with so many multitudes of emotions, feelings would make sense even when they are not on helping term with you. You will see that even such ‘bad’ feelings will open new portal to new creative journeys. For any artist cultivation of emotions especially the negative ones thus become highly important.

Letter 10 – Art is a part of life, life is bigger than art but at the same time, life is futile without art

“Art too is only a way of living, and it is possible, however one live, to prepare oneself for it without knowing; in every real situation we are nearer to it;…”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

It is not compulsory to end your artistic journey into the creation of your magnum opus or the masterpiece of your life. What art should do is to make you appreciate the life around you on deeper and richer levels. Once one learns this, they will find art in every aspect of life, which by the way is also an artistic take on living life. The life you are living itself is a masterful creation. Rilke wants the creative person to honor that beautiful creation by remaining worthy of it. 

So, this is it. I would recommend every person to read through these 10 letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke to Mr. Kappus. They are not some letters intended to communicate with each other. These 10 letters are guidelines for the people on their creative journey whatever it may be.

In today’s times the written communication has become so handy and easy that you can send millions of sentences from one end of the globe to the another within few milliseconds. This convenience of communication has stolen away the sanctity, sanity and strength of the words and emotions they invoke which were actually supposed to transform our worlds in better constructive ways. After reading these letters from Rilke you will appreciate how effectively he distilled down the divine wisdom of life in few pages. A book costing less than one time meal can transform your whole life. This is the power of a true artist.

That is exactly how a simple scribble by true artist becomes a sermon to whole world. People worship it forever. Authenticity, empathy, and patience make it happen.      

A Modern Prayer to Perceive ‘The Silver Linings’

The acceptance of our dark side is the only way to start a new journey to the real happiness, fulfillment. Achieving real fulfillment becomes way easier and manageable once we start acknowledging our dark emotions, feelings of sadness and sorrow. Running away from such “low” lying emotions actually intensifies them in the abyss. Actually, such emotions have great contribution in the refinement of our character. Empire of the Sun’s new song called ‘Happy Like You’ talks about the acceptance of our dark side to make our personality whole for creating a newer and better version of ourselves.

Empire of the Sun’s song “Happy Like You”

The best piece of art can be attributed to the multiple perceptions, interpretations it creates in the mind of its subjects despite keeping its physical structure constant.

The beauty of a masterpiece is that people have their own opinion about that piece and nobody is wrong. The mere subjectivity and the possibility to invoke personal feeling in the mind of the observer or the enjoy-er of the art is the power every one of us has naturally. Most of the time very few of us unlock that power in a better sense. Music is one such power.

Recently, I came across newly released album named “Ask that God” by an Australian electronic duo called Empire of the Sun. All the songs on this album are banger and are complete redefinition of what the Empire of the Sun stands for. In my personal opinion, it is a crime to compare all the songs to choose the best one, (but you already know why I am writing this). One song that is looping in my head continuously and has occupied a larger portion of my brain for many days is “Happy like you” (this only shows that the song has conjured me thereby maintaining my previous point of not comparing good songs with each other).

Luke Steele and Nicholas Littlemore of Empire of the Sun

Actually, bringing the poetry into the bastardized territory of prose should be a crime, for it de-beautifies the very reason for it being so wonderful. But, in order for everyone to appreciate the multiple subjective point of views and its connections with the multiple facets of life it is trying to explain, a poetry must undergo its ‘deconstruction’ into prose.

That is the crime I am committing here. If there is any songwriting, poetry, lyrics meaning police anywhere, tell them that I am here waiting for them to tolerate all this prose I have written hereon.  

Jokes aside, I am deep diving into the song and its music video.

The song

The song is written by Luke Steele and Nick Littlemore of Empire of the Sun.

Happy Like You lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group

You’re revolutionary
You’re like a phantom taking a leap
You’re heart is legendary
Bet you are feeling so high 
You have a higher power
Telepathic talk to me
Make me whole again
Whole again whole like I used to be 

Happy like you 
Happy

The poet is asking the higher power for something that would make him feel complete like he was before. He is praising the power of this higher power so that it can bless him.

The words used by poet like revolutionary, taking leap, legendary heart are used to describe this higher power reflects what he exactly wants from the higher power. He wants to regain a lost part of his personality he was before going through this hardship. He wants the higher power to take the leap to come out of the sorrow, transcend the current state and bring about an “internal” revolution in a way.

Telepathic ability indicates the poet’s trust in the higher power. Poet knows that this higher power is his final resort to all that exists. That is why this power knows everything already and there is nothing required to be expressed formally to get things done.

Ultimately, it is a request to regain that precious part of the poet’s personality, that happiness which defined his whole personality.

Won’t you humanize me
Use all your wisdom 
Show me joy in everything 
I’ve been clouded by machines
Lost my way deep inside another screen

The rhetorical question posed by the poet is a slight indication of what he lost during his difficult times. He lost the things which made him human. He lost the ability to see the silver linings.

This is the exact spot we must understand that the person lost his personality in depression and mental battles. But why? and how?

Immediate forthcoming lines show what happened. The screens and “machines” indicate the influences of the mechanical world on our daily lives and the added powerful effect of social media which led to a dreadful state of depression.

It’s an irony that when we are ‘liking’ certain things on social media from other people’s lives, a deep-rooted sadness, envy, hatred is getting born out of the one-to-one comparison of lives. Everyone is conscious of these emotions due to social media but the penetration of social media, screens everywhere is so regular and normal that we are subconsciously (now mechanically) ignoring these emotions which take a toll on our minds when we are shocked with something really sorrowful.   

All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you 
All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you

 Once you pass through such horrible emotions of sadness and depression you start appreciating the person you were, how happiness made you the better version of yourself. This happiness made you feel like the greater, higher power itself. That happiness actually made you feel closer to the higher power. The poet urges the higher power to make him who he was before and just in the ways the higher power carries itself.  

You’re revolutionary 
Telepathic talk to me
You are imaginary
Bet you are feeling so high 

Wish is a dream that comes true

The most difficult part of coming out of the depression is that it starts in mind of a person with such an intangible, non-physical thought/ idea and then it starts to affect the real events, objects, people around him/ her. So, even though fixing the reality around such person can help to come out of the depression; uprooting the deeply settled feelings of sadness, grief, sorrow has immense impact in the person’s fight against depression.

That is exactly why the wish to become happy shows that the poet whole-heartedly wants feel happy. The ‘wish’ indicates is readiness from inside to be realize happiness from intangibility to reality thereby highlighting the use of the expression “dreams that come true” here.

Time is a song that forms you 
Oh I hope you

The expression of ‘time’ which formed this higher power implies the time which need to given to person to heal when he/ she is in hardships. Give it some time, it will pass too. The poet has understood that over the time even though it will seem difficult but over the time every sadness will fade away. It’s just an ask from poet to the higher power to get the patience, courage for passing through this hard time.    

Won’t you humanize me
Use all your wisdom
Show me joy in everything
I’ve been clouded by machines 
Lost my way deep inside another screen 

All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you 
All I wanna be is happy happy happy like you

Ultimately the influence of social media on our lives and the mere algorithmic, mechanical nature of our lifestyle is leading lives of many really happy people to a depressed, sorrowful life. The poet asks the higher power to make such people complete again and happy again just like the supreme power is. It also means that once we become happy and complete, we will become that supreme higher power again.   

From a simple explanatory point of view on any poetry/ songwriting, the song gives an impression of the man’s urge to regain his happiness, his identity when he is in the conundrum of depressive emotions and thoughts. The impact of depression is great because the factors causing it are within our hands (or I may say fingers’) reach – the social media and the screens.

I think the songwriters have taken this excuse of the depression from social media to show what an urge to overcome any depression means for any human being; what it means to redefine the personality and also complete the human being in a bigger picture.  

The video and its symbolism

The phone call –

The video starts with a phone call. The girl receives a call on her landline and then the frame shifts to a guy (Luke Steele – Emperor Steele) in a dark with a red hue and dark hat. This is indication of her having a call with her inner self. The low-lit room shown throughout the video is the metaphor of she having discussion with herself and her inner thoughts and emotions. The phone call is proof of she handling her emotions by herself, it is her own conscience calling her.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
A low-lit room –

Watching reflection in mirror and hand movements on her own body shows she is interacting with herself. It is like a self-talk one has with themselves while figuring out what needs to be done. The low-lit room shows that dark part of our personality which also need acknowledgement. Even though the song calls for the person to be happy, this low-lit room has bigger significance. It is an indication that the real happiness comes with our acknowledgement of our darker side. Darker not in the sense of negativity but more in the sense of left out emotions which also need proper attention.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
The colors –  

Even though the music video looks colorful with some dark theme, the choice of colors used in this video are specific; there are characters, colors to the people shown in the video. Hot, cold, and warm / Red, blue, yellow, greens sometimes – indicate respective emotions and the interaction of the girl with those emotions. It is like she is trying to understand them and accept their presence to find the answers.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
The window –

In the early part of the song, you will see the girl peeking through the blinds to see what’s behind the glass. It’s literally her peeking into her dark side of the mind.

There is a glass window with blinds between a person and the girl. The person can see her doing all her activities. What girl sees is only her reflection, this absolutely support the symbolism of her having an internal conversation about the overall depressive state of her mind.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV
The sadness, grief –

You will see one person (Nick Littlemore – Lord Littlemore) with the black tears seemingly away from the window in certain snippets of the video, who appears and goes withing few moments. This is that deep rooted feeling of sadness which the girl is trying to acknowledge. One person closer to the glass window observing the girl’s activity is her conscience and the grief is away from the glass lying in the deep abyss of her mind. I say the guy closer to the window is her conscience because it has symbolically shown with multiple colors and hues showing the variety of emotions one carries in themselves.  

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV

The rain in the end symbolizes new beginning, renewal.

Frame from Empire of the Sun’s Happy Like You MV

The creators of Music video deserve special applause

A deep dive into this ‘prayer’

For me this is not a simple song, it’s a prayer and I have a very strong reason to justify my point. A prayer from a literal, grammatical point of view is a request to higher powers which have better control of the reality than us. We surrender to such higher powers to show that we are humbled and are in a need for help through such prayers.

This song may not have that feel of “conventional” prayers, hymns due to its electronic and not so ‘religious-feeling’ notes, melodies but there is no written rule on the ways to compose a prayer anyways.

On first thought it’s weird, how can a prayer in electronic music make sense spiritually?

I say why not! I would say the composition itself dares the modern listener to appreciate the feeling of awareness of our higher self – hidden inside our own selves. It is like tapping into that unconventional, unexplored hidden, darker part of our own conscience.

The song mainly focuses on visiting and acknowledging the darker parts of our mind, especially when we are in deep sorrow. Abandoning such dark emotions thinking that they are not part of your personality actually intensifies them and when you are feeling weak and defeated – these emotions will easily cover your whole personality.

My point to call this song a pious prayer is that it makes the listener, the singer acknowledge their emotions. Good or bad whatever they are, they together make the personality whole. It also makes them to accept their urge to improve themselves in life. Even though we are asking the higher powers to grant us the powers to become our better version it is actually we – ourselves acknowledging our darker side to improve and build upon them for the better and evolved version of our selves.

The most important act to come out of any negative, depressed feeling is the acceptance of the fact that they are an inseparable part of our personality and only this time they have charge over our personality and we can take control from them anytime we want. You can only cure a person who really want to be cured and live ahead. The feeling to come out of such sorrows has to come from inside and it becomes easy once we accept our darker side of emotions, feelings.

So, the best way to handle any challenging emotional state, any darker emotional state is to first acknowledge them. Acceptance of something wrong or abnormal is the first step to effectively work on handling them. It becomes very difficult to accept that we ourselves are the originator of our emotional responses and its totally normal. We just feel that it is difficult to control our emotions because mostly they are triggered by the external stimuli and that is where the real trick happens. You see, the illusion that our emotions are uncontrollable is created by the assumptions that one need to control his/her surroundings to achieve what they want to become happy. That is why when such person fails, they are immediately drowned into the feelings of sadness. This also does not mean that you should always control your emotions and avoid expressing yourselves.

What I am trying to make point about is that the moment we start segregating our emotions as good and bad we end up in an illusion of happiness instead of the real happiness. Instead of avoiding and dumping, controlling your sad, dark emotions deep down, their acceptance as one more normal part of our personality helps us in a better way to achieve the real happiness.

Being sad justifies the moments of happiness and that also does not mean that you must remain sad – suffer more to be happy in bigger ways. You see, all happinesses in the world are same. Actually, they are not even same, they are subjective – to be precise, there is nothing to compare between any type of happiness. But due to the social media and the screens, we are always trying to compare our happiness with other people’s happiness. That is where the origin of the problem lies.

Looking on the other side of the shore same goes with the sadness; no two sadness must be compared. Acknowledgement itself is more than enough.

Working on sadness is like hugging an annoying crying kid; just a tight hug without any intent. The kid will stop crying.

Once we have accepted all our emotions as a natural part of our personality then only can we have the chance to recreate our personality. This requires humbleness and in most cases when people are thrashed with the reality and the sadness, when they are helpless the final resort is the spirituality where the help from almighty is requested. The moment you attribute this power to any object especially human-like object the religion starts taking shape (that would be topic or another discussion!) But without diverting the topic, only when we are humbled then we seek help from others. Prayer allows you to do that without any feeling of shame. That is exactly why I feel this song is a prayer. It allows you to accept your darkness, understand it and asks you to use it to create new happiness.  

I will stick to Kierkegaard on this, we have to understand that when we are praying to the higher powers to handle our lives in a better way, we are actually asking the forces lying inside our own selves which hold the capacity to create the better version of ourselves.

We are capable of creating better times for ourselves on a condition that we acknowledge every part of who we are. It is just our mechanical nature to categorize certain things as good or bad sad and happy which takes charge of our whole personality.  You will appreciate this more once you closely observe the stories behind the creation of all types of the masterpiece humanity has ever seen. All those great things had that unconventional, hidden dark side which triggered the creation of something totally new and radical.

So, in order to become truly happy, one must accept their dark sides that is where the potential to have completely new beginnings lies.

The Free Spirit – Beyond Good and Evil

The journey to the freedom demands solitude thereby making man responsible, accountable for the consequences of his every thought and action. Friedrich Nietzsche in his book Beyond Good and Evil paved a way for future philosophers to establish their own new perspectives about the truth where there are no two sides – good-bad, sad-happy, moral-immoral, beautiful-ugly, calm-disturbing but a revised and better version of the older truth. Nietzsche in this book focused on the refinement of our perspectives, our versions of truths for the real freedom because immediately surrendering to already established versions of ideologies is the worst imprisonment any man can have. Nietzsche showed how badly our ignorance creates an illusion of freedom and how to come out of it. This is to remember Friedrich Nietzsche on his death anniversary.

Remembering Friedrich Nietzsche on his death anniversary

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most impactful philosophers we as a humanity have ever seen. Reading Nietzsche is a task in itself. But the moment you start getting hold of the things that Nietzsche is trying point to, you will literally undergo transformation. The path that Nietzsche paved inspired many modern philosophers, thinkers, writers. To not mention Nietzsche is to do injustice with our understanding of ourselves as the human beings. This is one attempt to revisit Nietzsche’s ideas in his famous book called “Beyond Good and Evil”, especially his ideas on free Spirit.

Nietzsche in his special style clarified what it means to be really free and how we develop our perceptions, philosophies about the world around us and ourselves.

This is me remembering Nietzsche on his death anniversary. His ideas will keep on living forever.

Oversimplification kills the nuances thereby changing the big picture

Nietzsche strikes powerfully on the idea of understanding the life as simple and easy. It’s a humorous way in which he tried to convey how we consider living life as way to goodness, happiness, pleasure and freedom. The sentences that Nietzsche used to put his ideas about life are built in such a way that you will start questioning the happy nature of the life we desire. You will realize that during the process of understanding life as a pleasurable, happy experience we have submitted our thought process only to the side of pleasure, happiness, and truth. This presumption about life always deviates our search for the truth – “the happiness” that we lookout for as a biased pursuit. Here Nietzsche is not saying that if ‘this’ which you are trying to justify life with is true then it’s opposite is wrong; he is trying to point us towards the idea that as we have attributed life to a happy and pleasurable experience, this attribution has oversimplified what life actually is. Oversimplification has happened because not everyone can understand complex ideas on equal level. It’s not because people are dumb, it is because we have our own ways of interpreting the world around us and the ways through which we interpret the world are totally subjective. Thus, the truth if it exists, it will never be absolute but based on perspectives one has.

“We have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety – in order to enjoy life!”

In order to make everyone appreciate given idea of life on same level we have oversimplified what life is and such oversimplified foundation has led to building even more oversimplified versions of so-called truth. In the pursuit of clarity and ease of interpretation and communication our lives have become false!

That is why Nietzsche here tried to attack the very fundamental way in which we try to break down the things we come across when we live through them. See it in this way, if life by default was supposed to be simple then it is implied that we would have grip on every aspect of life and existence. We know that’s is not the reality. So, if it is not simple then it must be complicated is our next thought. Thus, if life is complicated in reality then oversimplification eliminates certain aspects of life which we keep on missing in the search of truth.

You know what, Nietzsche further explains that when we are denying that life is not simple and happy that also should not invite it being opposite of what was earlier thought i.e., sad and complicated. Nietzsche rejects the idea of polar opposite to portray the lives we live. He calls life, knowledge as the process of “refinement”.

It’s not duality of any aspect of the philosophy, good and bad side of life but the ways and times they have refined themselves which should be the parameter of their worth.

The Death of Philosopher

Nietzsche had his way to express verbal anguish. The sentences are so dense that the prose feels literally repulsive. I think it was intentional. His writings were never meant to be read while sipping coffee or to romanticize the philosophy or the idea of life. They will make sense to those who really want to understand what he is trying to say. Nietzsche in his next idea talks about how every philosopher is trying to find the meaning of life and thereby his/her truth of life. He despises the idea of life or philosophy being explained with a single idea. That is why he sarcastically calls philosophers as the protectors of truth, the thing which itself doesn’t need protection in first place!

Nietzsche thus calls out to the philosopher to get ready accept the martyrdom, the death of their idea of philosophy. The philosopher can only carry his point forward for further refinement but he/she must not – cannot define the life in whole with that simple idea. That idea has to die in the process so that newer refined ideas can be built out of its broken pieces.

In order for philosophy to exist it has to end, it has to kill its older version – that is what is the tragedy of philosophy is as Nietzsche goes.

The Freedom Paradox

When Nietzsche is trying to initiate treatise on freedom, he starts with what it means to be free for any person. One important observation he puts in front is how we get freedom on personal level. On surface it feels if the person is free on personal level, then it is easy to be free in society as a whole. But Nietzsche shows that these ideas of freedom are paradoxical! Man goes inward for the freedom because he/she knows that there is no one else to tie, bound him/her inside his privacy. The man seeking freedom when interacts with the crowd soon realizes that his experiences of life are bound to how crowd handles him, reacts to him, treats him, shapes him. That is unsettling, the burden is difficult to carry for single person hence the man again resorts to privacy, in order to do that he has to let go of certain truths and create his own little lies so that the external crowd won’t disturb his “freedom”.     

“(the man) he was not made, he was not predestined for knowledge”

The point Nietzsche is trying to make here is that the taste of freedom comes with the unsettling feeling of existence. But as a man we are not seeking that freedom for us; freedom is some citadel, a happy place where we expect to have control over course of things. The real freedom as Nietzsche explains will be gained by being in touch with crowd (which sounds paradoxical again) It’s like saying you will understand what you real singular identity is when you start mixing yourselves with the crowd!

Nietzsche further advises philosophers of the future to not turn away from the unsettling ideas about philosophy. He takes support of cynicism to make his point. Cynicism bases itself on the idea that people are selfish, self-interested (so in simple words if anything doesn’t go the way a cynic wants, they would whine and create reasons to justify it.) Nietzsche expects the future philosophers to understand the difference between ill-speaker and bad speaker. The lovers of knowledge should also be able to understand what is unsettling, maybe their lies the next opportunity for better version of their philosophy.

The Freedom of Expression

Nietzsche had already explained how things lose their essence in oversimplification. In same fashion it becomes difficult to interpret what a fast thinker is thinking and then explain it to the relatively slow thinkers and make them appreciate the same idea on same level. Even in our thinking we are not free. You can create an explanation for others to understand what you are thinking but they themselves have to climb up (or climb down sometimes) to your level to appreciate what you are thinking, you may succeed in expression but interpretation, comprehension and its appreciation gets limited by the levels on which others are thinking. (My question, if this is the case then even if you are a free thinker, are you truly a free thinker? I know Nietzsche is paradoxical most of the times)

“What is most difficult to render from one language into another is the tempo of its style, which has its basis in the character of the race, or to speak more physiologically, in the average tempo of the assimilation of its nutriment.”

Nietzsche further builds this “so called” freedom of expression using the limitations of the language. Language is the culmination and mirror of the culture it originated from. So, naturally each language has its own style, flow, breaks, rules and ways to highlight certain aspects of narration. When such languages is used to express an individual’s ideas, the speaker has to let go of the nuances of his culture, his primary way of life so that others having another culture, another way of life can appreciate and understand what he is trying to convey, but what if the nuances were the only thing which made that idea influential? Then the influence of the idea would be lost because of the translation. (This is Nietzsche’s way saying lost in translation!)

The Tragedy of Independence

Another way to become free is to become independent. The very few lines Nietzsche uses to explain independence are equivalent of an atomic bomb! (trust me it is still not an overstatement!!!)

People who become independent are few as Nietzsche says and those who are strong can easily achieve it. This independence is also one way to be free. When a man becomes independent, he is on his own, there is no one like him – he is alone. Nothing is anything alike him – he is alone. Thus the whole world becomes a puzzle for him as he is on his own. Any direction becomes new path for him. As he is the only one like himself, there is no one who would reach to his level and match his thinking. And in such case if he needs sympathy, people cannot even sympathize with him because they are not on his level. What a tragedy! The sadness he has in his heart, mind is rendered useless because others around him are not able to comprehend it – sympathizing gets ruled out automatically.

This is Nietzsche’s way of saying what Hemingway said. (I mean both meant the same although Hemingway came later, but you get the point) You must understand that happiness is not the real pursuit of life, then you won’t feel tragic about what Hemingway is trying to convey here, same is what Nietzsche trying to convey here. Freedom by independence can be a tragedy for the person who was expecting glory out of it.

Foolishness Hides Chances For New Insights

Nietzsche here is trying to remove the lines between what is good and what is bad, what is allowed and what is forbidden.

“That which serves the higher class of men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings”

In modern crude sense, Nietzsche says “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”!

Same idea, same act will have different perception of morality, scale of right and wrong. A rebel thinker in common poor public could be attributed to a philosopher amongst the riches. A murderer who killed an evil landlord could become a saint among the people who were victims of this landlord’s oppression.

So, Nietzsche’s attribution of foolishness is a way to point out the exceptional, outlier acts, prohibited acts, crimes to find the better truths. That will make you freer than others.

The Freedom of Youth   

 The stage of youth feels like the freest stage of all the stages of life and it is so because it has let go of the nuances. It also feels free because the youth in the stage of exploration never submits to right or wrong, yes or no to the life as Nietzsche says. But as the time passes when the youth is exposed to disillusions, broken expectations they try to modify themselves in a way that will get things done the way they wanted – the compromise starts to enter. The moment this happens the same youth tries to punish themselves as Nietzsche says. The freedom exists no more, so is the youth.

The Freedom of Actions

(Again, this a hydrogen bomb on morality!!!)

How can we say that the given action is right or wrong?

Nietzsche has very interesting thought process on this question. In the starting times the action was right or wrong based on what it led to – its consequences – the effect. The problem with this thinking is that one has to wait to let the action happen to decide its rightness or wrongness. If the stakes are high, such attribution of right or wrong can be devastating.

So, Nietzsche takes support of Chinese idea where the parents are responsible for the betterment of their child. Meaning that the origin of the thought which led to that action should be the decider of whether the action is right or wrong. Nietzsche called this pre-moral period of mankind. And sarcastically he points out that we have made a total turn around the idea of right or wrong action. Earlier it was what happened after the action i.e., consequences; now it is what led to that action, meaning what was happening before that action i.e., the origin which is the decider of right and wrong of any action!

This is where the origin of action gets named as ‘moral’ which is generated from self- knowledge. Later these morals evolved into “intentions”. As Nietzsche says, intentions serve as the origin of any action.

“people were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention. The intention as the sole origin and antecedent history of an action: under the influence of this prejudice moral praise and blame have been bestowed, and men have judged and even philosophized almost up to the present day”

Nietzsche then drops another bomb called – unintentional actions. We are clear that whether action is right or wrong can be decided by the intent. But what if there was no intent or there are no other ways to pinpoint the intent behind certain actions? There is a possibility that the intent may get mistranslated, misinterpreted during the unfolding of events, then how would you decide the attribution of given action.

In such case we would again go to the effect- the consequences of that action!!! You see what is happening here? We might have to resort to that older measuring system of action based on their consequences.

This is Nietzsche’s style to question how we think of morality in general and also on deeper level.

(I can’t resist praising Nietzsche lesser but deep down I know he would question his own worship too!)

The next attack Nietzsche does by using morality is the sentiment of sacrifice. The basis of his thought process is that you should question everything that gives you pleasure at least once. Here, he shows how fake the feeling of sacrifice for others, surrender could be if it is intended to display how moral and virtuous you are!

“There is far too much witchery and sugar in the sentiments “for others” and “not for myself””

In simple words, you are saying that I like to help others because it makes me happy. So, in order to help others you have to become selfless, but if becoming selfless to help others makes you happy, doesn’t that make you selfish? You are selfless because you are selfish!!! (Disclaimer: Nietzsche is paradoxical.) The paradox is resolved when you accept that you are just taking support of morality to display you higher value. Being selfless is just a better excuse to display your high morality. It there was any cruel way to display your high morality no wonder you would have gone for that!!!

In modern ways, it’s fox’s way to say the grapes are sour or I am a virgin because I am waiting for someone special (In reality fox cannot reach the grapes and the person is not able to appreciate other person or people rejected that person continuously – please note that I am not blaming someone’s character – it’s the limitation of language that prevents me from expressing what I am thinking for oversimplification. As Nietzsche has already shown that oversimplification kills the nuances. You get the point!)

The Immoral Philosopher – The Free Philosopher

Building upon the ideas of nuances lost in translation, right and wrong in morality Nietzsche calls the future philosophers to go beyond the dichotomy of philosophy and also distrust the morality in the development of new philosophy, new truth.

“In all seriousness the innocence of thinkers has something touching and respect-inspiring in it, which even nowadays permits them to wait upon the consciousness with the request that it will give them honest answers”

This is Nietzsche’s way to show that in order to find the new truth new philosophy, new philosophers have submitted themselves childishly and blindly to the principles of morality hoping that morality will give them new answers. But it is the same tinted glass of morality that prevents them from getting new perspectives. Hence, he calls them naïve here. They must let go of this childishness.

“The belief in “immediate certainties” is a moral naivete which does honor to us philosophers; but – we have now to cease being “merely moral” men!”

This is Nietzsche’s way of saying it’s good to be bad!

For Nietzsche, morality shows only two sides of reality- right or wrong, this works fine if reality is really dichotomized. But we know there is no such thing as right or wrong for every real-life scenario. So, in order to find the real truth, you have to let go of morality, then you will see that reality has its spectrum and people residing on different biases of such reality have their own attribution of right and wrong for the same action. Morality is the subset of newer truth, not the other way around.

‘il ne cherche le vrai que pour faire le bien‘

(he who searches truth to do good) – I wager he finds nothing!

 Nietzsche make his point by him being the first bad-philosopher!!! (This is why I am loving him more and more. It’s like a brainiac with full grown muscles if you want to picture him thematically!)

The Freedom From Passions and Reality – Will to Power

Nietzsche makes an attempt to show that the reality could also be made up of something totally different that we can even comprehend. What if the world is more real than what we can experience? And if such reality exists, our senses will limit us from experiencing it. So, in order to be free in such reality we have to rise above our senses. That would be the new freedom. Our senses are bound to desires and passions whose interactions – impulses are creating thoughts.  

So, building on these impulses Nietzsche says that many emotions, processes are created in “our reality”. What would make any of such impulses, process free from others? He introduces the idea of causality to show the flow and root of everything. If cause leads to an effect and further that effect becomes cause to newer effect then it is possible that the root cause of all would make us really free. Nietzsche further explains that it can also be one of the processes which would overpower others to become free and not the root one. (For example, the first unicellular organisms would be the most powerful organisms on earth today, that is not the case.)

Here Nietzsche introduces the concept of Will to Power. Whatever overpowers the other processes has the potential to remain in the big game and thus has real chance to be free. Will to power in any process allows it to gain more freedom.

This is Nietzsche’s Darwinian theory of evolution – the survival of the fittest. (I know it is a bastardized translation, but again I summon the loss of nuances during translation.)   

Then Nietzsche puts the idea that by this way of thinking the originator does not necessarily be the most powerful one, thereby questioning the existence of the God! Because if the God was the originator, then then he/she would exist only if he/she has the highest Will to Power. That also does not mean that if God does not exist then devil exists or has the highest Will to Power. It could be anything! We are not sure for now. (typical philosophical answer!)

Using causality, Nietzsche also questions the morality of French revolution. If for the locals the royalty was cruel that is why the revolution happened then why didn’t the remotely located people who considered them noble in first place considered them cruel too? In the eyes of remotely located people the French royalty had a noble past. (The question is intended to think on it not to find the right and wrong. It shows how flawed our thinking becomes when we stick to morality blindly.) Whoever came in power overthrew the less powerful. That is one way to explain Nietzsche’s Will to Power. According to Nietzsche, if Napoleon would have been continuously invested in the morality of his actions he wouldn’t have become the great emperor.

Freedom From Truth

Here Nietzsche starts with the very obvious and common fact that some truths are unsettling. Not every truth ensures happiness. Only an idealist, as Nietzsche says would submit the idea of truth that brings joy, happiness, and beauty.

Here comes Nietzsche’s biggest drop-

“the strength of a mind might be measured by the amount of “truth” it could endure – or to speak more plainly, by the extent to which it required truth attenuated, veiled, sweetened, damped, and falsified”

This is self-explanatory. It is just our unsettlement that we need to take care of while looking for the truth. We are thinking animals and thinking is a result of our impulses, desires, and passions. So, not every truth is destined to bring us peace. ‘We would die if we eat poison’ – is a truth which unsettles everyone but that is not how we react to such truths, we prepare for such bad events, that is the wisdom what Nietzsche is talking about in a crude way here.

“There is no doubt that for the discovery of certain portions of truth the wicked and unfortunate are more favorably situated and have greater likelihood of success; not to speak wicked of who are happy- a species about whom moralist are silent. Perhaps severity and craft are more favorable conditions for the development of strong, independent spirits and philosophers than gentle, refined, yielding good-nature, and habit of taking things easily, which are prized, and rightly prized in a learned man.”

Nietzsche prefers learned man more than the moralistic or the virtuous one. A learned man knows the consequences of learning new truth, or sometimes even unaware of it but he does not pivot his happiness on the discovery of new truth. What else could you make freer when you are ready to accept the truth in its crude and real form! This freedom will bring clarity, new perspective and not happiness or sadness or chaos or calmness.

Truth will not decide how and what you are. You just will have added new tinted glass in your collection of perspectives towards life and reality and the philosophy behind all of them.  If your Will to Power is good your truth may become the truth for all others.

Freedom From Identity

The profoundness demands the rejection of submission to any side of existence. If one promotes certain ideology the people around him/ her will try to comprehend that person using the tags they have in their own minds for that idea. The mask thus brings in that ambiguity where people are not associating, tagging you to one definite truth. Even your mind can start creating bias if you let it. That is why Nietzsche focuses on mask in profoundness.

“A man who has depths in his shame meets his destiny and his delicate decisions upon paths which few ever reach, and with regard to the existence of which his nearest and most intimate friends may be ignorant; his mortal danger conceals itself from their eyes, and equally so his regained security.”

The mask frees you from attribution thereby biases and even the socio-economical influences. You will never let honor or shame, right or wrong, good or bad, happy or sad justify the events in your life. You will never ever flinch to enter an unsettling adventure which guarantees your growth personally. Embarrassment, failure will just be another emotional response for you (please note that this does not mean that you will be emotionless, it means that you will be able to recognize your emotions and let them pass.)

This is exactly why I would force everyone to understand Nietzsche on their own level!!!    

“Every profound spirit needs a mask; nay, more, around every profound spirit there continually grows a mask, owing to the constantly false, that is to say, superficial interpretation of every word he utters, every step he takes, every sign of life he manifests”

This could also be one reason why some the greatest personality humanity has ever seen had a layer of controversial ambiguity around them.

From the idea of mask, Nietzsche moves to the idea of its conservation. The conservation is meant to define the philosophy of containing who you are rather that you submitting to some ideology. Whatever you have collected as an individual, whatever you are on philosophical level personally, how you have upgraded – refined your philosophy you must conserve that instead of giving to some ideology. The mask helps to conserve who you are.

“One must know how to conserve oneself – the best test of independence”

(this could be the reason why superheroes wear masks!!!  Joke aside but it is one powerful thought)   

Further Nietzsche warns new future philosophers to not be people pleaser or submitter to temptations. That will steal them of their judgement and independence.

Freedom From Your Version of Truth

The ways in which Nietzsche is trying to close his arguments are really beautiful. He knows that when the future philosophers will have discovered their new truths in their journey of blood, sweat and tears, it is natural that they will get attached to it. Such is the human tendency. He wants us to get rid of the obsession with this new truth. This truth even if it’s the newer one will create boundaries in your perception, you won’t be free anymore! Nietzsche wants to let the future philosophers let go of the dogma.

“In the end things must be as they are and have always been – the great things remain for the great, the abysses for the profound, the delicacies and thrills for the refined, and, to sum up shortly, everything rare for the rare”

Freedom From Illusion of Freedom

On closing notes Nietzsche has advised new philosophers to be careful of the “freedom” they are being offered under new socio-political ideas. Nietzsche focuses here on the ways new philosophers are embarking on the journey to new truths. He tells that having fluency in speech and effective grip on written communication will not define you as the new philosophers, even though they are one aspect of it. But the systems having higher Will to Power will use same tools to control new philosophers and change the course to their versions of truth.

New philosophers will be misled with words like “Equality of Rights”, “Sympathy with All Sufferers”, “Modern Ideas” but they should be careful about them. They should be aware that the moment they create a thought process the people on different levels with different Will to Power will interpret these same ideas for their own benefit especially the ideas which are polar opposites of your ideas. Once such separation happens nobody, not even you cannot get the real freedom.  

Nietzsche offers the rule of solitude while embarking on such journey. Only you can free yourself.