Meaning – Parts Per Billion

The Essence of Nominalism

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

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

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

Is Reality Same for Everyone?

Do We Share a Common Reality?

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

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

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

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

There is one more interesting thing happening here –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A simple experiment

Look at the picture below:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nominalism – There Are Just Names No Essences

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

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

Ockham’s Razor goes like this –

“Plurality should not be posited without necessity”

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

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

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

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

Consequences of Nominalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Boundaries of Nominalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

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.

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.
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”

“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).

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.

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!

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.)

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:

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

Being Watchful Of The Ebb And Flow Of Life

In the constant pursuit of eternal happiness what man forgets is that nothing is everlasting, the sadness exactly like the happiness too shall pass. But, the urge to remain eternally happy and safe, steals the man from actual sense of reality. The illusions of thoughts filled with prejudices, conditioning and the escape from the reality by justifying the same thoughts becomes the endless cycle for such man. The moment man rejects the separation between him and his thoughts and sees that he himself is the originator of every thought is when he starts observing reality for what it truly is. Now there is no urge to seek happiness or the aversion to sadness. The man who is able to observe the reality for what it is and denies the wishfulness has understood what it really means to become free from ‘ego’ – ‘the self’. This is how the man becomes free and fearless.
It is really underrated how much we overvalue our thinking, thoughts, ideologies – for they always create an escape when reality is not how we want it. The man who is able to see through this can appreciate how life is always a continuous flow and not a starting point or destination.
Krishnamurti thus taught about the ability to observe the reality for what it is and without any preconditioning, thinking or prejudices.

Part 2- Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge

Because I am free, unconditioned, whole – not the part, not the relative, but the whole Truth that is eternal – I desire those, who seek to understand me to be free; not to follow me, not to make out of me a cage which will become a religion, a sect. Rather should they be free from all fears – from the fear of religion, from fear of salvation from the fear of spirituality, from the fear of love, from the fear of death, the fear of life itself.

– J Krishnamurti, Truth Is A Pathless Land

Krishnamurti for me is the perfect person at perfect time to ask the perfect question.

I will focus on how Krishnamurti’s teachings – how his ways to dissect our curiosity paves way to understand what it means to be a conscious human being. The further writing is an attempt to address what is thinking and why we think and if not thinking then what makes us real human beings.

In Part 1 on Krishnamurti’s teachings, we touched on following important aspects of what it means to be a human and how distracted we are from our human side:

Krishnamurti most importantly taught how we are trying to bring peace to our lives by associating it with some meaning or purpose. Those who have fair understanding of the gap between what is thought and what is real, they can understand that the world in which we live – the reality in which we exist is constantly changing. Whereas we as human animals are always in the search of stability, that is how we will be able to optimize our energy and efforts to maximize the chances of survival. We crave for longer and peaceful existence in the continuously changing world.

The very continuously changing nature of the reality goes against our wish to live a peaceful, safe and predictable thereby fully controllable, maneuverable life. This resistance between wish and reality splits our thinking, our thoughts from ourselves. This split of ‘we’ – ourselves and our thoughts is the root of all the existential confusion and false sense of happiness – the gratification.

First, we realize that reality will not bend to our wishes, then we give up on real happiness and create our own world of thoughts filled with our facts, our knowledge, personal point of views, prejudices to create certain worldview. This worldview then keeps on feeding itself to grant us gratification. But there comes a point when we see – confront the reality we were masking and running away from, it brings more pain than ever before. It is painful because we distracted ourselves from it, because it never guaranteed eternal happiness – our thoughts granted that eternal happiness while wearing the coat of wishful thinking – gratification. We have separated ourselves from our thoughts in such way that whenever something bad, wrong, unpleasant happens, the blame can be immediately thrown on these thoughts. Thought which we have assumed to be the result of our upbringing, our culture, the unfairness happened to us. We use our thoughts as a separate entity just because we can conveniently find an escape from reality to create a newer one. it has become a tool to find a justification for everything that is unfair to us.

Once we accept how effectively we are deceiving ourselves we come to know that we ourselves are the thoughts, then responsibility follows. We see however painful it may be, this too shall never be constant. We reject the convenience of self-deception, accept who we are and observe the reality for what it is and not how we want it to be.

The moment we become responsible for our thoughts is when we start to see the reality, we start to see the world for what it is, without prejudices. All deceptions are stripped off. We also realise that thinking was mere swaying between acceptance and rejection of two ends – happiness or sadness. We see how much we were bounded due to this swaying – due to this isolation.

The moment we let go the urge to become happy, we let go urge for gratification, then we let go the wishful thinking, then the self-deception dissolves. Once self-deception dissolves, we start to accept our thoughts are our own, then we start to improve ourselves just for the sake of the real truth not for happiness. The life is unshackled from two possibilities of happy or sad into the infinitely many possibilities the reality can offer.

Touching to these ideas we saw in Part 1, how we assign the purpose of our lives just for the sake of gratification, how we separate thinker and thought to reject responsibility, then how the self-deception keeps this cycle going.

Now moving on to the other teachings by J Krishnamurti, I felt a need to understand the quest for happiness. I mean there is nothing wrong in people wishing to feel happy, safe in their lives.

Then I realized what the real problem is; it’s not the wish to become happy, it is the acceptance of certain illusions to become happy. I will throw light on how that happens unknowingly and then we will again come back to Krishnamurti’s ideas on those areas.

The Curious Animal

I think what separates humans from animals is the incessant curiosity for anything and everything that is there to experience; sometimes we are curious about non-existent things too. The extent of curiosity might be different in everyone but it is safe to say that we are way more curious than animals. This curiosity always needs the food of thoughts and reality checks to arrive at a conclusion – that is how we are always reinforcing our consciousness. I think one cannot maintain their conscience or consciousness (call it what you want) if you cannot maintain at least small amount of curiosity in life. Animals have natural routines for survival exactly like we do but I think we are more aware of our own being than the animals do. (might be an overstatement, but you get the point)

Curiosity is not just about some sophisticated questioning to certain sophisticated, complicated part of philosophy, it can be rather very simple. A person thinking about what should be done to get the next meal? – is also one type of curiosity – let us call it the curiosity of ways to get the next meal. This curiosity to get next meal is common for both human and rest of the animals but over the time we have found totally innovative ways, the ways in which animals have not found how to address the same curiosity. So much that now we don’t even consider the curiosity of getting the next meal as a curious problem. Being human thus means that our curiosities also keep on evolving faster than the animals. What was peak curiosity for a primitive man is now a low-level curiosity, we now have much high level and more complicated – sophisticated curiosities.

Starting right from birth till death we carry many curiosities – some of them get answered some remain mysterious, unanswered. The key attribute which remains common in all of us is how satisfied are we when it comes to our curiosities, our personal curiosities? The more curiosities you have found answers to, the more satisfied you will feel. You will have sense of fulfilment; your wishes, ambitions, wants all are connected to your own curiosities. Take one simple example – why do you want that specific job? For some people their curiosity was why some people are happier than others? They see that doing this job gives more money, for some people they see that doing this job will give them happiness, for others this job will wipe away their sorrows. In every possible sense, you can link the curiosity to the very reason of our being.

The Conscious Thinker

If you look closely to the curiosity, you will immediately accept that thoughts are the most important aspect of who we are. We keep on thinking to address our curiosities until they are addressed satisfactorily. That is exactly why thinking is crucial for humans; it shapes our character, our lives and then the lives of everyone around. Now that I have brought in the point of “thinking” you will feel that thoughts play bigger role than curiosity in our lives. And it is right to feel so. But I have reason to weigh curiosity heavier than thoughts or thinking. You will see that smartness can be found in good spirited people and evil people too. When we can develop technologies to save lives, we have developed technologies to bring about mass destruction too. Looking at the current situations the later look more sophisticated. So, if the good person has better curiosities, he will have his curiosities answered in better ways than the lower curiosities of the evil person. See, both sides can have same curiosities as the purpose of their lives but the ways in which their individual thoughts answer that common curiosity gives us either godly men or evil men. So, curiosity supersedes thinking. How you will address that curiosity is how you will be. That is exactly why thoughts are so important. How consciously you think is how you will have your curiosity answered.

Thinking Is Useless

(Just now that we said that thoughts are important.)

The self is a problem that thought cannot solve.

– J Krishnamurti, Can thinking solve our problems?

When you will appreciate different ways of thinking; the process to create thoughts to answer same type of curiosity and the ways that can create totally different human beings you will see that curiosity is mostly the innocent aspect of who we are but the thoughts take shape, color, aspect of who we are, what our experiences are, how we are treated by the people around us, how we treat others. It is not an understatement when I say that thoughts rarely create the true understanding of the reality. And the farther our thoughts are from the reality the more we experience failure and unfulfillment of expectations, sadder we are. Thoughts can create an excellent sense of reality but if not built properly can make people despise the very reality they live in. The closer you are to reality realer will be your curiosities, the realer will be your thoughts and faster will be your satisfaction to the curiosities. Otherwise, we will keep on playing the games of thinking in certain ways and would never be able to satisfactorily answer the greater curiosities of our lives. Every illusion will create next illusion.

Krishnamurti advises to let go of this game of thinking where every illusion reaps newer and more potent illusion, dragging us away from reality.

Thought has not solved our problems and I don’t think it ever will. We have relied on the intellect to show us the way out of our complexity. The more cunning, the more hideous, the more subtle the intellect is, the greater the variety of systems, of theories, of ideas. And ideas do not solve any of our human problems; they never have and they never will.

– J Krishnamurti, Can thinking solve our problems?

The main intent is to understand how self-protecting our thoughts and thinking are. You must appreciate this. The essence is to understand the fact that if thinking would have really solved our problems, we would have immediately stopped the process of thinking. We would have stopped it because it gave us the final solution to the real problem.

You may in thinking out certain facets of the problem, see more clearly another person’s point of view, but thought cannot see the completeness and fullness of the problem – it can only see partially and a partial answer is not a complete answer, therefore it is not a solution

-J Krishnamurti, Can thinking solve our problems?

Thinking can create false sense of solution but to certain extent, the reality holds more possibilities than that.

We would see that the more we think about something even fundamental the more complicated it becomes. Thinking may help us to understand perspectives but it never serves us the truth of reality as a whole rather it always gives certain dimensional information. Now this certain dimensional information can be easily poisoned with prejudices and not the facts. Thinking actually steals us from the multiple possibilities of the reality. As the problems from thinking multiply themselves, we are now entangled in the problems which are not even there in reality. We are just multiplying thoughts and problems because we know they give instant happiness for reality doesn’t guarantee eternal happiness. We are running away from truth by treating thoughts in superior ways.

Does that mean that thinking steals away the creativity? It seems counterintuitive! Thinking is the reason why we are creative. So, what exactly is going wrong?

The thing that is going wrong is our habit of separating things and comparing them with our previous knowledge; it’s our habit of grouping things in our old understandings. We try to understand newer things with our older understandings. We keep on filling our knowledge bank. We rarely unlearn anything with completely new perspective.

We fail to unlearn, because of our urge to happen things in certain ways. If you want the reality to happen in certain way, you will always be blinded to the reality which could have had better possibilities, better and beyond the limits of your thoughts.

This is why Krishnamurti focused on self-knowledge. Your pivot becomes you rather that the ways in which you want things to be. Once you understand who you are, you see how cunning your mind is, it always tries to create justifications to escape through a never-ending chain of illusive thoughts.

Once you accept who you are, you will see how the reactive thought got generated from you, that thought is you yourself. Now you see who you are. Once you see who you are, you don’t rely on thoughts to understand the reality. This is what builds the bridge between thinker and thought. This is where thinking is no longer required. You see reality for what it is. You become fearless, free from expectations and free from thoughts. Your actions now have intent instead of a wish.

Now, let us see how to maintain the awareness of self and be free from the illusion of never-ending chain of thoughts.

The Real Baseline – Non-Isolation

It seems to me that before we set out on a journey to find reality, to find God, before we can act, before we can have any relationship with another, which is society, it is essential that we begin to understand ourselves first.

… And it does not mean obviously, that self-knowledge is opposed to, or isolated from relationship. It does not mean, obviously, emphasis on the individual, the me, as opposed to the mass, as opposed to another.

-J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking?

Krishnamurti paved the way to break out of the vicious cycle of self-deception. When ending up in self-referential paradox the basic question one can ask is how the reference is getting created. We see that we do not actually have an eternal, unchanging baseline. The baseline keeps evolving as our beliefs, experiences keep on changing. To understand ourselves is thus one difficult task. It’s like aiming a moving target, a target which keeps on changing all of its attributes. We realize that what we were calling our baseline – our core was just our thought conditioned by our urge for safety, peace and happiness.

Many think that in order to understand self, one has to isolate themselves from others. The rejection of isolation itself is the purpose of understanding self. Rather the more isolated you will be from others more your thoughts and mind would dominate you. The real purpose of self-knowledge is understanding of ourselves as the whole not as the isolated one.

Self-knowledge thus means the rejection of selfishness and the sense of ego. Then the person starts to understand what it means to think about the events and what it means to see the event. Former is limited because we are wishing for it to happen in certain way, latter hold any possibilities because we are not expecting or imposing what should happen.

Because we are craving for certain anticipation, trying to have certain expectation – we try to isolate our experiences to only those expectation. We blind ourselves by isolation. We see that our experiences create a reaction in us which we try to connect with certain memories, feelings. Then they lead to acceptance or rejection based on the sad or happy feeling generated. Then if that feeling is happy, we crave for more of it; if that feeling is bad, we try to suppress it. And the cycle keeps on going. We get tangled in our own thoughts.

Until and unless I don’t accept that ‘I’ am the originator of my thought I can’t really find that which lies beyond that thought. My thought will create another thought based on my urge to find the sense of security. The thinker has to just observe the thought and not expect it to be desirable or undesirable. This is one difficult task. But it guarantees eternal truth.

So long as effort is divided into the experiencer and the experience, there must be deterioration. Integration is only possible when the thinker is no longer the observer. That is, we know at present there are the thinker and the thought. The observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experienced; there are two different states. Our effort is to bridge the two.

– J Krishnamurti, Can thinking solve our problems?

Krishnamurti explained why our thoughts do so and why we refuse to let go of our thoughts (even though deep down we use our thoughts as a way to justify anything to our convenience, security and peace.) In the pursuit to bring “peace of mind”, the mind created two ends of every thought. The thinker who has already considered himself different from the thought now assumes one side of that thought and then measures his/her worth, goodness/badness by the extent of deterioration from that assumed baseline.

In reality, the very assumptions of either one of the ends of the thought prevents the person to have exposure to the real possibilities lying on the other end rather beyond the whole horizon.

The answer to come out of such bias is to observe that the originator of the thought is the thought itself. There are no two entities – thinker and thought are exactly same. This is where the observer and observed stare into each other’s eyes. Now the observer is not expecting the observed to become a certain way. Observer is now just observing that what it is. There is no need to move to next thought. Only thing that remains is to observe things for what they are.

We now think the thought is separate from the thinker, but is that so? We would like to think it is, because then the thinker can explain matters through his thought. The effort of the thinker is to become more or become less; and therefore, in that struggle, in that action of the will, in ‘becoming’, there is always the deteriorating factor; we are pursuing a false process and not a true process.

-J Krishnamurti, The thinker and the thought

When one starts truly observing there is no need to select one side of a thought, so there is no urge to favor one outcome, rather there is no wish to have certain expectation. As there is no wish to a certain way the mind does not work towards cultivation of one side and deterioration of the another one. Now mind just sees that which is there.

I divide myself into the high and the low in order to continue.

-J Krishnamurti, The thinker and the thought

Earlier there were only two possibilities – either cultivation of that which is desired and suppression/ deterioration of that which was undesirable. But now that when thinker and thought are bridged there are no side, no prejudices, no expectations. This opens totally new possibilities, and these possibilities are as real as the reality we are observing, the reality we are trying to understand.

You will realize how limited we were by our thoughts.

You will see how illusive the thinking loop seems, even though you “thought” your imagination was infinite. Your imagination now feels limited because of your prejudices, biases, memories, culture, knowledge.

Our imagination is way more limited than we think. That is exactly why observing without any prejudice becomes more important. We just refuse to do it because we don’t want to get overwhelmed by the infinite seemingly life-threatening possibilities. We are fearful. We think we are not ready.

Be Watchful Of The Isolation – The division

If I am aware that I am greedy, what happens? I make an effort not to be greedy, either for sociological reasons or for religious reasons; that effort will always be in a small limited circle; I may extend the circle but it is always limited. Therefore, the deteriorating factor is there. But when I look a little more deeply ad closely, I see that the maker of the effort is the cause of greed and he is greed itself; and I also see that there is no ‘me’ and greed, existing separately, but that there is only greed. If I realize that I am greedy, that there is not the observer who is greedy but I am myself greed, then our whole question is entirely different; our response to it is entirely different; then our effort is not destructive.

-J Krishnamurti, The thinker and the thought

This is revolutionary in many senses. As we are dependent on thoughts to understand reality. This dependence is filled with preconditioning right from the moment we are born. Therefore, we always try to mold our observation in the shapes of what we wish to become. If I wish to become a world known robber, I will see the act of stealing as a good one – a stepping stone in my “career”, if I wish to become a world known cop/detective I will see the act of stealing as a wrong one.

But if I have no wish to either become a robber or a cop, I now will have totally new concept of what stealing is. If I am observing a robbery right now with no prejudices, I am seeing the desperation, fear of getting caught in the eyes of the robber. I am seeing the mental stress that cop is going through to solve the case; if the cop is a smart one, I am seeing how he feels sorry for the robbers and how happy he feels that he can easily catch them.

Without prejudices you see that the reality morphs according to the wishes of its observers – the observers having certain expectations from it, certain prejudices.

It is that problem which is creative, in which there is no sense of ‘I’ dominating, becoming, positively or negatively. We must come to that state if we would be creative.

-J Krishnamurti, The thinker and the thought

You have to thus let go of the what is expected and observe what is happening without any preconditions. Then you will see that the negativity or positivity of the same reality became in that certain way because you had already picked either one of the sides. If you wanted to behave like a cop – a successful robbery is nightmare for you; if you wanted to behave life a thief same is the happiest moment of your life.

But if you just want to observe what is there in reality, you will see the desperation in the eyes of the robber and the ways cop chooses to hunt the thief down – even if it would steal his ideals.

You see people degrading themselves to have an illusion of the life they desire. You will feel like helping both of them. You will not feel of favoring either one of them.

This may seem like a person who has let go of life or like a sage, but trust me once you have this real worldview, you will see that you are more than yourself. You will see yourself extending to others, you will have this innate urge to reach out to others, to help them to come out of the illusion of happiness and sadness. You will help people in surprisingly different ways – not just right or wrong ways.

What is important is to see that the maker of effort and the object towards which he is making effort are the same. That requires enormously great understanding, watchfulness, to see how the mind divides itself into the high and the low – the high being the security, the permanent entity – but still remaining a process of thought and therefore of time.

-J Krishnamurti, The thinker and the thought

Once you accept yourself in such way you no longer have craving for happiness and aversion towards sadness. You will see that this current happiness is short lived and so will be the sadness arriving after it. You will see that reality is just a tide of happiness and sadness, we are just swaying in between.

Rather you will start seeing that reality is not just a wave between sadness and happiness – it has other attributes for which words like happiness or sadness would fall short to describe them. You are existing between the superposition of many such waves. This is the real journey towards a creative and realest real life.

You will see that you are not affected by these waves. Not affected does not mean that you are insensitive or numb to these aspects of life, rather now you are more sensitive and open to infinite possibilities of life. You don’t get tangled in thoughts, you now act to pass through the life, instead of attempting to control it. You become fearless. You don’t start any journey to achieve freedom in the end. You become free in the first place before you start the journey to experience the life lying ahead. You truly become free in reality.

We will see in detail why Krishnamurti said that freedom is at the beginning in next part.

“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”

J Krishnamurti

References and further reading:

Truth is a pathless land – J Krishnamurti
The First and Last Freedom – J Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge : Part 1 – The Liberation From Thinking and Thoughts
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge : Part 3 – Minding The Gap Between Ego & Reality

The Liberation From Thinking and Thoughts

Remembering J Krishnamurti on his birthday.
The major focus of J Krishnamurti’s teaching was the awareness of how thoughts are created from ourselves and our constant pursuit to make things happen in a certain way, most preferably in our own ways.
The tragedy of human life can be given in one simple sentence: Man, the thinking animal – has deceived himself so much in the pursuit of happiness that he has given up on the reality in which he was born just for the sake of false sense of short-lived peace. The silver lining of this tragedy is that we ourselves hold the key to our peace. Self-knowledge holds the key to the peace.
We can only understand and appreciate reality and come out of the self-deception once we let go of the separation between the thinker and thought. The rejection of the convenience of self-deceptions paves the way to the real freedom. J Krishnamurti’s teaching thus shows us the path to experience the life in our own truest ways.

Part 1 – Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge

Jiddu Krishnamurti – one of the greatest philosophers, one of the greatest humans paved a pathway to the modern worldview of the real truth, the real freedom, the real meaning of life, real love and the real life itself. His life story talks for his ideology. Right from his childhood he was nurtured to be the chosen one – the spiritual guide for the world – “the World Teacher”. Certain influential people were already anticipating the coming of the world teacher who will show the way of life to people and bring light into their lives. This society was called the “Theosophical Society”. The Order of the Star in the East (OSE) was the theosophical society which was responsible to let the world know that the world teacher – Maitreya has arrived on earth to show the real path of our very being.

What has created a deep impact on me is the way Krishnamurti handled this matter. That is exactly why his place in my heart is immovable. When the time was right Krishnamurti dissolved the order (keep in mind he was the leader of the OSE). He was groomed to be the chosen one. He had every chance to utilize that for the benefit of the mankind. Krishnamurti dissolved the order and asked every member of the order to not follow him and create their own path to the truth. His talk “Truth is a pathless land” given on the occasion of dissolution of the order of the star in the east is a testimony on what greatness the humanity awaits at the end of their individual journey of their very being. It strengthens the belief that we were really made for something simple yet great.

“I do not want you to agree with me, I do not want you to follow me, I want you to understand what I am saying. This understanding is necessary because your belief has not transformed you but only complicated you, and because you are not willing to face things as they are.”

– J Krishnamurti, Truth Is A Pathless Land

This is me remembering Krishnamurti on his birthday. Krishnamurti for me it the perfect person at perfect time to ask the perfect question. My explanation for the train of concepts and ideas is really long (I apologize for that) so the discussion is split into few parts. Lucky that we had J Krishnamurti who simplified life for us but I think it’s an interesting exercise to connect the dots on how Krishnamurti can remain relevant for the eternity of humanity.

I will focus on how Krishnamurti’s teachings – how the ways to dissect our curiosity paves way to understand what it means to be a conscious human being. The further writing is an attempt to address what is thinking and why we think and if not thinking then what makes us real human beings. Trust me, thinking feels the most unnecessary part when you understand what Krishnamurti taught throughout his life.

Purpose of Life – The Safety And Peace In My Existence

“What is it that most of us are seeking? What is it that each one of us wants? Especially in this restless world, where everybody is trying to find some kind of peace, some kind of happiness, a refuge, surely it is important to find out, isn’t it? what it is that we are trying to discover?”

– J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking

Krishnamurti tried to answer the curiosity of all curiosities. When we are trying to address curiosities, we find our very own existence at the focal point of the discussion. Then we ask if I am here why am I here? What should I be doing now that I exist?

It is fairly simple yet fundamental question. Krishnamurti was the expert of creating a chain of questions and everyone seeking the reality could create a path of their own to the truth when they honestly started answering these questions. Instead of bringing horse to the water and forcing it to drink the water even if it is not thirsty Krishnamurti’s talks have this way that the horse first becomes aware what it means to be thirsty, then it sees that it is really thirsty, it sees what it is thirsty for and then Krishnamurti’s questions send that horse on its own path to the waters. In the end whether horse finds water or not that is the matter of what the reality is. Horse is fine with that.

Krishnamurti called out that we all want our suffering to end eventually and be happy. But he pointed out that the moment we sense that happiness – every type of happiness is not permanent then we seek for the gratification. Because happiness being a byproduct of process cannot be artificially created whereas gratification can be easily and artificially created. We can create gratification immediately by fooling ourselves. Trust me everyone is ready to fool themselves if it guarantees peace, comfort, safety and thereby gratification – a false sense of happiness.

“I am afraid most of us are seeking gratification. We want to be gratified; we want to find a sense of fullness at the end of our search.”

-J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking

We create this gratification by isolating ourselves from certain parts of truth which are painful to accept. That is why we have this notion that our thoughts are what we are, if you are happy inside then everything around you will seem happy. So, our thoughts start creating their own reality. This is done by isolation and division. Deep down we know that the uncomfortable truth is the realest reality but we choose to ignore it for the gratification.

“Mere isolation in an enclosing idea is not a release from conflict.”

-J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking

The moment we start building new understandings based on the thoughts responsible for our current gratification we again find those sidelined uncomfortable truths to be the part of the bigger problem, bigger curiosity – now a bigger conflict.

Unless we are not embracing the reality however uncomfortable it may seem we will never find the real peace. It feels really counterintuitive and paradoxical. How can I be happy, peaceful when I recognize that uncomfortable thing? I mean this is the exact uncomfortable thing that steals my peace.

The answer is the inherent nature of our thoughts to divide, split, segregate things/values/attributes to understand the reality.

Thinker Is The Thought

“We do not know ourselves. We know a lot about facts, what the books have said; but we do not know for ourselves, we do not have a direct experience.”

-J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking

Krishnamurti always tried to put a special emphasis on how our own thinking is designed to fool ourselves – the thinker. As we have already appreciated that when the truth – the reality is painful we try to find peace not by the pursuit of truth but by grouping, focusing on thoughts, biases which create gratification and then happiness. We fool ourselves through our own structured thought process however deviating it might be from reality. We create such belief system and accept, follow only those thoughts which keep on feeding those belief systems.

There always comes a time in life when this belief system gets challenged by the very reality we ignored just for the peace of our mind.

So, it is clear that however painful it may seem the truth will always be there. If not eternal peace the next best thing we can have, is the eternal awareness of how that truth, that reality will create pain, how we would react to it (or don’t even react to it) and the way to pass through that pain. This is not possible when we are seeking gratification. In gratification, we just want our wishes to somehow align with our thinking, so we start bluffing ourselves through certain set of thoughts.

“Truth may be something entirely different; and I think it is utterly different from what you can see, conceive, formulate.”

-J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking

The real peace is knowing that peace is not eternal. Best we can do is to at least be aware what it is instead of what it should be. This is possible when we question the origin of thoughts.

And as I have said before, Krishnamurti was master of questioning the very question! Now he questions the questioner – the thinker. The one from whom thought gets created.

“When you say, ‘I am seeking happiness’, is the seeker different from the thought? Are they not a joint phenomenon, rather than separate processes? Therefore, it is essential, is it not? To understand the seeker, before you try to find out what it is he seeking.”

-J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking

You can say that whole purpose of Krishnamurti’s teaching, the purpose of his whole life was to make people understand themselves first, to make the thinkers aware of themselves. Then only it is possible to see how the thought gets created from thinker. One has to do this themselves, there is no external agency to understand this.

Krishnamurti understood the impact of truth being conveyed through direct experience. You can read many truths, hear many truths, believe many truths but the truth that you experience yourselves will have bigger impact on how you understand everything.

(That is also why empathy is very important. That could be topic for another day.)

“Does self-knowledge come through search, through following someone else, through belonging to any particular organization, through reading books, and so on? After all, that is the main issue, is it not? that so long as I do not understand myself, I have no basis for thought, and all my search will be in vain. I can escape into illusions, I can run away from contention, strife, struggle; I can worship another; I can look for my salvation through somebody else. But so long as I am ignorant of myself, I have no basis for thought, for affection, for action.

But that is the last thing we want: to know ourselves. Surely that is the only foundation on which we can build. But, before we can build, before we can transform, before we can condemn or destroy, we must know that which we are.”

-J Krishnamurti, What are we seeking

Here Krishnamurti solved the self-referential paradox of truth. When we are using our thoughts to create an understanding of reality which could give us happiness in the mid journey, we realize that reality is actually painful, so we condition our thoughts to certain aspects so that we would at least mask the portion of reality that creates uncomfortable situation. Then for the next quest. the ‘so-called’ suppressed truth brings its head up, so we further keep on masking it. Now we are far away from what is real and what we believe.

That is why Krishnamurti talks about a baseline. A baseline which is not created from external agency. A baseline created from within, created by direct experiences. This baseline can only be created when we see how we ourselves are the generator, originator of our thoughts.

The Convenience Of Self-Deception

“We now think the thought is separate from the thinker; but is that so? We would lie to think it is, because then the thinker can explain matters through his thought. The effort of the thinker is to become more or become less; and therefore, in that struggle, in that action of the will, in ‘becoming’, there is always the deteriorating factor; we are pursuing a false process and not a true process.”

-J Krishnamurti, The Thinker And The Thought

What Krishnamurti spotted and beautifully explained is that we separate our thoughts from ourselves because it becomes easy to disown their consequences when we see that those thoughts may not give us the happiness, peace we wanted. That is why the separation of thoughts from their thinker is one convenient trick we keep on playing to feed gratification. This process leads to self-deception. Then we end up in a thought process where we are so desperate for gratification (because happiness is not eternal so we try to create some convenient form of happiness i.e., gratification) that we are always in a hurry to achieve that which we wished, that which we desired. This self-deception for false security keeps on building until the reality hits hard. Then that pain brings grave hopelessness.

“The seeker is always imposing this deception upon himself; no one can impose it upon him; he himself does it. We create deception and then we become slaves to it.”

-J Krishnamurti, Self-deception

There is a reason why the ultimate face-off with reality hits hard. It’s because our process of separation of thought from ourselves is so potent and self-feeding that it leaves no responsibility on thinker and also gives ways to the thinker to run away from the painful reality through asserting any convenient justification. The cycle of self-deception keeps on feeding itself. Then this same person starts deceiving others who are also desperately in the search of gratification. (These are the false leaders, messiahs who claim to have found the ultimate eternal truth.)

“…the more we deceive ourselves the greater is the strength in the deception; for it gives us a certain vitality, a certain energy, a certain capacity which entails the imposing of our deception on others.”

-J Krishnamurti, Self-deception

(And that is how religions work.)

That is exactly why Krishnamurti was against the formalization of any religious, spiritual society. Even one self-deceiving person can create a complete cage for the people around him and once people sense the security and peace even if it is not the reality people start worshiping that false truth because somehow it easily provides gratification.

Conclusion to Part-1

The major focus of J Krishnamurti’s teaching was the awareness of how thoughts are created from ourselves and our constant pursuit to make things happen in a certain way, most preferably in our own ways. The tragedy of human life can be given in one simple sentence: Man, the thinking animal – has deceived himself so much in the pursuit of happiness that he has given up on the reality in which he was born just for the sake of false sense of short-lived peace. The silver lining of this tragedy is that we ourselves hold the key to our peace. Self-knowledge holds the key to the peace.

Krishnamurti’s teachings help us to come out of the cycle of suffering and fear.

Once we start walking on the chain of ideas presented by J Krishnamurti, we realize that we conveniently created a barrier between our sense of being – the thinker and the thoughts because the moment we sense that things won’t go our way we can disown our current thought and bend it into something else through self-deception. This creates an easiest way to gratification – a false sense of happiness but that is not the reality. We can only understand and appreciate reality and come out of the self-deception once we let go of the separation between the thinker and thought. The rejection of the convenience of self-deceptions paves the way to the real freedom.

We will see how isolation creates bias in our thinking, what is the role of mind, how can we unlock the infinite possibilities in reality and the real meaning of being a conscious human being in the next part as taught by J Krishnamurti.

Remembering J Krishnamurti on his birthday.
The major focus of J Krishnamurti’s teaching was the awareness of how thoughts are created from ourselves and our constant pursuit to make things happen in a certain way, most preferably in our own ways.
The tragedy of human life can be given in one simple sentence: Man, the thinking animal - has deceived himself so much in the pursuit of happiness that he has given up on the reality in which he was born just for the sake of false sense of short-lived peace. The silver lining of this tragedy is that we ourselves hold the key to our peace. Self-knowledge holds the key to the peace.
We can only understand and appreciate reality and come out of the self-deception once we let go of the separation between the thinker and thought. The rejection of the convenience of self-deceptions paves the way to the real freedom. J Krishnamurti's teaching thus shows us the path to experience the life in our own truest ways.

References:

Truth is a pathless land – J Krishnamurti
The First and Last Freedom – J Krishnamurti
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge: Part 2 – Being Watchful Of The Ebb And Flow Of Life
Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge : Part 3 – Minding The Gap Between Ego & Reality

Freedom = Courage (Now + Here)

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

On the book – The Courage to be disliked

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

I have a question for you,

– How is life treating you right now?

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

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

Life is not treating me fair

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first
Carl Jung

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

Deny trauma – Deny the comfort of causality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is self-acceptance in individual psychology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is confidence in others in individual psychology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is contribution to others in individual psychology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life goes on

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be real, not a hypocrite

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Alienation and Creativity

Creation for capitalism, consumerism and pleasure maligns its true purpose which actually is to create joy and a sense of belonging, comfort and safety. Alienation is the end effect of such capitalist processes where people have isolated their humans side for the rat races and FOMOs. Pure creativity, empathy, connect with nature and self can help use to preserve that human core and come out of the alienation.

How true forms of creativity can help us to reconnect with our human core

“On The Train Ride Home” by The Paper Kites

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I found –
Maya Angelou

Humans – the creative animals

I think creativity is the most important quality granted to human beings. Nature in itself is the ultimate and the best creation which at the same time is also the creator of many things. Animals, non-human beings too have the gift of creativity to certain extent but human beings have outperformed in using this gift of creativity. We are always creating something, we have tools, we have automated processes to create anything we can understand. This creation of things has led us to becoming the most developed species on the planet. Creation can be in any sense – creation of music/ art/ cultures, families/ society, factories/ industries/ conglomerates, institutions/ organizations, cities/ metropolitan, governments, policies, supply chain, and what not! All these creations are intertwined to prove how advanced the human species is. You must also remember that once a process of creations starts generating fruitful outcomes it gets automated to optimize, to improve the efficiency. Most of the times we forget that some creative processes are not meant to be optimized because value of their outcomes is not materialistic. The concept of efficiency and/or optimization is purely materialistic concept. But as we are progressing ahead as the species, most of our creation processes are getting robotized, where materialistic outcomes are more important than the process of creation itself.

Young generation has crucial role in deciding the future course of our species, especially when we have this great tool of creation – our creativity itself. People of my generation (millennials and Gen-Z to some extent) are the key creators of this time who will decide where our future will lead us. This generation is completely busy in various ventures of creation to justify their own life. But, as I have mentioned before, our creation processes have become so mechanistic, so robotic to gain more, extract more materialistic outcomes that this young generation is getting more and more detached from the real purpose of creation in its true spirit. The consumerism and (crony) capitalism has thrown today’s youth into a forced state of alienation in spite of being living in crowd, densely populated resourceful, glamorous cities. We are lonely in spite of being surrounded by the crowd.

This loss of attachment from the spirit of creation has led to the alienation of the today’s young generation – who many times go through the feelings of isolation, meaninglessness, directionless, confusion – it’s not just a normal existential crisis through which every young generation of their times goes through rather it’s the blurring of the true spirit of living in today’s young generation. Please keep in mind that it is not mistake of this same young generation. The system, society, institutions have evolved in such way that the creative processes are getting designed more for materialistic optimization instead of getting created for the real upliftment of the human civilization. Feels like we are losing touch of the real purpose of our being.

An Australian indie rock band called The Paper Kites released a song called “On the Train Ride Home” which in my opinion tries to touch those feeling of “alienation” which our today’s young generation is going through. Deep down we all know what we really want, we know what our core is but the systems in which we are living today have made our lives more and more mechanical, even though we are in the process of creation that creation no more belongs to us, that detachment, that alienation, that freedom from the vicious capitalistic cycle is what we are yearning for in the end. This is what this song for me is.

The Paper Kites
L–R: David Powys, Sam Bentley, Sam Rasmussen, Christina Lacy, Josh Bentley

I will dissect this song from the point of alienation; for me that is what it is all about.

The lyrics of the song is credited to Samuel Bentley, On the Train Ride Home lyrics copyright: Wonderlick Pty Limited

(It’s a song which needs to be treasured, hidden from others so that no one spoils it and I know I am committing a personal crime by exposing it. But such creations need more exposure and deserve proper appreciation too.)

Waiting down at the station
I don't remember, think it was late then
Standing, always so quiet
We're like elevators filled up with strangers
No sound, no hallelujah's
Still I was praying on the train ride home

The starting of the lyrics creates an imagery of the person waiting for a train home. The complete separation from the surrounding has made this person to forget vivid details, it shows the mundane-ness, the separation from surrounding to just reach a safe, calming place which is home. The feeling of loneliness in spite of being in the crowd shows how there is no emotional connect between people. Elevator filled with strangers shows that people are closer and more connected, more accessible but they are not closer emotionally. This is exactly today’s situation, social networking and internet brought us so close that we can ‘poke’ our friend living in another hemisphere within few seconds and still we will see people craving for true connections more than ever. No hallelujah’s shows the loss of spirit, loss of soul in people who are part of this – physically close but emotionally isolated crowd.

If I can't get the things I want
If I can't get the things I want
Just give me what I need

Here, the person is aware of the difference between wants and needs which shows that his/ her separation from home to go to the crowded place to create a better resourceful life was not the ultimate goal. This is the only way through which this person can live a life. The system based on the cycles of consumption has narrowed down the meaning of living a life to mere survival. One can get as many things by obeying this cycle of consumption but it will not satisfy the hunger – the emotional hunger, that intimate craving of humanity. The distinction and use of wants and needs is a very smart way to show how the person is trapped in the system to survive but deep down they know what actually makes a fulfilled life. That is why person asks for basic fulfilment if not all what they desired.

Our words fill up the pages
Fill up the days with psalms for the ages 
Still those vows that we all speak
We break them like concrete
And just make our words cheap

This part of song shows how words have lost their worth. Words in the sense the sense of commitment, sense of loyalty to keep the promises. The piousness of the daily prayers, the vows are less cared for. This expression shows how insensitive we have become to just gain the materialistic means, to survive.

This is exactly where it struck me that this song is not just about average existential angst every young generation goes through; this song is more about the alienation of a person where system does not value real creativity – which gives our lives meaning. The system now has been maligned with the materialistic efficiency. Consumption has become more important than the end effect it creates. Mention of “wants” and “needs” thus highlight the culture of consumption here.

I want someone to grow with
Songs I can sing to, and I family to cling to

The song tries to conclude with the ultimate pursuit for living a better life. Why are we all doing the things which we do? Why do we go on job? Why do we work all week, live paycheck to paycheck without any greater purpose – in spite of knowing that we hate this work at its core? Why knowingly, intentionally are we craving for more and more materialistic pleasures?

I think it is because of the recent vile cycle of consumption. I have a reason to justify this. Somewhere we know that the process of creation in which we are involved is not doing justice with our pure humanistic core.

As a human being all we crave for is the mutual growth, sense of fulfillment, love and intimacy for each other in this limited time on the earth. We know that ultimate goal of creation should be this humanistic goal, but the moment the creation loses this human touch we suffer from alienation, a sense of directionless, sense of being confused, a sense of trapped inside an infinite maze. This is the exact moment when the person craves for home, family and intimacy.

The train ride home is that craving for being the real human being who values emotions, commitment, love and happiness of the loved ones.

But If I can't get the things I want
If I can't get the things I want
Just give me what I need

The person understands that in this seemingly flashy, attractive, glamorous but mechanistic, mundane, lonely and unemotional life there is some hope that they at least will be able to preserve their human core. The request for the “need” over “wants” is the cry for that preservation of the human core.

Alienation

What urged me to completely (and maybe blindly) associate the lyrics of this song to alienation is how Socialism defines the concept of alienation. Karl Marx identified how a process of creation thereby value creation could isolate its creator from its creation. This isolation of creation and creator once intensified removes all the human, emotional attributes from the process of creation and here the brutal capitalism starts. The creation is now mere a mechanical, boring routine of materialistic revenue creation where humanity has no value.

Karl Marx on alienation

Karl Marx presented very beautifully the purpose of creation in human life. It is what separates human beings from other animals, non-humans. We are always involved in creative process which have a personal purpose, a meaning. That is why our creations and it’s end results are so intense and are way different than how other non-human creative processes. The moment such processes start demonstrating the separation of creator, the process of creation and the end-product of creation, capitalism/ consumerism start peeking their head out thereby slowly eliminating what made such things processes humanistic. This exactly is alienation, there is no sense of home, comfort or belonging.

Marx defined four types of alienation in his discussions:

Alienation of an object –

A factory labor stitching the designer clothing does not bear the capacity to own it and enjoy it. Even though the labor holds the skill and knowledge to create that fancy clothing the system is rigged in such way that the emotional connect between creator and creation is lost forever.

Alienation of process –

The process of creation has become so mechanical, so repetitive to improve the efficiency and to increase the output that humans involved in them have also became mechanical, unemotional. Today’s young generation working in mundane jobs, the jobs they hate only for the paycheck and the job without any personal purpose is the example of that alienation. The separation of creator from objects makes the object accessible to anyone but this accessibility is not equally distributed because the input to output ratio is highly skewed. The value that is created in the creation of the object does not reward the creator in any good way thus creator – the labor remains poor. This also make the creator to lose the faith in the process thereby leading to the alienation of the process.

Alienation of species-being –

The moment this mundane, highly optimized process does not bear any real humanistic purpose, the creator no longer follows the process to reach a better position in life spiritually, intellectually through the process of creation. It’s like the human creator has become a machine giving throughput. A sense of being a better species is lost forever – this is another form of alienation.

Alienation between humans –

Once the creator no longer has a direct connect to its creation, has no faith in the process for better pivot of meaning, has no sense of humanity, the value for another human life is lost. It is not because the creator or this person demeans or belittles others, it is because the creator himself/ herself does not consider their efforts their value of better worth, hence same treatment is given to people in their surroundings.

There is one famous snippet of a speech from Gabor Maté, a Canadian-Hungarian physician who has done work in ADHD, trauma, childhood development.

Gabor talks about broader scope of alienation which somewhat is based on the Marx’s idea of alienation.

Alienated from nature –

We as the human species no longer have that connect with nature which has resulted in its deterioration. You might have seen that there are still some tribes living in the remotest, inaccessible areas round the globe which are completely in tune with the nature and have preserved it. Today’s consumerism has detached our objects of consumption from their consequences on nature thereby destroying it.

We have to somehow re-establish that connect with nature otherwise nature has its way of adjusting things (we are seeing its effects all around the globe). And remember that this re-connection is also linked to we being the human beings. I mean, who doesn’t like lush greenery, pristine rivers and remarkable biodiversity!

One of the first condition of happiness is that the link between man and nature shall not be broken.
Leo Tolstoy

Alienated from work –

The works we are engaged in are rarely driven by a meaning or a higher purpose. Even if it has some meaning it is immediately inked to some materialistic thing, there is nothing wrong in it as far as survival is concerned but at least this awareness should push us to work for the things with higher humanistic, spiritual purpose, that is our real core as the creative beings. The alienation from work has led to depression, anxiety, emotionless feeling, numbness among every one of us. We are replacing this meaninglessness by other material means which involve how we look, what we possess. Such means of damage control are creating more damage to who we are and what we work for which defines us. You will see, the economy we live in highly focuses on associating meaningful experiences to materialistic products.

Alienated from other people –

The moment we lose the hope and connection between our surrounding we are losing some human part in ourselves which dims down our perception of humanity for others. We trust very few people or almost no one, the relationships rarely have that depth, that intimacy. Social structures based on the depth of relationship are dwindling. The mental illnesses are emerging due to the lack of social emotional support system, growing intolerance, apathy on global level are also effects of that.

The start of the song where it mentions people filled in the elevator, disinterested and having been lost their spirit is the same alienation.

We have to start forgiving people again, create safer environments where we can express ourselves without any prejudice. It is scientifically backed that putting trust in people and treating them with high worth makes them trustworthy and high performer (see Pygmalion effect) In the end, everyone of is craving for someone to rely on and also someone who will make our sacrifices worth of the hardships. Associating positivity of self-worth to being appreciated and being respected for who we are is hardwired in our human circuitry. Our existence gets redefined to higher standards the moment other people (even single person) recognize it. (History has examples where people did impossible for far lesser people who believed in them without expecting anything in return)

The urge to cling to a family, sing a song to someone, grow with someone mentioned in the song is asking to escape from such form of alienation.

One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night
Margaret Mead

Alienated from ourselves-

We have lost the connect our inner self, our curiosities, our inner child in the pursuit of the consumerist ends. The disconnect with the surrounding and numbness to the processes in which we are involved is furthermore deteriorating our inner human core. We rarely listen to our gut feelings, instincts because presence of lots of data, information around us creates a false sense of understanding of the things around us. This is alienation from ourselves, we don’t even trust ourselves – a simple advertisement or targeted influence is enough to make us buy that next thing that we don’t even want.

The part in the song where it talks about making our words cheap is the alienation from self. There is no concept of morality and inner compass in such alienation.

We know deep down what exactly is happening with us and around us but the system rarely creates conditions to come out of that.

How to de-alienate?

The desire to know your soul will end all other desires
Rumi

The core reasons of alienation lie in the loss of empathy, loss of higher meaning/ purpose and loss of responsibility/ commitment (committing to something to change the course of life requires higher sense of responsibility). We are empaths by default as a human being, so it is imperative to preserve this attribute even if the surroundings force the opposite. I know this is difficult when we are responsible for multiple things and people, but you are also responsible for yourselves. It is worthless if you win, achieve something great while losing yourself in the end.

The creative processes whose outcomes are not attached to any material means are thus the purest paths to avoid such alienation in the times of high consumerism and negative effects of capitalism. High consumption is an addictive form of alienation which can be nullified by pure creation. Consumption will give pleasure but creation will give joy.

The prayer to ride home in the song is the hope that we will again meet ourselves in spite of such extreme disconnect. Pure creativity is the answer to such prayers as far as the process elimination of alienation from our life goes.

What separates human beings from rest of the animals is their creative ventures otherwise we are exactly like all other living things. We are the beings who engage in multiple activities of creation which are driven by conscious intent, a reason. This ability to create something has led us to become the technically advanced species on the planet. If we establish the connect with our inner core through meaningful creation, the victory over all forms of alienation is possible.

True creation is all about connecting to every possibility there is.

Such deep concept of alienation expressed in a wholesome and soulful song by The Paper Kites truly deserves more and more appreciation and recognition. Words failed me to express how it made me feel (that is exactly why I didn’t control my words count, where few verses of this song did the same job. No wonder poetry is highly potent than prose!)

The song-

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

Is Reality Same for Everyone?

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

Nominalism – There Are Just Names No Essences

Consequences of Nominalism

Boundaries of Nominalism

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Medieval Idea of Ockham’s Razor For The Modern World

Craving for Simplicity

William of Ockham and Ockham’s Razor

Consequences of Ockham’s Razor

Good consequences:

Search for the theory of everything

Efficient Machine Learning Models – Generalization Error

Parsimony in Psychology – Morgan’s Canon

Bad Consequences (limitations of Ockham’s Razor)

Universe might prefer complexity to exist

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Human like intelligence in Animals

What goes missing in simplification?

Context is everything

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

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

The Impact of Suffering in the Pursuit of Happiness

Enduring the Suffering

The Eternal Curiosity, Innocence and Love

Conclusion

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Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women

The Paradox of Individualism

In Another Country – Summary

Deep Analysis of In Another Country

Lack Of Warmth

Together But Lonely – Alienation Among Men

Self-pity And Surrogate Sympathy

Men’s Inability To Communicate And Express Emotions Clearly

Emotional Numbness – Alexithymia – Hemingway For Today’s World

His Woman Is Everything For Any Man True To Himself

Conclusion – The Feminine Side Of The Real Masculinity

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

Existence Of The Mind – What Is The Mind?

Reactive Mind Vs Objective Reality

Love – Cure To Self-Deception And Surrender To Reality

Conclusion – Why Is Love Answer To Everything?

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Part 2- Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge

The Curious Animal

The Conscious Thinker

Thinking Is Useless

The Real Baseline – Non-Isolation

Be Watchful Of The Isolation – The division

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Part 1 – Jiddu Krishnamurti’s Legacy Of Self-Knowledge

Purpose of Life – The Safety And Peace In My Existence

Thinker Is The Thought

The Convenience Of Self-Deception

Conclusion to Part-1

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On the book – The Courage to be disliked

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

Life is not treating me fair

Deny trauma – Deny the comfort of causality

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

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

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

Life goes on

Be real, not a hypocrite

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

Conclusion

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How true forms of creativity can help us to reconnect with our human core

“On The Train Ride Home” by The Paper Kites

Humans – the creative animals

Alienation

Karl Marx on alienation

Alienation of an object –

Alienation of process –