We, the people, have spread and inhabited every corner of this world of ours over the thousands of years that we have existed. We have together witnessed the depths of the ocean and the blue expanse of the sky, and explored the vast space beyond it. Since we are a pretty intelligent being, the smartest one that is known to us, we communicate in intelligent ways, such as the one happening right now, transmitting thoughts through a concept of alphabets and words, which the reader is also mentally repeating inside the head, with the little voice in there that we all have, while also deciphering and understanding the meaning conveyed very clearly. No other being can do this sort of communication. Or, maybe they can, but just don’t give a damn about it!
I wonder if most people give a damn about it, sometimes. British-American Philosopher Alan Watts, an interpreter of Eastern Philosophy, has an interesting quote, “Only words and conventions can isolate us from the entirely undefinable something which is everything”. So by trying to decipher and understand the meaning of life and conquering the four corners of the earth, are we actually entirely missing the point? Animals live by experiencing life, not trying to define it and then communicate it to other animals. But then again, we humans are not really different from anything else around us, including animals; we are as much a part of nature as the clouds up there or an ant below, so there really isn’t any distinction. We can’t be isolated from nature, as something unnatural. We are just experiencing life right now in this uniquely human way, using tools we humans have created ourselves, including all communication, so it’s as valid a life experience as any other.
We, the people, have always striven to collectively know the world through shared imagery & knowledge of nature, of the planets, of the ocean, of a sunken ship, or a flying jet and whatever there is that we know, or strive to know. There is nothing that you know that hasn’t been known by someone else already. Even if one does find something new, it’s arrived at by using mechanisms devised by other people, including speech! I, as an individual, am a continuation of humanity’s collective existence. Can we ever come out of this maze? Can we exist as a completely unconditioned person, not affected by anything that we ever learned, and see things as they are, not how we define they are? That’s a very tough ask, and probably an impossible one!
Every time that we listen to a different song, a different sound, or witness the next second of life, we find a new world there, something we were unaware of till then, which did not exist for us, and then we communicate what we experience through all those means that we have, namely speech, words, actions, behavior and so on. In fact, People cannot exist without discovering a new world every instant. The sound entering your ear can never be the exact same sound that you had ever heard before. There are infinite number of variables around us, however minutely small, but ever so slightly different. There is no exactness in nature, there are only fuzzy edges. The external world is ever changing; the only thing that is constant is this voice inside us, the observer of all this happening around us.
It reminds me of Shiva and Shakti, consciousness and energy, two intermingling forces always creating and changing the universe. The thing to realize though is that, Shiva-Shakti combine to make existence possible, and the observer (which is the “I”), is not fundamentally different from the observed universe around it. I, as Shiva the consciousness, am just making the world come alive to a dancing existence as Shakti, the energy, which is what the world wrapped around us is, energy. It’s an intriguing concept, and probably why CERN, the biggest physics lab of the world, installed Nataraja at its facility in Geneva (read here).
We, for reasons not very clear, have divided ourselves into these ignorant boxes of all the ‘isms’ in the world. We have become, or maybe always were, ignorant to not realize the interconnections of the whole of existence, of man with man and nature. And we want to hate the other; we want to behave in a manner where we always give that bit of extra importance to our own group, whatever that may be, ethnic, religious, irreligious, nationalistic, and ideological and so on. Or, It may well be my ignorance to think on these lines, maybe these boundaries are very real, may be the division is right. It’s only we, the people, who can decide that, it’s as much a personal choice or realization for us, as it is a public one.
