Karta: Life-Inspiring Essays On Cognition, Consciousness & Causality by Santosh Jha (book suggestions txt) 📕

So, what should ideally be the order of the day…! Let us be realistic… rationally simple in our approaches…. and have lots of trust…. in a stage we are, there probably ain’t anything called ‘order of the day’. The huge bonus is sometimes what looks like a huge burden; what looks like an ‘un-patterned energy’ of ‘disorder’, is what analysts love to call ‘the magic’. This truly is the magic of all societies…. let the magic unfold…. let this pinching energy of popular disorder unravel and undo things…. societies have seen them all…. often than not….

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Playing To The Gallery

Breathing in an absolutist space of personal optimality is tough, very suffocating. The pragmatists would insist – ‘thrive’ in the abundance of the suture zone of multiple utilities than ‘survive’ in unilaterality of singular stream.

It’s a point of order. Darkness is preferable over light as later is a guarantee of absolute non-violence. Similar is the logic behind the advocacy of silence over speech…. but then… ! Somewhere, rationality must have taken sides…. It looked like taken to have opted for ‘playing to the gallery’, as most art and intellect often do…. even emotions love populism….

Success is most preferred utility… and not that they don’t know that it is the ‘trigger’ of most violence; in all forms of ingenuity. Once a best paid soccer star said about one of his favorite winning goals; amazing, success has such strange utilities….!

He said, he enjoyed the goal (…the success attained) more than sex with his girlfriend! Peripheral rationalists would wonder, “how could he? Can kicking a stupid ball in a wide net be a joy more intense and satisfying than sex? That too with your beloved?”

Violence must be really kicking…. an association with success looks only natural! Someone can say, “how demeaning… can someone be such a brute to relate such a divine experience as body intimacies with a sadistic joy of making your opponent one down!”

A somewhat politically correct assessment may say, “ yeah… sounds a bit out of place…. people can’t even choose their words the right way…. or, probably, do they perceive intimacies the wrong way?... whatever…”

This is it…. the suture zone of multiplicity of million choices….!

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Maximum Can Carry Guilt Too

There was a runner…. he would always finish second in a race. However best he attempted to bridge the gap between the winner and him, it could not come his way…. and what added to his dismay was the fact that he would be just a meter behind the winner.

He consulted all experts but in vain. So, finally he landed to a psychologist. The psychologist said, “how stupid, can’t you see the difference between winning and losing? It is just a meter! What you simply need to do is pump in just 10% extra effort when you are 10 meters away from the ropes and you will see the magic!”

The runner said to himself, “Yeah… just 10% is not a big deal…. I must do it…”

In the next race, he attempted the advice and …..

As he approached the last 10 meters, he tried to push in more. As he was already giving the maximum he could, his effort to push in another 10% ruptured his lung and he died on the spot.

Yes… there is always a guilt when we lose… or do not get the desirable win…. nobody wants to fail…. and the guilt pushes one to do that extra …. in a wild hope of getting it right, outcomes may also go wild!

But then…. a maximum is a maximum….! If only there could be a maximum+10%.... there could have been many ‘winners’ …. But, in all pursuits of life…. especially in pursuance of something very special called relationships…. one always feels, enough is never enough and maximum is not beyond further elasticity….

The guilt of ‘not doing enough’ is always there as one helplessly sees things going wrong…. the race being lost! Even if there is no individual guilt, the collectivity would always advise you to put in just a tad extra…. hoping that there always is a possibility of maximization of maximum….

Nobody believes you that you have given your ‘maximum’ for the success of an enterprise if it does not stand on the winner’s dais… there will always be an advice to put in more. The ingenuity of self and the collective are those devils, which will always make you guilty of ‘under-performance’ and easy it is for anyone to blame you for being a ‘sulky stupid’….

But the runner, who died on the tracks…. never came first…. when prolonged efforts do not result in what you expect, there might be a case for rethinking the ‘expectations’. Can we say that the runner should have understood and accepted that losing was his optimal destiny…. shouldn't have opted for popular destiny?

If only a better advice could come….! …. awaited it is….. but the advise be please that of an innocence…. not the ingenuity. Till it comes, it is somehow accepted that better to carry blame than guilt…. guilt is killing… blame only hurts….

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Ask Tolstoy, Not Me

Late night…. might have been 3 am…. when a bodyless mindedness took off…. on the journey of unconscious stupidities. Science says, 3-4 am is the time in the entire diurnal cycle of body, when all its hormones are at their ideal levels…. and as this ideal state of being desires, body is in complete harmony of ‘self’ and conflicts of body and minds are least active….

As afflatus swung its arms for a flight of fancy…. it got a lift from what it introduced itself as ‘ras’ (source of joys). Hormones are also some sort of ‘ras’…. and as ancient wisdom says, ‘jas ras tas jas… (as is body hormones, so are you…)’

Years back, had an encounter with ‘ras’, which impacted in its own way. Leo Tolstoy said about human life in his famous book Resurrection, ‘a man falls in a well… as he fell, he was fortunate to grab a rope that was hanging on the side of the well wall and as he hanged mid-way through, he saw a cobra beneath on the bottom of the dried well. Above, a rat started to tear the ropes with his sharp teeth. The man couldn’t climb up, he could just hold steady with the rope. It was sure, in a quick time, the rat would cut the rope and he would fall below where death awaited him. Suddenly, drops of honey started dropping in his mouth from a beehive on a tree above the well. The man knew that he had only a few minutes of life left but still, he relished the honey and became happy. He, for some moment, was able to keep his mind away from the finality of the occasion….

Tolstoy summed up, this is life for all of us. The flip side of the story is a question…. is this ‘ras’… the honey of life, that good… that strong and capable that it could help humans take their minds away from the finality of the inevitability!

If yes…. what is this ‘ras’ all about? Early humans have written ‘shastras’(treatises) on the variety of ‘ras’. All forms of art, literature, music, dance, drama, etc have detailed mentions in these ancient scripts. However, these pursuits of ‘ras’ are for learned and those who believe in attainment through exploration and expedition.

For simple and unflattering humans, the ‘ras’ is a very simple emotion. Though, science is hell bent to blame this ‘ras’ on another ‘ras’, a ‘naughty’ body hormone….

The ‘ras’ of love and compassion…. the honey of life….! Let the learned be in a battle over how, why, what, when and where, etc. A common human who has a taste for this honey and bows to its magic is no less a wise. Ask Tolstoy…. not me….

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Receiving, An Act of Generosity!

He might be a confused man… or probably an unresolved genius… he said, “…ask for help… receiving is an act of generosity…”!

There are people in the world …. very few of them actually…. who have the almighty’s blessings to be in a position of ‘giving’…. compassion comes naturally to all but recreating it in a empirical world is not easy task…..

But still, ‘receiving’ is even more tough and hard to come as a feeling…. people usually are bereft of compassion and generosity to be able to receive…. ego, ignorance, ingenuity block reception…

There was a great soul in China. It is said that in his entire life, he said only a few words. He had thousands of disciples and followers but he never said anything….

One day he was taking a stroll in a jungle and as he passed through large trees, rivers, birds and lights peeping through leaves of the trees, he closed his eyes, tears rolling down his cheeks and a child-like smile adorned his face. A curious disciple asked him to say something…. he wished to know why he wept and smiled simultaneously ….

As the disciple persisted with his question, the great soul got irritated and said, “…. everything around you is saying things… the nature is so full of answers and you are pestering me for answers…. just be generous and fill your heart with compassion…. you will start receiving things which I can right now and you will understand ….”

There is so much love, so much joy, so much well-being, so much prudence and wisdom scattered around us… in nature, in beings and non-beings…. even within us…. let us just be simple…. it will make us generous…. and then we all will start receiving all goodness….

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Art of Internalizing Externalities

Someone said, ‘…nothing external to you has any power over you…’!

True…very true… there are things scattered around us in a shape and size that may not be what our own ‘make and positioning’ wishes them to be… that’s why they are ‘external’ to us … and, not amenable to our reception…

…. We just need to internalize them….! Around us, every day we see lots and lots of things which we all believe is wrong and not so good…. but still, we do not learn from the mistakes of ‘others’… they remain external and hence, no have power to influence us….

That's why, whenever, one has to point out any mistake or wrong in ‘others’… he or she must make it a point to say, ‘… I have these wrongs in me…’… this is how others can learn the ‘art of internalizing’ things… and as and when he or she does learn to do it, things become ‘internal’ to them and have power over them to influence them….

…. this is the only way to learn… and to make others learn…

…. Yeah….! Saying this does have shades of what we call ‘narcissism’… but this is good one…!

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Of In-cognitive Inconveniences

Since childhood, our minds are trained like that…. the transition from this mind-positioning even in later years of grown-up existentialism is not very easy…. it needs a lot of painful ‘unlearning’…. very very cruel for self…. and, when we really wish this to happen… do we have the time and positioning…?

We all live in a world with accentuated sense of ‘self-sustenance’…. stretched to the limits of self-stupidity’…. and, the mind training is there to accept it as ‘survival’ bare-basics. The mind-training to accept and acclimatize only with ‘cognitive’ values and valuables leaves a lot many things wanting in life-propositions where most values and valuables fall in the beautiful world of rainbowish ‘incognitives’…..

We grow to confront and create lot many incognitives…. and, as our mind training is highly unsuitable to these incognitives…. we stand confused and critically wanting in handling them to advantages….

…. the incognitives of affection, compassion, assimilation, acceptance etc., often lands us in the domain of ‘cognitive conundrum’…. most young ones, even adults behave like a confused corn while exposed to love and compassion, which seem alien to their ‘self’ as it is not trained to accept them, being acclimatized only to ‘cognitives’ of accentuated sense of ‘self-symmetry’….

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