The Point of it All

I still remember those days, vividly. I had just finished reading Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’. My mind and being had been ‘jhanjhodoed’ (shaken?) by the imagery of what the Universe could be. And I went into, straight from the external to the internal, unwittingly, into Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu Li Masters”. Is there any way I can describe what happened? A total wonderment at the understanding of what “as within so without” meant? The time was like that. Of sheer Magic. Zen. Mathematics. Astronomy. Heady combinations.

And thus started a never-ending journey … a million miles I have come and a million miles still await me…

25 years down the journey, and I know only one thing. That I don’t know. That I shall never know. That it was never meant to be known. That, probably, it is only meant to be experienced, perhaps internalized, and to be marveled at.

I now read, work and try my hand at everything with no boundaries, with no beliefs or disbeliefs. Any subject that takes my momentary fancy. Obscure ones. Well-defined ones. Unbelievable ones. Believable ones. Fiction. Non-fiction. Linear, tangential, macro, micro, within, without … it does not matter.

I have come to realise that everything I come across, that can be understood by my five senses and maybe a sixth one too, only continues to add to my deep understanding that I do not know. I enjoy this knowing. Of not knowing. It is so totally mysterious. Curious. And life becomes one long exploration.

In the end, perhaps, nothing matters. Nothing we do or don’t matters to this superstupendous organism called Universe. It goes its way. It has its way. And we are but non-existent points of energy in its vast, vast, vast undulation…

All that matters, to me, because I live, I feel, I think, and beyond all this I need a meaning to my existence, is how I love it, live this journey and how I choose to travel it.

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Science of Believing

I have a curious feeling that I am being gently ridiculed for my understanding of things – an understanding that is not based on ‘science’ and ‘logic’. Understandings being dismissed as ‘beliefs’ and superstitions, by Siphra …:)

Perhaps they are. I could go into countering with ‘evidences’ that substantiate my understandings, by personal experiences of others, of countless numbers of observations of many people. I play and toy with the idea. I have done my homework. 3 years of intense reading and learning and developing a whole lot of non-cognitive answers and understandings to situations … and think, no, it is not necessary for me prove anything. I could however give pointers to the directions I have taken, no more.

I am also currently doing a case-study on Ethics of Science & Technology and its impact and implications on people’s lives … focussed on issues of post-disaster reconstruction, with other 4 teams doing case-studies on Non-pesticide Management, Water, Climate Change and Reproductive Health … drawing its understanding from an Indian S&T manifesto being developed. One of basic understanding here is that Science & Technology have taken on a blinkered view of life, that in its heady growth, it has perhaps laid aside many aspects of non-quantifiable nature. That its limitation lies in its inability to engage with complexity of the multitudinal reality, that experiments in the labs are in controlled environments and the results thus reflect only part of reality.

But then Science has always been arrogant. It does not understand or even accommodate what it cannot “see” … even though more and more science is coming around to the deeper understanding of how Truth and Reality are relative.

It is not as if I do not agree with limited aspects of Science or find it seductive, its logic and systematic ability to develop a picture most intriguing. But somewhere, I deeply feel, we are missing the point. What we know is but a miniscule fraction of that which Is.

And often times the Mind cannot see what the Heart can understand …the paths that the Soul and Spirit follow …

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Buzzing Future

Google has launched its Buzz … a social media tool … and unlike FB which is a standalone, it seeks to integrate its various utilities, offering a seemingly seamless experience of all that we have, we do and we want.

Today’s Technologies, like Science, are moving more and more towards these quantum dimensions … the space where certainties cease to exist and we move into the exciting realms of possibilities and probables. Where anything can happen. Where any tiny movement can create an undulation that changes reality. It will not be long before even the perceived division in between these two realms cease to exist and it will be possible to move freely within this continuum. The utilities and the instruments are but a physical manifestation of the what society is living through. What is even more interesting is the schizophrenia between a society that is moving towards fusion and a society that is polarizing – the more it polarizes in the economic and political realms, the more it fuses in science and technology and socio-cultural realms. The more society fragments and divides, the more it unifies and merges. The more physical and certain it becomes, the more nebulous and ethereal it becomes.

And one enjoys actually ‘seeing’ and ‘living’ this contradiction. And that too in the mega-scale and mega-dimensions it is happening. What fun !

I wonder how the current history will be written. And how this period of transition and ascendance will be seen by our future selves.