Jargogled Impressions.

Why do we struggle with deeper thoughts? Why is it that writing enables some people to increase the resolution of their thoughts compared to the real life where many times the nature of conversations become too banal and mundane. How do we select our life choices to constantly be in a state of operation that is of higher level of consciousness? Is this what is meant by attaining Nirvana, as if often called in eastern philosophies? To be free from the cycle of life and death (which is what most of our thoughts are all about) and just identifying with the “being” part of human being? 

I find it curious to observe that eastern societies reflect the “being” part more than the western philosophical cannons where commerce and the desire to out-compete comes in the way of simply reflecting in the joys of life and going about your life as if the only purpose was to live through it and love anyone who comes your way. Some people that I come across demonstrate this instant calmness and peace of mind towards things around them that it makes me think that they have somehow figured out how to navigate the chasm between early presence and transcendence. That the struggles of daily life do not perturb them as much as they do to me and that they stand tall like trees in swaying winds, just standing tall and doing what it must to continue existing. 

In popular philosophy, we are often compared with natural things like trees, river, wind, etc. and they find their way into the metaphors we use to describe our lives on this mortal earth. Our love for nature, or biophilia, isn’t purely a localized construct that affects only a few. The need to connect with something bigger than ourselves, to find our presence in the things we see around us, to identify with an uncertain world and the enormity of our existence within it, is in fact a need to feel the idea of being.

Being like the river – that is in all places all the time, and that defies the conventional wisdom of the linearity of time. By being there and here, as if each cross-section of the river cannot be separated from the other, the rivers give us the uncanny idea that our sense of time is also maybe not the right way to look at things. Curiously, this also aligns with the scientific notions of the time-space continuum that time is like space and that everything that we have lived through or will pass through in the future already exists and with advanced understanding of this dynamic, we must be able to traverse time the way we traverse space. It’s this aspect that rivers already exhibit. 

Rivers also absorb a stone thrown at it through a seemingly calm and composed posture with a ripple and then a return to the normal state. Again, the comparison with human nature finds its way in describing the ideal state we should try to achieve.

Mind Like Water: A mental and emotional state in which your head is clear, able to create and respond freely, unencumbered with distractions and split focus.

—David Allen

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

—Bruce Lee

Formless, shapeless, and non-assertive – like water, to be able to respond as we must and not as we perceive. Accepting everything as the God’s way is the time-honored thinking behind every major religion. Believing in randomness is a way of acceptance or being like water. Randomness isn’t a purely mathematical concept that we sideline through the studies of wall street and of main street. Randomness is present in our choices, in our responses to what life serves us in its daily grind, in the ticking of each arm of the clock, in the ways we interact with the objects around us, and in the ways in which we interpret the truth.

“No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

 Accepting randomness in our lives isn’t easy. Too often we find ourselves wondering about the unfairness of life, of the inequalities of fortune we find ourselves surrounded with, of the ethical and moral conundrums that we see going unobserved around us. The idea that an external event can be purely incidental and existed only because it did, to accept the absurdity behind the idea of existence for its own sake is difficult to accomplish. What is reality? Is there an objective reality or what we are living through is more a chimera of our own imaginations? Are our feelings and our interpretations real or are they so conditioned to respond to our inner biases and trained eyes that they have become a part of our reality, if there is any such thing.

The very fact that I can think about these matters of the mind is an indication of our freedom. This freedom though, comes with conditions and with a gauntlet for the roaming mind. Tolkien said, “not all those who wander are lost”, but a wandering mind is a lost mind.

“I am free and that is why I am lost.”

― Franz Kafka

Or in modern parlance, the Dunning Kruger effect of finding our island of thoughts adrift in the stormy seas of reality and of cause-and-effect. This constant duel, between our inner search for meaning and perception of reality, of the cold, “frozen seas” within us with the randomness in the subjective reality we call the world around us is an absurdism that we spend our lifetimes around. And with nowhere else to go other than the natural, slow, decayed progress towards the netherworld.

… in spite of or in defiance of the whole of existence he wills to be himself with it, to take it along, almost defying his torment. For to hope in the possibility of help, not to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all things are possible – no, that he will not do. And as for seeking help from any other – no, that he will not do for all the world; rather than seek help he would prefer to be himself – with all the tortures of hell, if so it must be.

– Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

Acceptance then, becomes the nectar for the troubled hearts. A placid sense of being, of a response system that isn’t adversarial towards the events thrusted upon us but, like water, a vessel for morphing into whatever is needed to survive and to exist. Of being, purely in the pursuit of being itself, nary a purpose or agenda in mind other than what we have been dealt with. And death is, first and foremost, what we mortals have been dealt with, and that keeps challenging our idea of meaning.

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”

― Franz Kafka