Tuesday, December 08, 2020

The Middle Path

Buddha realizes that there ought to be a way of living between extremities of luxuries and mortality. One cannot submit life to the existential crises. To just live and accept yourself is important to be able to perceive others' thoughts and feelings. To be an ordinary human being is to be Buddha. Buddhism doesn't teach you to be special, but ordinary in a way that you are living with everyone else, not above or below. 

A string of sitar too tight will break while if too loose, will be incapable to produce any sound. In order to produce any music, the string has to be tightened just enough - that is the essence of the middle path. That one needs to know just enough to not hurt others, but unite with the rhythm of the universe in order to experience resonance and happiness.

Saturday, November 28, 2020

Questions on the Nature of Truth

1.

I am often being told that I am too sensitive, someone who is far too easily affected by what people say.  How does one measure the limits of being sensitive? Isn't sensitivity desirable to be able to become perceptive, responsive, careful, empathetic, and so on? Aren't these values expected out of all human beings. To be human, they say, is to be alive with all your senses, and be able to relate and empathize with feelings and sensations of other human beings so as to become graceful and wholehearted. Do we not need to be sensitive in order to make ourselves large hearted to be able to contain a large amount of experiences, and allow thus, for different forms of lives and their ideas to exist. Is being sensitive not merely being more and more human? 


2.

Implied in their comment is that I dwell on people's comments far too seriously. Often, they mean to suggest that there is no need to pay so much attention to what people say, and that one must not take what is subjected to oneself so quickly. And that makes me wonder if anything that people say could be true? If there is almost nothing that people tell us that can be kept close, what is the purpose of speaking? I could understand that truth is provisional, and that truth is constructed for the moment, and that truth has a function of allowing something to exist in the here and now. 


3.

But then, what does it mean to live a truthful life? It is similar to asking if reflections are true? Do we exist only in our reflections? And if we agree that reflection is not our body, rather an image, then what is the purpose of reflection? Is the nature of truth same as the nature of reflection? Does truth lie outside the body? And if it does, then how is it possible to inhabit it? Does truth then become a mask? If it is a mask, doesn't it become paradoxical to be called truth, for is not the function of mask to merely hide. And by this line of thinking, one begs the question whether truth is a form of concealment? Is truth the mask of lie itself? Could truth simply be a form of lie? Do we only live in shades of lies? 


4.

Is lie a sociological necessity, and the manner in which we come to terms with everyday world? And does truth then become one of the functions of lies? Does it make truth the worst, or best form of lie? Is truth meant to be forgotten? Or does truth lose its truthfulness over time, and keep turning itself into a lie? Can the realization of truth be harmful for one's being? Is that why people transact through pretense? What is the social life of truth? How does it contribute towards becoming human? If there is any connection between truth and sensitivity (and thereby being human), how does one establish this relationship? Is being human far too ambitious a value to be chased? Is sensitivity only some perverted form of value to be mobilised for social transaction? 

Saturday, November 21, 2020

The system of collecting - Baudrillard



































The object deprived of its function becomes the locus of the subject. Functionality comes in when an object comes in a social world and objects utility is a function of social relations. This is how in a way and object becomes a matter of collection. What you collect depends upon these social relations. Object gets its objecthood only when it is deprived of its utility. Then is when it slips into an abstract autonomous realm. That's when you wonder why people wonder, if they have preserved some object, that have surpassed their use value. Then it is its destiny to be collected.


The need for validation of your world of collection isn't there before puberty. (Age of 12 to 13 years). Things become elegant after 40 years of age. the intermediate period is about transition and change.

on Monophobia


From Psychology Today dot com

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Ghei Chhand Makarand / Translation

Film: Katyar Kaljyat Ghusli
Composition: Shankar Mahadevan
Singers: Shankar Mahadevan, Rahul Deshpande


घेई छंद मकरंद, प्रिय हा मिलिंद
मधुसेवनानंद स्वच्छंद, हा धुंद
मिटता कमलदल होई बंदी हा भृंग;
परि सोडिना ध्यास, गुंजनात दंग


Translation:

Takes pleasure of the nectar, lovingly, the honeybee
Savouring unworriedly the sweetness, immersed
as it still suckles, the flower petals fold in the bee
Yet unfettered in its trapping, its hum-buzz persists