The Meaning of Life

Its wierd to see how many ways there are to make sense of the life we live. (Wait a minute- Is that the meaning of life as I see it?)
(Anyways,) Each one of us attributes some meaning to his or her life and that of others- and spend a lifetime devoted to it.
I would like the enumerate the 10 most prominent beliefs which people have about the 'Meaning of Life' . Read them and think if any of it is true for you:

1.To enjoy or experience life.
Enjoy the ‘moment’ , ‘the journey’.
To laugh often and much’ and ‘to appreciate beauty’
life is a very short trip—while alive, live
You got to get it while you can.
life can be enjoyed even if that is all there is.
If I go to a play I do not enjoy it less because I do not believe that it is divinely created or divinely conducted, that it will last forever instead of stopping at eleven, that many details of it will remain in my memory after a few months, or that it will have any particular moral effect on me. And I enjoy life as I enjoy that play.

2. To love, help, or serve others.
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.
love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. The salvation of man is through love and in love.
My consolation and my happiness are to be found in service of all that lives, because the Divine essence is the sum total of all life

3. Life is a mystery.
“I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me to know.”
“If we find an answer to that (why we and the universe exist), it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.”

4. Life is meaningless.
Life is that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose
It is meaningless that we are born; it is meaningless that we die.
Life ia like a disease, and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives
Comparing life to a ship that is tossed by every wave and by every wind; a ship headed to no port and no harbor, with no rudder, no compass, no pilot, simply floating for a time, then lost in the waves.

5. To serve or worship God and/or prepare for the next (or after-) life.
Life as “only a preparation for the eternal home, which is far more important than the short pleasures that seduce us here”
In life we should “give God glory by reflecting His beauty and His love. That is why we are here and that is the purpose of our lives”
“I just want to do God’s will”

6. Life is a struggle.
life is one damned horrid grind
Life is a tragedy wherein we sit as spectators for awhile and then act our part in it.
Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret.

7. To contribute to something that is greater than ourselves.
The meaning of life lies in the chance it gives us to produce or contribute to something greater than ourselves.
To leave the world a bit better
You should be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity
The true joy in life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

8. To become self-actualized.
To develop or ‘evolve’ as a person or as a species.
To pursue truth(s), wisdom, or a higher level of being.
Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is
To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.

9. To create your own meaning.
Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be
The ‘hard truth’: We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning.

10. Life is absurd or a joke.
The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
Life - a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in the long shot.
Our ability to understand life: reading ‘Sanskrit’ to a pony.
There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.

The Outsider - by Albert Camus

I just finished reading the Outsider by Albert Camus. I am not quite sure if I regret having read it or feeling fortunate to have come across it. But all I can say with certainty now is that whoever will read it will feel a profound sense of respect for Albert Camus for having created a character like Meursault and letting us look at the world through his perspective. I think one must read this book and experience this world for himself at his own risk, beacause its quite possible one may never be able to come out of it.

It easily ranks among the greatest novellas ever written!

That is all I would say to review this book!

Hyperrealism

The term hyperreality characterizes the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterise the way consciousness defines what is actually "real" in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter the original event or experience being depicted.

Most aspects of hyperreality can be thought of as "reality by proxy." For example, a viewer watching pornography begins to live in the non-existent world of the pornography, and even though pornography is not an accurate depiction of sex, for the viewer, the reality of "sex" becomes something non-existent.

Some examples are simpler: the McDonald's "M" arches create a world with the promise of endless amounts of identical food, when in "reality" the "M" represents nothing, and the food produced is neither identical nor infinite.

Baudrillard suggested that he world we live in has been replaced by a copy world, where we seek simulated stimuli and nothing more. The example can be given of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyperreal.

Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain current cultural conditions. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one's wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially, fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any "real" reality.

If you're interested in knowing more...then google up and explore!!!

I SHALL NOT CARE

When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.

-Sara Teasdale

(This beautiful piece,she wrote just before she committed
suicide by an taking an overdose of sleeping pills)

What A Wonderful Life

Only rarely do you come across stories so incredible to be true and yet you would want to believe them. 'Its a Wonderful Life' is one such story. A film you watch and at the end of it you feel this immense sense of gratitude towards all the wonderful people and things that happenned to you and you thank God for all the simple good things of life.A story which each one of us would yearn to live after having watched it!A big thanks to all who have played their part in making this movie experience possible...From Conception to free delivery through a free download on the Internet and those wonderful unlikely circumstances and coincidences that lead me to download it and watch it.

Watch it and you'll thank me!

LONGING

I am not sorry for my soul
That it must go unsatisfied,
For it can live a thousand times,
Eternity is deep and wide.

I am not sorry for my soul,
But oh, my body that must go
Back to a little drift of dust
Without the joy it longed to know.

-Sara Teasdale

(I simply love her)

On Art.....

Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. - Leonard Bernstein

Giving up Smoking...

Friend (Who wont change for anything):I just want to run away from here,as far as I can as fast as I canSo many expectations from work and I am in capable of doing anythingBesides, have smoked only one cigarette.Maazha doka phiraaylay

Me: (Who fails to pursue every time) Smoking is all there is to ur character/identity now....There is nothing else to talk to you about,which both of us can understand and identify with.We hardly talk about anything else.Besides ur s/w stuff and cricket, i dont really know what u understand,You do not exist otherwise.

If we take responsibility for our emotional response to all events in our life, there is nobody else to blame if we are not happy! The choice is ours alone.

Religion....


"You see, I’m an atheist. And I have only one religion; the sublime in human nature. There is nothing to approach the sanctity of the highest man possible, and there is nothing that gives me the same reverent feeling, the feeling when one’s spirit wants to kneel bareheaded… do not call it hero-worship, because it is more than that. It is a kind of strange and improbable white heat, where admiration becomes religion and religion becomes philosophy and philosophy, the whole of one’s life." - Ayn Rand

In the Shoes of God...

Nobody Dies of Smoking Just One Cigarette!So,get up,get going,go for it.You gotta do what you gotta do.

We are humans afterall...
The mind gets tired, needs relaxation.When throat is parched, we give it water.When stomach is empty we give it food. Similarly the mind gets tired. And afterall its Your mind, it cant be your foe.Its just like a child, needs to caressed with love.

In a way, we are all addicts, only our subjects are different.Even in a sage,there is a psychopath hidden. Even God goes against the good he defines, just to give meaning to that which he calls evil.The entire creation, the whole of manifestation is God's play ground- We are merely roleplayers in the Cosmic dance of His. God can Believe,prove,do,preach,practise absolutely anything- so can his children. Its just his Gift to his children.You too should allow yourself to be fooled sometimes, simply to get that pleasure, to measure the good in you.

So when a temptation shows up, do not panic, do not resist it,do not run away from it- Just let it come of its own, let it seep inside you and become one with it.

Then there is Unison, only then there is harmony,there is peace.

Understanding that everything we know,experience,crave for,do and die for is merely a speck of dust in the nebula of God's plans.

Its not very easy to look at world from this position, not everyone can.Only a few gifted souls know of God's plans and join him in a mood of servitude.

He is in all of us...He simply is Us.

(This might just be one of the concoctions of some deranged mind. This post is merely to give you an idea that Merely Thinking and Reasoning is not enough, what is important is to always lead them to and also derive them from Values- Real,Positive,Uplifting,Pro-life and Pro-coexistance)

With the Summer Rain , with the Lovely Spring
Awaiting The World That Sings Of Thee
Where Magic Reigns, Dancing With Glee
In That World where thou belong, I Long To Be.

Essential Reading: (Many I have still not read,but want to , soon)
The EssentialDifference
The Artful Universe Expanded
Descartes' Baby
Curious Minds
The MurdererNext Door
DesCartes' Error
The Ancestor's Tale
Sweet Dreams
The Math Instinct
Mediated
Collapse
Why We Do It
The Quantum World
Radical Evolution
FAB
Incompleteness
The Fabricof the Cosmos
A View From theEye of the Storm
The End of Faith
Victory & Vexation in Science
Rational Mysticism
Miss Leavitt's Stars
Everything BadIs Good For You
The Singularity Is Near
Mutants
The (Mis)Behaviorof Markets
The Birth of the Mind
What the Dormouse Said...
What MakesBiology Unique
Saturday
Augustine
The Road to Reality
A Passion For Mathematics
The Blank Slate
Warped Passages
Mind: A BriefIntroduction
Authentic Happiness
Science Friction
Natural Selectionand Social Theory:Selected Papers
On Human Nature

The Pleasure Of Not Finding Things Out

All of you would agree with me that we find it absorbing and rivetting to solve puzzles,be it crossword or world problems. We say that we find them 'stimulating' and it gives us a great amount of satisfaction, a sense of achievement , when after battling for a long time with pen and paper, we come up with anwers or solutions.

What is about these puzzles and questions that we find so interesting? Why do they stimulate us, at all? Don't you think that evolution has favoured our capacity and ability to find pleasure, a 'pleasure sensation' in finding things out? It infact has, that is for sure.

Buts it is not quite this pleasure that I wish to draw your attention to, but rather the exact opposite of it - The pleasure of not finding things out.

Haven't we all came across questions or puzzles that could never be solved?
How did we react to it- Once we learnt that it can't simply be solved by us (or anybody, for that matter) , we pass it on to others.

I dont just believe that we have all evolved to better solve puzzles, but also have evolved in a way that we tend to keep unsolved ones alive - alive in our memory and alive in our culture. Which means our brains have evolved not just to to give emotional/harmonal rewards on solving puzzling questions but also to retain them in memory and passing it on to others. Evolution might have favoured this tendency because it found that having answers to such questions, helped us survive better. Such animals were better equipped to survive because every puzzle of nature that they solved , increased their knowledge base. Everytime man faced with a new piece of information, he tried to resolve the contradictions within the sum total of the information that we had before stumbling across the new piece. With a larger knowledge base he could organize more information and further expand his knowledge.

So an animal aware of an unsolved puzzle had a better future that the animal which is not aware of the puzzle at all.

Soon the amount of information and knowledge that made up this culture of survival became so large that the investment of energy and risk needed to cross this knowledge barrier to a higher level, beacame unaffordable. The brain's ability fell into a strange predicament- a trouble hitherto unknown- complacency and stagnation.

Many of the questions that we had then, we call- the Eternal Questions. Questions like- how are the seasons created, where does the sun go after it sets, does nature have a controller, where do we come from, Is there a God, Who am I, Why am I, so on and so forth- are questions / puzzled raised as we move from one Knowledge strata to another. It is this state of human mind, this state of culture that gave rise to religion- dogmas and superstitions, blind faith and blind beliefs.

Only an extraordinary mind, a brave sceptic could break out of the shakles of religion and take the human mind to the next level. It is this mind that we salute and show our gratitude to- and many such minds that would follow- Socrates, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci,Galileo, Isaac Newton, Fraraday, Darwin.... the real heroes.

So whenever we realize that we, consciously or sub consciously, are finding some pleasure in knowing and remembering the unknown and unsolved, we must immediately shake ourselves out of the dream- of complacency and stagnation- to struggle our way towards the solution- to the next level- to a level where in lies the future- a hope for better life- and ofcourse- A Pleasure unsurpassable by any other.

Kunidu Kunidoo Bare ... ( Mungaru Male Lyrics )

(I post the complete lyrics of my favourite song from the kannada film Mungaru Male for readers who cannot read kannada like me but can understand and speak fluently.... So Simply Enjoy Maadi.. )

Kunidu Kunidoo Bare, Olidu Olidu Baare
Kunida ninna mele, maleya haniya male
Jeevake jeeva tandavale, Jeevakinta saneha baare
Olave vismaya,Olave vismaya....
Ninna prema rupa kandu naanu tanmaya...

Huchchu huduga neenu, bichchi helalenu
Jeevake rekke tandavane, Baanigere haaruva baare
Olave vismayaa .....

Irulalli neene-ellu mai muridare, nanagelli naviraada ho-kampana
Kannalli Nee Kannittu baraseledare, maatilla kateyilla bari romanchana

Ninna kannatumba , irali nanna bimba, Hoovige valava tandavane, parimaladalli araluva baaro,
Olave vismaya....

Oolave neen-Oliva kshana-dindale, ee bhoomi, ee baanu hosadaagide
kushiyinda ee manavella hoovaagide, bere enu bekilla neen-illade

Kunidu Kunidu Bare, Olidu Olidu Baare
Kunida ninna mele, maleya haniya male
Jeevake jeeva tandavale, Jeevakinta saneha baare
Olave vismaya,Olave vismaya....
Ninna prema rupa kandu naanu tanmaya...

Huchchu huduga neenu, bichchi helalenu
Jeevake rekke tandavane, Baanigere haaruva baare
Olave vismayaa...

Will I be able to write this post?

I am writing a post after about a year and the reason why I write today is quite an important one for me. And although I intend to it to be more of a confession, it is a atleast in disguise- A test to check if I can really write something on my own-think and write on my own- am I creative in the sense that I'm not a mere mimic. So only time will reveal the truth- but if I shall be able to post this one, it will be quite a beginning for me- to start trusting myself on my individuality and independence.

So, how was this dragon of suspicion unleashed?
I ve been reading this book- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence- over half way through. The author was discussing his past years, when he was a schizophrenic - or as far as I can tell a different person altogether- An advocate of the Church of Reason- a character whom he refers to as Phaedrus.

Phaedrus - a staunch rationalist Professor of English- taking the processs of reason itself for granted- tried to integrate his entire world into the fabric of reason- by spending a lot of energy thinking and trying to resolve contradictions- sadly,unsuccessfuly.

Everything went all right until the day he stumbled upon this concept of 'Quality' - but he failed to reduce it to a concept- an entity which you can slice seperate with the knife of objectivity and then examine it- suspending it in vacuum. He says you cannot define Quality for the same reason.And this line of thinking is what triggered his madness- which I believe (as I havent read that far) and taking it to the hilt- where he lost his mind entirely- along with wealth, family and relationships.

So, when he was trying to discuss this with his students he tries- as a rationalist must- to justify his stand on the issue of Quality. He says that all kinds of creativity,innovation and original thought-even hypothesising in science- have their origin in our ability to snese and produce 'Quality'.

He asks one of his students to write an essay of 500 words on the town Bozeman. her mind went bonkers- she couldnt figure out what to write,where to start and what to ignore. So,when she came confused to him, he asked her to write an essay on The Main Street in Bozeman. she could nt do that as well. Then he asks her to write an essay on the topmost-left brick in front of a particular building in Bozeman.

She came back to him with an essay of 5000 words with a truly original personal account. This is getting a bit lengthy, anyways- He says that she could do that only when she could realize that she could have a fresh first hand experience of visiting the place and writing an account.-Otherwise all she could do was imitate something already on her mind, fed in by books,peers ,teachers etc and she could do that because she could choose what to write and what not to write.

Robert says - Robert Pirsig the Author of the book- that this habit of imitation is an evil, a result of external compulsion- it kills our oneness with quality- our potential to create on our own something fresh,original,personal, individual.

I think I ve gone a little to far into this-like Phaedrus but without going anymore further, I must conclude, that I could on my own conclude this post, giving me a hint that I could write and not merely copy or imitate. I intend to do a lot more of writing in this near future and will descibe my experience of reading the rest of the book, as well.