Stuff I have been thinking about

 I haven't written here in quite a bit and it was like I was bursting at the seams to write about the new experiences I had, so I decided to just compile the things I wanted to write about in one post instead of going through the toil of fleshing out different and detailed expositions in different posts. 

I recently started college and in a lot of my first semester courses, we have been studying about logic. The laws of thought such as the law of identity, the law of non contradiction and the law of the excluded middle are good enough crystallizations and approximations for the everyday process of life, but realistically they are like all our systems of thought, nothing but approximations. In a way thinking through thought is like taking a slower and more rigorous approach through the path made by the dynamic flow of awareness. I was trying to read the phenomenology of spirit, and in that it seemed that by very carefully threading language (as also seen in some religious metaphors or the koans of zen buddhism etc.) it is possible to bridge this gap in the tempo of flow of thought and awareness. Thought as a verified system of symbols is too crystallized. Even something which we consider as axiomatic to our perception as the law of identity isn't truly correct. In one of the passages I thought I got a decent hold on, a beautiful dialectic was explained. It is easy to conceptualize other things around us as objects because that is what our ego reduces them to for ease of perception. However, to grasp them as subject instead of substance, it is necessary to see the self othering sameness. How a becomes not a by pushing itself out of itself but in the process remains a. This process is the real process of (hypothesis-antithesis-synthesis) which people give as an explanation of dialectics, however the problem with grasping that dumbed down interpretation is that it adds a dimension of time between these three things which are actually happening at the very same instant. I didn't look into this line of thought further, but a system of logic that actually encapsulates this dialectic as the real nature of things would feel much more correct. This is similar to another thing I wanted to write about which was that meaning can be interpreted as a verb in this way. This self othering sameness is not static but is in fact continuously moving the more you cognize it. Meaning, by which I am trying to the inner essence of the statements should also similarly be interpreted not as a static and fixed interpretation but rather a moving process of beauty. 

Another thing I learned through observation was the appreciation of dance. Dance is appreciated better not merely as a set of movements bound by time but rather as the process used to decorate a certain space and time. I have never really been good at dance and stayed away from it like most people for the longest time. But when I was in a condition that pretty much forced me to dance, I not only realized how hard it is to perfect each movement we perform but also learnt to appreciate the effort other people have put into perfecting their own movements. I could see the immense intelligence which our physical body has on its own, which would differentiate the learning speeds of many of us. Natural talent might be a thing, but it should never stop you from doing what you like. If you try your hardest at anything, you will leave your own mark on that field with your genuine creativity. Even classical dance which I never thought I would be able to appreciate has immense practice, intelligence and beauty behind the movements.

Here is something I wrote for an assignment which I liked quite a bit, hopefully it does not count as plagiarism to post on my blog (or I will have some explaining to do).

Peer pressure is doing things or holding opinions we wouldn’t otherwise do or hold in order to gain validation or valuation from our social group. Human beings are social animals, so a certain degree of influence from those around us is always going to exist. Hence, peer influence is better conceptualized not as a binary indicator of whether our actions are inauthentic or not, but rather as a continuing dialectic process between the strength of our individuality and the authority of the collective. All collectives are centred around individuals with a strong individuality, through the process of deification. However, after the elevation of these people with strong individualities, the collective starts crystallizing or inverting the values which were originally deemed as good, in effect exercising their power over the individual. Since a strong individuality is a dynamic and developing process, the individual always remains constrained to some degree by the collective in its development. These are like the opposing forces of gravity and nuclear reactions taking place in a star, when the strength of a person’s individuality runs out they are co-opted into some group or the other through mechanisms of dogma, or deification of stronger individuals etc.

I was also trying to wrap my head around the concept of relationships. Not that I haven't experienced or seen them before, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that in most cases, getting into a relationship isn't the correct choice for people. Society has fetishized relationships from the very beginning, through all the media we consume. Most relationships in real life are bandages. Bandages on the wounds of the fear of loneliness, of not being understood or wanted by anyone, of going through the rollercoaster of life by ourselves, of all the hurts we have acquired till a certain stage in life, or of endless sexual and infatuated pleasure to numb ourselves and not introspect into these issues. The media naturally inverts these fears to give us the maximum sense of security possible, to sell relationships to us as a product that we need to have. Most people I see around me have reduced their partners to distorted counterimages of their fears and I am sure that I would probably end up doing the same in a relationship. In a very Nietzschean sense (though his perspective may have been tainted by not having a healthy romantic relationship), it seems to me that most people around me are settled into relationships to stop braving the storm that is loneliness everyday (rather night). I was also reminded of Sri Aurobindo's description of a pure form of love untainted by sexual aspects. (I refer to it as untainted not because of some naïve puritanical sense of morality, but rather because of a recognition of the fact that adding desire to things often reduces them to mere transactions). Isn't such a pure form of love something we should feel from within towards everyone and everything around us? What is it in romantic feelings which is different from a human love, which centers it around one person? and should you even want that? These are some questions I don't have answers to yet. 

That's pretty much it for this post, I need to fix my sleep cycle so yeah, thanks for reading if you read through that stuff, until Next time.