"..as if every thought that came out of your head was so precious that it would be a crime to not share it with the world"
It is the mind that fucks you up, the body is better tethered to reality and more honest.
--
I was sitting by the pool a few minutes ago, my feet in the water, sipping Balinese coffee (which I don't think I'd recommend, atleast going by the couple of renditions I've had) and as worries and anxieties threatened to take over, tried to do a 'mindfulness exercise', as Amma would've recommended, by letting thoughts come and go without pursuing any of them. My eye caught the reflection of a tree and a few branches in the pool- as the water stilled, they came better into focus, only to dissipate when I jerked my feet until the water was able to calm down ('water was able to calm down' lol) and the image became clearer and persistent. And I thought to myself, that's a nice metaphor for insights. (And now, as I write this, I'm thinking that's an old, cliched, pop Zen aphorism.) Which reminded me then of something Ebert wrote, how before shooting one of their films, Ingmar Bergman and his cinematographer sat in a particular church all day, seeing how light shifted and transformed (in) the room. (Now I'm thinking of Pico Iyer's Naoshima diary. 'Now I'm thinking of the phrase "Train of Thought"'). And then it struck me that nothing is a metaphor to anything else, it is its own being. Or looked at the other way, everything can be stretched enough accomodate anything else. I could sense that it was no deep thought, 'మామూలు ఆలోచనలు కూడా గొప్ప సాక్షాత్కారాల్లా అనిపించాయి', (then what am I doing writing about it now?), and while I sit here trying to parse it, and beat and berate and cajole it to yield some transferable, memorable, general 'insight', I can see the contradiction staring me in the face.
If metaphor-ising, which if my rudimentary reading of Prof. Hofstadter is correct, is what thought primarily (solely?) is for, then they are akin to (statistical) models. And all of us know that data doesn't offer insights as often as it gives us the tools to convince, others and ourselves, why we are justified in doing what we've set out to do. ("If you torture data enough, it'll confess to anything" and all that). Which then raises the question of what are our actions motivated by? Just mimetic desires and bodily urges? If my mind is only able to grasp the world through my body, then isn't the body much 'closer' to reality (whatever that means)?
After years of going on and on here, mostly in circles, I have given up all hopes of reaching a point of realisation through working it out intellectually. It is perhaps an abdication of responsibility, of misutilising and then recriminating the mind, when I (now, who or what that 'I' is I don't know) haven't been able to understand and work with it properly. Yet, I don't know what to do anymore in this particular direction; For now anyway.
This blog has turned into a quasi-therapist's couch, where I don't go to find solutions, as much as to direct the gushing onslaught of never-ending, exhausting thoughts away from itself ('recursive' and 'meta' my mind again pipes up, bugger) and to gain some respite- for a few precious moments of calmness. I'm not going to find జ్ఞానం by sitting under a banyan tree anytime soon; My mind would probably just overheat and explode. అమ్మ, 'ఆలోచనలు రానీ పోనీ' కి నాకు దొరికిన మాధ్యమం ఇదే.
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