All Men Are Liars – Ouspensky

“To comment on the last paragraph: If you are writing and FULLY conscious of the fact that you are writing, can you still be writing? The same goes for reading. Once you become conscious of doing the activity, you are no longer “doing” it. I believe Sartre wrote on that, but I may be mistaken.” This was a comment to a previous post.
I was reading Ouspensky and he talks about a similar phenomenon – consciousness. What he says is that it is quite possible that a person is conscious for about two minutes or so while he/she is writing or reading, but what remains is the memory of the consciousness. However, the person thinks that he was conscious the whole time. Ouspensky has declared the whole of mankind to be liars. Not because they don’t speak the truth but because they don’t know that they are not speaking the truth, for they are unaware of the truth.
This is food for thought and I must thank my friend J. Bo for propelling me in that direction.

Absurdity, Man and Religion

There is a certain absurdity in the way fate operates. One can never know why one was born into a certain place. Why did a man rest at a particular place while travelling and why not at another?
You mix this general absurdity of fate with man’s irrational behaviour (including religious behaviour) and one doesn’t know what will become of it. The consequences are extrapolated into unimaginable dimensions. Unfortunately, I am not the best of writers and will have to resort to an example to make my case.
This is an Indian set up, say in the interiors where the religious strife is high, coupled with ill informed villagers and gullible townsmen; who would believe anything. A Muslim boy decides to rest for the night in a temple. He loves temples and is researching on them. But the reason he rests there is because he is unable to get a grip on the fact that he was the cause of the death of the girl most dear to him. She committed suicide because the non-Muslim boy she loved was murdered by her relatives (who were informed by our hero of their elopement). When the Muslim boy is seen inside the temple, he is immediately assumed to be a terrorist and the police is waiting to gun him down and people from all over the state are gathered to lynch him. He walks out of the temple after two days. He is shot dead.
Notice the absurdity of the whole situation. Starting from their birth, all the three – the muslim girl, muslim boy and non-muslim boy had no reason to be born as such. The lover need not have been killed, the boy need not have been found at a temple…
The force that acted on these seemingly unconnected absurd events, was man and his irrational behaviour. Thus it is not good enough to say that life is absurd and we can do nothing about it. The absurdity has at all times to be balanced out by rationality. Man’s rational behaviour – conscious and thinking behaviour can cancel out or rather balance all absurdity in the world.
Where does religion fit into whatever I have said so far? Religion does the very opposite of rationality consequently extrapolating absurdity. The boy got killed because he did not belong to the same religion as the girl. There is no rational in that. It has, if at all, magnified absurdity. The same goes for all religious feud, whether it is the Hindus (banning Valentine’s Day) or Christians with their forced conversions or any other religion with its respective idiosyncrasies. Bach has said – that when spiritual knowledge becomes public and is taught it becomes a religion and then the knowledge is lost. Therefore, any knowledge has to passed on to individuals and not the masses. This is what is happening today. Absurdity is getting magnified to be all consuming and to fight this unknown, uncomprehensible absurdity man resorts to God. Man must if at all, resort to his reason.
(Please note that whole concept of absurdity being balanced out by rationality was something I discovered during an argument with a friend, all due credit for this thought process of mine is to go to him.)

Existentialism is looking the other way.

I have never read existentialism. But I have read about it. I can say with some humility that I am a Camus fan. I have read two books – The Stranger and the Rebel. But I am not sure if these two books count as core existentialist thought process.

The thing that interests me is the question – what is beyond this absurdity? Given that the world is absurd, and one conquers (for want of a better word) this absurdity, then where does it lead you. I was discussing this with a friend, who talked about nihilism. He said that the problem with existentialism and men especially, is the fact that they reach a point where there is nothingness and many men (not few) once they have reached that last step willingly let themselves get sucked into nihilism.

This is quite interesting. He also said that there comes a stage when thought gets turned to itself and life itself is self destructive. But thought turning to itself, for e.g. ‘prove proof’is of no consequence. However, it has made me think and led me to believe that there is in fact an answer to the question – “if a tree falls in the middle of a forest and there is no one around, did the falling tree make any sound”. Now the tree itself being inanimate may not have realised it. However, a human being is a totally different ball game.

For instance, a human being while reading is not simply reading; if he concentrates hard enough he will be able to see that he is reading. He will be able to perceive that he is reading. Therefore, the concentration through observation of the happenings instead of leading the existentialist path to nihilism, takes one to complete consciousness. Instead of nothingness, there is ‘everythingness’. But this can be achieved only through conscious thought process and observation of oneself as a third person. What happens therefore is that A is writing and is therefore a conscious being. But if A is conscious of the fact that A is writing one has turned consciousness to itself. I think existentialism went the other way.