Musings on a Birthday - 2012
Musings on a Birthday .
Alan Watts - an influential philosopher once commented " We are not born into this world; we are born out of it".
Again Stephen Jay Gould - an eminent evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century wrote in the preface of his wonderful study of Burgess shale - "if one were to rewind the tape of evolution and play it; chances of any species even closely resembling a human is as remote as a leaf growing on a twig on the branch of a tree"
As a human race , we simple cannot accept the simple fact the existence is essentially meaningless. Our attempt throughout the ages has been to anthropomorphize life. The fiction that Charles Darwin erected in the eighteenth century that Human beings are the pinnacle of creation has steadily been eroded and reconstructed by every known scientific discipline since then . The more we push the frontiers of knowledge the less it seems probable that Man holds a special place in this universe. A collective human history of a few hundred thousand years can hardly stand testimony to our vain glorious claim of being the epitome of creation; when this very earth was inhabited by unicellular organisms for at least a million years before any semblance of life was recorded was on this planet.
What then gives us this audacity of hope and misplaced pomposity. Our everyday lives are so insecure and depth less that we seek salvation in ideas of permanence in whatever form it comes. When the entire universe is mutating every moment, we seek to achieve immutability through our actions, deeds and thoughts. Our glorification of birth and death is merely an effort to immortalize ourselves in an universe that is essentially timeless.
Earlier this year, I understood the true meaning and significance of what it is to be a "mortal". A mortal is one for whom life is not a means to an end and is merely an event in this vast panorama of this universe sustained by vast cosmic forces that converge at a single focal point in existence - bereft of any doership, but merely a placid vessel that is propelled through this boundless ocean of creation to a destination that is completely uncertain yet mysterious and compelling. In short, a life untrammeled by consequences.
A birthday them is not merely cherishing the birth of a "Me" but a profound gratitude to the cosmos for having manifested this Psycho-physical organism - A singular chance occurrence that was conceived in chaos and yet imbued with insight to discern and intuit its significance as merely flotsam and jetsam in this evanescent cosmic broth .
Gosh - What a Birthday :)
Cheers !!!!!!
Alan Watts - an influential philosopher once commented " We are not born into this world; we are born out of it".
Again Stephen Jay Gould - an eminent evolutionary biologist of the twentieth century wrote in the preface of his wonderful study of Burgess shale - "if one were to rewind the tape of evolution and play it; chances of any species even closely resembling a human is as remote as a leaf growing on a twig on the branch of a tree"
As a human race , we simple cannot accept the simple fact the existence is essentially meaningless. Our attempt throughout the ages has been to anthropomorphize life. The fiction that Charles Darwin erected in the eighteenth century that Human beings are the pinnacle of creation has steadily been eroded and reconstructed by every known scientific discipline since then . The more we push the frontiers of knowledge the less it seems probable that Man holds a special place in this universe. A collective human history of a few hundred thousand years can hardly stand testimony to our vain glorious claim of being the epitome of creation; when this very earth was inhabited by unicellular organisms for at least a million years before any semblance of life was recorded was on this planet.
What then gives us this audacity of hope and misplaced pomposity. Our everyday lives are so insecure and depth less that we seek salvation in ideas of permanence in whatever form it comes. When the entire universe is mutating every moment, we seek to achieve immutability through our actions, deeds and thoughts. Our glorification of birth and death is merely an effort to immortalize ourselves in an universe that is essentially timeless.
Earlier this year, I understood the true meaning and significance of what it is to be a "mortal". A mortal is one for whom life is not a means to an end and is merely an event in this vast panorama of this universe sustained by vast cosmic forces that converge at a single focal point in existence - bereft of any doership, but merely a placid vessel that is propelled through this boundless ocean of creation to a destination that is completely uncertain yet mysterious and compelling. In short, a life untrammeled by consequences.
A birthday them is not merely cherishing the birth of a "Me" but a profound gratitude to the cosmos for having manifested this Psycho-physical organism - A singular chance occurrence that was conceived in chaos and yet imbued with insight to discern and intuit its significance as merely flotsam and jetsam in this evanescent cosmic broth .
Gosh - What a Birthday :)
Cheers !!!!!!
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