Friday, June 11, 2004

On Life

[Listening to: Coming Back to Life - Pink Floyd - P.u.l.s.e. (6:56)]

The existential predicament is a topic that has bothered me a lot from time to time. The weird part is that it is as if the feeling evolved. I was perfectly satisfied with life and then it was as if a time bomb within my cognitive systems went off and suddenly I realized I do not know why I am living. The reconciliation of this situation is a difficult one. It is my personal belief that there is no justifiable reason to live. It is just our biases towards our bodily functions that keep us alive. Then while we are living we get caught up in more intellectual thoughts such as God and reality.

On Mysticism

[Listening to: Lateralus - Tool - Lateralus (9:21)]

Indians have their Bhramin and we have our sufis. There appears in each civilization or society an ever broadening spectrum of versatile people, activities, traditions as the individual components grow and evolve. One cannot simply dismiss these deviations on the basis of majority beliefs. Traditions such as metaphysics and mysticism are not a figment of some crazy man's imagination. They are the result of a combined effort of mankind to use stagnant rules of understanding upon an ever changing swirl that is their temporal existence.
If we were to evaluate mysticism in its proper context as a rebellion against the contemporary analytic approach then it would become apparent that mysticism is much more than a few reclusive individuals chanting hymns. It is a revaluation of human understanding and a departure from normal comprehension towards emotional surrender. I cannot do justice to this topic here but I believe our bias towards the fully comprehensible acts as a barrier between us and a better understanding of mysticism.

On Horizons

[Listening to: High Hopes - Pink Floyd - P.u.l.s.e. (7:52)]

There are limitations on man. I once read somewhere that our eyes have this inbuilt desire to see perspective. We cannot imagine a picture which has two vanishing points. Never will we see parallel lines that do not meet. Yet another place I read that a man wore glasses that inverted the image of the world for him all the time for two weeks and at the end of two weeks his vision had returned to normal, right side up. Now when he took his glasses of again he had the same problem that the world appeared upside down but it soon returned to normal. If our eyes can compensate for such an event I am sure they have the ability to see multiple vanishing points in images. Our horizons are broad indeed and anyone who uses the limitations his physical body or his mental organ imposes then he is for sure putting forward a rather weak arguement.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

On Sound

[Listening to: Lost For Words - 1994 - (5:15)]

A phenoema of compressions and rarefactions that require a medium. A very intricate and complex process that leads to the most effective medium of communication that we have. It is used both for business and pleasure but it is its metaphysical aspect that intrigues me. I have heard rumours that when in resonance with your own mind sounds can prove to be very illuminating. Althought I have tried to replicate this effect but with little success. It seems one requires headphones for such an act.