If you look at birth without bringing in any metaphysical perspectives into it, it is one of the greatest mysteries. Myth making has reduced Life to either a gift, or to a well of sorrow depending on the cup you drink from. Some look to utilize their talents for benefit ,either of the self , the affined or the altruistic. Yet others look at it from the eternal cribbers eyes ,neither enjoying it nor living it to the lees. Yet others grow old and have a foot in the grave before they realize the possibility that life is.
Now the visioning you do is entirely a product of perspective. And perspective is a product of the self. Self and Selfishness go together as you will see in the following examples. And the self itself is a construct based on the circumstances of your birth and upbringing including heredity. Yes heredity is also a circumstance, for some, a privilege, and for the drug addicts child, a malediction. I am sure there are those among you who deny that circumstances are more important than free will, being blissfully unaware of the irony in your capacity to make that statement denied to many others. Yes I don’t believe in any Ubermensch. Yet there will be others who have overcome circumstances. I don’t deny that. But for every one who succeeded in overcoming his demons, silent history would be littered with the graves of thousands who did not. Luck does matter.
Now that the self, for better or for worse is in place we need to understand what is this beast called love? One of the acknowledged desires that humans have is to feel connected and together with some one else and the collective. That is where this wily creature springs from.
Unfortunately at this point to prove my hypothesis, I have to resort to induction as a better method fails me. I will look at three scenarios and disprove them
The young boy and girl: If there be any sillier variant of selfishness then this be it. To Quote Nicholas Nassim Taleb, The more the lovers cling to each other today, the more they want to nurture each other today, the more they would want to hurt each tomorrow if they break up. It is from a desire to nurture the self that love stems from ,and when they break up this very ego resident selfishness wants to inflict hurt.
Heck sometimes it can even be worse. From a land I Love comes the love story of Sohni Mahiwal. The Infidel Sohni crossed the Chenab for her Lover using pots. The day her sister in law substituted it for an unbaked pot she still tried to cross the swollen waters of the Chenab bringing about her own death. This could be a product of three things, A)A Hankering for a good night of sex across the Chenab with her lover leading to an over optimistic assessment of the floatability of unbaked pots. B) A Yearning deeper than the fear of death to meet her lover. C) A knowing suicide in futility and desperation
While A is self explanatory I will deal with Case B and C. Case C. Suicide is an act of self love not hate. Suicide is an attempt to end your reality and beliefs without having to yield to someone else’s imperatives. If Sohni chose to kill herself, it was not out of consideration for her lover but for herself.
Case B. I will use an analogy here. That of a mother killing herself to save her son. The mother in this case makes her child a vehicle of her self, of her dreams, of her unfulfilled aspirations. And in that her self’s interest lies in letting her child survive and die herself.
Love as an emotion is “treacherous” and more fatally blinds you to the flaws of others. Truth and justice fail at the altar of selfish love. I have seen so many rational people blind to the flaws of their parents.
So if not love what are we left with. As hackneyed as it sounds the only thing real is a sense of duty. Have you noticed how many people accept their parents and love them regardless of how they treated them. Regardless of whom you are born to most children love their parents including child abusers. You could have been born to anyone as a matter of chance. Even more silly is the way we make friends. Most of our friends lie from the minuscule minority of humanity we have interacted with. What if with a hypothetical system we had access to every person across the globe? Would our best friends still be our school and college mates??( the Hypothetical sytstem is in its first phase of evolution-the internet)
By Sense of Duty I mean a cosmic sense of duty to everyone in general and no one in particular. The intensity being the same. And of course with that we need a sense of beauty. Humanity flawed as it is will never reciprocate in full our actions. And it is human to expect reciprocity. And Beauty Ah Beauty helps to make the pain of denial a lot easier to bear.
Its important to be practical but be not so practical that you fail to see possibilities around you…
