Einstein's Sound of Wisdom

Just a  moment ago, I came across a letter written sixty seven years before this day, by Albert Einstein. It was dated 24th June, 1951, addressed to Jesuit institution. The contents of the letter were for the students of Colegio Anchieta and its main motive was to inspire and encourage the future of that age and the past of our's.

On opening the letter on the screen, a picture with strange characters popped up. It was German which I later realized with all the "fur"s and "ien"s. When I went through a translation of the same letter, I realized that, that letter, which once appeared to be so blank and empty, was brimming with beauty and profoundness.

It said, "He who knows the happiness of understanding, has gained an infallible friend for life. Thinking is to man as flying is to birds. Don't follow the example of a chicken when you could be a lark." I was inspired at the moment by a man who lived ages and miles away from my being...and all through that one image full of strange figures.

Courtesy: The Telegraph

The fact that intrigued me more than the words themselves was that the same words were so empty and so full at the same time. Before knowing the meaning, I was reading the words out loud in order to get the essence. Honestly, it felt like I was chanting like a baby, making random sounds (that too with great difficulty...German can really twist your tongue)...and just then, an abstract thought struck me...

Those random sounds meant so much for one set of people and nothing for another. Similarly, my mother tongue must sound as abstract, meaningless and confusing to the Germans.

Its amazing how humans have created language. They have inserted thoughts and feelings into random sounds, and they have further classified these sounds into different languages and expressions, demonstrating with panache how sounds have evolved into a mode of communication.

When I say "a cake", you immediately think of a cake, or at least understand what I am trying to convey. However, the ground fact is, I have simply emitted a sound with the help of my oral organs. Only because we are taught that this word is supposed to point to an edible mass of flour and sugar, we hard wire our brain to think of the sound and object to be synonymous.

We were taught about Ivan Pavlov's Classical Conditioning experiment in middle school. It is a mirror of our sound-to-meaning technique. In the experiment, a dog came to believe that the ringing of a bell was synonymous to food. We are no different from beasts, except for the fact that we possess a higher intellectual threshold, which might one day cease to be enough.

One will understand the sound transition better if he/she is learning a new language. At first, the words seem so random and absolutely devoid of meaning. Eventually though, the sounds develop a personality. They become pointers and direct us to the real aim of understanding.

The ability to grasp a mode of communication might seem ordinary to a lot, but I will humbly remind you that humans are the only beasts who have found such diversity in sounds and have honored them with thoughts and feelings. We can play with these sounds for a more creative communicating approach. Imagine if only we could use music to talk. The conversation will go something like this:
A: ♩♫♪

B: 𝄞♫𝄫

Translation:

A: I really like your tea Sir.

B: Thank you miss!

In fact, people do communicate through music on a more abstract level. When low notes along with a few minor ones are played, it conveys the sensation of thrill and mystery. Higher and major notes convey happiness. Slow music tries to foster passion and sadness, and so on and so forth.

Notes, tempo and pitch always carry a surge of emotions and thoughts. Often a musical piece will take you back to a moment of nostalgia. A pointer again. Do you not think it will be great if we consciously learn to communicate through rhythm and music?  

This idea, however abstract it may sound, fascinates me so much that I want to start at it right away. But men stick to what has deep foundations. The mind, over the ages, has become such that it does not feel the urge to fly, but feels the necessity to sit on highly built walls of civilization. A change is not welcomed, unless it is absolutely necessary.

Do you not like changing the colors of the sunsets and oceans on odd days?

Nonetheless, I feel most grateful to be present here consciously as a human for the beauty and power of words and language, and my ability to grasp it unlike any other creature. It is a pleasure to hear, perceive and understand it, without even speaking it. It is a massive treasure which every human consciousness has been bestowed with.

So, men may remember that treasure does not always mean gold, it can mean much more.

Breaking Down Love

I saw two pigeons today. The female did not share a care with the world. She twirled and ducked her way through random routes on a distant terrace. Her stare was not directed at anything in particular. Perhaps, she did not bother to honour any object of the world by the courtesy of observation and saw a hazy blur of it all, preferring it that way.

Most unusual was the behaviour of the male. He seemed to care about the reality surrounding him. He seemed to be wary of the stones and stairs on that terrace of dangerous possibilities. He was the rational realist of the two, as rational and real as a pigeon can be.

In spite of his sense of the hard reality, he seemed to follow the female in her aimless pursuit through the mysteries of the terrace. He followed her not only in her wandering, but also in her gesture and poise. My cousin followed my glance and exclaimed in a tone of ecstasy, "the follies of young love!".

I agreed with my silence, and we stared for a while at yet another phenomenal event of this world.

After a while the female almost jumped off the terrace and took her flight, and as we confidently predicted, the male hesitated for a while at the edge and then followed her to another wandering on another mystic terrace.

Even the simplest creatures felt the violent urge for love and longing, which I believe is a way to reach a higher string of existence with the right partner. This extremely complex event of pairing in humans, I realized, is quite simple in other creatures of this planet. We exactly behave like these simple beings but like to believe in the grandeur of our emotions and physical needs, thinking that simplicity cannot be at par with greatness. I cannot quote anybody stating this, but simplicity is grand. Simplicity is the crux of complexity. Break down a terribly complex structure and you will find very simple elements which add up to the grandness we so desperately cling to.

In the pigeons it was indeed the simple impulse of the moment, a simple thing, but it was triggered by the urge to live on in this planet even after their inevitable demise. It is a beautiful story of genetic longing to find a match to preserve the genes for generations to come. It is poetic to admire the signature features of one's partner but if only one knew how our subconscious, stacked with information from distant ages, play a significant role in admiring them. We are so wakeful and ignorant that it is beautiful.

We gravitate towards a certain person, get conscious of features which stand out to us and wonder how the world can be blind to those very elements which intoxicates our mind during odd hours. They say love is a matter of the soul, but then the soul must be contriving with the body, because one cannot deny that genetic memory helps us identify the key elements of the one who will put our genetic anxiety of a sudden stop to a peaceful death.

It is this simplicity, carried over from our farthest ancestors, that shape the unrecognizable and confusing emotional state of the present. We stay up nights, losing sleep over the WHYs and HOWs of love, solving the riddle of the heart which ignites us to the bones.

Only if we had payed heed to the profound words of Descartes;
Only if we knew how to break, in order to build.

Love is grand and it is quite simple, but only if we allow it to be.

The Mysterious Guardian

It has been almost 4 years since I wrote my first letter to a non- existent being summing all the thoughts a week’s time could permit. It will feel more like a diary entry if one reads it, but as far as I remember, when I wrote it, I addressed it to somebody in particular in my mind, hoping that one day someone will lay their eyes on it and walk by the same muse as mine.

During my school days, never even one tiny thought of grabbing the pen escaped my mind. I used to run and obscure myself from the pangs of pulling out words from the imagination. Especially when we were given assignments to write long essays I was absolutely clueless about. More appropriately, all those essays I was not keen to exercise my imagination for. This continued year after year, and I merely touched the average grade in all my English exams.

Until of course this gorgeous day came along. It was my grammar exam, and we were supposed to come up with a story which began with, “On that day..” or something along that line. That was a pure opportunity. For maybe the first time I saw such an independent question which allowed a student to let their imagination run free. Anything could happen on that day, anything…and that became a weapon. I scribbled my way across two pages and ended up sketching a heartfelt story about the attack on 26/11, Mumbai. It was my brother’s story, a brother I never had in real life, and one who did not escape the story alive.

I remember I had a tear escape my eye while concluding the piece. I was moved beyond measure by what I had just written. And to be completely honest, to this day, I do not believe that the story was drafted by my mortal self. Because can a person’s own imagination kill them?

That was a question which changed my life.

When the results were out, my teacher called me and asked me to participate in the National Essay Competition. I was glad of course and did not need to feign a beaming face, even though I knew that the words did not arrive at any random call. When I was about to leave, my teacher pressed her lips together before she asked me with a suddenly guarded voice, “Were you there?”.

“No mam.”

She smiled without any expression but looked straight at me with peering eyes and I dawdled to my class feeling a shiver down my spine.

Was it possible that I caught a glimpse of what actually happened that day and made the brother in my dreams the crux of the terrible events which followed? Was it even likely that I spoke someone else’s mind?

Ha! Maybe not. This is what happens when the imagination runs free and becomes a separate entity in itself, and maybe, just maybe we think that this Imagination’s voice is not our own.

The essay I was told to write for the National Essay Competition, no doubt, turned out to be pure trash. I have blamed several elements including myself for that failure. One of the elements was the essay topic itself to begin with. Then there was the word limit, and then the time limit. I know those are too many demands from a competitive arena but the truth is, Imagination cannot be enslaved by the limitations of mere numbers.

My teacher was unmistakably disappointed.

Another year went by, I stayed utterly undisturbed by the agony of creativity. There were of course moments when thoughts thundered through me in a flash, and often during inappropriate moments like when I was crossing the road or was under the shower or was waiting on the bus. And as soon as I let myself cross a threshold, the thoughts escaped me, or rotted away owing to no immediate action. I am guilty of not taking the aid of ink and parchment to jot down the strange events of a plain human mind, a guilt which I’m sure has agonized us all on random days.

But of course, on another glorious day I came by a milestone, and as far as my experiences suggest, a day… rather a moment, changes the outcome of all our creative energy, it changes our future to be precise.

So, on November 14^th, 2014, I wrote down the first letter, addressed to no one in particular. Hoping that some curious eye finds it and wonders about the possibilities of the questions left unanswered.

That letter, as already mentioned, was the result of a week’s curiosity of the unhinged mind.

And then, there was no stopping. A letter was a rare occasion, but at least it kept going. I wrote about two to three letters a month, and sometimes nothing for two straight months. Even though I was just falling in love with this craft, there was the heartbreaking knowledge that this was not to be my bread and butter. I could go from writing ten letters a day, to years without writing a single word, and I did not wish to starve my mind of the physical needs of mortality.

So, I kept going with what I thought I was moderately good at.

Logic. A rational element of the human mind.

And as Andrew Stanton put it, we cannot let one element of our brain struggle for hours at a stretch and expect it to perform with shinning brilliance. No, of course not. We need to fluctuate the elements. Maintain the balance. And I knew, my profession, as long as it was about the elements of rationalism, was to be the savior of my unrealistic ventures to the realm of surrealism.

During all these years of nurturing this craft, until the present day, I was so unsure of the ‘How’. I confessed to my mother and to certain close friends on very rare occasions, that I did not know ‘how’ the words came to me. That there was someone else speaking through the pen I held in my grip. I was ordinary, but the thought which distilled on paper were things I could not think of in my wildest dreams, or things I could not portray so perfectly, just as they were. I was after all, the one below the threshold of average when it came to Language exams in all my schools.

The ‘How’ was a question asked to me on unlikely days by rational minds and coarse tongues, and I did not answer them, afraid that they will not understand, or simply consider it a whim of the fanciful mind.

But this was until I found real evidence which matched my ‘fanciful’ understanding of Creativity. It wasn’t actually evidence, it was a witness. Another person narrating the exact same events to a crowd of enthusiasts. Elizabeth Gilbert, an undoubtedly charming writer in her forties, wrapped in graceful divinity.

She not only elaborated her own experiences with a humor beaming in raw originality, but she also conveyed the stories of ancients who believed that the “spirits of creativity” lived outside the vessel or the body of a mortal. Often called ‘Daemons’ or ‘Genius’, these were the mystical creatures of the surreal world. Unlike today, they believed that an artist ‘had’ a Genius and was not ‘the’ Genius. Quoting her on post Renaissance, “people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error.”

When I wrote something, which impressed well on my mind, I knew, as Elizabeth Gilbert puts it, “the Elusive One showed up”, and when I wrote something ultra-close to gibberish, there was the consolation that my partner was probably off to some vacation, bothering Jake Shimabukuro in Hawaii.

And this was it, the exceptional answer to the questions which have left artists Divine one night and robbed them of all the jewels the next morning, leaving them clueless about how to meet their own standards once the aid of Divinity was set afire and reduced to mere dust, converting the creative sections of this world to “alcoholic manic-depressives”. Mortals cannot beat the divinity of a Superior, and every time they do, it renders their time post-creation wrapped in nothing but chaos. However, the key, as Elizabeth so perfectly embodies in her words, is to have the “sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up” for your part of the job.

I suggest you hear the words straight from the one who conveyed them:

Elizabeth Gilbert Ted Talk

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Date: 22nd July, 2018

Hyderabad, India

Picture Credits: Google Images

How I Fell for the Words

As a child I seldom touched novels. To be more specific, I ran away from them, as if those innocent pages had the ability to burn my skin. I wonder whether I will ever be able to jot down the reasons adding to my apathy against reading during those early days. It has been years, yet I cannot stop thinking about those days, about all those times I did not lay my eyes upon the sacred texts which opened the portals to new dimensions of our Universe, opened the doors to our very own world sometimes, a world which otherwise is very good at wrapping up its secrets. Perhaps I was too lazy to run my eyes along the lines or perhaps assumed the task of processing meaning from words to be too exhausting. Well, whatsoever the reason was, I miserably regret that specific apathy I had.

However, being raised by parents who were avid readers, as good as book worshippers, I never suffered from the lack of a good read. During middle school, when I talked about books, which was very rare, I remember how my classmates were often taken by surprise when it came to their understanding that every other book they mentioned, had a copy securely hibernating in one of the shelves in my home. That was how I realized that books were not as common as table salt or pepper. They could have been however, if the world was not as ignorant as I was. That was the time during which I started valuing books. Not because I wanted to read them, but because I wanted to capture that rare essence, under the influence of the knowledge that very few were fortunate enough to be surrounded by the yellowing pages of wisdom.

I did not love them, I knew that very well. In fact, it marked the beginning of my lust for books. I often confided my feelings in them by momentarily visiting the racks. I spent hours turning pages, not reading, but skimming. Not one book at a time, but maybe ten at one go. I turned to random pages, selected random paragraphs, read until it failed to enrapture me with its spell, and of course, it was not long before I abandoned that page for another. While walking through the chaos of random sentences, I seldom took to smelling the wary books. They smelled of old pages, and as days passed, it became my smoke of ecstasy. When I got wary of not finding enough magic in the sentences, the fragrance became my rescue, and oddly enough, I used to feel that even that strange smell restored wisdom in me, as if through osmosis.

Perhaps it was my personal way of making up for the years lost in running away from the goblet of pure knowledge, or at least, believing that I was making up.

It was a matter of years, and then, even though it should have been sooner, I realized that I had the potential to love. I did not just mingle with the pages for their ecstatic smell or for the selfish motive of quick wisdom, but for the very first time, I wanted to know what that page had to say. I read.

That was when I was taken aback by the power a book could carry. I was astonished to feel my mind under the influence of simple ink on parchment. The words stayed with me, and it was as I had lived a hundred years at a very ripe age. To put it in simple terms, I realized that a book could carry me beyond ages and places without any restraint in time or space, essentially because of the naïve mind. If you have studied your biology well, you will know that most of our senses report to our mind and then the mind processes that particular feeling or stimuli. Well, a book becomes our senses when we readers indulge in one. It directly feeds the stimuli to our mind, and our mind helps us get carried away to worlds far beyond our very own.

My love for books was complicated. Once I started with one of their pages, I couldn’t stop. I could read until my eyes hurt or my mind got exhausted with the extensive travel. I knew this was insane, and quite risky, given my role as a student in this world. I had to get back to tasks, which was of course, a mountain of struggles. But I managed to get back, because “it does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live”.

There was a problem though. Once I exited my fantasies, I found it very difficult to go back, knowing very well that it will take me a solid effort to pull out of one as soon as the reality ushers me again. After months on end I stayed away from my books. Not because I did not want to read one, but because I had to sort out my priorities, and the list was not very often headed by very pleasing tasks. But I would come back when I could and spend days on end completing rows of books at one go.

I was like a soldier fighting against the daily calls of duty, coming back home after months to express my love to those closest to the heart. Books were my family, they were my home. Perhaps that is why they advise us to be avid readers, because books have the power to keep our homesick hearts at bay. They are like tiny blocks of our home which has its foundation in a parallel Universe. They are a part of ourselves living apart, in another world and in another time.

With a book, every day is a hundred days crammed in one. “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once.”. It is our ticket to a sunrise amid the stars.

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16th June, 2018

Pictures: Google Images