Yes , what came first?The chicken or the egg.This is a debate that i have never given much thought to.I have always looked at it as an amusing quandary that would never get solved, so why bother.After all who cared. And then in one of my deeper moments i realized it was an extremely important debate.You could draw parallels from it to any situation in life, in fact to life itself. If anyone solved this problem then it would be like untangling the most crucial knot of life.
I personally do not want to know the secrets of life.But i could relate this dilema to my life.Most of my life till now has been spent in passing off everything bad that i have done as a reaction to something else. "This happened to me that is why i did this". This has been the all powerful sentence that soothes the most troublesome of consciences. I have always been able to look at it from a point of view in which i was wronged first. But now that i think of it i wonder. What if the action i was reacting to was actually a reaction to some action of mine? How would i ever know? What right did i have to an easy conscience? How can i ever blame anything on anyone , when deeper thought places the blame back in my court?You might tell me this is as pointless as the chicken and the egg problem. Well pointless or not, it has been extremely liberating.
How?Well ask yourself this.How many times have you held a grudge against a person? more importantly, how many times can u remember the reason later on? Usually we carry a grudge without stopping to think why. The reason being we human beings feed on emotion. Emotion the only thing that tells us we are alive, we are more special than the rock there. Emotion , both negative and positive, makes us feel we have a right to our space on earth.
But today after i thought about cause and effect, i asked myself what need had i for this particular emotion.Did i really need an emotion that overshadowed thought and reason and basic compassion for the fellow human being, to make me feel important? I realized the answer was not important. I would never be able to hold a grudge against someone without giving it second thought. And once second thought sets in you can't really hold a 'mindless' grudge now, can you? Hence I am free, not by much maybe but more than before. And as i learn i realize, the most complex solutions lie in the most ridiculous of situations. I mean com'on "the chicken or the egg ?" not very profound is it?. but "what came first?" yup that unlocks quite a few doors for me.Yes its as simple as that, "What came first?".
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11 comments:
you've made me think adi....
hmmmm.... ya its true that we all tend to connect our emotions to something else that was linked to it somehow ... but thats how it is... yes finally whatever happens in our life is finally because of our own actions n we cant n shouldnt try to run away from our conscience or try to clear our conscience with some lame excuses .. thats on one side .. on the other side there s also the basic fact that we all on this earth live on emotions , be it negative or positive , and these emotions are linked to others and their emoitons ... if we lived alone on an island we woulnt ve experienced emotions (probably)apart from the basic needs and probably some happiness or joy related to it ... but the more complex emotions are there in us cus of our relationships . we have to be in control of our emotions, yes , and if we lose that control we tend to do the wrong things ... so finally the blame is on us. but as humans we tend to err and no ones created so perfectly so that he never loses that control .. the dignity lies only in being true to oneself n to one s conscience n not using lame excuses to blame our conscience . abt holding a grudge against anyone , the smaller immature grudges may seem silly yrs later ... but at some point in time if your soul s been hurt and it is someone s fault and not your own , as in , if someone hurt you deliberately so very deeply that it kills you from inside yrs later too you wouldnt call it silly ... the emotion will still be strong ... cus the soul was hurt ... the mistake wasnt yours ... and had you been true to yourself then n done the right things n yet someone hurt you cuz of their negative emotions .. you can never shake that off... well thats something one can understand only through experience ... so how you co relate all this to the chicken or the egg situation varies from 'emotions';) that are evoked as you think deeper into that .. so it varies from emotion to emotion , that is , from person to person ! well that comment seems to be longer than your blog;) !
Its a nice thought. Unfortunately, I carry all my past grudges, probably to my grave :(
@manasa
# I do not believe that whatever happens in our life is due to our actions alone. That’s too simple a statement and gives us too much power (which in fact we don’t have)
# Conscience is not something that can be cleared with ‘lame’ excuses. What I meant by soothing the conscience is when something obviously wrong has been done to you it is very easy to do stuff and write it off as something that is fair.
# Yes I completely agree that we feed on emotions. Losing control is but natural. Yes practicing control could be a good solution. My words were more to the effect that when we are going through some of the shallower emotions then clear thought will make us realize how shallow it really is, so the need for control gets eliminated.
# “using lame excuses to blame our conscience” ?? I don’t understand the concept of blaming my conscience, its always the other way round.
# Grudge – silly immature grudges are usually gone in so less time they are not worth discussing. And yes I never meant that we should try and be mahatma’s and accept all wrong, in fact we can’t. And yes being true to oneself is a rosy concept , but what if u are deluded in what is right and wrong ?(as most of us are, cause that area is the middle of the “grey area”) what are u being true to? Are “you” right?
# And the way we think of ‘chicken and egg’ might be different but the idea what came first is solid.The idea remains the same , what we get when we incorporate the idea will ofcourse vary
Both the long comments have made me to think!
@ bhash & subbu
is "made me think" an easy way out of reading the blog and the comments? :D just wondering
It made me stop thinking.
Realized I lack the brain for it.
But grudges shd be weighed against the probable loss they might cause to u in terms of emotion, economic and socially and then arrived at.
Once u decide u'll hold a grudge, evaluate it periodically to see if it is still worth it.
@ajay
i am sorry but i am confused here.
are we talking about human emotions or the stock market??
Initially or transitively, the whole idea of blaming someone for anything is stupid. That initial problem gets propogated ahead by what you have so well described, the chicken or the egg syndrome, shall we call it?
Eventually people realize that they eventually were being stupid about that initial thing but till then the whole thing has gone through so many "Oh he did this/but he did that/but he did that first!"'s that they never can unravel back to the original issue, which often is comparatively, trivial.
I guess the solution, which is something you left to our imaginations ;), could be just to start being more accepting of faults in people (and of course, even ourselves). Let things go or stop them from snowballing into the chicken and egg syndrome.
Another one of the many "should do"'s that exist in life but well, even the preachers often don't follow :)
btw, do write more. That was very well done.
In philosophy n logic, the chicken n the egg question is dismissed coz it is self referencial... meaning u r evaluating one form against its own form...
basically if u compare 1 and 1 square... to see which is greater, u get no answer.
Similarly in human emotions also, they are just different forms of a unitary whole... they keep on changing. Never hold a fixed stance on the form, hold it only on substance.
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