Forlornness

Fears apprehending man arise out of the ethics of belongingness. They do not, as many think, arise out of a peculiar weakness subject to an outcome of singular deficiencies like weak mind or body or image. The concept of responsibility is muddled in the myth of just actions usually only system-born. As a collective human being you bear the responsibility of the group to which you have chosen to be a part of. As an individual you take on the universe in all its cosmic vastness because of the separate feeling which is quite like waking up. The real notion that crowds your mind is not whether your group is correct or not in its projections of life or world but that you would like to be a part of it so that separateness is shared. What results from separateness is the feeling of forlornness. If you go to a theatre and react the way others react you do not exist as a forlorn being because as long as you are ‘with the crowd’ you think separateness is shared. But in this shared separateness forlornness does not vanish. You have merely chosen to be inauthentic in your response! When you are by yourself and face your self- deceptions then you realise that forlornness was always there. It is your very nature.

Realizing that you are responsible for your actions may be one of the causes of forlornness. The other is realizing that you are alone. If you are devoid of excuses that you would like to give for your actions, you realize your true nature. There is a problem here. If man is in an island and forced to submissiveness he has only two choices which are either to take the brunt or give in. If he chooses to give in then he has not exercised a conscious choice. The law of self-preservation dictates that the ‘self’ does what is necessary to preserve itself. Then submissiveness is not a choice but a responsibility of ‘the other’. If man is willing to take the brunt, the responsibility is not on him in that his choices were diminished by brute force. His responsibility is on him to the extent that he has defied his law of self-preservation. In other words these are all different occurrences that cannot be accounted for by one individual alone. In so far as man is victimised by this predicament without his bodily acceptance he cannot be held responsible for himself as the situation is outside the purview of what the body can achieve. If however he agrees with the concept of tyranny that he was subject to and defends his group just for the sake of belongingness he is trying to share his separateness but in reality he is only multiplying it because in the end he is going to be alone to face himself for his deceptions.

There is a difference between separateness, forlornness and aloneness. Separateness is the fact of being separate; forlornness the emotional state of being separate and aloneness the resolve to be separate. ‘Going with the crowd’ does not solve the problem of forlornness. Playing to the gallery does not either. Carving out the inner resolve which is absolutely independent of the group is what will get you in touch with being alone. If you do not like to be alone and choose to be alone it is not a contradiction as there is a phenomenon outside the purview of your body and mind that prevents you from being a part of the group. Although this is a choice it is not black and white anymore. Your mind and body have parted ways and there is conflict. Forlornness is then separated. Then forlornness is ubiquitous. It has touched what it desires not to adorn. The inner, being separated from the exterior, resolves to face the meaninglessness of life and the limited capacity of the cosmic force to protect any living being from the calamities that befall man.

On ‘the Search for Happiness’

One emotion that unfortunately does not have a clear meaning is happiness. Although it is considered a desirable state to be in no one is able to explain without ambiguity what happiness really is. Some say it is a state of mind; others say that it is a euphemism in some sense for the word ‘pleasure’ which is normally a word used in the context of human or animal instincts and there are those who say that happiness in the ideal sense is an illusion. But whatever be the specific meanings that people ascribe to it, it remains a word of the heavens. By ‘word of the heavens’ I mean something that does not have an earthly place as it is not a plain emotion. Yet people are searching for it hoping that they will find it sooner or later. In the struggles of their situations some may give up the hope of finding happiness and be content with their predicament. This is a rather unusual state to be in because on one hand they have not found the state of mind that they are looking for and on the other they give up the search accepting what little they have and they find it! But there is a pathetic fallacy associated with the search for happiness and it is that one usually does not know to what extent happiness is possible and how to preserve it till the end; yet one wants it quite desperately.

From time to time it has been observed that we go through happy moments now and then. If they are outcomes of the dreadful word ‘success’ then you can be quite sure that it is subject to insecurity. Preservation of a success induced joyful state is by no means happiness. Happiness is a joyful state which is experienced for its own sake or when you are involved in an activity that you like without any intentions of benefiting from it in the future. Happiness from this angle never exists in the future. Attempts to discover happiness only leads to creating techniques that will have to be applied to be able to find it. But application is a process which has nothing to do with the end result, which in this case is happiness. There have been people who write about happiness; psychologists who research on the subject and find only their own perspectives of it. Whatever be the attempts to find the heavenly state and preserve it till kingdom come, you should be spared the vanity of associating it with success or priggish talks. It must be noted that one who experiences anxiety does not want to be unhappy but is desperately trying to find this heavenly state of mind. One who is anxious is not just tired but is terrified at the thought of consequences of not finishing the line or entering mainstream. He is anxious and not unhappy.

The only person who really is unhappy is one who is able to see that nothing in life can ever bring him happiness. If nothing can bring me happiness even from within then I would not want to keep searching for it as it is a waste of intrapersonal effort. If I am unhappy then I may consider not looking for happiness at all and this unhappy mind does away with itself. It has let go of my unreasonable search of that which I cannot describe. If I cannot describe it and have no idea of what it is then it does not exist in my being. If someone else finds it in common pursuits then I can be quite sure that that is not my concept of happiness because I cannot find it. Happiness is simply a myth.

The Fear of Disappointment

Caught in a vicious cycle of hope and despair man tries to make sense out of his life. Assuming that hope is desirable without which he cannot move on is a preconceived notion that the optimist would hardly abandon. Both optimism and pessimism are only states of mind; yet one is eulogized while the other is condemned. There seems to be a lack of clarity as to why one would pursue optimism and reject pessimism. One tends to think that optimism is desirable because it generates positive energy while pessimism spreads the veil of negative thinking. One is caught in the prison of apathy whereby the external world cannot be transformed and so if at all there is any transformation possible it has to be a transformation of oneself. This notion of a ‘being within’ is subject to the most cunning deceptions. The genuine response gives rise to a being that questions the meaningless life in a hostile universe. Then man is divided into two beings where one is secure in the thought that one can still be happy when the world around is hostile and the other is a being of natural response to the ennui called life. Between the two beings a tug of war is inevitable but one who has brought about this situation is sidelined. The individual concerned is responsible for this alone. The individual is not responsible for the entire humanity because in one being there is a restricted response. Another human being brings only another set of responses. Although both have in them a self-paced time and matter relationship, in themselves they are just two drops in the cosmic ocean. – Nothing has changed and the vicious cycle continues.

Optimism as a natural response is one matter but optimism adopted dogmatically is absurd. Optimism can lead to what one may call self-deception which is the consequence of the tug of war between two beings within the same individual. It also arises out of another phenomena which is called the hope and despair cycle. When there is a positive outcome in life that thrills man, he is motivated to hope for more such outcomes in the future. This is a hope that is a natural response to his situation. But even this although natural, fuels the cycle of hope and despair. He is insecure as to how long this illusion of excitement will last. As a result there is a fear of losing hope and this is enough to anticipate despair and disappointment. The mind with its set of ideas about success, friendship, loss and optimism is the seed of disappointment. There are some consequences of this conclusion and that threatens the regular man in whom being is ‘non-existent’.

Coming to the subject of a negative outcome in life that saddens man, he is demotivated to hope at all and falls into the veil of despair. This is again despair as a natural response to a disappointing situation. With this despair persisting there is an attempt to immortalize it which is nothing but the union of two beings within the same individual. The individual who does not pursue this state of mind has no choice but to adopt self-deception and optimism dogmatically. This is of course not a genuine response. In the case of despair as a natural outcome, the individual is dragged into the vicious cycle of hope and despair because of the desire to unite the two beings within him in order to avoid self-deception. This aversion to self-deception is what leads to accepting the vicious cycle but the real exit from the cycle is not self-deception but abandonment. Man has evolved psychologically into a being that may face disappointment but is still frightened as hell at the thought of disappointment.