The art of telling lies

Even if I tend to be a bit 'preachy' here, it would perhaps, also tempt, those who are most intolerant towards a preachy stuff!

But no... I am only trying to 'look' at the 'art' part of it...

Do we enjoy telling lies, all the time, every time, most of the times, or just at times?

Unless we enjoy doing something, how can it become a art? Simply becoming skilled does not give scope to the 'art' part... art parts away, when we focus on the skill.... skill should be a consequence, even as, on an 'on-going' basis, if it has to remain an art!

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Please see, what is all those famous 'fiction' novels about? They are skilled liars, engaged in trying to make it into an art! (It is the 'commercial consideration' that tends to make it skill-oriented, when the creativity-concept of art is trying to ... struggling to ... survive inside that story! That is exactly what we criticise, when the end of a movie, a novel becomes a 'routine' stuff!

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As adults, we do not enjoy telling lies, even when it is a 'social-compulsion' (somebody asks us for a hand-loan, quoting some very 'urgent' need.... we invent another 'urgent' need... trying to compete with the quality of the borrower's urgency... both become tense while lying to each other!)...

Now, we the same adults, try to convince a kid of 2 years of age, that the “crow took it away” ... that kid becomes transfixed ... the gaze tells it all to us .... he shifts gaze from our eyes to our noise when we animate it with a 'kooooosssssshhhhhh), or our hands ... we 'flourish our arms in a vague direction' (courtesy-Shri R.K.Narayan, his 'fictional' story) .... the kid is trying to decide which is more reliable.... our hands, noise, or the hands itself.... there was some gadget, now vanished, which the kid thought was a 'toy' ... but for us , either the gadget is valuable, or the kid's safety or both! When it is 'both' our joy during that 'telling' a lie is better, and the artistry gains momentum, and itensity, to rivet the kid's attention towards the fiction part of it! What we may not realise is that the kid at that age is 'pristine-intelligence', and the grasping is at the best-ever-peak-levels! It does not have the self-awareness to recall the images (the video plus audio of our 'fiction' ) to further analyze it soon after... but the kid's chemistry retains the impressions in an embedded form.... here starts the 'karma', or 'maya'.... Even our 33-crore-Gods, seem to find it easy to say 'Thatah-asthoo' instead of they themselves facing the consequence of taking a 'decision' (all those maya-related dramas, which become epics later on ! (At all big places, there is always a scape-goat, who is forced to 'announce' having made a decision, and become available for the punishments, if any, later on!).. Maybe, if we make it into an art, that lying, and enjoy telling it, we might go undetected during a lie-detector test! That 'narco-analysis' test requires greater art, obviously!

When we develop the skill, we fare better at logical areas like algebra ( in solving simultaneous equations, we add 'x' at both sides.... fair enough, though the 'x' is a lie, looking at the 'original'equation!).... does it look like a far-fetched-example? That 'Perry Mason' in one of the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, 'plants' two extra guns, at the 'scene' of murder, and manages to divert the police detectives 'off the scent' from the real murder weapon! Later on, he quotes the loop-hole in the law “Tampering the evidence is a crime, but not adding an evidence”!

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When I said about memory-recall, please see, memory is not just in our minds, or brain-cells or whatever... That scar on our forehead reminds us of 'how it happened'.. and if that scar was caused by us on our kid, the pain of recalling it is still worse! We have portable memory gadgets now.... pen-drive, pencil-drive, etc... Monuments hold memories of ancient people... The junk of 'duplicate-gadgets' that we marketed without proper bills carry memories of how we lied to innocent buyers (especially the non-biodegradable-junk)... The sounds of what we say, keeps revolving around us getting further fragmented as it crashes incessantly against other 'true-lies'.. but it is only a question of small dish, a set-top-box, to collect those fragments, reconstruct those words, and amplify it, re-enjoy listening to it years later, during our re-entry into the earth's orbit..... there seems to be a whole technology developed by ancients, a wonderful name in sanskrit (translates quite close to a word in english as 'synthesis' ..)... this process is basically aimed at 'commuting' the gross-total-effect of all the lies that we lived by, nullyfying it, and then try to 'look at' proceeding further towards a 'release' ( a very long journey indeed! For those who insist on a bit 'practical-way' it is a tough-journey too, with the need to return to their very same 'karma-bhoomi' again.....!!! But, it can be a greater possibility when the 'intensity', by itself, compresses the time—yet another process—widely popular as 'Tapas'!

Art? (I told you... it is easier to become 'preachy' with our strong-inclinations towards lies... Several similar attempts were made in the recent past... Bhajans were re-mixed to blend into music-portion, or the 'noise-portion' of those 'item-songs' ... to entice those who repel at those dry-bhajan tunes of rich and traditional values! Gimmicks are all that we can use, to deal with those who 'refuse' to 'see'... Mystics seem to enjoy only 'tough' propositions.... like taking the water to it, making the camel 'gulp it', ..... when we know only-that “we can ONLY take a camel to the pond, not make it drink!”)

psn(31^st March, (2012)

Checks and Balances

If somebody likes to view it as, ..... that “ verify the balance in the Bank account before issue of a cheque ....” , well I seek shelter under the “ Redundancy theory of truth” (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Redundancy+theory+of+truth) ...

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For those interested in mysticism, it is a different issue altogether....

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(I was even worried, if this post has to be 'classified' , and categorized under 'mysticism'... but then I thought, mention of an aspect concerning 'mysticism', by itself, does not warrant a 'classification' (like the files marked 'classified information'... it is up to the seekers, to look for those greener pastures! )

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Even great institutions find it difficult to grapple with the task of putting an effective system under place, to have those fine-tuned 'checks and balances' .... loop holes are many ... system lapses are abundant ... scams thrive in such fertile, humid, atmospheres! That 'data-integrity' itself needs those 'checks and balances', not to speak of computational designs, complex embedded systems, processors etc which need even security too! Financial institutions struggle despite on-going audits, or concurrent audits.

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Coming to the mystic aspect, the first surprise came, when as an initiate, I started wondering as to how that 'chant' which was hardly a mystery, so easily available, so widely publicized, ... could trigger a mystic phenomenon, just because I was going to be put through a traditional ritual of 'initiation'? ... then came an instance, where I ended up with some headlong-collision with the recent most of our family preceptors, regarding the seed-invocation factor attached to a very common hymn (which was 'otherwise' an innocent looking propitiation of a deity)... When challenged, I reeled off that 'seed' factor... He abruptly became tense (as if I had tripped on a landmine), and cut me to a stop at the half way (the safe half .... of course). I was surprised. I had logical support from within me to place implicit trust in him... He was the last of the descendants of the sytem of 'family-preceptors' who lived up to the concept of living for the 'good of others' (puro-hit .... puro= other, and hith= good, a simple translation of those sanskritised form of nomenclature). I could not grasp the concerns he had hid behind the anxiety he manifested... Yet I trusted his judgement and action of having stopped me (there after, our relationship acquired a new dimension, though quite a clandestine one, since there was that generation gap, and others around... who were beyond reach, at least then!).

My wanderings into spiritual pursuits during the later part of my life, happened to 'more than' convince me about the wonderful system of 'checks and balances' the ancients had instituted into those lavishly strewn gems all around us!.

To a logical mind, there is an example of in the novel 'Atlas Shrugged' where, the hero chants a pre-embedded phrase, when recited properly, the sound becomes the key, to open the doors to a vault housing a giant motor. Any tampering with the door, would trigger a mechanism to render the contents of the vault into a shattered mound of dust! There was an old English movie where an army trained physicist used the sound from a small explosive detonator to crack open a huge masonary dam, while it was 'otherwise' difficult to approach the militarily-well-guarded-dam.

This at once raises again the doubts and debates about the 'need' of a teacher/guide/guru/preceptor, to become an 'initiate'.... The very nature of mind is 'divisive' when it is dominated by the logical aspect. This attitude presupposes the state of our existance to be only 'dualistic' by its very nature, accepting the interdependence quite generously at the same time, ... as 'exclusive' to all other possibilities. That is why the vehement inclination to refute the dependence on a 'third' entity (as a guru or so...). But, once the perception deepens enough to conclusively resolve the issue of this 'duality' into a non-duality, the arguement about the 'guru' also would dissolve (not just resolve!). But the problem is not that easy , though it looks simple ! That baby starts crying incessantly out of hunger, and would not relent until the first morsel of its feed enters the stomach. But the first morsel would not 'safely' pass down the gullet till the crying recedes! So, somewhere, the Guru has to excercise his benevolence, force-feed the 'initiation' upon the unwilling but innocent baby, and then resolve the issue! (How these giant masters do it , their 'maneuverability' through this impasse, is yet another mystic phenomenon!). This was something that fascinated me very much, and obviously, I had to pursue it, till I reached a stable plateau ( like that 'padaav' in 'Kaun Banega Crorepati' , from which we do not slip further down!)...

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I have to place my humble apologies to those who reached up to this point, without being able to comprehend the theme in a cohesive manner... but I could sense/feel a few inquisitive 'minds' at the forum, who would find it quite thirst-provoking perhaps.

psn(28^th March, 2012)

Chaos

Somebody wrote a wonderful blog about the theory of chaos, and I found myself poking my nose into that blog (as I find myself doing it quite often, of late, into the other blog-posts of that friend...).

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It was about a heavy theory, that makes a person heave, when he decides to look at it intensely!

( http://www.speakingtree.in/public/spiritual-blogs/seekers/msticism/pleasantadverse-events-are-due-to-effect-of-chaos-theory )

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When I finished my response, I thought of giving it yet another twist... it is just a theory ... may be to inspire those who are insistent upon logic, than those abstract theories...

Please see, chaos can happen only in our mind .... not anywhere else!

To give a 'contrast' example, are we not looking forward to an event we call as 'wedding-reception'.. this nomenclature, at least in India, has ceased to live up to its own original 'purpose' of late...

It precedes the wedding itself, and is conveniently clubbed with 'reception' for a wedding. We find it very convenient to 'show' our faces during that reception, climb up the dais, thrust the envelope into hands of either, pose for still photo-image, oblige the request of that still-photographer's gesture to wait for a few more seconds till the video person spans the camera from one end to the other, shake hands, and then shake the head also (converting it into a look-like-a-nod), ahead of time, presuming the host's mumble 'please eat and go' (what else do you expect? Travel all the way back home on an hungry stomach, and face the wrath at home?).. but a plastic smile... hurriedly offered, to reassure that the host is very reasonable to hurry through us too , like wise.

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In all this scenario, please see, ... when we meet other acquaintances, .... often after a gap of time .... it is actually the chaos there, the created chaos that we cheerfully accept, welcome and rejoice ... we have no 'reference' point to start a meaningful conversation when we meet a person after too long a time. So after that 'how-do-du-doo' noise, there is nothing else to do except retain that 'cheeks-elongated-sideways' gesture we call as smile, waiting painfully till the other fellow 'blinks-first'! The 'music' is in full blare (try asking the residents of any close-by apartments, as to how they wish they were 'apart' from the noise too, the very same way they stay 'apart' in a flat which is called an apart-ment, though housed in the same building itself!)... We try to shout our polite, courteous inquiries, to become audible.... Usually the other fellow nods in addition to that retained-plastic-smile (as if he could hear it!). We repeat the query... this time, he sincerely brings his ear very close to our mouth, and mumbles a whisper-response (again being too unsure of having heard the query right).... this exchange goes on, and fills the time .... till it is 'time' enough to proceed to the dining hall (God-forbid, if it is buffet, standing and balancing that large plate in the left hand is painful, and more painful is the need to converse, as a part of courtesy!)...

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This is a typical 'chaos' we cheerfully get invited to, participate, and subtly rid ourselves of that 'unmanageable' clutter going on at the back of our mind, for a while! A win-win-situation for all! The traditional ritual of participating in the highest of the 12 odd forms of wedding, handed down by ancestors, to witness, promote, participate, and partake the benefits thereof, of that invoking the higher beings, with the sacrificial fire, the invoking of chants, the creating of 'fusion-ensuring' mantras, the subtle yantras, the severing of subtle birth-bonds, for a higher purpose, and therefore the conscious-fusion-bonding into another lineage/chain of ancestral bonds, ..... all that is blissfully by-passed!

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Any imaginary visitor to our planet would be welcomed first by the chaos we created in the immediate periphery of our planet (recently, a news-paper reported the narrow escape of cosmonauts from ISS, from getting hurt by that debris, and the statistical guess-work of volume was also mentioned)... the junk that keeps circling the earth's outer orbit. In the name of better connectivity for better communication, we have created a permanent 'chaos' around our planet itself... A sample to indicate to the visitor, that 'more like this' waits when you land on us! And then we talk of 'collective' karma, and ask questions like 'why so many share the same calamity at the same time?' etc...

Anyway, I am not trying to offer any solution.... just to keep us well informed, and if inclined, take a periodical re-look....

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I reproduce below the response that I gave for that friend's blog-post... I tripped on to a subtle hint about re-birth theory (for what ever it is worth!), and that is why, I thought , why not spill it out at another blog-post itself!

psn(26^th March, 2010)

Quote:

I am reminded of an interesting event during a workshop we attended a few years ago....Some faculty member takes that extra efforts, walks that extra mile, to give a demonstration about how 'team-spirit' is practically implemented ... We had one such person. The event he conducted was 'beyond the call of duty' (his colleague-faculty used to simply dismiss it as 'out of syllabus' and a stupid and needless effort!.. So, this teacher had to 'request' very politely, and then garner support, after the 'mandated' duty hours, from the trainee-participants... A typical PSU where 'rules' are more of an excuse for 'non-performance'!... Anyway, that is not the point...)
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We were grouped into 5 in each group, given random pieces of puzzles, asked to arrange the pieces of that jigsaw puzzle. The pieces were shuffled such that the 4 groups of 5 each had all the pieces inter-mingled.
It is the rules, that made the things difficult, and at the same time, helped us to evolve "during the struggle"!!!
We were not to speak to each other...
We cannot ask for a piece from the next person, or from the next group even... and even with gestures! Anybody can pass over the 'unwanted' piece to the person next to him (only on the right side), and if he is benevolent, and also the next few, that piece might come back to us (if we wrongly handed over that puzzle! Karma theory plus free-will in action!)
The worst aspect was, there were a few 'common' pieces which would 'delude' us to fit in at one place say "place A" so well, that it was needed badly, exclusively at some other place, some other point 'place Q'.... (Here was the difficulty, .... to perceive, and judge correctly! we had good fun, watching the frustration on the 'intelligent' faces, at the stupidity of 'passive' participants, who just casually, indifferently passed on a piece several times... and as if to add to the trouble, some other 'wise' guy used to pass it to the next table on the right.. which means, that piece would come back to us after several rounds at each of the tables... like that precious 'human' birth coming back after several lifetimes as other life-forms!)
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Nice blog sir.

Mandate

Politics starts right inside our head!

The title can be viewed in at least two ways...

Our mandate (I got a mandate....), and our mandate (I gave a mandate).... This itself is 'politics', nurturing the 'idea' to look at it in all possible ways, instead of looking at what it means with a “contextual reference” (children look at it mostly by contextual reference, out of ignorance + innocence.... that is why they are lesser into 'adult-type-politics'...)... to further complicate, rake in the gender issues by raising a protest 'in-favour-of' a newer version “Woman-date” (are we women meant only for your 'dating'....? we need a 'reservation' in our favour, with a womandate, which no man can consider as His-Man-date!)

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I don't know why or how I got into this muddle of 'title-analysis'.... I had intended (when I has set out to write), just to bringing a similarity about how elected representatives forget the purpose why they are elected, and have their own agenda's... and yet, never fail to quote 'people's mandate' for purely political purposes of scoring over their adversaries (now-a-days, they have a problem with the Umpires too! The media plays, both , 'to the gallery/s, and ....well, we know!).... Like wise, we as 'human' entities, with volitional consciousness, reasonably agreeable to the axiom 'existence exists', seem to misinterpret the 'mandate' of being a human, in several ways.... we re-enter the arena, then, in several other forms, to filfill other created mandates... but deprived of the awareness about it.... in a few 'base' forms of life, .... and again perhaps resurface with a fresh human mandate... (now reminding ourselves of the mandate is itself a political 'procedure' as we see in commercialised version of several religions!)..... We get out-side support, issue-based support, walk-out support (abstention from voting to ensure marginal victory of one side)... etc!

(When I try to look at it as a 'mandate'.... I feel fortunate that I spend more time 'commenting' on blogs, instead of risking the 'unmandated' blogging-independently..... Some unseen, abstract, 'something' ... seems to have protected me when I had been blissfully writing for an obscure blog page for nearly 5 years! Hardly any comments/rebukes/retorts/remarks/etc.... But here at ST, the vulnerability is quite 'heavy'! :) ... and somehow it does not 'occur' to target the 'comments' to a blog! The author seldom 'invites' troubles along with the 'doosra' invitation to comment-itself!... so it is quite safe to 'assume' the aaam-aadmi' position... cast a secret ballot in favour, and then criticise from the bench of the nearest road-side-tea-shop!)

psn ... 22Mar2012

ps: that reference to 'ST' was the web-page, for which this post was basically written... and obviously, the 'obscure' one, we all are so familiar with!

http://www.speakingtree.in/public/spiritual-blogs/seekers/science-of-spirituality/mandate

Are we 'reasonably-logical' or 'logically-reasonable'?

It is not about interplay of words. Neither is it about teasing or tickling the 'sentiments'. It is about an attempt to strike a judicious balance between the exercise of logic on the one hand, and upholding the emotional values on the other, and retain both of them, well under our faculty of 'reasoning'.

We happen to inadvertently 'touch' those delicate 'religious sentiments' of a person when we try to find out how they manage a 'deal' with their deity, trying to offer a petty gift in return for a huge and disproportionate benefit... Those who 'feel' the hurt are quick to shift their position, and quite swiftly act upon the query, trying to become a legal advocate on behalf of their deity.... this positioning makes an explanation on their 'own' behalf to be 'redundant'! What they fail to see is that they stretch their logic to an unreasonable extent, to cover up their own inadequacy of emotional strength to handle the situation on their own! Most of the incidents in our day to day life get 'adjusted' or tolerated, despite the 'lack of reasoning' to support certain attitudes.... thus came to be born that 'sentiment' perhaps! And once that 'sentiment' takes an avatar, there is no other way (for the time being), but to rename it as a 'false-sentiment' , just as we try to 'disarm' /diffuse it like we remove the small switch or fuse of an explosive, and later on take it out to an open are and set fire to that explosive material (in the case of that 'false-sentiment', it can be 'engaged' like that missile any time again!). The 'reasonable' part of that precious emotion of a sense of gratitude, and the show of it as a gesture, at times, due to urgency of the 'seeker' takes the shape of a 'deal' and like that adage of putting the 'cart-before-the-horse', the deal is struck in advance, even before receiving the benefit... (that round about way of justification of emotion by over-stretching the logic.... anyway, a gesture of gratitude is due.... so why not offer that token of gratitude as a guarantee , well in advance, and hope for the gift/ benefit like an insurance policy? Or, shall we say, a 'mututal-benefit-scheme' ?). It is this over-stretching of logic that clouds the intellect, and we miss the basic concepts, the fundamentals about the source of creation, the creator.... and when such tendencies harden or solidify into a sort of sentiment, it becomes like our own built-in 'chemistry', to be 'religiously' handed down to even the next generation/s too!

That 'religious' sentiments was a 'typical' instance to illustrate the point... because it is the 'religious' aspects that tend to heavily polarise a person, way beyond emotional considerations too! Otherwise, we often find the conflict between emotional decisions and logical decisions locking horns through their representatives (spouses usually :) ... and we know who wins 'normally'!}... It is not about supporting one against the other.. it is about conscious use of 'reasoning' to arbitrate using the sense of discretion a bit judiciously! Unless we do this, we are not merely setting a bad example to our off-springs... we are even leaving them utterly confused, about our own 'sense of maturity'! No point, lamenting about 'trust-deficit' later on....

(I am still hunting for an 'exact' equivalent of the English word 'sentiment' in one of our Indian languages..... Or... was it that we never needed it in our ancient 'bullock-cart' days! Also that 'boredom' seems elusive in our Indian way of saying it!)

PSN(14^th March, 2012)

Emotional Training, Desi style!

Somebody tried to 'brand' me as a movie-buff .... (I am yet to 'rebuff' the surface meaning that I had grasped, about what 'they' mean by a 'buff'.... and then to attempt at reaching its intrinsic meaning ... my laziness got the better of me... long ago, I had managed to grasp its 'round-about' meaning due to frequent contextual-usage collusions!.. please try.... those who use 'buff' as a suffix with 'movie' often mean it --or are led to presume it--- ... as movie-crazy....!!! )...

But please see.... it is not just me who digs up such old 'things', re-cycles it, renews it, buffers it (in the sense of 'polishing'... that 'buffer' it....)... there are several others, who do it as a part of their curriculum....

Teaching kids is no kids-game! Learning to 'teach' has to go much deep, to catch their emotions 'early' (catch them early.... they say!)... Once the kids get stabilised into emotions, they happen to 'learn how to learn'... and the rest is going to be record-shattering!

If patience permits, please take a look at these two video clips (they aren't too long and the music is not too noisy either!)....

that original song....

Masoom (1960): Nani teri morni ko mor le gaye

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4HmKkvluxM

ITEP Participants singing a poem (Nani teri morni Ko mor le gaye)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4YxV9mf9jo