There is nothing more surprising and challenging than the limits of human creativity. Personally, whenever I interact or come across something that is uniquely delightful, something that makes me go ‘wow’ at the brilliance of its imagination, how the extent of human experience has been portrayed, narrated either through the arts or any other form of representation. I have never understood how life never seems to surprise me, how the world that I live in, am a part of, is constantly changing and moving at a pace I can never keep up with.
The human mind, our ability to think, to imagine and just create the most wondrous things that we see, or not see around us is the most unique of our various gifts. I don’t think we can really compare the various things we have been blessed with, but the extent or the limitless range of the human mind is what makes our lives, our living so uniquely enriching.
Just yesterday I came across an excerpt from the various speeches of Socrates. He spoke about the union of the minds and how that form of union is the only coming together that is of relevance. On so many levels that made so much sense to me, can there be any other form of union, coming together of talents and just extreme levels of brilliance? Can we even imagine if the mind became the only place, only level of union for all living organisms? Socrates even goes to the extent of attributing all activities, including sex to be mere social acts, just biological actions and not relevant to society other than their basic functions. I think the importance Socrates gives to the human mind is what is so fascinating and just a given. Can there be anything more fascinating. Not to say that everything that has been created around us, by us, for us, is not equally inspiring, not equally beautiful, it is. Just that on a personal level, I have found the human mind to be just extraordinary in its abilities.
I would like to evaluate and somewhat analyze our ‘head’ through two prisms, one through the remarkable positive that it can create, and the second dark, negative aspect of its existence. I don't think this is a unique analysis, I am aware that this sort of dichotomy has been evaluated before. There is only the positive and the negative side of things, so what is unique in what I am trying to do. To begin with, I simply don't understand the human need to create something unique all the time. There is a definate identification, a definate desire to be unique, however such uniqueness is not always possible. People should be allowed to create things which are not out of the ordinary and just run of the mill, I should be allowed to go ahead and indulge in the same critique that has done the rounds for many many years.
Bon so here goes.
Often times pain and death have been shown to represent the darkest realms of human thought. It seems that pain, suffering and death is attributed to the negative that exists in the world. I would think that this is so because of the emotions that these feelings bring out in people. I don't know if human emotion can be the judge or the benchmark for any of our beliefs or the parameters that we set, however they definately can be indicators of how we tend to interact with a given set of circumstances. So on this side if we have the negative, then the positive should be the same. When emotions like love, happiness, joy and delight result, that would imply that there is a lot of positivity that surrounds, there are good things that happened. We need to be congizant though, through all this analysis we are discounting the role of social and historical conditioning towards both the concepts of good and bad, and the emotional reactions to positives and negatives. None of our interactions or results therefrom are seperate or independent of history and society.
But imagine that while we continue to look for ways to perpetuate the positive, we struggle to continue on the path of little understood goodness, its the negative that actually is worth anything. Why do I sound such an extremist, simply because the mere existence of any good in the world is because of the bad, the positive is seen as such because of its contradictory foe that exists. Nothing very enlightening, I agree, not in the least, yet the human thought known for its rather unending abilities at innovation doesn't seem to wrap itself around this simple reality.
I too contributed to the neverending compliments to the undefined and unlimited ability of the human mind, yet its the essentially rudimentary understanding the mind has of life, of good and bad, that torments me, surprises me. So while on one side we have its brilliance, on the other its complete stupidity. It continues to repeat, to no end, its cycle of desire to keep the bad away, try and have the rivers of positivity flowing. Or so we think. For if there was no intention to have negativity in the world, how would it exist? How would it manifest itself and take shape the way it does? I don't know. At the risk of making very fundamental and existential deductions, I would think that there is as much a desire to live in the dark as there is to in the light. The extent of the human mind, the never ending and far stretching realms of who we are makes room for all sorts of things to exist and flourish. We consciously choose to distance ourselves from them, atleast one aspect, however there is nothing that makes it a complete whole other than the existence of both darkness and light.
When I look at the wonderous imagination of what I call the human mind, I imagine and marvel at everything. I marvel how death is glorified, used to petrify, darkness and its representations all instilling fear in our deepest cores. While the flowers of spring, the rain that signals the onset of the greenest times in the year, while the birds and the skylarks and the sun and everything that makes us feel alive, makes us want to be alive, all exists simultaneously and not independent of the other.
What is to say that the world wasn't meant to be the way we see it unfold in front of us. Well, alright not the entire picture, there are a few errants I would like removed, but in its entirety, its beauty is worth just admiring the way it is, without question. The beauty that gave rise to its existence, the endless journey of the mind is to be relished the way it is. No?
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