Sketches in Pencil: Drawn, forgotten and remembered once again while rummaging through an old file

so easy to fall in love...

the lonely tree

forest scene

Philosophical Ramblings

I have a habit of holding this imaginary conversation with myself. I imagine that I’ve entered my room, say from my lab or elsewhere, and I find myself asking: ‘from where did I come?’ And I find myself replying: ‘from the lab.’ And then after a series of backward iterations the answer finally becomes: ‘from my mother’s womb.’ After that the question becomes: ‘Where was I before that?’ And for that I have no answer.

There are really two possibilities here: my existence began with my inception in my mother’s womb, and will likewise end with my death. Before my birth I had no existence and after my death I will have no existence. The world is indeed as it seems and is to be taken at face value; no questions asked. (Interestingly, this view conicides with the very strange result of quantum mechanics: that a particle will have a definite observable only if you happen to observe it…it is like saying that a tree exists only if you happen to see it, or that the universe exists only if you are alive…the existence of the tree and the universe are tied up with your existence and do not have a separate, independent existence. This theory is slightly solipsistic).

The other possibility is that my mother was just an intermediary, a sort of vehicle to bring me forth into this world from wherever I was, and that likewise my death will not be the end of my existence.

We really have no choice but to believe in one of the two possibilities. We do not know which one is right. That is where faith comes in. Believing in the first case also is a kind of faith; for who knows its veracity? Everyone lives on faith: the atheist and the agnostic and the religious. (The agnostic is really someone who changes his views with the rapidity of a humming bird’s wings).

If we assume the first possibility to be correct, there is nothing to fear, and everything is meaningless. That makes matters very simple as it puts an end to the need of holding imaginary conversations with oneself. It doesn’t matter what we do in this world, what we think or believe. And if it doesn’t matter what I think or believe, I might as well believe in the second point of view, because if it true, there are answers to be found, and if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter. It’s a matter of faith in the end. That explains my fatalistic nature. Which is not to say that I am a defeatist: far from that. I think I’m being gently drawn into the karma yog aspect of the Bhagvad Gita. The famous verse of doing one’s duty to the best of one’s abilities and leaving the rest to whatever your conception of god is. Far away from home, but with some parallels, there’s another point of view, this time by Niccolo Machiavelli, which I stumbled upon while reading ‘The Prince’. It says that one can build dikes and levees in times of calm to seek refuge from the flood when it arrives. A point of view echoed in the fable of the ants and the grasshopper (and which again was contradicted by Somerset Maugham in one of his stories…but Somerset Maugham thrived on extremely plausible exceptions which we see all the time!)

There’s also a kind of argument by Pascal in the probabilistic merits of believing in God…but I don’t remember the context or the nature of his arguments