Balaji Prasad
By Balaji Prasad
“And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
~ Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III, Scene I
Some questions are powerful in that they have value in just the asking of the question itself. A well-framed question can drive reflection and a better understanding of yourself and what is of value to your existence, and what is not.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet pondered the question, “to be or not to be”. This was literally a matter of life and death for him. Fortunately, for the success of the play, Shakespeare decided to let Hamlet “be” beyond Scene 1 of Act 3.
In a strange way, the question posed in the title of this piece is very similar to Hamlet’s question: it too is a matter of life and death.
What is life, and what is death?
There is life outside of words. And numbers. And other symbols. This should not be a revelation, but it may well be. So much of our lives are filled with these wispy things that are mere means to an end, but which often, tragically, become ends unto themselves.
Then there is “logic”: the beautiful kneading machine inside, which kneads whatever it is that we need (or, more accurately, would like to think that we need). It ingests words, numbers and other symbols and produces works of art that please the owner of the kneading machine. The only problem? There is no rule that the art has to resemble life – not in the least. And there is no way to enforce such integrity, i.e., the alignment of the manufactured work of art to something that actually has an existence in the real world.
It is the lack of alignment of the products of this strange and convoluted process with the real world that is “death”. Life has to be lived in the real world with real things. When we separate from reality through these symbol-based gymnastics, we cease to live.
But… like Hamlet, we can make the choice to live rather than die.
Born again!
It’s a whole different world out there, beyond the words. It is not that we don’t live there every now and then, barely realizing that we have crossed over from the parallel universe into a place that the less complicated animals live in. Unlike them, our habituation and indoctrination that begins from the cradle makes the world of words seem more natural and normal than it should. And so, it is that only for some part of the time that we think we “live” that we actually live. For the rest of the time, we just pick our way through the dark and shadowy woods littered with the deadwood of words. The lush and breathing woods, meanwhile, teem with living animals that have escaped the shackles of indoctrination — of human ideas.
One such human idea is that we are not animals. As with many things, this can be both true and untrue at the same time: a kind of quantum state that word-based abstractions create. If we can bring ourselves to consider the “animalness” in ourselves without the involuntary revulsion that the word might bring because of indoctrination and an acquired ego, we may find it easier to watch and learn from our cousins: dogs, squirrels, and more. Unlike us, they are unhampered by words and ideas as they scamper around doing what they do: living.
Making a break with the words can take us closer to our animal origins, enabling us to live among real things. And when we do this, we are “born again” into a place that we inhabited once before we acquired the habit of doing the painful split between the real world and the numerous ones that we fabricate.
Pain or pleasure?
Living can feel painful, if we attempt to be a voodoo practitioner. Thinking in one universe and acting as if one lived there, while real things are going on in the real universe, produces strange and painful results. Surely, such pain would be replaced with pleasure if you stopped doing “the split” and moved over to the paradise of the real world?
Not necessarily. The notions of “pain” and “pleasure” can get in the way of understanding the difference between a virtual reality and the real one. It requires a certain kind of “faith” that if you live in an “aligned” way with reality that that is what living is really about. Knowing things as they are, rather than as you would like them to be is not always pleasurable in the moment. There are no word-based painkillers to numb oneself to any fallout from seeing and dealing with things as they are. But that is how the animals live.
To see or not to see? That is the question that Hamlet could have asked rather than the one that he did. And, if he had chosen the former, he may never have had to ask the question that he did.
Balaji Prasad is an IIT/IIM graduate, a published author, SAT/ACT Online and in-person Coach, and K-12 Math Tutor at NewCranium. Contact: balaji.prasad@newcranium.com
