Rationalising or fooling yourself ?

September 10, 2006 | 03:17 PM
Rationalising or fooling yourself ?
"Maybe our concept of time is just a method for rationalising things and making it have a point or giving it a meaning... a perspective."

yes absolutely, raviswamy, our five senses in their limitations need to reduce perception to rationalize our understanding of the world we inhabit...


So we give everything a begining, and an end. We see time linearily. And then we spend our lives wondering and being afraid of the event called Death, because we have decided the universe exists in beginings and ends, in events separated in time/space. The question we should be really asking is "if the event of Birth never happened, then how can Death happen ? Or is my Birth and my Death continious even as I write ?

What I keep struggling with is why we need to reduce everything to a point where we need to rationalize it. Why do we need to rationalize ? It seems purposeless, but then of course it is difficult to find any purpose in this world. The only purpose we have ever seem to have found is in imposed 'morality'. But the Universe is neither moral nor immoral. It's amoral.

I do not believe we are born with an addiction to only the 5 senses. We acquire the ability to shut ourselves out of anything that does not fall into the perception of an increasingly limited rationalistic world. That's modernism. Logic.

My daughter at 4 was extremely comfortable with the idea that Angels existed and at the same time did not. She saw no difference between the logical world and the illogical one. To her the connection between what she saw and what she imagined was not contradictory. But now at 6, with her going to school she is already getting trained to ignore that which cannot be touched, seen, heard or smelled,

Consequently she is less and less comfortable with her emotional life, as myth and imagination are played down in schooling. But the do not go away do they ? They bubble up in the most unexpected ways. And sometimes dangerous ways. You and I are coming to terms with our loss of universal percepton by arguing out right now through words.

Buddhism says that at the root of all human suffering is Desire. I do not dispute that. For Desire only arises out of a misunderstanding of Time/Space continuum. How can I desire something unless I see the object of desire as something seperated from me in time/space. But even Quantum Physics now reveal that all such seperation is not real fact, but is assumed fact through the act of observation by the observer.

What i want Buddhism to explain to me is the purpose of Desire, if there is one. Procreation of the species? is that all ?

Shekhar