Love. Truth. God. Universe. You.

This is something I have always wanted to write about.

Before you go any further:

This article of mine is mainly focused on the randomness of certain thoughts weaved into certain questions, which were raised and answered after having a talk with my friend.

Life is as uncertain as it gets but how we define its worth is as how much we do in that short span of time which we get called, Life. Our definition of a good life’ is defined by the popular belief of the societal based construct which defines our rank in the ladder of hierarchy based on the amount of money we have, the amount of money we show off. We fit in somewhere in these ranks and incorporate some other vague characteristics like ‘feelings’. Happiness, sadness, etc. Which are always subjective differing from one person’s perception and idea to another person’s. Such intangible limits and extreme behavioral characterizes are at times defined and generalized by the society, providing what I call as a ‘wall’ to our thoughts. A generalized view by the so called society is based on restrictions and tangents posted.  Here I shall take up some concepts and put them down to my reality and try to put them to some derived and self-defined realities and end my discussion on the basis of all the arguments try to find a conclusive or inconclusive answer. I don’t know as of yet.

Love:

As I was discussing some aspect of my life with a friend, he told me what he had learnt in his psychology class. He told me that “There is no selfish good”. Love in its very form is a form of selfishness. I was a taken aback by his statements but somewhere deep down within my being I knew he was true. He told me that when you love someone there can never be this clause of unconditionality. There can be no one, and there is no one who doesn’t expect something out of the person whom they love, least of all would be reciprocation. Even when we take the case of a woman you love, until and unless you reciprocate it will never be complete but even when you don’t reciprocate, then too the expectation still lies and that very phenomenon of expectation makes us selfish. We expect a little something in any form and expecting that little something to happen one fine day we care, we nurture, we all sorts of things labeling it under the umbrella of love. I am not saying love is unreal I am just realizing that an expectation is always existing, this expectation might of something impossible and unreal but that basic expectation is what makes our love selfish in the wide sense of the term.
In many cases it can also be where I love someone because I like being loved and I would love a person so much just to be loved the same way. Similar to the condition I mentioned, expectation.

God:
This is a very controversial topic and will always remain. Some people believe in this very unknown, unexplored concept, some don’t, some believe in it partially, some believe in it to keep themselves sane and the rest, well there are a million other possibilities. God for some is what they’ve found in text books, for some Is the preaching of a ‘saint’ who had covered his share of a journey and returned to preach the world what he found, for some it is what their parents taught them, for some it is a divine existential force, for some it is the balancing nature of the universe. There are a million definitions and another million questions attached to the beliefs, statements and ideas. But for people who would really want to find out the driving force, to meet the maker of your being (i.e. if you believe in one) how could you settle for an explanation in some book? A few lines is all you need to calm your mind down? How can you believe in a saint while believing in his cause, without being a part of his journey? Without finding out the answers yourself, for yourself. How can you be a part of the whole when the whole was never a part of you? 

Truth:
What is the truth? Is truth what you believe in? Or what you see? My friend had once had this idea of everything being unreal. He asked me, “How can you prove it to me that the wall behind me exists.” He liked to believe in things that he sees. Which he can see and in that vision span is what was reality for him. Everything outside him was unreal for him. For me, I had a thought of “What if all of this is a dream? What if all my actions, reactions everything is just a part of the dream. What if when I sleep, I am actually alive?” These questions led me a similar thinking and existential crisis that the character ‘Mal’ from inception. Also, the thought of getting up when you actually die occurs to you and that’s what happened to her.
This was because the truth was different for everyone. The truth is what you want to believe in and the human mind has this beautiful and dangerous ability to lie to ourselves so brilliantly that while knowing that something is wrong, we still make sure that we do it convincing ourselves of some greater good which might or might not exist. There are cases of people who suppress memories which they do not want to access or they want to forget, where they forge a memory to fool the mind into believing what they want to, to protect themselves from the brutality of our reality.
At the same time sometimes to counter everything we use our brain’s ‘ Negativity Bias’ which allows our mind to remember bad memories more than the good ones to later protect ourselves.

Universe:
Einstein talked about parallel universes. He explained how each universe is parallel and runs like a river just beside the other one. There is no proof for it that I’ve seen but this shows the significance and insignificance of a mere human in this world both beautifully at the same time. If we see the universe in all its vastness then we will realize that how insignificantly small we are. One person on a planet, one planet in a solar system, one solar system in a galaxy, one galaxy in one of the parallel universes. How small are we exactly?
While suggesting the insignificancy of us as individuals another one of my friends just made me ponder on another possibility by saying “You change the universe”. And suddenly I was significant. I was the most significant being in this universe, and so was she, and so was every living individual who could take a decision, who made a choice because in my universe, at this very moment I would have made another choice and that choice would have made that universe different than this one. Hence, each decision you take makes your universe what it is. 

The Point:
The point I want to make wit all of this is that everything in this world is so relative and our realities so interlinked and individualistic at the same time, what we need to understand is that we need to make choices. Choices based on whether to follow a societal construct and rise through it following maybe a rat race patters, going higher up the ladder and earning fame, name etc. While maybe believing in the journey you never took part in, the box of feelings which you’d like to name as something, restrict your universe to just the area you want it to or explore and get lost in the vastness of this ocean of knowledge and experience, dive into the ocean of nothingness and find everything just to lose everything else. All you need to do is understand the concept of ‘Marginal Opportunity Cost’ and go where you would want to.