Rose & Cow Dung - Different or Same?

Wondering what’s the connection between smelly cow dung on the left and a fragrant symbol of love on the right? Aren’t they same on a deeper level – just the transformation of life energies over a period of time. We have an uncanny ability of not connecting dots when the change is infinitesimally slow and viewing things as different objects when they are as same as our left and right hands. Think about coal and diamond, sunlight and the energy you get from consuming plants – million other examples from everyday life which seem like completely distinct objects but are actually the same at the core.

Guess it’s the beauty of language – by identifying things with different names, we trick ourselves into believing that they are different. Imagine that we forget speech for a day – won’t all distances and barriers fall immediately – how would anyone know who is a Christian or a Hindu or whether you are an Indian or a Pakistani to etc. There is no way other than names & concepts we identify with, right? And the icing on the cake is we have even forgotten that we are the creators of language, we named objects in the first place & created differentiation to ease communication – a tree always existed even before we started calling it a tree! It sounds ironical right – creating differentiation to ease communication but ending up creating more differences and barriers to communication.

Let’s take a pit-stop at the doors of communication. It seems to be at its best in the present times but if you observe and analyze deeply, we are communicating like robots in our everyday life – masking our emotions, giving trained diplomatic answers, making it look like everything is civilized and genial even if a storm is raging within. We uphold honesty as a core value and teach diplomacy for leading a ‘practical’ life – a contradiction which defines our current social structures & values – I like to call it as iOS - the invasion of superficiality. The only positive seems to be that our reach has become amazing. The number of people we can touch with our thoughts and feelings is millions of time higher than say 50 years back.

Anyways, let’s get back to nomenclature & language. Everywhere I go, everyone I talk to seems to be running behind trying to create pleasantness or experience pleasure, whatever their trigger maybe and avoid pain. But what’s pleasure without pain? What’s happiness without sadness?  Do they even exist in isolation or is there duality in all emotions we experience. Or rather all words we express? Imagine being happy at all times and never experiencing sadness – wouldn’t the attraction of happiness suddenly fade away? It might get boring to be happy then which might make you sad. Oh wait, that means never-ending happiness would also fade into sadness. Why? Maybe they are just different names to the same underlying emotion, the clichéd 2 sides of the same coin (I wonder if in future, in times of bitcoins & digital transactions, will people even understand this simple analogy). A little difficult to comprehend theoretically but experientially it makes a lot of sense. Basically, where I am trying to get at is that things and/or emotions which look like totally unrelated, even opposites are genetically similar in ways we can’t even imagine or perhaps, don’t want to imagine. We are just too busy trying to buy the latest iPhone, the newly launched Mercedes, the sexy dress but we have forgotten the art of living, of observing and of enjoying the everyday magic – Life!

The duality inherent in our existence is everywhere and failing to understand this simple principle is just one of the myriad reasons I believe we as a race are lost, totally lost and the sheer confidence we have in our ability to know & understand things just makes me smile or a little sad – the smile and sadness conveying the same emotion. Again.