Money, Moha and Mahabharata-II

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Thinking Ecologically than thinking of ecology-V

Thinking ecological happens to be a method where the immediate next moment is always a mystery. This next moment is not the future rather the bridge between the present and the future. We, human beings have got accustomed to the future and the futuristic thinking so much that the importance of the next moment is never underscored. The next moment is tactical, moral and hence essential. One can do anything except avoiding the next moment. The essential reality of this moment is that it is subjective. It's a zone of so many clashes and convergences that the act of facing the next moment becomes the most decisive act of being. Whether we like it or not, the decisive character of this moment is because of its being a link between the present and the future. We may assume to postpone the issue of decisiveness but the way we handle this moment gets permanently registered in the continuity of time and hence life. Every next moment has this character attached to itself. Whatever we have contributed to this series of moments, shall keep on building but we may call as our past. This past shall be a permanent reference point for all moments to come. This reference may crop up as a matter of bondage or a matter of liberation but I would say that reference should remain first and foremost only reference. The meaning, positive or negative may be a contextual force but the basic fact shall remain that a reference is only a reference.
People might find it a bit uncomfortable because we have remained the beings of moral thinking. A moral thinking will either make you a prisoner of the past or achiever of the past. I would maintain that this reality should not be taken out of a certain context. In objective terms, the past to remain a reference point. Why I am saying that history of a person may define the future of a person but may not determine too. The distinction between defining and determining is because of the presence of one universal which is nothing but death. This universal was present during all the moments of the timescale that a person has gone through. It shall also be present for all the moments that are yet to come in somebody's life. That is why the context of death was there, is there and shall remain there. A person may ignore to authenticate the presence of death but this ignorance is not an unlimited act. It may be broken anytime anywhere. This brings out the distinction between defining and determining. The past shall remain a defining possibility but the person shall remain the determining entity. The process of determination is a process where desire and death are in the state of immediate face-off. This kind of meeting is not based upon any kind of astrological understanding of timing of death rather it is founded upon accepting death as the immediate possibility in the next moment. Anybody who takes a shot in this interface may fulfil the desire of the moment. She may die after that but she has the option of giving priority to desire and not to survival. It's like trying out bungee jumping for the first time but it is much more than that. Death may eliminate her in the next moment but she has chosen her desire to live with. She may die but if she doesn't die in the next moment, she can realise with awkward relief and a bit of common sense that the context of death is as alive again as it was in the last moment. This time, it is not equal into bungee jumping but it may turn out to be again a case of priority of desire over the priority of survival. I'm not saying what a person can accomplish with this kind of practical experimentation by assuming the context of death but I would definitely say that she can realise the sustainability of this context as a permanent context. She may refuse to participate consciously with this context but her refusal will not eliminate this context.

Death is like a wayward traveller that can venture into our life from any point of time and space. So, the question is if the desire can sustain its power in each coming moment despite the context of death being operational at every moment? Generally, what happens is that the idea of death and its power can distort many desires and almost vanquish the paraphernalia of those desires. This can be the time of great personal tragedies, critical occasions or social disaster and so on but my experience tells that death does vanquish many but not all desires. There is no method of calculating that in any scientific terms but still, every person does perform somewhat more or less beautifully in such a situation though not at the first occasion. And this process continues its improvement till end. This realm of desire that remains untouched by the fear of death is the fundamental construction that everybody wishes to be part of. Of course, it may be multi-faceted but the structure shall vary from person to person. This is something that not only explains the intrinsic exclusivity of all souls as well as the essential plurality of human existence. A desire can look a very selfish concern at the first glance but all desires have an in-built design for the other's role. In the Part-IV of this series, I have explained the factor of “the other” but here, I would only say that the desire is the only force which builds the basic equation between the self and the other. This equation may turn out to be a question of ethics but it's the subsequent question. The primary force shall remain a function of desire.

Thinking Ecologically than thinking of ecology-IV

After posting the last article on this series, somebody asked me, “What does that mean ‘somebody thinks for you’; is it equivalent to love? To answer straight, it may be love but I would try to save this conclusion from any simplistic kind of understanding. Love is generally assumed to be equivalent to compassion and benevolence but a relationship in ecological terms may not be a very soft relationship. For example, to a person immersed in addictive aspects of a relation, it's not very easy to convey the true meaning of love without being hard or harsh. Similarly, to a person stuck deep in the systems of violence, it would be impossible to communicate the language of compassion and justice. Again, for a person untrained in the domain of aesthetics, it would be amateurish to make him understand the beauty of love. That is why the ecological relationship may be an exact replica of love but here Love needs to be contextualised. Any general treatment of love outside its context may be a total failure of understanding the ecological nature of a relationship. In certain terms, we cannot necessitate the form of relationship because all forms are in sustained communion with their surroundings and hence keep undergoing a substation shift every time. Love is more about the deep awareness of this communication and resultant change. Any kind of essentiality stops the entire process there and then. Whatever I have said about love can also be said about the exact opposite of love which is enmity. Here, somebody thinks against you instead of thinking for you. For a person who is too much afraid of his enemy, it is ridiculous for him to think of anybody other than the enemy. Similarly, if the person doesn't know the art of self defence or cannot make the strategy of defence, any kind of reaction can possibly mean lacking total commonsense. Again, if one of the characters has a historical record of being exploited or impoverished, the possibility of a genuine response is quite limited. Such kinds of perception can actually lead to totally unpredictable kind of behaviour which can stall the possibility of a dialogue in a permanent fashion. In these cases, if other is not the enemy, the eventuality may tend to create one out of a non-situation. That is why to define an ecological relationship both as love or enmity may lead us into a direction of total irrelevance. Setting one kind of idea against the other kind is not the route I am suggesting. Such frameworks shall remain addictions of two extreme kinds-one is extremely schizophrenic and the other is extremely narcissistic. Our precise objective is to avoid both these two extremes because they are isolationist in form as well as texture. People find it very difficult to understand this kind of philosophical suggestion because they find it very difficult to bypass the overrated-ness of the self. To give an attribute to Gramsci, I would put it closer to the distinction he offers between the traditional thinking and the organic thinking. To him, organic thinking is a result of deep understanding of history and the present while the traditional thinking is a result of the conditioning done by the structures of hegemony. It's a kind of position without an identity, a kind of “subaltern” definition as given by Gayatri Spivak. Both Gramsci and Spivak would have defined ecological as rising from the darkness of earth. It is quite supporting for me with just one caution that the directional essential should not be taken too literally. Of late, thinking ecologically is turning out to be an activity less of brain and more of being.

Thinking Ecologically than thinking of ecology-III

After my last post on this series, a student friend of mine, Gaurav Bajaj once expressed his difficulty in understanding the concept of ecological thinking. He's a young man who is trying to explore his own way through the life. He finds himself a deep misfit within the so-called material growth all around himself. He tries to find substance in the relationships but they turn out to be as material as the world around is. He seems to be caught in a thinking trap which makes him dream of natural farming on the one side and deeply disillusioned with the concrete structures of urban life. The whole thinking is built upon a dichotomy of inside and outside. There is a world inside which is not finding its way out and there is a world outside not giving up its hegemony.

Whenever we create an “other” particularly in the political and social terms, we also create an element of fear from this “other”. What we think, we assume to think of ourselves and what the other thinks, we assume to think that it is against ourselves. The element of fear distorts the natural reality of the entire ecosystem spread around ourselves. If we just remove the element of fear, we can tend to understand that thinking is not only a domain of personal control. The others also think for you and not always against you/not necessarily against you/rarely against you. They may even think without any trace of you being there. The point to mention here is that the immediate space around us is an ecosystem of multiple thinkings. Hence, thinking transforms into existence and that's why the space around us is an ecosystem of multiple forms of existence. No amount of good thinking or moral thinking is big enough to qualify any equivalence with this kind of vastness. When we think of the other, we generally tend to think of only human beings but I would say that not only human beings but the animals, the plants, stones, rivers and roads also think. The only problem is that we don't think that they really think. There is a certain kind of streak in the educational grooming of our minds where we tend to focus more and more upon the human beings and tend to forget the nonhuman spaces as the intangible and hence the unimportant spaces. The problem of too much of “I” does not allow the growing of “We”. This precise limitation of our dominant method of thinking creates so many layers of problems for us that the entire struggle becomes an intellectual and moral trap for us. While the reality of the situation always is that these traps are very minor locks where the energy and the movement meets a dead-end and the vast frame of the ecosystem around us keeps up its vitality as usual. For example, when we distinguished between mainstream history and the subaltern history, we had to dig out one form of history against the other form while history was being there in all its forms. What to talk of subaltern, there were private histories against the public history. There were human histories against the national histories. There were religious histories against the material histories. So, the moot point is that thinking as a method has remained a very restricted potential. The sense of morality defines its structure but I would say the sense of being ecological should define its existence. A structure may come out of that existence but we should not expect it to be a controlled structure; it may be as complex an ecosystem as a jungle is. To live in a jungle, one must accept that there is no life outside jungle. Hence, the sanctity of a jungle has to be maintained at all costs. The fear in jungle may be a procedural reality but the fear of jungle as a substantive reality has no point to exist. Still, if we want to cling to our fears, we shall never understand the jungle.

Thinking Ecologically than thinking of Ecology-II

After putting one post on my website yesterday, I still felt the need of elaborating on the same theme a bit in detail. The main point behind that is the so-called notion of moral achievement or moral success that we have got conditioned to. The fact is that within an achievement, there are so many layers of non-achievements and failures that it's never possible to develop a singular definition of the eventual result of any action. When I tried my hands at organic farming, it was an achievement for me but deep down, I could notice that there are so many failures which were really hurting my target of holistic course of development. The very first was that the land never belonged to me in a proprietary sense of the term. It limited my options to go deeper into my experiments. It was a question of serious debate between private and public property which I was struggling to handle. The second question was the availability of seeds which was again limited because of my non-training in the realm of natural farming. The third question was to take my professional career along with my ideal choice. The final was that me, my family and my society were not in total sync with one another over this issue. This kind of set of problems can be found in any kind of moral choice or a moral success. That's why I started feeling that thinking should be more than a moral activity. It has to be organic and somewhat in correspondence with the contemporary history. It is not possible to think ecologically when the society around you is not thinking the same way. The predominant method of social thinking currently available to us is monotheistic and pursues the path of mono-linear morality. When an individual makes a choice, he/she has to get entangled into the immediate web of external ecosystem of the contemporary times. This eventfulness is very mixed in nature because it can be simultaneously progressive and regressive. Here begins a story of partial movements, partial compromises, partial failures and partial successes. I'm not pessimistic about this kind of existential reality or the resultant action but what I want to point out is that there is a serious need to understand the limited nature of current methods of thinking. To be honest, any method of thinking has to be a partial choice of what human beings can achieve by interacting with reality. If the method of thinking is replaced with the ecological nature, we face the problem of not having a conscious structure of thinking. This is something that we are not used to and that's why we keep building structure after structure. Thinking has to be taken into the organic domain so as to make it not just unlimited but also interconnected with the counter possibilities. It has to be potent and in sync with its ecosystem. That shall make it ethical and moral instead of vice-versa. The question of morality is the question of judgement but the question of living is the question of continuity. Any rupture in this process of continuity demands the emergence of justice but any principle of justice cannot be imposed permanently upon this continuity. By sticking to judgements, we keep sticking to the ruptures and hence, we keep sticking to the fractures of reality. This kind of conditioning makes the life a serious mono-crop affair. We might desire to live in the jungle of human possibilities but we trap ourselves into artificial worlds of so-called moral thinking.

Thinking Ecologically than thinking of Ecology

For quite some time, I have been thinking about how we think. This is a question which is not even thought of what to talk of it’s being raised. We almost forget that there is a method behind thinking and over a period of time, this method becomes not just invisible to us but we also turn oblivious of it but it doesn't mean that method has stopped working. It keeps working right there but our relationship with this method undergoes a serious decline. This is not just true of an individual human being but it is also equally true of societies and communities. There is an automatic development of a uniform nature of thought among groups conditioned by caste, colour, gender, culture, religion or any other factor. This uniformity does create a certain sense of composite way of living life but this kind of development should be questioned and decoded simultaneously. Of late, I have been suffering with a strange development. I would prefer to call it strange because of a certain kind of private selfishness. I don't feel the burden of morality pangs as I used to do over a pretty long period of time. The first morality pang which I suffered from was that of “an impossibility of being a good son”. I tried my best before my family and realised that despite achieving a good sense of son-ness, I never wanted to be acknowledged as just a good son. I wanted to be something else. The second morality pang which I suffered from was that of “an impossibility of being a good male”. I tried my best, failed a lot in many cases; succeeded a bit in a few cases and ultimately I realised that goodness of a male can be determined by a female first, a range of social or cultural factors second and finally by my attempt of being good. My trials and tribulations in this domain were so limited by the factors of ‘otherness’ that I could be a good male even if I don't try to be the one. Gradually, over a period of couple of decades, I could understand that trying to be a good male was the greatest illusion of morality which I had imposed upon myself and the fact was that a female and her environment together define a major chunk of my goodness. The third morality pang which I suffered from was “an impossibility of being a true Indian/Oriental.” In the beginning, this attempt/crisis took me into the domain of cultural nationalism which later on turned out to be the majority fascism. Then I shifted into the domain of spiritual nationalism which took me into the domain of serious Indology. This was a bit satisfactory period of my intellectual journey but soon I realised that all spiritual journeys have to be based upon the material lives. One has to develop one's own Mahabharata, one long battle and one's own wars. This brought me down from the domain of spiritualism into the domain of essential materialism. I could learn to respect people like Gramsci, naxalites, grassroot activists, ecological warriors and libertarians. These three morality pangs were basically the fundamental methods of thinking which I had developed rights since my birth and had almost forgotten that my entire action was being dictated by these fundamental forms of thought. The series of successes and failures were actually driven by these hidden forces of judgement which were always in operation though I was almost ignorant of them. It's only recently that I have realised that these three morality pangs don't bother me as they used to do earlier. The fourth morality pang which I started suffering from was around a decade back when I started realising the cost of an urbanized and consumerist living style which I had got used to. I had no training in rural habitat or the method of natural life. I kept saying to myself that I am only consuming and consuming but I'm not creating the natural wealth. I'm not saving water, am not saving greenery, am not doing enough to save the ecology. This morality pang took me into the world of natural farming, organic farming, permaculture, sustainable development and alternative forms of human habitat. A couple of years back, I tried my hands at organic farming and after a series of minor experiments, I realised that my enterprise may give a lot of satisfaction, vegetables and fruits to me and my family but I was not able to design a system which was truly ecological because of so many factors that I could not even see. This was the final morality pang with which I decided not to be conditioned by. These deep-rooted methods of thinking which seemed to give a direction actually constrain the vast scope of human action. They seem to provide a direction in the beginning but they don't solve the question- Who you are and what you want to be? These methods are mono-crop, mono-tonous, mono-theistic, mono-polistic and mono-chromatic. Why a method cannot be based upon a model of biodiversity? Instead of thinking of ecology, why the method itself cannot be ecological? Why it has to be constrained by only one kind of predominant value system? Perhaps, our problem is that we tend to believe in clean, moral and synthetic methods of thinking. Rather I feel that no method can really fulfil these three criteria. The human consciousness does not operate as designed by these limited doctrines. It draws its strength and vitality from a much deeper resource of thinking which is made up of very deeply interconnected, deeply rooted and biologically joined ecosystem which may be called a jungle, as good as a rainforest. A forest is life source of human habitat but a forest as a method of thinking is yet to be registered in human mind. That's why I believe that we need to learn to be aware of what is called ecological thinking.