An Image On Water
We are all rational beings. I truly believe that.
I believe that common sense , at least in some degree , is very common. Yet, without fail, life seems to be hell bent on proving me wrong.
Obsession would probably be defined as the domination of one's thoughts or feelings by a persistent idea, image, desire, etc. or perhaps an irrational motive for performing trivial or repetitive actions against your will.
Now, if we are all rational beings then shouldnt we able to see for ourselves that obsessions are irrational and capable of great harm? Well we should. Yet history is abound with tragedies caused by a man's obsession. Be it Paris's desperate desire of Helen or Narcissus's obsession with himself.
I find it hard to believe that a man would go so far down the road of desire that he would waste away by the side of an image that he himself had created and then fallen in love with.
However at some level I guess I can appreciate that human compulsion .
For an obsession always comes in the guise of a thought . A thought that comes in and then grows until your every waking moment is filled with it . It grows until the point of madness . A Zahir.
I suppose it seems we all have a little bit of Karna in us .
Karna was generous to a fault , righteous beyond comprehension , brave and basically the embodiment of all that is good in humankind . Yet he was of low birth and therefore rise in society was limited. In his pursuit of higher learning he posed as a man of warrior caste.His lie was found out and in his teacher's indignant fury was cursed to lose all that he had when he wanted it most. Basically, to cut a long story short Karna died on the battlefield because at that point in time when he was in dire need of all the knowledge that he had acquired , it didnt come to him.
Its the same thing with us. At that point in time when we require our sense of rationale most ,it deserts us to fend for ourselves.
Even though we know that a certain course of action might be unwise we are powerless to change course. We have no will to do so.
Narcissus knew that what he saw was merely an image in the water. He knew the result of his course. He just didnt have the will to go back.Paris probably knew that his country would have to go to war , his countrymen would die. He didnt want any of that. Yet that is what he chose.
Kind of makes you wonder if there is any free will at all. As one guy once said "Free will does exist, but it's a perception, not a power or a driving force. The more you scrutinise it, the more you realise you don't have it."
I dont know and I dont want to get into the philsophical marshlands of whether every action of our life is already pre-ordained or whether we are the masters of our own destinies.
What I do know is that when we want something bad . When we want something so bad that the need is the only thing that fills your mind ,then we act in a manner that we wouldnt have otherwise. Our actions are no longer determined by logic as conventionally defined, but by something much more basic. I call this the obsessive logic.
Its the logic that made Narcissus think that lying down by the side of the river until the end of time seem like a perfectly obvious thing to do. Besides, who are we to judge? After all, Narcissus acheived immortality with his actions.
Will we?
posted by AJ @ 10:33 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
I enjoyed reading this post. However I hold a different opinion on some points.
Firstly, how can an obsession be against one's will? Either the person is not strong enough to act according to one's will or not responsible enough to be able to take responsibility of one's own actions... One can fear obsession only when one fears one's own intentions.
I see obsession as one's determination to achieve things. It might be right or wrong but that is a person's own perception. If a person feels what he is doing is not right, he should not do it in the first place.
I feel obsession is healthy. Its faith in one self's ability to achieve things.
Hey the blog is very well written. Just as loveleen said I too have some thoughts abt it, they aren’t necessarily different but are from a different perspective.
Obsession as you rightly put it comes in the guise of a thought and then manifests your very existence, then it is not a thought anymore for you, it becomes a virtual reality. A reality, which is incomprehensible to the outside world. Usually every man has or is supposed to have the will to control the flow of one’s thought as probably this is one the qualities that helps him to stay ‘rationally sane’. The loss of this quality questions the rational sanity of the person. They are not ‘MAD’ in the true sense of the word but they aren’t sane either. Medically this phenomenon (if we can say so) is defined as OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder).
Even I would not like to go into the philosophical marshlands on the subject of one being the master of his destiny, but I would just like to share a little thought abt it anyway.
‘Free Will’ has been the point of debate in the philosophical circles from time immemorial, but in the scientific realm it was always looked down upon as the so called ‘object of metaphysics’.
Something very interesting happened in the near future that changed the prejudice abt this ideology completely. To be precise two very distinct events started this transformation. One amongst this was ‘Sir Albert Einstein’ and his theories of relativity and the other contender was the theory of “Quantum Mechanics”.
The clash between these two titanic theories gave birth to the scientific ideology of the so called “Free Will”. To cut the long story short, relativity says that there is no free will and quantum mechanics says that there is……and the argument still continues.
Well I would like conclude by saying that….obsession is good as long as the leash on its collar is held tightly held by rational logic, The day this leash breaks….history has time and again shown what would happen…
I had fun reading the post. but sometimes i think its a matter of perspective. what most people view as compulsions or obsessions are normally quirks or mannerisms totally absent from their own character which they then find necessary to label weird to establish their own sanity. i read this article once, that an obsession with perfection can ruin your career, ur family life and god knows what else. funny, my dad is a hard core workaholic and perfectionist and yet considered a god by his co-workers, us and my mom. sometimes, i wonder, does it boil down to basic human tolerance levels of people with different priorities than our own? i know i have diverged way off the topic, but dunno, when i think of obsessions, i always think of this. sometimes of feynman and his refusal to accept the least action method, sometimes my dad, sometimes my obsession with gift-wraps.
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