Our Take on things…

Today i was reminded of my first class of fine arts. When i sat down to make the first ever mono-chromatic live drawing of my life, the teacher placed an apple and some grapes with a bottle perched upon one another and asked us to draw it. The class scattered all around the table with the items and got to work, since it was out first time and first class, nervousness prevailed so we tried to sought help from the practiced hands of our class….in doing so we realized that if we keep on copying their sketch lines we won’t be making the drawing from our respective perspectives it would rather be from their angle.

It seemed like a problem at that time and we all took pains to maintain our own positions and drawing boards in hand we kept on going by trial and error. The end result was a wall full of grapes and apples in different colors and from different angles…..it showed how different we all were, what colors we chose and what angles we took.

We all have a take on whatever we come across, be it a person walking down the road or a series on tv; we pick, choose, and act upon what grasps our attention. We understand the angle to which first our environment exposes us and secondly the perspective our mind takes on it. It means that our perception is deeply effected by our context, the spectrum through which we view the world and the workings of our mind……the flow of thoughts, the use of specific senses.

The nature of primary delusions……the topic of debate today, is this very same spectrum that is showing us what our mind intends to, with in our own specific context. If i think that people look at me while i am eating because i eat clumsily, it should be so in my context as i might have, at some point in time been clumsy at eating and from there my paradox started  (Delusions of memory) though people might not have not noticed me at all at that point in time. Or it might happen that some parts of our random stream of thoughts is magnified out of the blue (Delusion of intuition) and we come face to face to a very novel idea like i am an extraordinary person as everyone is in awe of me. Or someone might notice a sign as being related to something poles apart, like the chirping of birds and the sound of an airplane may indicate trouble for someone (Delusions of perception).

Human mind is as complex as anything can get because we can neither break it down, nor look for its sequential processes, we can only infer……and the most complicated of all its dynamics is the process of thinking. It is ever continuous, ever complicated, and ever expanding, connecting various threads into its already complicated web of strings. The more i study it, the more i get confused at times but then i try to break down my own thoughts to make new connections to decipher the hidden answers for myself. Angles might be distinct, perspectives might be different, and understanding might vary but the underlying working is the same in all the human minds……we sought at making links between in our new and old knowledge; one incorrect link and a new tangle starts forming.

The Streams of Thoughts

The concept of reality and truth has been very vague long since the conception of the recording of the thoughts of great minds. I add truth to it because truth is often told and seldom seen and whatever is told has to have a tinge of surrealism to it. So the question has always been that what is the actual reality, be it the reality of our existence, anyone’s behavior, any event, or of our own behavioral interactions.

Over the years theorists like the constructivists, noted that we construct our realities ourselves. We sense, perceive, and then derive our own meanings to the reality. Associationists attributed our ability to associate things into meaningful wholes to the understanding of our reality. And then finally the critical theorists who brought in the scientific concepts in understanding the reality.

If we closely observe the way we think, understand, and respond to the people around us, it is surprising to know that we are all stuck in many of these theoretical orientations. We go with the obvious, we make assumptions, and we go with whatever comes first; never going beyond the picture and never giving the other people the benefit of doubt.

We walk out of our homes everyday thinking how people would look at us but we ourselves hardly notice a few people who come head straight towards us. The world is a blurred mirage for most of our senses, like the buzzing of a bee or the ticking of a wall clock that we only notice when everything else becomes too consistent with the surroundings or when someone points it out to you. The human behaviors appear to me with in the same phenomenon, our mind is in a flow a constant coming and going of splashing waves through a dark tunnel, these waves are mostly audible but only visible when they pass through the slight openings of light. It is these slight illuminations that makes us take notice of specific things, and by illumination i do not mean the sudden intellectual awakenings its just a random attentional phase like the accurately distanced street lights on a dark alley.

When the distance between these street lights gets random and we start focusing on the less important, non-significant parts….that is where a totally new stream breaks out. Human mind and conscious gets as complicated as we try to unravel it but this is how i see it……this is how a dysfunctional thought occurs for me 🙂