A Dialogue

This post is actually in reply to a comment on one of my previous posts Ignorance is Bliss. I consider it a good piece of thought, and chose to make it an independent post in itself, given that it should not go unnoticed as a comment.

Its not a fascination about death, but only a conscious choice that a person faces, when he arrives at that point based on the previous arguments. Understanding life is an ongoing process since known history, and I’m sure you would agree with me, that humanity has made significant progress in that direction. Based on this fact, it is imperative that we cannot come to the conclusion that we can never understand why we live completely.There is a hypothesis that we simply cannot know about life in its entirety because we are not biologically and psychologically equipped enough for that mighty a task. And maybe we do need hardware changes, but evolution will take care of it, if it is indeed necessary. But since evolution is an ongoing process in itself, we as individuals are also playing a role in it. So let’s do think and contribute, and in doing so, we might be planting seeds for an increase in the said neuronal connections.

If we agree that attainment of bliss is the aim, many religions promise bliss and eternity. But we do not blindly go by all their rules. We use what we believe is our better discretion. And regarding anything, “how” is a much simpler question at times, because we can answer it through observation (be it even statistical) and through experimental science. But when we ask “why?”, it more often than not gives rise to a paradoxical never ending line of thought. One such example is regarding the creation of the universe, where an infinite causal regress arises.

Thinking about thought itself is perhaps what psychologists most definitely do, and philosophers sometimes stumble upon. But we should know that thought cannot think about itself without the initiator of the first thought in that cycle. So we should be sure that it is we who think about thought, which comprised of other thoughts.

Yes, we have built upon the thoughts of other people, though flawed they are. But we do not have a better way, for if we do not do that, we wouldn’t have any scope for progress – the one thing much craved by humanity in the present day. But in our process, we try by all means to identify and rectify the flaws committed by the people before us, in hope of a better outcome. In fact, that’s what philosophical dialogue is all about. Talking about the bliss due to the two different types of ignorance, true ignorance and willful ignorance, it is implicit that the bliss is of a different kind in both, in the sense that it arises from a different combination of feelings in both cases, but nevertheless be called as bliss, based on the definition of the word.

It is most definitely we, who are making ourselves happy, but we do so with the help of a complex combination of a plethora of aspects in and around our lives, and that’s just the way human life is. If we were to engineer and synthesize happiness willingly and forcibly, then we would perhaps be equivalent to lab rats, and a majority of us do not find that idea very pleasant. That said, many of us do make a positive attempt in that direction, because happiness is a dire need. But just because happiness can happen synthetically doesn’t mean that it does not happen through other means, and so does bliss happen through ignorance.