Swadhayan

Describe a sunset… Cotton-candy skies, random birds frolicking their way home, merciless shafts of sunlight digging through a small hole in the clouds like a spotlight on one corner of the world. People almost ignorant of this blessing of light, waking into dim lit noisy rooms.

Can you explain the scent of your grandmas sweets, Dad’s old t-shirt, the treehouse you grew up in to a stranger?
Maybe.

How are this interactions different? Are they really anything but descriptions of simple sensory facts, or do they tell you something more? is there a hidden meaning in conversations?
Like a true Absurdist, I too believe we are all fishing for meaning in an inherently meaningless world.

Ok. let’s take it down a notch before you abandon me.
AGAIN.

We make sense of the world by connecting the dots, by comparing new information with something we already know about. I know of darkness as the absence or presence of light.
And one is larger relative to something smaller.
Cognitive cues and Deeper intuition, and quick instinctive responses to new information are all understood in response to (comparing)past relative information.
I know that most readers would leave at the first bit idea that requires multiple neurons to fire all at once. A cognitive decision.

Hence the break above. I would we rather take one step at a time into exploring new webs of ideas and perspective.

The idea of this post was born of a conversation where I explained a friend how relativity and comparing are the same thing, used in a positive or negative concept.
The intuitive call in this conversation to isolate jealousy from the learning curve of a person – comparing yourself to something new of the other person helps to observe, learn and reflect.

The instinct to lie to avoid a hard conversation is not just people pleasing, its our brains learned shortcut to safety.

And we have a hundred more of such mental model shortcuts. Some learned during our personal experiences; but most draw from human nature and societal conditioning. Also known as Heuristics.

They are both emotional and logical- Scarcity and value, survival bias are all commonly discussed concepts under Heuristics.
If you come from a Desi household, you would grow up and find some wisdom in certain age old notions; some you just can’t wrap your head around, like at all.
Oh, I bet some that you created are somehow just as absurd.
But hey, to each their own.

On a purely Philosophical view, the study of heuristics reveals the intricacy and paradox of the human mind. We are at once finite and infinite, fragmented and whole, absurd and divine.And these mental shortcuts are but one facet of this endlessly fascinating puzzle – a reminder of our capacity for both delusion and insight.

Perhaps the greatest heuristic of all is the recognition of our own limitedness – the understanding that our mental models, no matter how sophisticated, can never fully capture the mystery and majesty of existence. It is in this space of not-knowing, of radical openness and wonder, that true wisdom begins.