Human children in the first three years of life are consumed by a desire to explore and experiment with objects. Humans have an incentive to investigate the nature of things in their own right and will forever learn more about the practical – life-enhancing – potential of world they lives in.
That way of course, lies biological success. Moreover, that way, in the longer run, lie grand science and human civilization too. For it is this love affair with the natural world that drives men and women to their boldest feats of exploration and invention.
Richard Dawkins – the exponent evolutionists – has caught the mood exactly:
“After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life.” Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked-as I am surprisingly often-why do I bother to get up in the mornings.”
If the atheist temperament of Dawkins does not suit to your taste, let Henri Poincre say it instead:
“The savant does not study nature because it is useful: he studies it because it is beautiful. If nature was not beautiful it would not be worth knowing and life would not be worth living.”
It is undeniable that there is a deeply engrained sense of delight genetically coded in the DNA of humanity – their unfaltering love for this enchanted existence of ours – our life, nature, the drama of every day existence, family, friends, art, science, etc. Since millennia humans have been is in love with life and its mysteries, its adventures, the opportunities, its dreams, its hopes, its silent love, its desires, its pains, its pleasures, its aspirations, and its grandeur.
Interestingly this profound attraction is created inside the phenomenology of the interaction of the never endings in the brain. The objective external world where the drama happens is just the starting point. That triggers a set of excruciatingly complex mathematical signal processing inside one’s mind. It is inside, where this sparkling, seductive, mushy, luscious, and elegant qualia – what we call our experience. There is a borrowed phenomenality that the external world takes up which adds that sheen in one’s existence. I say often – “Perception is a project of internal Self”.
How often have you stared into a flaming fire, listened to the hoot of an owl in dark dangled your feet in cold stream, or watched the sun setting in a blaze of color and been knocked back by the transcendent beauty of it? How often have you been captivated by some gemlike detail of your environment that seems almost too right and too good to be true, leaving you gasping? How often you have had that special person in your life whose just one smile or a frown either beautifies, or devastates your entire week? Certainly every one of you would have go through such profound experiences in your own lives.
As per Vincent van Gogh, “I have never had such a chance, nature here being so extraordinarily beautiful. Everywhere and all over the vault of heaven is a marvelous blue, and the sun sheds a radiance of pale sulphur, and it is soft and as lovely as combination of heavenly blues and yellows in a Vermeer of Delft…I am ravished with what I see…I have a lover’s insight or a lover’s blindness.”
Imagine an existence which is entirely guided by physical science, business utilitarianism, and self preservation and proliferation agendas. It would be a world of zombies, of robots. A zombie would never make the mistake of coloring the world with projected qualia or of misjudging his own boundaries and feelings himself mysteriously connected to nature and the world outside. Indeed, imagine if you can the zombie’s world. It would have to be a disenchanted world – a world where things no nlonger glow or have any phenomenal significance. The great psychologist William James raised that possiblility as a dreadful thought experiment, “Conceive yourself if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion of which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as “it exists”, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness! “
Certainly you would have had glimpses of such states of zombies in your everyday life, where existence is motored by eerie realism, scientific objectivity, personal agendas of self preservation and proliferation, sole pursuits of money, power and status. Life indeed is so very dis-enchanted and dark for those.
This profound love-affair with which humanity has evolved since hundreds of millions of years, has given rise to something what scientists call consciousness. This aspect turns every human to a poet, a lover and a maverick. This has a very important evolutionary role to play. For the first time, we have a living form (humans) in this planet, who do things not just it is useful to do. But it takes delight in doing so. This added sense of delight, mushy longing, appreciation and aesthetics and beauty increases the probability of existence and sustenance of humanity over years of evolution. Certainly that deep fear for death, and all that humans meticulously do to avoid death, is due to this profound love-affair they have with life and the world. The first thing that a depression patient taking into suicide loses before contemplating suicide is his love affair with life.
Shakespeare in his following sonnet beautifully expresses how we cast this magic dust on our reality of world, making them glow!
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
This profound love affair inspired Viktor Frankl to use wretched environment of Hitler’s concentration camp of Auschwitz to use as a laboratory for his research on logotherapy! The other inmates who lost this sheen of romanticism either died of depression or some other bodily disease due to unhygienic state of existence, without food and clothing. This love affair inspired great souls of likes of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Vivekananda, Subhash Chandra Bose, Einstein, Newton, Freud, Darwin, Steve Jobs, Ratan Tata, Ram Charan, Michelangelo and thousands and thousands of them, to go beyond the seemingly dry realistic and limiting circumstances, and transmute the mundane existence of themselves, to awe-inspiring creations they made or still making in their lifetime.
Certainly it is a pleasure to be in love.
It is a pleasure to be a romantic maverick.
To spend the life is silent appreciation of that perfect river,
That magnificent formation of cloud in the twilight,
Seen from the terrace of one’s home,
The sense of being lost in intoxication of those Most Beautiful Eyes,
The pleasure retrieved from a work done well,
That feeling of being loved,
In the appreciating and understanding eyes,
Of family and friends!
That deep sense of faith in the heart of the kid,
In the mother’s casual answers to her curious questions!
To that satisfying feeling of being relevant,
In doing something that will live beyond ones life,
Making a positive difference to posterity to come!
That deep fulfillment of shedding sweat and blood,
Fighting for some victory for humanity,
Either in forms of a social activist, a musician, a poet,
Or a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a mother.
Certainly it is a pleasure to be in love.
It is a pleasure to be a romantic maverick.
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