Iyya

THE Japanese often hold ‘moon parties’, to which people are invited in the understanding that during these parties, no conversation is to be indulged in. Each merely watches the moon’s different moods and shades, as it drifts through the clouds and the sky. Full attention to this ‘moon gazing’ is presumed as it is felt that, any diversion through talking or even exchange of greetings, would dilute the focus which this involvement would demand.
Various exercises, rooted in relaxed awareness, as the ‘moon gazing’, though apparently not dynamic by themselves, actually serve to provide the needed diversion from feverish activities, which a human mind is prone to. Thus enabling the aspirant to be with himself, these exercises set in motion the creative mechanism within.
Earmarking some time for “being with oneself” is also often termed as “being in solitude.” This solitude is not loneliness — in fact, it is far from it. Creative and true solitude is being in dynamic company with the self within and the creative outpourings of the sublime vibrations, which inspire dynamic attainments in all fields of human endeavour. It is therefore, being in communion with and feeling as if tangibly, the promptings and messages of great minds and that of Mother Nature.
Awakening the dormant creativity within, these influences on the psyche also serve to neutralise and resolve the impressions in consequence of the cares, anxieties, impact of shallow relationships and bickering within. This also is the process of being born to one’s natural world for realising his true potential and worth.
The great Tamil saint, Avvaiyar when asked to name the sweetest experience, replied, “Solitude”. The Bible, observing (Psalms: 46, 10), “Be still and know I am God; also records (Mathew: 14, 23) how Jesus went to the mountains, to pray alone. This indeed is the process of seeking that kingdom of God, which, as noted (Luke: 17, 21), is “within you”!
It could be argued, with reason, that, to meet the demands of life and living, it is imperative to be involved continually with various activities and relationships. Nevertheless, in the midst of these, taking time off often to “do nothing in particular”, is also necessary as this process serves to recharge the spirit and generate the creativity within. This verily is also heeding the warning, pronounced many years ago, by William Wordsworth, “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

Source: The Economic Times

Iyya wrote: Be in Solitude

SPLIT a ray of light with a prism. Any child can do it today. But does that kill a rainbow? John Keats thought so, when he accused Sir Isaac Newton of having destroyed the beauty of a rainbow by ‘explaining’ it. Little did Keats suspect that Newton, who was such a towering icon of rationality in public life, was in fact obsessed with myth, magic and alchemy in his cloistered private life.
   To Newton, the fact that metals could be made to grow in a flask was a sign that they possessed some sort of life, and could therefore be made to ferment, putrefy and ultimately multiply. As a muchfeared Master of the Mint, Newton was more intrigued by the possibility of finding the philosopher’s stone. This was the goal — of changing base metals into gold with a magical touchstone — that every alchemist worth his salt had pursued since medieval times.
   In the later years, the legend of the lapis philosophorum grew ever more fanciful: it became known as a divine elixir that could immediately perfect any substance or situation. It also became associated with a variety of fantastic things including the astral body, salt of the earth, even Jesus Christ himself. No one knew that Newton sought this “blessing” which was believed to be one beyond all blessings upon the earth and which was supposedly given to but very few, and “to those few rather by revelation of the good angels of God than the proper industry of man”. This may explain why Newton plunged into the Bible and Cabala studies with such maniacal zeal. All this came to light only after Newton’s death.
   Newton’s double life — a great Magus in private and mathematician and pillar of Royal Society in public — hid yet another irony that would surely have humbled Keats had he known it in time. Keats had famously defined a man of achievement as someone endowed with “negative capability”, someone like Shakespeare, “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable searching after fact”.
   Even by that token, Newton seemed to have had more negative capability in his nails than many poets possessed in their entire bodies. What’s more he divined the music of the spheres with sheer force of mind without ever losing the loopiness of his heart. If ever there was a Taoist of Physics, it was Newton. He truly lived the life that William Blake talked about: “The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself.”

Source: The Economic Times

FROM the beginning of physics, there have been those who imagined they would be the last generation to face the unknown. Physics has always seemed to its practitioners to be almost complete. This complacency is shattered only during revolutions, when honest people are forced to admit that they don’t know the basics. But even revolutionaries still imagine that the big idea — the one that will tie it all up and end the search for knowledge — lies just around the corner.
   We live in one of those revolutionary periods, and have for a century. The last such period was the Copernican revolution, beginning in the early sixteenth century, during which Aristotelian theories of space, time, motion, and cosmology were overthrown. The culmination of that revolution was Isaac Newton’s proposal of a new theory of physics, published in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
in 1687. The current revolution in physics began in 1900, with Max Planck’s discovery of a formula describing the energy distribution in the spectrum of heat radiation, which demonstrated that the energy is not continuous but quantized. This revolution has yet to end. The problems that physicists must solve today are, to a large extent, questions that remain unanswered because of the incompleteness of the twentieth century’s scientific revolution.

Source: The Economic Times