Herein, I wish to start with some factual ideas about our world and then we can build up from there. First, let us agree that no one ever sees anything for what it truly is. The phenomena of refraction and reflection make it impossible to get there. In short, reflection is what we can see and refraction is what we can’t. Thus, our understanding of this world is not perfect. Neither can my search for nature’s true meaning be ever complete. It is simply not meant to be. This is the ground reality that I accept. At the same time, I do not take this to mean that patterns are not observable and inferences not reachable.
For example, let’s say that earth and nature has a pattern. Let’s call it self-cleaning. One of the characteristics of sustainability is self-cleansing. Ruthless and honest. In Balaghat, I loved the first rain after the long summer. The scent of soil, dust, trees, animals and plants were all intertwined and one could feel it in the winds. This is the scent of unity. And we danced in exhilaration and experienced and welcomed the next stage of it. It was propagation, movement and, ultimately, nature’s cycles.
Nowadays, however, people speak of “acid rain” which are also largely responsible for dimming the shine of Taj Mahal. Put it simply, anything acidic leads to corrosion. And corrosion leads to decay. When the first monsoons fell on us in India, it made the sky cleaner and one could see further. It was like making something anew to restart the system. Sort of like what we do with our computers (with Control+Alt+delete). In Künzelsau, and especially in my train or bus routes, I have seen the snow fall all over earth. First just a few tidbits and then nonstop snowfall, covering every conceivable part of the nature. The point is that rain in Balaghat and snow in Künzelsau is supposed to do the same. Self-cleanse. But it can’t.
The black you see (as a color) is the dirt we have imprinted onto our surroundings. Snow is white for a reason. Optical laws dictate that when all visible spectrum is reflected back, one sees white and when it is all absorbed one sees black. This is to highlight that we only can “see” what is reflected.
I have my personal reasons to understand what it means “to see” and they are irrelevant for this post. Suffice it to say that I neither just want to see black, nor white. I want to see colors of all in-between wavelengths. I was 8 when some people helped me see that moon’s reflected light also contains a rainbow. It was a simple experiment where one throws water in the air and that water can create the short-lived rainbow. Its fascinating really. This grew on me and made me search more for what one sees when we observe “light.” I am happy to know that similar methods (aka gravitational lensing) is now being used to detect planetary motions across other galaxies. It is normal, actually; especially once we lay down the fact that light itself is bendable and gravity can itself exert a force to make it happen.
More to the point here is that I can see sky-dirt falling off. It looks like a shower. But it does not clean like a shower should. Nature knows how to clean itself and balance itself. Perhaps there was always this dirt, in whatever form it may have existed. For us, however, it exists in the form of water we can’t drink. The food we cannot regrow. The land we cannot re-cultivate. We all rely on the nature staying sustainable for it to continue to provide us with the resources we need to survive. Therefore, there is an interdependence. And sadly, we have fucked with it enough.
It should not be that we create more dirt than nature knows how to clean. Just like you expect your soap, shampoo and whatever products you use to physically cleanse your body, you expect afterwards to feel clean, be bacteria and germs free etc. You don’t come out of shower thinking wow, I am so dirty. Similarly, why do we expect nature to come out and say, dammit it’s still dirty?
Why this matters? Because there are limits to what we can register with our senses. When we know for a fact that all of the realities that we can register wont ever be 100%, doesn’t it make sense then to start with that? None of our senses are perfectly reliable. This is also the reason why spirit and heart has its own insight too.
A star (including our own Sun) is active because it is continuously burning helium at its core. Helium is the simplest of matters really, that’s why its the first one in our periodic table. One electron and one proton is all that’s needed. The longer this can continue to exist, the longer can everything else exist. Blackholes don’t suck things in. They are the much-after results of a star having died. And a star dies when at its core it has birthed iron. Iron is what messes up the entire structure. (For more on this, you may watch Kurzgesagt video which explains all this phenomenon in very lucid terms)
The lessons then should be, to have a simple heart for us as humans. And that not be “iron” for us not to die out. All of these universal processes are here only because none has become iron yet. Let’s not go there.
Let’s not create iron at our souls and hearts and everything else. It stops movement and that stops everything. Our sun and thereby the solar system will perish when sun’s core has created iron. This is a fact.
Let us, instead, understand that all of what we see, feel and experience has always been changing. We have measured gravitational waves already on earth and they are essentially “ripples”… One quality of which is that they are continuous. Along with insights put forth by Einstein, I take this to mean that SpaceTime is bendable. And this, at least for me, is not science fiction. Sure, this maybe (for now) theoretical physics but it is only a matter of time before we have observed and noted down everything else.
My questions for now are actually very simple: Why don’t we accept that the world has always been changing? Yes, there were events which caused a ripple in space-time but ripple hasn’t stopped. Our understanding of both what we know about space and time has been (or must be) changed.
Let’s begin the story then with the factual realities. All of what I have hitherto written are the biggest of changes, made at the smallest scales regarding this matter. Your matter, my matter… Our matter. Our atoms. Our electrons. These are the facts. And we should accept them. When physical realities change, so does the world.
This is why, I think, its exceedingly important to delve into one more concept. This is called (in Hindi) Ardhangini. It is the unity of nature, explained in the terms that one needs “she” and “he” to make things happen. And this is the universality. Life doesn’t come to us in its perfect shape. We need to make it that way and that requires balance between two undeniable realities of this world. Let’s respect that and try to make our lives a little better :)
