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The
above three are enshrined in the preamble to the American
Constitution, written in the year 1772, by Thomas
Jefferson. What laudable objectives to achieve, when
possible, in this world!
Life is an enigma. It is next to impossible to say
what life has in store for anyone at any given
time." On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the
finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five
travelers into the gulf below." Why did this bridge,
the best in all Peru, break, and why did those five die
at that time? Is there a pattern in human life, or a plan
in the Universe at all? " Either we live by accident
or die by accident " said Thornton Wilder, the great
American novelist of the early part of this century, in
his book The bridge of San Luis Rey, the classic
written in 1927. He also felt that these kind of things
that happen in life are unfit for scientific scrutiny,
for want of what they call proper control. He goes
on to add "Some say we shall never know, and that to
the Gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on
summer day, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do
not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the
fingers of God".
Liberty is a relative word in any given society or
civilization, the latter two words being used
interchangeably by many thinkers of yore, as for example,
Lucien Goldmann, writing in his famous book The Hidden
God ( Le Dieu Cache, 1955 ), rightly says that "
in every case this view of the world is coloured, if not
determined, by social tensions." Fernand Braudel,
the famous French historian, says that " the
question frequently put to him, by both historians and
philosophers, was what becomes of man, his role in
history, his freedom of action?" This question is
best answered by another thinker of that time, Gertrude
Himmelfarb, in 1940, at the height of the"Hitlerian
paradox", who said that liberty of every man "
is being convulsed by the passions of a single man".
Is that not true today in any other society or
civilization?
Happiness is living dangerously, was the motto in
one of London’s schools. What a scientific
statement? It is all in the mind- happiness being a state
of the mind, at any given point in time. Pittacus (
Plutarch, De la tranquillite de
l’esprit-tranlated. Amyot ) said that every man
has his curse: his was his wife’s bad temper; "
if it were not for that he would think himself entirely
happy". " Seeing that so just, so wise, so
valiant, so great a man like Pittacus should feel the
whole state of his life corrupted by it, it must indeed
be a grievous clog. So what are we to do about it,
little men like us?" asks Michel De Montaigne,
the great French philosopher in his beautiful classic
" The Essays ". While on this topic it
is good to get reminded of what Socrates said when he was
asked whether it was appropriate to take or not take a
wife, he replied " whichever you do you will be
sorry". Very true. " Man is God or wolf to
man" was very famous proverb. One can make or break
one’s happiness. Another reason to be unhappy is the
feeling of being not appreciated. It is better to
remember that the " most beautiful and most virtuous
of deeds are not always the most celebrated ones."
A friend of mine once told me that life is like going out
for a drive in a car. If you start with a bad car and
flat tyres, you are more likely to meet with an accident,
than if you started with a new Mercedez Benz. In real
life this does not hold good that way at all. If one is
alive and healthy at a given time it is because of chance,
and if one has lost a near and dear one unexpectedly, or
if one is suffering from a deadly disease at a given
time, again it is because of chance, I wrote in my
book Holistic Living, some years ago. Many of my
colleagues were very angry with me for that remark.
However, a recent meta analysis of all the medical data
so far collected put into a supercomputer gave the same
verdict that chance could not be ruled out as the
cause of all the findings reported.
" Doctors have been predicting the
unpredictable" all these years was the firm opinion
of a great physicist, Professor Firth, of the Strathclyde
University in Glasgow. Time evolution does not depend on
the partial knowledge of the organism, and even a small
change in the initial state could result in dramatic
changes as time evolves. This new knowledge in science is
called the science of Chaos, and explains all
these unexpected things happening around us. All our risk
factor hypotheses, and the screening procedures, do not
necessarily predict the future correctly and a recent
audit did show the futility of many of these expensive
procedures. All these procedures, however, have the
capacity to make man unhappy because of many false
positive tests and the uncertainty of the genuinely
positive tests in bringing on the danger in the distant
future.This was very well shown by the shopping plaza
blood pressure measurements introduced in USA in many
places. This resulted in many people being labeled
hypertensives and the consequent sick absenteeism that it
brought about.The effort has been given up now.
Montaigne was again at his best when he said
"considering the frailty of our life and the number
of natural hazards to which it is exposed, we should not
allow so large a place in it to being born, to leisure
and to our apprenticeship-I cannot accept the way we
determine the span of our lives". "Men are vain
authorities who can resolve nothing" was the firm
belief of Socrates himself !
One sure way of keeping oneself happy is to fill the mind
with altruism, a beautiful concept given to us by
the French philosopher Comte; jealousy being our worst
enemy, we are better off giving love in abundance."
If joy is what you give away, joy is what comes back each
day was the belief of Amy Cassidy, a leading American
poetess"Qua Deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum,
Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit, unde coacti,
Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit;
Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine apet,
Eranus, et in undeperennis aqua? ( Montaigne, 1580)
[By what artifice God
governs this world, our home; where the moon comes from,
where she does go and how she does bring her horns
together month after month and grow full; whence the
gales spring which rule the salty sea, and what dominion
does the south wind enjoy; whence come those waters which
are ever in the clouds? is the English translation.] He
went on to add that " no knowledge of mine will
bring it to change its course; it will not take to
different road for my sake. It is madness to wish it
so". What a beautiful statement of the truth, which
is higher than all our experiences, scientific or
otherwise. That was his metaphysics, but looks like
modern physics of the non-linear mathematics and chaos.
Life , liberty, and happiness are all in the human mind,
the latter is in the driving seat of human destiny to a
very great extent. One can make or break his life. One
could bring on happiness or depression on oneself at
will. If we contemplate on all these, man will stop
squandering the sparse resources of this planet. Because
of our actions, based may be on scientific assumptions,
we have been destroying our planet gradually. Now
thinkers all over have been alerted and recently there
was a conference about that in London, where it was
decided to warn the powers that be about our self
destruction, as otherwise by the year 2020 AD, the
temperature of this planet is going to go up by 2 degree
Celsius, making life miserable for all of us. It is
supposed to kill at least 60-80 million people with
malaria alone in the West. The sea water will come up by
50 centimeters and that will submerge many of the island
nations of the world. The most important culprit in the
game is carbon dioxide produced by our burning the fossil
fuels. Let me end this article by reminding ourselves of
the famous saying of Allan Porter in his good book God’s
Fools, " Man with his proclivity for comfort,
and his greed, will eventually destroy all the natural
resources of this planet- this will happen in all kinds
of societies- whether in monarchy, aristocracy,
plutocracy, democracy " or what have you.. .
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