Reality – a truth so absurd, it has perennially perplexed the most brilliant of minds. The contemplation of which is the obsession of every being who seeks the answer to the simple yet maddening question, “why?”. Every aspect of human reality remains a bewildering portrayal of how strange existence is; sometimes horrifying and sometimes rather euphoric.
Think of it this way: a galaxy in a cluster of billions, a star system in that galaxy, again, one in a billion, home to a planet on which we dwell. What are the odds? Would it be any more random if humans were replaced with, let’s say, talking bugs? Franz Kafka, in his famous novella, The Metamorphosis, indirectly illustrates this supposition. Many absurdist playwrights and authors have also tried putting forth such thoughts in their works.
A way of understanding this notion is through the experience of derealization. It’s the feeling one gets while looking at the mirror for a bit too long and feeling disconnected from oneself. To me, that is actual awareness. The state you and I are in now, this “normal” feeling is nothing but abstraction and absence of mind.
To tangle up this inquisition further, there is no fundamental proof of what was and what is. Carefully consider the following circumstance: suppose your reality changes- your thoughts, memories, experiences, and surroundings. Everything, out of nowhere, somehow changes. How would you know this did not happen? Maybe this happened to you or me a second ago, what is our reality in such a case?
This brings us to another enigma of humanity, consciousness. The problem with consciousness is profoundly complex, and a rather confounding one. How do our brains integrate information? Why are physical experiences accompanied by emotional fluctuation? The human mind is an elaborate labyrinth full of conundrums.
One of these is also free will, yet another puzzle of our reality. The freedom to do what one wants is dizzying. A man on the ledge of a twenty-story building feels two anxieties at the same time: one caused by the fear of falling and the other, by his own will to jump, his ability to end himself. This analogy was proposed by notable theistic existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard.
Understanding existence is as hard as explaining the world to a person born blind. If they ask you to describe the atmosphere, the most straightforward answer would be something like “sunny”. But what does “sunny” look like? Some would say it looks and feels like light and warmth. But that is still not a visual description.
This inquiry is an infinite trench with virtually no answers. The more insightfully we observe things and the more we get to know ourselves, the lesser we realize we actually know.
To conclude, there are no definite answers to anything except that of God. All the solutions to the questions of our muddled-up minds lie within introspection, but there are infinite questions, nonetheless. This has been a baffling course of questions with no real explanations, but that is where the real fun is; in curiosity. As Socrates has said, “Let questions be the curriculum”.
Saqlain Beig
Class XII
