Sensationalizing the Substance and then Substantiating the Sensation — The Cure and Remedy for this tendency
M.R. Subramanian a.k.a Ramanathan S Manavasi
The reason why I write articles for the Medium Website :
I adore most of the articles appearing in Medium Website. This framework publishes expressions of brilliant minds. The conception of various themes in a variety of disciplines — Science (Physics, Programming, AI, Deep Learning in particular), creation and curation of interesting topics in psychology, philosophy, politics etc., — they are simply admirable and adorable. An interesting article by Amy Suardi titled “Got Lots of Unfinished Work? vide https://medium.com/swlh/got-lots-of-unfinished-work-fde526cc83db thrilled me and I will cherish the inspiration always. Let us listen to Amy.
“For a piece of writing — or any creation — to realize its full potential, it must be let go to shine forth in the world.
Plant four seeds
In a row
One to rot
One to grow
One for the pigeon
and one for the crow
The farmer fully expects most of the seeds not to take off, and yet he plants them anyway. Most of nature’s products get reabsorbed and dissolved, but plants keep producing fruit, seeds, flowers — trillions of them. Writers keep writing, because life is always unfolding and there is always something new to examine, to celebrate, to share.
But keeping baby plants inside because they’re too tender, or not planting seeds because most won’t germinate, is allowing fear to halt the creation process. Maybe an article will reach a lot of people, maybe it won’t. Maybe a crow will eat it and poop it out in a more suitable location. Maybe it will rot, enriching the soil for a family of worms. So don’t create as if you were performing in a stadium. Create like a maple spawning thousands of winged seeds — and letting them all fly. Create like the Nature that you are. The massive quantity of writing out there is as bountiful as the leaves that drop in fall, composting into the earth for spring buds. Keep creating, and pushing it out into the sunlight. You have plenty more where that came from”.
Sacrificing Self for the sake of Social Inclusion and Acceptance :
We all wear a mask to some degree. We are all hiding something, sacrificing an aspect of ourselves for the sake of social inclusion and acceptance. We do this because underneath surface-level thought is the narrative that says it’s safe on the inside — on the outside, it’s dangerous. We are discouraged from going it alone, so most of us don’t. And so we never find out who we are.
It seems there is something within us that wants to belong, yet there is the parallel need for independent creative expression, albeit buried deep. So we experience conflict, one that every human being feels to varying degrees. But perhaps it’s felt more so by the artist, writer, performer or musician. The muse calls, yet the world calls too.
Whatever I am I find it’s indefinable — I’ll never get there, I’ll never reach it. If there is a self in me apart from this dichotomous exchange, its only job is to decide who has the loudest voice. All my life I have sought the shadows. Hiding who I am from everyone; Presenting part of me as all of me; A mask not quite a lie but not the whole of who I really am. The significance of the terms Sentience and Sapience is to be realized now.
Sentience and Sapience :
Sentience and sapience are two term that are often confused. Knowing the intrinsic meaning and significance of both these terms are absolutely necessary in our daily lives.
Sentience : Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia”). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that require respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights.
Sapience : Wisdom or sapience is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. There appears to be consensus that wisdom is associated with attributes such as compassion, experiential self-knowledge, non-attachment and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.
I have received the above image in Social Media. I was curious to know the veracity and implications of the statement mentioned therein. After some deliberate attempts to decipher the meaning of the terms Life, Reality, Adjustment, Feelings, I have finally arrived at the following nuggets of wisdom.
Advaita yoga which stipulates aesthetic experience :
To accept reality, quit your feelings at every stage and make adjustment to meet the demands of the reality. But the ancient Hindu saints thought otherwise. They believed in advaita yoga which stipulates aesthetic experience — a deep and subtle connection with their inner sensitivity and outer reality at the same time. The aesthetic experience (Rasa) is not only an enjoyment, but it also helps to sweep aside the thick clouds obscuring our lives. We are “cloudy.” We become dense because of the blocks, contractions, and physical and psychical knots built up as a result of everyday pressure. Beauty breaks down the continuity of the ordinary tightness of our lives.
Rasa is intensification; it removes obstructions and everything becomes fluid, widening, expansive (vitatā). The yogi and the lover of art forget their habitual shape and status and step into the taste of stillness, almost dissolving themselves and becoming open spaciousness. And they rest in this openness, they rest in themselves (atmaviśranti).
They create a “resonance with the heart” (hṛdayasaṃvāda), a deep and subtle connection with their inner sensitivity and outer reality at the same time. The yogi is a rasika: not only wakeful and sensitive, but “aesthetically sensitive” (sahṛdaya). Aesthetic sensitivity or awareness is an increased quality of attention, imbued with openness of body and heart.
When we are holding onto pleasant feelings at any cost, avoiding the painful ones, we prevent the natural blossoming of beauty (saundarya). We cover the experience with our longings. There’s a lack of vividness (sphuṭatva), and this cloudiness prevents us from entering the yogic experience as well.
In aesthetic experience, the enjoyment of beauty reveals itself in the relationship between the enjoyer (the subject of the experience) and the enjoyable (the object of the experience). The yogi has the chance to explore a super-beauty (ati-saundarya), in which subject and object dissolve one into the other, becoming the space of relationship.
In this regard we can look at yoga as a true art. The Sanskrit root ar- involves the meanings of moving, combining, bringing together and disclosing the right proportion among different things. The beautiful order performed by the artist or the dancer (nāṛtaka) on the stage is the same beautiful order performed by Siva naṭa-rāja, the Lord of the Dance, who makes the world — and by the yogi in the creation of āsana.
Medieval advaita yoga speaks about passionate attention, a kind of “hot cognition” instead of the cold cognition of the ordinary mind. Rasa is a way to know through tasting reality (saṃviccarvanā). This full sensorial unfolding is called udyama, the joyful adherence to whatever we perceive in the experience of art or in yoga practice, an open, all-inclusive momentum, not identified with our personal desires or drives. This joyful wakefulness does not want to reach a goal, but simply wishes for what is here, what is occurring moment to moment. It’s a savoring, non-grasping attitude.
Inspiration from a Goddess never not broken :
Deriving inspiration from the Goddess Akilandeswari (Thiruvanaikaval Temple at Srirangam, Trichy, Tamilnadu, India) is appropriate here. “Ishvari” in Sanskrit means “goddess” or “female power,” and the “Akhilanda” means essentially “never not broken.” In other words, The Always Broken Goddess. Sanskrit is a tricky and amazing language. I love that the double negative here which means that she is broken right down to her name. But this is not the kind of broken that indicates weakness and terror. It is the kind of broken that tears apart all the stuff that gets us stuck in toxic routines, repeating the same relationships and habits over and over, rather than diving into the scary process of trying something new and unfathomable. Akhilanda derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.
Ramana Maharshi’s lucid comments about Reality :
From our perception of the world there follows acceptance of a unique first principle possessing various powers. Pictures of name and form, the person who sees, the screen on which he sees, and the light by which he sees: he himself is all of these.
All religions postulate the three fundamentals, the world, the soul, and God, but it is only the one Reality that manifests itself as these three. One can say, “The three are really three” only so long as the ego lasts. Therefore, to inhere in one’s own being, where the “I”, or ego, is dead, is the perfect state.
Although the world and knowledge thereof rise and set together it is by knowledge alone that the world is made apparent. That Perfection wherein the world and knowledge there of rise and set, and which shines without rising and setting, is alone the Reality.
Under whatever name and form one may worship the Absolute Reality, it is only a means for realizing It without name and form. That alone is true realization, wherein one knows oneself in relation to that Reality, attains peace and realizes one’s identity with it. The duality of subject and object and trinity of seer, sight, and seen can exist only if supported by the One. If one turns inward in search of that One Reality they fall away. Those who see this are those who see Wisdom. They are never in doubt.
Borrowing Intelligence from the Article “The Value of Emotion — A Way Through Pain” :
You will always find pain, and its cousin suffering, covered by religions, spiritual/esoteric schools, secular self-help gurus, and mental health professionals of varying ilk. In many ways, I find most all of these fields lacking in some way: too general and lacking practical guidelines, too specific and therefore not personally relatable, not logically rigorous enough, or simply so far off the mark.
By pain, I mean the physical, mental, and spiritual dis-ease that arises as one attempts to figure out their own humanity. Pain happens by course of being a human navigating the world. Put more succinctly, pain is a natural by-product of living.
If you Google the difference between pain and suffering — go ahead, I will wait — you will find a couple of different themes presented. One: pain is inevitable, while suffering is an option. Two: pain occurs naturally, while suffering is “the story you tell yourself about your pain.” While both hold some truth, neither one alone tells the complete story. What’s more, a dearth of suggestions usually follows such admonishments. I would like to connect these two statements and deepen the understanding about this core human issue. I will say at the outset that I do indeed agree that pain proves inevitable and that suffering “is optional.” But stating this without giving the reader a way out is like telling someone they’ve got something stuck in their teeth and not offering a mirror. I won’t do you like that.
We need to start by unpacking what it means to “tell a story.” We as humans were made for storytelling. Storytelling occurs as a human right and need to make sense of the absurdity we call existence. So, it’s not story telling per se that makes for bad happenings, it’s the content and direction of said story.
We create suffering when we resist our authentic, lived experience. I must emphasize that pain, besides being inevitable, is also obvious. We know when we are hurting. Not so with suffering. Because people all too often confuse the two, they might very well describe their pain as suffering. The process of this mislabeling and mishandling of emotion leads to a habituated pattern of resistance and, you guessed it, more suffering.
I would like to unveil my pet theory about emotions. Apart from emotion being an energetic joining of physical and mental movement, which you can also read as physical sensations concepts, emotions also serve as signals. These energetic information packets inform us about our current relationship with a particular value. The values I am referring to reside in quality. Quality is quintessentially phenomenological. Values are personally felt experiences that express, support, and demonstrate existential identity. Think adjectives: brave, kind, punctual, thorough, etc. Values are the qualities we want to embody, that we dynamically strive towards actualizing.
Keep in mind that I am orienting you to a perspective that sees emotion as an energetic expression of relationship. Each emotion possesses a particular dynamic that, when fully understood, guides and directs self-through-world.
Wisdom from the words of Mark Nepo ~~ The sensation of being alive in the company of another :
“It does not matter how we come to this. We may jump to it or be worn to it. Because of great pain. Or a sudden raw feeling that this is all very real. It may happen in a parking lot when we break the eggs in the rain. Or watching each other in our grief.
But here we will come. With very little left in the way. When we meet like this, I may not have the words, so let me say it now: Nothing compares to the sensation of being alive in the company of another. It is God breathing on the embers of our soul.” ~Mark Nepo
Thanks for reading patiently.
Regards