Dec 16, 2010

Molecular Visualizations of DNA: A profoundly beautiful phenomenon



Amazing CGI visualization of molecular biology's central dogma. It shows animations of DNA coiling, replication, transcription and translation.

Dec 5, 2010

Do NOT "be your self", if that even means anything!!

One of the most over-used over-rated and faux-wise formulations of the modern/postmodern era is the jaded idea of “being your self”. I have, upon hearing it ad nauseum now, come to absolutely despise it. When one actually does sit down to analyze what good there is to it, one finds nothing but a sack of entangled contradictions.


We all have either multiple selves or a 
multifaceted self but NOT a unitary self
To begin with, most people are remarkably ignorant about what is it that their selves really are. In fact to be certain, there really is not a coherent monolithic self-contained thing as the “self”. The author undertook to examine different theoretical traditions in scholastic disciplines devoted, in part, to the understanding of this elusive construct of "self", a construct which has found its way into widespread use in everyday language but remains frustratingly  hard to precisely define or articulate even. While there are divergences, what forms the common denominator of all “self” traditions (incl. in psychology and psychoanalysis), is that self is an ensemble of many things... a constellation of multiply realized ideas, schemas, memories, and emotional complexes. Without getting into the nuts and bolts of it, it’d be sufficient for us to distill out of the foregoing that there is no one, stable definite thing as a self – its very "thingness" is suspect - which fundamentally eats into the premise of “being yourself”.

Nov 28, 2010

The sublime quality of Absurdity

The 'original' Absurdity: Man-in-the-universe
Absurdity of human life, make no mistake, is its defining condition. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the entire lexicon of all human languages that so precisely, and dare i say handsomely, describes the human condition as the cute little word 'absurd'.
At the outset, this is no reason for pessimism, neither for despondency nor is it anything particularly remarkable - in fact, what ought to be remarkable , truly amazing and almost incomprehensible is how it takes considerable effort , sincere dedication, intelligent thinking and some good guidance to realize this pervasive substrate of reality that underpins each and every human experience - or for that matter any experience at all of a self-conscious being. Self-consciousness, thus conceived,  is the necessary and sufficient condition to experience the absurd. In fact, the degree and purity of the absurdity experienced is in direct proportion to the extent and intent of self-consciousness. Ordinary human experience has to be excoriated, layer by layer of all its unstable, superficial conceptions, sheaths and semantics to uncover what lies at the core - pure, ineffable absurdity. 


The Four Horsemen (HD): Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Dan Denett & Christopher Hitchens in conversation


They discuss the tough questions about, inter alia, religion, faith, science, politics, culture..








IF YOU ARE WONDERING ABOUT THE TITLE...

A rendition of the Biblical Four Horsemen
The 'Four Horsemen' of the Apocalypse are described in the last book of the New Testament of the Bible, called the Book of Revelation of Jesus Christ to Saint John the Evangelist. The four riders are commonly seen as symbolizing Conquest, War, Famine and Death, respectively. The Christian apocalyptic vision is that the four horsemen are to set a divine apocalypse upon the world as harbingers of the Last Judgment. 
 

A declaration of discontinuity

Having not written for a long long time, i find myself a stranger to my own words and to all the imagery that they evoke in my head as i re-read them. I realized... and intend to convey that very realization... of in some sense having moved on from the perspective that informed and oversaw all that i have written hitherto.It is peculiar, in a comforting sort of way, to know that one can graduate to a standpoint from where your own earlier standpoint(s) may be appraised and vivisected in all formerly unimaginable ways. 

As to what precipitated this change is unclear, or at least not clear enough to be precisely pointed out here - I've carried on growing as a person as all of us do, i've been reading a lot more of late, a lot more kinds of reading too. Have met and interacted intensely with some very smart and knowledged fellows, clarified certain things that stood in need of clarification, muddle up a few things i had foreclosed as clear, and really, an unneccessary-to-mention assortment of other phenoms have perhaps cumulatively changed the qualia of my weltanschauung.

So, here it is, I am back, and will hopefully be able to reflect on all the thing around me, with a renewed and enriched perspective. What it may not have though, is continuity with my earlier posts, I may very well contradict some of what i have already exposited, I may go against what you may have presumed my natural stance on an issue to be - but what has not changed is my the belief in the desirability of philosophy, philosophy in everyday life, a habit-of-thought of applying our rational consciousness to our existence and increase the sum total of what we know, what we think and what we imagine - and perhaps what we are and can be.

Oct 29, 2010

Chris Anderson: How YouTube is driving innovation



TED's Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation -- a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter ...!!

Mar 3, 2010

Michael Specter: The danger of science denial


Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.

Feb 27, 2010

The truth(or the falsehood) of Karma

All right.. let's get one idea right .. we have remarkably more control over our lives than we are generally prepared to accept. By implication, we also have full responsibility for our lives. The very idea that there is a greater divine agency controlling the outcomes of our lives and that too in consistency with a selection principle based on a human moral constructs like 'good' deeds and 'bad' deeds stinks of fear, insecurity, misunderstanding and of an escapement from the truth.

Lets get the prevalent and purported beliefs in order first. To put simply, the philosophical conclusion of the concept of 'karma', at least insofar it is held in the popular imagination, seems to lead to a order of nature where all the 'good' and 'bad' that one accumulates decides or weighs upon the causes and effects that unfold with your life. And apparently you generate these 'good' and 'bad' karmas through your actions,through your thoughts, through your words and also through the actions of others under your influence. It's sort of a current account, the balance in which is supposedly the principal determining agent of causation in your life. Of course, in trivial terms, it means that what goes around comes around or in other words still, if you do bad it falls back unto you as well as the good that comes back to you for the good you've accumulated. And get one thing straight, the believers ill tell you that this is a strict determinate law of life, and there will be others who say that over and above that it is permeable to god's will , i.e.,"god does not make one suffer for no reason nor does he make one happy for no reason, god is very fair and gives you exactly what you deserve". The long and short of it is that, at least in the hindu tradition, god is the dispenser of karma.

Now, there are absolutely overwhelming evidence in the reality of our lives to rid this idea of all logicality and hence its warranted assertability. We do this with the caveat that as the concept appears in Upanishadic philosophy, it is of little concern to us, as it appears in the faith of the millions who live it like a creed every moment of their lives. Lets get them right one by one:

1. For a universal system that ensures that everyone gets what they deserve, the precondition, or one of the many preconditions that must exist/be fulfilled is the existence of a universally applicable standard to judge 'deserving' from 'non-deserving'. More over, it also necessiates a universal, unbiased arbitrator to do so (we deal with god later). None of the above seems like a being in the realm of reality. Did Bhagat singh deserve to die? Yes from someones point of view who believes in a judicial system that punishes death by death. No from someones viewpoint who considers death penalty as a historical mistake that needs to be eliminated from all systems of justice. Yes again for the sympathisers of the british raj. No still by the indian who felt his freedom wrenched out of his life. The point behind my reiteration of differing instances is to demonstrate that the whole concept of 'deserving something' in a human construct. It is not present "out there" in the sphere of some absolute, transcendental reality but 'in here' enshrined in our own moral traditions which begin and end with an uniquely human and emotional interpretation of the world. It's an attempt to reduce reality to the limit of our understanding without regard to a metaphysical framework to support it.

2. Now lets come to the second point, which is that of the need for a universal, unbiased observer who is able to perceive all the things at all the times, is omnipotent and everpresent. Well, it will presumably have to be god. So its god who manages, powers and drives the whole karmic cycle ensuring that it follows the rule of fair return for 'good' or 'bad' that any human manages to generate. Now yet again, this implies an interventionist god, one that actively manages the affairs of this world, one that exercises almost complete control over the outcomes or the possibilities of our existence. Now please connect the dots and tell me that you are forced to conclude that god here is a bit of a misanthropic sadist. If he indeed controls all the outcomes and if its him who decides/designs the nature of reality then why did he in the first place make allowance for suffering in the scheme of things. Why dint he just give humans and everything else only a capacity for good. At the very least he is a very bad designer. At logical extremes, this argument is enough to rule out god's intervention in the supposed karmic cycle on account of internal contradiction that it leads us to.

3. Now, i hope we believe that there is no such thing as good, bad or deserve-ment/deserve-tion in any absolute universal sense. Then we also ruled out the possibility of god actively managing the whole show. Now lets turn inwards. I postulate here that this fatalistic belief is actually a defence/coping mechanism which took form of a religious/spiritual belief in response to some of the most profound and deep rooted aspects of our emotional experience of life. The need for us to believe that this is a fair world where all get what they deserve, the need for us to believe that there is something universally good that we must all strive for, the need for an emotional/spiritual incentive for us to take a righteous path in the face of a world where people gain prosperity at the cost of other people's prosperity and the need for us to have a common belief which can unite our lives by positively predisposing us towards doing good to others will go far in explaining the genesis and ontology of this prevalent belief.
It is much like how when man feared fire, thunder, floods or any other force of nature he started worshiping them (across all pre-modern cultures, across many modern cultures at some point in history), hoping that it would lead to some sort of sympathetic remuneration by the forces of nature. I mean, its abundantly clear that the weather pattern turned out and will continue to turn out in accordance with the energy equilibrium of the earth and will be described accurately by the laws of physics. No amount of incantations, rituals or prayers are going to play any role in changing what the interplay of geography and physics will decide. Still, to this day we notice many cultures venerating and consecrating these forces of nature in an exhibition of cultural retardation. The point is, it makes many of us live more peacefully in an otherwise absurd, uncertain and meaningless world. Thus the emotional instinct and the psychological affinity to construct such beliefs within which we can spend our time here in this world with peace.


Well, i certainly do not wish to, not that i think i'm capable of, shake any one's belief out of recognition here. What i do wish to do here, and hope have been able to do, is to demonstrate that assertion of your beliefs onto others , or construction and perpetration of you idea of life based on notions handed down by generations past is not the wisest idea. It almost necessarily renders our conception of life a little behind what the passage of time and progress of ideas would justify. Perhaps most importantly, the point i make here is that your own unique, personal emotional reaction to the fact of existence is what should be the starting point of all your beliefs. Remember, its us ourselves who are completely responsible for our lives. There may be millions of factors outside your control which causally interfere with your life, but they are all in this world. There is'nt a divine magical engine driving it. Make what you have to of your own life.

Feb 24, 2010

I really should've been a Virus

A virus is just a strand of RNA molecule inside a cell membrane. The concept of life and death does not even apply to it in a clear cut fashion. What a life (or the lack of it)!! I sincerely wish i was a virus, perhaps a benevolent one, not the kinds which spread diseases, but the kinds which is content just  to be.. just plainly, simply exist. I mean how many complications can you imagine in the life of a 'thing' which is'nt even a full cell. All you would have to do ....is nothing at all. No consciousness to worry you, no reproductive motive driving you, no need or utility for material things, no social traditions to follow. Damn, no birth and death to punctuate time for you.

Well i am certain there is'nt a way to disprove the hypothesis that viruses are better off than us(while there may not be to prove it either). In fact they may quite be the best exemplars of transcendent beings beyond whole happiness-sadness spiral. It all leads me to think that viruses are perhaps the only 'things' which may come into being having pre-attained the hindu ideal of salvation/moksha in some form or shape, even before religiously qualifying for it by being born. Damn!!

Feb 19, 2010

Thinking a purpose of life 101: A Primer

The whole driving force behind thinking is to transcend the process of thought itself. 

Disambiguation ,i.e, separation of "one" from the "other" , is the basic unit of thought 

....and thinking thus yields a disambiguated picture of what is the mind independent objective reality that we intake through our sensory perceptions and that’s where the problem starts. Reality "in itself" is an integrated whole, it is a cognitive limitation of our thought process to see it in terms of constituents. So thinking has to be balanced by "feeling", that is to say, one has to think life and live life at the same time. Thinking independent of living and living independent of thinking is the same, both useless. Yet again to be "useless" or "useful" in life... one has to define a "use" first, now that’s a fundamental problem.


Most of us define it narrowly in the manner that we our conditioned by our environment through numerous reinforcements (both positive for certain things and negative for certain others). If one tries to break away from the context of his life, only then one makes some sense of life which is absolute, but in the context that our life inherits, this sense of realization may transform from being absolute to being absolutely "useless". Perhaps the need to take care of the context of one's life (parents, society, money, country, culture, systems etc) as a hygiene factor, i.e., something which needs to be done in order to be "not sad". Then, once one reconciles the context to one’s envisioned absolute purpose (self-actualization maybe??) by say earning enough money, having enough sex, having enough of an ego trip etc, so as to be able to move to a higher level of existence without the contextual needs bothering you, only then can one aim at being "happy". I suspect most people in life, by chasing grades, sex , money, ego etc are just trying very hard to be "not sad" under the illusion of chasing happiness. From their lives, “happiness” is missing. While on the other extreme there is a minority chasing "happiness" by focusing on the sublime and the transcendental and disregarding grades, sex , money, ego etc wishing all the time that they be "not sad" , but of course that never happens. From thier lives "not being sad" is missing. One needs to be both "not sad" and "happy" to feel free of the dread of existing meaninglessly. A need is a felt sense of deprivation. A sense of deprivation felt most often and most precisely can be characterized as a basic need, like food, clothing, shelter and in the modern society add communication/transportation...and go on in that order. One feels deprived of food every few hours and one knows what one has to do to relieve that need - one has to eat.
 
A sense of deprivation felt less often and more profoundly is a perhaps a higher order need. E.g. one often feels an indefinable anxiety, one does not even feel it in discreet units, it is almost like a leitmotif of life, like a background noise out of your control rendering everything less of meaning and satisfaction. One does not even have the wherewithal to define it. And that’s when you don’t even know what the hell to do about it. Now the fact is, in reality, unlike Maslow would have you believe, these needs don’t come in serial order, all the needs our present all the time, we just miss some and focus more on others. One has to keep everything in mind. The clarity one achieves along the course of life of the sense of deprivation one has is what dictates the action one takes to mitigate that deprivation. 

So, I guess, the best one can do is, to at least undo all the sense of deprivation one clearly feels and knows what to do in order to be free from it, and it’s my belief that by doing so this arrangement of different deprivations will become clearer in a stepwise fashion, like ice melting off layer by layer, and revealing a deeper truth every time

Jan 31, 2010

Richard Dawkins: A thesis seeking resolution of the "why" questions vs. "how" questions in human enquiry.


All the intellectual force, humor, razor-sharpness that is Richard is on a wonderful exhibition here. I would prefer a theatrical release of his talks actually.
Of particular interest in this talk is the thesis of "Archaeo purpose vs. Neo purpose" and the "Subversion of purpose".

Jan 18, 2010

A Passive Metaphysic of Existence

Perhaps this is just a disembodied soliloquy that lost its way into my consciousness... perhaps is it just me using words as a metaphysical device to achieve a connection with my own "self".

I am me... siddharth kaushal… i… am... siddharth kaushal... my being representable by a textual configuration. What is 'siddharth kaushal'?... whats my being?... I, the subject, ask myself this question and let my self, the object, answer me... Not 'myself' but 'my self'...

I make the necessary distinction between 'myself' and 'my self'... between the 'I' and the 'Me'... the knower and the subject known. 


My being is primarily apprehended as my life… which is in turn cognized as the 'aggregate' perception of my existence.. !! My life is, in all its magnificence, in its existential entirety a perception of my existence. By the intellective force of reason it accesses itself. What separates me from the rock outside, the chair I rest my material form on, from the road that swathes my house, from the notebook that lies in front of me…they all exist as is do.. just that they are devoid of , bereft of, oblivious to any perception of being in existence...

Jan 16, 2010

Yours Truly - Your Ambition

The only thing that truly belongs to you in any absolute sense, is your unique, personal sense of ambition in life.

The question here actually begs as to what it means for something to belong to something/someone else?

Let’s make a neccessary distinction  between the commonly used concepts of ownership, possession, title, property and the general idea of “having something” on one hand and true belongingness on the other. While you own things paid for, you possess objects and artifacts at your disposal, you have the title to your property, you “have” friends to call your own etc... none of them actually belong to you insofar all of them are 'not you' by their make/nature. Belonging, in the purest sense is matter of constitution, i.e. the very constitution(elemental construction) of an entity or a “thing” is what determines its belongingness.
From the instances mentioned above… the car by its constitution is metal and rubber, the watch would be metal and quartz by its make, the property is made up of a lot of cement and bricks (which in turn are reducible to matter “other than you”)…. Of course your friends are “whole other” human beings. So now what does it mean?? that all these things are by constitution, by nature's construct different from you, and while you may “have” them in some way or other, in some form or shape, by some arrangement or mechanism you may 'relate' to them…. They never completely “belong” to you.
Your ambition on the other hand is an absolutely native element in your person. You’re ambition is made up of your emotions, your experiences, your feelings, your thoughts, your dreams, percepts, cognitions, your personal history and in fact your identity. All the else which make up the person that is you, which constitute your personhood. Thus, your ambition is made up of you.

Your ambition by its constitution is yours, it’s your personal reaction, response to the fact of existence. It’s logically and by the virtue of being 'immensly exclusively' related to you ...the highest and purest ideal in “your” life. It’s what gives meaning to your life, in fact it really is how you give meaning to your own life. The only thing worth the moment that it fills.


Disambiguation:
(i) Ambition is not just a career objective or a temporary goal. In fact it is not even just one thing, in its truest sense ambition is a dynamic equilibrium that you hope to achieve between your personal, professional and social goals

Jan 6, 2010

Deconstructed: 5 Minutes of Life - A Primer


Deconstruction: An artistic rendition

Let my start be an emphasis on the fact that this is a rather abstract and esoteric description of a conception which, as within actuality, is a simple experience of life, a plain picture to imagine once it is constructed correctly but due to our conditioned experience, comprehension and semantic representation of the world it may prove elusive initially to perfectly internalize the view that I hope I succeed to deliver. We will first deconstruct the view that we hold of the 'passage of life' through time and then reconstruct the composition it in a particular manner with different (substitute) elements. Now instead of actually stating that what I am going to eventually describe I'd rather lay a foundation on which to do so.
A moment of reflection is enough to imagine the vividness and variety of the experience of life that we all undergo everyday. More specifically the stream of consciousness that characterizes the passage through time. You will have to imagine the “going-on” of life as a flux of consciousness through the cross section of time. This cross section of time is ‘the present’. For any given moment, the very given moment is the present and thus the temporal cross section through which stream of consciousness comes from a theoretical future, be-comes the perceived present and the very next moment be-comes part of actual past. Look at it the other way, where you imagine time flowing “through”consciousness, here the consciousness becomes like the ‘filter-detector’ we ‘dip’ in the flow of time and perceive certain aspects of it that get filtered through the consciousness into the semantic center of our brain. I hope you’re able to think this idea as a visual representation where consciousness is like the light which illuminates the invisible flow of time.    
Let us understand one thing very clearly, there is potentially infinite information that we passively ‘encounter’ every moment and our consciousness is the filter that only lets us selectively process the relevant information from it and this happens as per our picture of the world and every associated concept in our head. Now its we can all imagine how a regular TV screen radiates only light in a combination of three primary colours in continuously varying proportions and/but we perceive it as a meaningful image. Much the same way from of the whole domain of our sensory channels, i.e., the sum total of all that there is to ‘sense’ at a given moment, we only perceive what our particular sensory system is conditioned to pick from the reality (that given moment) by our meta-consciousness.
We see different objects, backgrounds, colours, shapes, sizes, features, contours, luminosities etc using our visual equipment. We hear many sounds, the noise of vehicles, objects clashing with each other/rolling over each other, musical notes, the wind blowing, water gushing, people talking, metal banging, background noises etc using our auditory equipment. Same goes for touch, all the different ways we sense it, be it water trickling down the body, the sun burning down on it, the touch of another person, the feel of fabric on our skin etc. All these senses combined with a cognitive/psychological interpretation/view give meaning to our everyday experience of life. Before i reveal the purpose to touting this here I’ll ask you to picture a common situations plucked right from life as we all know and live it.

Jan 1, 2010

Emptiness

Emptiness.. to a remarkable degree of certainty, is my favourite topic to talk, write and think about.(as well to pontificate on!!) Hopelessness.. to an even greater extent has been the leitmotif of my life of late. They together fill up all the space there is to accommodate my experience of being alive. Its the remarkable combination of the two(hopelessness and emptiness), which lends itself to making the journey through time, space and consciousness that we call life, particularly worthy of intellectual focus this moment.

Now a few disclaimers, I'm not trying to establish anything here, nor i am attempting to make a case for a particular view of life. What follows is a preliminary, over-simplified description of my first encounters with "Emptiness" which shan't be understood to be unctuous.

As i reconstruct/recollect my memories , with the benefit of hindsight, it now seems that my whole meaning of life, my view of the world and my place in it, my whole purpose of existence were just condemned inheritances which i assimilated into my personal constitution without any resistance. Always so caught up in the everydayness of life that could never look at it from an observers perspective. Did good at school, operated fine with women, got through the best colleges et cetera. There was pleasure to be found in other peoples' companionship, in establishing or at least extracting an acknowledgement of the superiority of my worldview, in reducing the whole world to a inherently prejudiced picture of an interplay between circumstances by principles that i had seemingly already understood, in being the perfect creature in the Darwinian sense - content with adjusting, reactively and in the least possible measure, to all the minor shifts in the your experience of life and maintaining your set of biases nonetheless.

There was a powerful undercurrent building all along. As a consequence of hiding, ignoring & denying every little insecurity that confronted me, as the aftermath of every lie i bred, as to every incomplete concept of life i built there were, undergoing an ontogenesis, the mental equivalent of tectonic faults. I did perhaps realise but presumably ignored that behind or underneath my supernormal (taken to mean better than normal but in the normal/normative sense) development i was like almost everyone else i ever encountered, was loosing touch with the truth of my existence, somewhere in the micrological intricacies of life. My concerns were undividedly limited to matters such as would describe 99 % of contemporaneous humanity - chics, money, ego. Wasn't tough i would now argue, to infer the engine powering my life and, sure enough, that of most people around me was Insecurity. Each and every little movement, little thought, little precept and concept had somehow been a way to deal with it.

By providence or otherwise there occurred a moment of epiphany when i first read an article by a person whose effect on my life has been, albeit indirectly, monumental and superabundant - Jacques Derrida. One casual skim through a few lines of an article proved plenteous to evince my immanent love/lust for philosophy. My native curiosity proved plentiful to steer me onto the likes of Socrates, Kant, Descartes, Nietzsche, Camus .. so on , so forth, so was it. I'm not going to write an expository piece on what each one said or for that matter what i understood of what they said but posolutely my whole conscious experience of life as it was happening, my cognitive interpretation of it as it had happened, my surmises of what it would happen in the future and most significantly my supposition of how it ought to be underwent and are still undergoing a massive reconstruction.

In trivial terms, the reluctance to, or perhaps just the sheer lack of the occurrence to me of the otherwise, ever truly know what is the whole point/purpose/possibility/nature of life caught up to me and screwed my conception of life at its very foundations. 

Today, all that i once knew was good, all that i once knew was right, all that i once knew was meaningful, all that i once knew was what a person ought to do in life, my whole composite integrated meaning of life has been, by my mental actions acting like blows, hammered out of all shape and form of which it was once a impressive embodiment. So have i wiped the slate clean ? Have i absolutely been able to unlearn all that i did or have i been, accompanied by a fair measure of success, been able to re-conceptualise my self , the world and my place in it ? No. Absolutely Not. Here i am today, this moment, having lost all my once-strongly-held notions, my perceived knowledge, my accumulated wisdom, my supposedly verified assumptions, my cognitive inferences, my customary morality, my sense of purpose, my direction in time,space & consciousness, my vulgar urge to defeat the one in front, my drive to prove myself to the other.. in brief.. all little bricks that housed, neatly in perfect order, my experiences in life and associated meanings have been deconstructed. Seems like, by just the sheer count of it, that i've lost quite a lot. In real, practical, everyday social life it meant that i became reclusive, disinterested in companionship of fellows around me, disregardful of the expectations of the systems that encapsulate your life ...be it the society, family, education, profession... so on. I may safely say that for a while I assumed a cynical misanthropic outlook towards life and all those who embodied it around me. Dis-illusioned in the truest sense.

What did i gain out of it though ? What was in it for me to adopt a nihilistic, plain existentialist view of life right after the peak of a phase filled with hedonism ? Well here is it, in my mindscape where there were once falsely constructed certainties , there were now magnificently perceived possibilities. Where there was a reliance on strongly rational reasoning, there was now a love for unrestricted imagination. Where there was a strong urge to just impress, there was now a desire to truly express. Where there was the safety of an incontrovertible purpose to life, now there is the comfort of life not compromised by it but waiting for me the 'experiencer' of it to give meaning to it. This is in short the story of me and my emptiness. This is how it came about and as i hope i've been able to describe with sufficient accuracy this was how i changed my whole conscious experience of and my emotional reaction to, being alive.

Hopelessness of the Emptiness is a slightly more challenging-to-describe fact of life. I will do it subsequently.