If you care, you question.

Morpheus asked Neo:

Do you think that's air you're breathing now?

This question changed the way Neo thought about everything. The question triggered a process. A shock, a surge of anger seeing his long standing beliefs coming to a breaking point before his own eyes, followed by a strong denial (that it can't be actually happening!!), followed by coming to terms with the fact that many of the strong beliefs were in fact statements easily falsifiable in another world, followed by greater understanding of self and the world around.

The moments of dismay caused due to such questions can be as few as one wants them to be. All it takes is assuming some large set of axioms as truths of our lives and building upon them. The larger your set of assumptions (foundations!!) stronger the strength of your beliefs and more is smoothness in your life. In the pursuit of simple, easy and often smooth life one admits this route. Beaware, thats a route always waiting for you around every corner. And laziness of human mind, the the need for stability and sometimes inertia force us to such a route.

The other route, however, one needs to search for. I will call that other route a golden route. Precious!!

No one is Clean "Dudh se dhula": I feel we all always try to simplify things for ourselves. We all make covenient assumptions in some or the other aspects, if not all. Some take for granted the love from their parents so that the obligation of giving back in that relationship doesn't weigh upon them. Some assume love of their spouce as something unquestionable. We all come with our own set of unquestionable areas. We are all stained and we are all in there.

Where are the golden path walkers then? Whats the gradation among us all who have diverged onto that simple path? Is there anybody better than the other?


Well, some never take the golden road. And some pass that route along some walks of life. And gradation: I think gradation depends on the number of times one crosses or reaches the golden road or in other words the number of different aspects of life one questions. The ideal would be to absolutely question everything. Right from love we feel for any living and non living being. Any and every irrational thoughts that cross mind at random times. The rules and ethics we have been told to live by. But then it may not really be possible. For example, a person who wants to ask important questions in science and spends his life doing so may not manage to give mental space to questions related to political issues around him. I am ofcourse not saying its correct. I am just sayings thats how it may turn out to be. To be able to focus all your resources (mental more than anything else. But also resources such as money, time or more practical one's) on too many issues may not just be feasible. But the ideal human being, whose life I assure will end up in complete chaos, is the one who dares to question everything. The other end of spetrum obviously is where one never questions anything. Like a child you just assume some axioms as told by parents, as told by some leaders or if nothing else, as told by society.

As an aside, I'll like to mention something about this evil called Society. Society, who is it? I know anybody like that. A really nice book I read said the following about the concept "society": ----when someone threatens you of society, in fact, that person who is treatening is himself the society. Its actually that person who is getting annoyed and is trying to hide behind an unknown face of the society to force you to do things---- I believe, society exists as much as the ghosts do. They exist if you want them to. Not otherwise.

Anyways, going back to questioning everything. In the gradation, let me place people who question everything they care about as somwhere in between these two ends of the spectrum.

If you think working for some NGO is the most important thing in your life. Then you should continuosly question this aspect of your life. May be after 5 years you may not care about it as much as you did when you started (May be the NGO has changed its form so much so that it hardly matches your covictions). But by then it has become part of your system and you don't even realise you have stopped caring for it. These are the ungaurded moments when one gets onto that simple path. (Just go on, one tells one self. You are in a circle where people know you, respect you, why leave? A convenience strategy) Ofcourse, it all starts with great questioning. But soon gets into a state of inertia. Same applies to all our interactions. We start them with good faith and nothing else. But do we question them enough? Our brain is not a static system sitting around without change. But one just gets tired of keeping track of how much it has changed. Thats a pity.

I now come to the main point of why I started saying all this.

I believe, the only way to care about some aspect of life is by subjecting it to a rigorous questioning every now and then. I mean, what would it mean to be interested in something if you don't even invest enough mental faculties into considering and reconsidering the foundations of your interests. There is no taking for granted if you really care about something/someone. In fact once you take for granted, rest assured, the thing of interest becomes totally invisible to you. One gets side tracked from where it started into this convenient path and probably in a vicious loop where your brain is trained to behave in a certain way that creates environment conducive for a kind of harmony. But the essence of the very source of that path is lost.
In nutshell, to justify your likings/interests into anything at all you must question every thing possible about it.