Joy of Life is Life of joy!!!

Prelude
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What am I doing here and at this point in time? I am trying to attempt the question of what is our nature. How to lead a natural life.

there are couple of things I need for my discussion, So I am defining those terms here. The words and some philosophical ideas are borrowed from the work of different philosophers, Notably Aristotle. However, I am not using those words in the strictest sense as they appeared in those philosophies.

Nature
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Nature of the person. we will explore this in the later part of the article

Potentiality
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Potentiality is the ability to do things. Abilities can be viewed as the combination of "innate abilities" and "learned abilities ". Ability to sense through our senses is an example of innate ability and ability to play a piano is an example of a learned ability.

Actuality
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The sake for which we have the potentiality. It is the end result and the manifestation of the potentiality.

Movement
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It is the act of becoming actuality from potentiality.


For example , if uninterrupted, a seed will grow into a full grown tree. The abilities the seed has is the potentiality of the seed and the actuality of a seed is the state when it becomes a full grown tree. The transitive action from potentiality to actuality is movement of the seed


Primary function
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The primary function of an eye is sight. Eye is as good in as much as it can see well. In the same way, what could be the primary function of the human life? the oneness with Joy.

With the things defined, we are ready to delve into various rather difficult questions. Hereafter, it is like a journey. Think of a voyage(sea expedition). We start off with the following question:

What is the natural way of living? It is the movement to the actuality. Why is it called natural way? we will understand it at the end of our expedition.

So the open question is how one can figure out actuality of one's life. We know this much that actuality of his/her life should comply with the nature of the person; So, the next stop in our expedition is to realize Nature of oneself.


Q 1: Understanding the Nature of oneself

To comprehend nature of oneself, one has to dive into oneself- deep within. The idea that can help us here would be the thought that "Anything would not have appealed to us unless that is in our nature, ". The desires we had when we were kids like becoming a scientist, a person with some authoritative power etc happened just because some perception of those states appealed to us. Most of us might have had the experience of observing the perception of a certain thing changes as we accumulate more knowledge. So, when it comes to understanding our nature, we can not directly take the desires to understand our nature.Rather, we need to try to reduce them into a quality that was the cause for the appeal. For example, in case of becoming a scientist it could be lasting fame. Other qualities that I could think of are -helping others, drive to experience contemporary fame etc. Pure philosophical approach would be to reduce them even further into the drive to differentiate ourselves from masses and other qualities of the same abstract level. For what we know and believe that one's nature would not change in the process of growing up, to understand our nature we need to zero in on those abstract qualities that will not change over the period of time. It implies that, we should not include any belief related things as they tend to change over the period of time as we are exposed to more and more information.

Assuming that, we learned something about our Nature, we can reduce the vagueness in our actuality as our actuality should not come in contrast with our nature. When we are growing up and exposed to many different things, we can add more and more details to our actuality, as we will understand more about the Nature of ourselves.

So the point is, vagueness in our actuality will persist but the amount of vagueness will be reduced at every step of our natural life. Adding details to our actuality is an evolving process.

if we will never know the actuality with no amount of vagueness , how can we use that information for shaping up our life? When we keep reducing the vagueness in actuality, we will start to see the next step clearly. It is like walking in the dense foggy morning; As we progress the next step will become visible.

Q 2: Aligning our life.
In order to reach the actuality, at every stage we need to find the direction, I mean direction which we feel is the best and appropriate to reach our actuality. In simple term, it is to identify what should I do next. The number of directions we see at every stage depends on exposure.

what ever we've been discussing is just in nature. Take for example, why don't we see trees with inverted cone shape. As a seed starts to grow, it aligns every step of its growth so as to receive maximum sunlight at every leaf. So the clue to natural living will be to align our developmental (both cognitive and physical) steps to optimally experiencing the happiness of being one with nature.

If we are happy doing what we are doing right now, it assures that we are doing something that complies with our nature but it need not be the best way to reach our actuality.

Q 3: Suspended disbelief

This is a state when we've taken wrong direction and ended up somewhere where we don't get enough joy. So, one tries to convince oneself that he/she can enjoy anything independent of where he/she is, at the same time, one's subconscious self is in disbelief as to deriving happiness from something that does not comply with one's nature. So, though temporarily pressure of going against nature is suspended, it will resurface resulting in sorrow and the feeling of emptiness.

The longer we stay off the natural path and the more we diverge from it, the worse our inner satisfaction or happiness suffers.

( But suspended disbelief is essential for our growth to some extend. For example, in mathematics we use 'x' for unknown value and we suspend our disbelief of knowing 'x' and proceed further as if we know 'x' and in the end we realize what 'x' is.)

Q4: Corrections & Constraints
if one realizes that he/she is in the state of suspended disbelief, then, natural way is to correct it by coming back to one's natural track. Align oneself again with the path of happiness.

The other hurdle in figuring out the best next step is to disambiguate different constraints; Constraints imposed by us and real constraints. Constraints imposed by our mind which have no rational basis are the likes of fear, lack of confidence etc. Other type of constraints is socio-economical constraints; these constraints can just result in delay if we cleverly work around them. So, there could not be any constraint which will preclude us from reaching our path of happiness.

Q5: Work and Life

Work need not be different from natural life. Work is also a part of natural life.

Conclusion
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Living happily is not the prerogative of a few people. But the primary function of human life itself. Everyone can lead a natural life if they learn lessons from the Nature. Unlike other natural lives (animals, plants etc) human beings tend to get their views muddled up so much so that they get confused as to where to find happiness. They search in vain, instead of following the movement to the actuality to attain oneness with joy.

The question of how to maintain the attitude to focus and not to lose sight of actuality begets other philosophical arguments which I reserve for future.

Untitled !!!

"Poor world, made you a beautiful page in my life

with the grandeur never seen before.

Should I thank you for my tryst

with a world of vibrant sensations.

or Should I thank you for making me wiser,

for the wisdom comes with every failure

I can not clone you in your entirety,

and I dare not to find you in others.

May I not get what I wanted

but I will get what I needed

I am not a prophet to know

what life holds next

but a human to search

what comes next."

Killing time!!!

Hi All,

I am just trying to figure out how to move forward in my career. Instead of giving away too much detail about my career path, I thought of charting a common framework that can be duplicated across all domains; so that, this blog will also serve its own purpose -sharing useful information.

What I figured out during my fairly frequent times of inactivity was that the reason for my inactivity was not the love for inactivity, rather not having other interesting stuff to work on. During those times, I was just desperate to kill time by watching movies or doing something that I would not even remember even that same night, let alone say about the next day. The other reason was the problem of monotony; Even, when I keep doing things that I am interested in, after a few days or may be a few hours, I lose the drive to do the same with the same intensity. When the intensity drops, I drop doing it any further. Then, brief period of inactivity reigns. Even though, it is very evident from my experience that not doing anything or pointlessly killing time does not give me satisfaction or happiness, I could not escape from it. On the other hand, when I am involved in my interesting area for a brief period, during that period I am a person of joy.

Can not we do things that give us joy continuously? Yes, says my experience. Perhaps for me, my interest returns after a brief period. The time between love lost and love regained is the time I feel the pain of inactivity. I spent long times wondering what should I do next or doing something that would occupy my mind like watching movies etc. Then, I stumbled upon the fact that, I might be interested in more than one distant categories, like engineering, philosophy , entertainment etc. The fact that they are distant from each other in a sense that I can not qualify, is the key much needed for maintaining my inner bliss. Finding distant domains that might appeal to us might be the key for maintaining the feeling of satisfaction when all things known for entertainment cease to entertain us.

How to know that, the domains we have collected are not enough? Again, if we feel the drop in happiness inside, it shows that the necessity for finding additional domains to be added to our list of categories, we are interested in.

Tools for finding different things that might interest us,

http://www.openculture.com/2007/07/freeonlinecourses.html

http://www.learnoutloud.com/

There are many different things to learn and we don't how exactly they interact with each other to improve our dexterity in the field in which we would love to call ourself a professional.

After all, the more quick and creative our mind is, the better it is in everything.

Thanks,

Ganesh