Monday, July 13, 2020

Life without conditions: Non realisable dream


Life without conditions: Non realisable dream
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Lalit K Kaul

When parameters like truth, justice, morality, ethics, extravagance, falsehood etcetera are brought in, then no ‘life’ is without conditions because these define the boundaries of freedom that are not to be violated. These may be defined by a society living in inaccessible regions of Amazon forests or desert peaks of Ladakh; that is, the societies that have total disconnect with the modern world and its belief and value system. Even if there are no institutionalised definitions of all the said parameters, yet within every human being there is something that without conscious control allows or disallows him/her a particular type of conduct. That ‘something’ is conscience which is undeniably a very dominant attribute of an individual and which differentiates one from the other in terms of external conduct. This conscience of a being (the slave) is under nobody’s command and hence free to direct the slave without being restricted by any conditions. So, within a barricaded human being there is this attribute with unrestricted freedom.
In any case, the concepts of truth & falsehood, right & wrong, ethical & unethical, etcetera have / can have no separate and independent identity (recognition). If they don’t merge with the thought and deeds of an individual, they cease to exist. Their cognisance is derived from speech/act/conduct and all kinds of civic sense of an individual (who would never think that whatever he/she did was untruthful, unethical and/or wrong), but- as always- the Judge is a rank outsider. So, whether a particular act of an individual- under certain circumstances- is ethical or unethical, the outside world decides and thereby even the ‘free conscience’ of an individual is subjugated. So, when even the internal world of a human being is subject to the scrutiny of the ever dominating external world, the life ‘ordinary’ or ‘extra ordinary’ is not without conditions.
One cannot break free from the world, but one can find freedom within the externally imposed constraints like a horse which is restricted to move in a straight line due to blinkers. The problem is not that life is not without conditions, it is that even the limited freedom to act of their own accord, an extraordinary huge mass of people have been denied by one stroke of pen that declared them backward, ignorant and superstitious while declaring their knowledge base as unscientific.        



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