Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Arthur Koestler considered man an evolutionary blunder.  The lion’s share of the wealth we create is spent in war, terrorism and other destructive activities.  We have infinite gods with countless priests and yet we are not able to surmount the unbounded hatred we carry inside our little hearts.  We work miracles with science and technology but remain crude brutes deep inside us.  Is it all because of some evolutionary error? Arthur Koestler Koestler believed it was.  There is “a screw loose in the human mind,” he wrote in his book, The Ghost in the Machine .  He called the Homo Sapiens a "biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process."  It is because the ape began to walk on two legs too quickly.  The whole mutation took place in too short a time for the human heart to change significantly.  The reasoning brain evolved, but the heart remained savage.  That’s what Koestler says. Koestler relied on neuroscientist Paul D. Ma

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) committed suicide.  His wife too committed suicide on the same day. Koestler was a great writer.  Parkinson’s disease and leukaemia enervated his spirits.  Below is an extract from the suicide note he wrote. Trying to commit suicide is a gamble the outcome of which will be known to the gambler only if the attempt fails, but not if it succeeds. Should this attempt fail and I survive it in a physically or mentally impaired state, in which I can no longer control what is done to me, or communicate my wishes, I hereby request that I be allowed to die in my own home and not be resuscitated or kept alive by artificial means. My reasons for deciding to put an end to my life are simple and compelling: Parkinson's disease and the slow-killing variety of leukaemia (CCI). I kept the latter a secret even from intimate friends to save them distress. After a more or less steady physical decline over the last years, the process has now reached an acut