Tomichan Matheikal's blog

“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, / Stains the white radiance of eternity...”  Like the other Romantic poets, P B Shelley was unhappy with the inevitable stains of life. One of the many stains or imperfections is our inability to perceive reality clearly. Reality comes into our consciousness through a lot of filters that have become a part of our very being.  Our past experiences, our prejudices, beliefs, convictions, desires, culture, religion, political affiliation... a whole range of things acts as the filters. For example, take ourselves, human beings.  “What a piece of work is a man,” exclaimed Hamlet in spite of himself.  Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark saw human being as a paradoxical creature that is noble in reason, infinite in faculties, admirable in form, angelic in action and godlike in apprehension.  Yet the Prince ended up hating many human beings and killing quite a few.  Hamlet’s whole perception and understanding of reality...

When the orator sees a mike Words rush out like a torrent. He’s a good juggler of words. Juggled words are like                 water drops falling in sunlight; They have hues indeterminate                 and they dazzle. I have learnt                 that words can create reality.

An individual’s behaviour (“strategic conduct,” to be more precise, as phrased by Anthony Giddens, sociologist) is based largely on how s/he interprets his/her environment, or the reality around.  But what is reality? How real is my laptop?  The ancient Greek philosopher (to start with our ancestral wisdom) Plato would say that the idea of the laptop is more real and this particular laptop. Ideas are more real for Plato than particular concrete things. Modern science will tell me about the various components that make up my laptop which in turn are made up of atoms which consist of subatomic particles which are made up of more fundamental particles!  Which among all these is real? This post is a sort of continuation of my previous one titled Truth is Beauty .  I think we cannot speak of truth unless we tackle the issue of reality. People see reality differently.  Hence truth too varies according to people.  For most people the scien...