Perfect order

"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."

We now have the opportunity to create the perfect world. We will give birth to a new being, that doesn't need the billions of years of evolution like us. We can think and plan about how to take the world forward. We don't know if there was ever a grand design that brought us into existence. But we do realize that we are staring at the possibility of enforcing such a grand design for future beings.

What do we transmit to our successors, to those next wave of intelligent beings? What do we understand about ourselves and the world around us? It can only be summarized as a collection of bits and pieces all without pointing in any particular direction. Do we have a deeper understanding that transcends our existence? Most people believe we have no existence beyond that which exists in our brain.

There are only a few concepts as well felt and touch us as the order in the existence around us. Our ancestors must have been puzzled by the cycle of day and night, and that of seasons. Unlike everything around us determined in one way or the other way by the one-way road called as time, the seasons are cyclic. What's more fascinating than a cycle, bring it back to the same place by divine ordinance.

The constant quest for discovering the order seems to be the only thing we can teach our successors. Somehow our minds are wired to appreciate order everywhere. Music, mathematics, truth, courage and all the traits we prize are all manifestations of our fascination with the order. It may be because there are only limited things that the mind can comprehend with and the things we can understand are so simple we see an order among them almost always.

Opposites

I'm the midst of winter I found within me an invincible summer.
-- Camus

The tragedy of the opposites surprised many a philosopher. Everything around us has an opposite, a negation that seems to complete the existence of the original. Without heat there is no cold, without darkness there is no light, without death there is no life. The universe is filled with these pairs of opposing states. Universe as it exists today can be defined as the existence of and the interplay between the opposites.

The seeming opposite entities are so closely connected, it's very easy to think of them as the same. One cannot imaging success without going through defeats. One cannot imagine feeling joy without going through the sorrow. This dialectic of the opposites is what produces the enormously complex and rich philosophical landscape within human mind. It has confused so many, that some came to believe in the existence of dualism and the rest came to believe the opposite, non-dualism, or the belief that all is one.

Of all the opposites, being and non-being is of the most profound significance. Plato thought we are born with certain knowledge of some, including the existence of being. We may be the only organisms who can feel the existence of non-being, non-existence of anything.