The Curious Case

Edmund Burke once said, "The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity". Curiosity is a trait of inquisitiveness, it is a quality which makes us learn, explore, ask and investigate. And this trait is one of the few which develops in humans at a very early age. In fact, we get most of our knowledge because of our curiosity. A child learns his mother tongue only because of curiosity. This quality is what helps children learn at faster rates than adults. And this is the quality which has led us to explore things beyond what we see, hear or feel...

As children, we learn thousands of words and that too with perfection. We insert these words in our day-to-day language and gradually, they become an essential part of our language. But as it always happens with every language, when we are asked to define a particular word which we learnt in our childhood, we would not be able to define some of these words. Or even if we are able to define them, their definitions would have some words, whose definition again, we wouldn't be able to give, thus leading us to a loop where one word requires another word to define it, and it continues until the last word requires the very first word in its definition.

My point is, to define new words, we need some basic words whose definitions cannot be given. But there are many words in our vocabulary which we use very often, but still cannot give their definition. And that's how we learn our mother tongue. We listen to the words being spoken, and then we are 'curious' to know about them and use them. Curiosity is the reason why children ask so many questions when they gain awareness. But, as we move on towards our modern system of education (which I discussed in very detail in my previous post titled 'The Modern Education Scenario'); we start losing our inquisitiveness. We start accepting concepts as facts. We start assuming things to be true. And we start taking theories for granted.

But how does that happen? 
We all have a pleasure centre in our brains. (Sounds like an amusement park, right? It is.) This centre lets us know if some action is pleasurable, and it generates the desire to perform the same action again. And this 'pleasure centre' is the centre for everything from laughter to drugs to sex... This centre is responsible for the titillating feelings we experience when we are having pleasure. And this centre is responsible for us wanting to do those things again...
And this is done via a chemical called 'dopamine'. Whenever we find ourselves in situations which are pleasurable, the pleasure centre of our brains releases this chemical. And we feel good. We feel a rush in our bodies. And that increases the secretion of this chemical, reminding us to do the activity again. Studies have shown that even a sip of beer is enough for the release of dopamine. And when we have an addiction, this is the bad guy which makes it challenging for us to stop.
When having sex, when taking drugs, when in addiction, this is the chemical which makes us do it all over again. So, when we see our partners again, when we see our objects of addiction again, this chemical reminds our brains about the last time, and makes us want to perform the activity again to have the 'pleasure' that we did before.

And interestingly, when we pursue new information through our curiosity, this chemical is secreted again. And that is why some people cannot control their curiosity - they would go to any lengths to satisfy their greed for information. That is why curiosity is often related with 'pleasure', because it gives us a unique kind of pleasure. It makes us feel satisfied, similar to sex and drugs. Research has shown that negative curiosity (i.e., uncontrolled curiosity) could lead to a new addiction - the addiction to find information. And no sooner does this addiction become an obsession, making us lose track of what is going on around us. That is why many scientists are often regarded as 'insane'. They are so curious to find answers that they become obsessed with this feeling, and soon, start getting detached from the world around them and enter a world in which they are satisfied -  a world which they can control...

There is a common joke about Newton and his law of gravitation. If Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, what was he doing when his poop went down the toilet?
Did gravity not exist before an apple fell on his head? It did. Did the laws of gravitation not exist before this event? They did. Then why did he discover gravity only after this event? Because of his curiosity. Because, before an apple fell on his head, he had never given a thought to it. But since he was in a garden, and he was sitting idle (hard to believe though), and at that point, an apple fell on his head; he got curious why. If the apple would have fallen on the ground instead, maybe he wouldn't even have gotten curious. When the apple fell, and specifically, on his head, he had a reaction - there was an instant where he thought about this event, which led to him being curious. And that is interesting. Feelings get merged with curiosity. And that leads to questions, whose answers we are tempted to find out...

If it weren't for the curiosity of humans, we would still be living in the Stone Age. Man rubbed two rocks together, and it produced a spark. It was his curiosity that made him do that again to discover what it was that was produced. When he was successful in producing something called 'fire', he tried to put various things in it to check what it did. And this curious nature led him to 'cooking'. And there are many, many such instances - you wouldn't even be able to record such instances, because every single day, everyone of us has several such encounters with our curious sides. There have been many a discoveries and inventions which were accidental... William Kellogg accidentally invented the corn-flakes when he left boiled wheat to sit out for too long. Percy Spencer got the idea of a microwave oven, when microwaves in the laboratory melted a candy bar in his pocket. Alexander Fleming invented the penicillin after noticing a mysterious mould in one of his petri-dishes when he returned from a two-week long vacation. And Horace Wells got the idea of an anaesthetic when he witnessed a man under the influence of laughing gas who felt nothing despite having an injured leg during a demonstration.
All these seem to be so easy to catch up, and we may be wondering they were lucky, that if we were in their place, even we would have invented something. But no, chances are that we wouldn't have even stumbled upon the idea of thinking about such things. We would have thrown away the flaky wheat as 'badly cooked food', we would have paid more attention to our spoiled pants, we would have thrown away the petri-dishes as a 'bad experiment result', and we would have paid more attention to the man in the demonstration than the fact that he didn't feel the pain. (Maybe we would have been jealous to see him 'control' his pain)

All these inventions were accidents, that's true. But these accidents wouldn't have become inventions had it not been for the curiosity of these people. Curiosity works in mysterious ways. It forces us to search for answers in situations we never think about. When we hear a piece of gossip, it is our curiosity that makes us want more details. There is no person who'd say he/she is not interested in gossip. Because we are curious creatures. We want to know. And we 'need' to know. That is what keeps us informed and makes us think. (More about gossip in a future post.)

Curiosity is interesting - it can drive people insane, and it can drive people to answers. It can make people addicted and it can make them feel satisfied. But more than that, it has the power to do what no other human trait can do - it can enlighten the minds, cause revolutions and forever change the course of our destiny...

The Two Faces

Look around yourself, and you'll see the world filled up with poles - opposite poles. You'll see the sky and the earth, you'll see the high and the low, and you'll see the rich and the poor... Wherever you'll glance, you'll see opposites - someone is tall, while someone is short; someone is fair, while someone else is dark... And you very well know why I'm pointing these things out. Our world is made up of poles - the positive and the negative, we say. And in a way, everything has two sides, everything has two faces...

Every coin has two sides - you can simply not have a coin with just one face. Even the Roman God Janus has two faces - he literally has two faces. You may read the name and discard it as 'never heard before', but there is something interesting about him. In Roman Mythology, Janus is the god of transitions. He is the god of gates, of doorways and passages. His two faces look into the past and the future. And he actually symbolises what I am writing about here - poles.

To transit from one phase to another, you need to walk through a doorway - and Janus is the one who stands at this doorway. Every door has a speciality. And I'm not talking about the color,  although 'Asian Paints' may easily make this as their tagline. I'm talking about the symbolism. At every door, one path ends and another begins. Every door is a symbol of beginning and end. When new doors in the form of new opportunities enter our lives, we transit through those doors - we end something and begin something new. And because Janus stands at the doors between almost everything, that's why when a year ends in the our calender and a new year begins, Janus makes the transition - yes, the month of January is named after this god of the beginnings and the endings...

We leave our past and enter the present, which was once our future. And that's how we make our transitions. We enter and we leave. We come and we go. We get born and we die.

But that is not all.

I am always so intrigued by 'duality'. But the mere presence of two entities cannot sustain this universe. When two entities of a similar nature add, they strengthen the effect. But when two entities of opposite nature add, they balance the effect. And harmony can only be achieved by two, opposite forces. Without the poor, there would be no rich people. Without days, there would be no nights. Without summers, there would be no winters. If everything in this world were singular, this world wouldn't have lasted even a day. If there were no nights, we would have viewed the world as consisting of only days. And we would have lived by it forever. Every day, when we wake up in the morning, we see the sun rise, we get a pleasant feeling. Imagine if this sun were never to set. We would miss the nights in ways we cannot even begin to imagine.

Because everyone likes change. No one likes a stable life. While all we try to do in life is 'settle down', we can't live our lives without change. That explains why some people, despite being loyal to the core, have extra-marital affairs - because they are fed up of a monotonous life; because they want 'change'. And then, soon enough, their one life would end and another one would begin. (Yeah, I didn't mean murder.) 

Enough about change. When we in general, think about 'two faces', we don't normally talk about change. We talk about 'actual' two faces. And again, as I said before - everyone has two faces. All humans have two faces - a person may shower praises full of candied words when he talks to his boss; but let him come out in the lobby, and he is no less than a werewolf  in broad daylight. And I am not blaming him, or anybody for that matter. This is human nature. We want to please people, because we are social animals. And because we may not find everyone pleasing, we try to behave differently in front of them. Take the case of a police officer. While a criminal might think he is a 'bad cop' - stern and strict; his friend would have a very different opinion of him. He might even think of him as an idiot. The same police officer, who is so firm and cold and detached in appearance, might be afraid of cockroaches. (Don't judge him, he is not real.)

And just like that, we all have two faces. But most importantly, we are all addicts.

We all have different addictions - some people are addicts in a more obvious way - they are addicted to smoking or to drugs; some people are addicted to caffeine; some are addicted to pornography. And we judge them openly. What we don't know is that we are addicts too, maybe to things less visible. And there are some addictions you wouldn't have even thought about, like an  addiction to one's breasts (not in case of men!), or an addiction to pull out hair from drains, or an addiction to talk to dolls, and many, many more. We may be addicted to the Internet (although being addicted to my blog will be considered positive behaviour), we may be addicted to Television, hell, we can even be addicted to pull out our hair, or scratch our skin. And then we judge others, while being in the same pool.

And you might be wondering why I am talking about addictions in a post about 'Two Faces'. But at this point, let me highlight an interesting piece of literature. You might have heard of 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' by R.L. Stevenson. I don't know how many people actually like the book, but there is something in this book that is worth thinking about. In this book, Stevenson says, "Man is not truly one, but truly two." 

We divide people into 'moral' and 'immoral'. But is it really just a simple division? Is a rapist as equally immoral as a murderer? On the lines of how we classify people, it sure seems that way... But you know it's not correct. Because even though both are immoral, their 'degrees' of immorality are different. (I will talk more about morality in a future post.)

No one on earth can say that they are completely moral, because no one actually is. Everyone has a moral side and an immoral side, a positive side and a negative side - and that is what I meant when I said that everyone has two faces. That is what Stevenson meant when he said that man is truly two.

Addictions change us. When we are addicted to something, we have basically split into two. There is one side of us, which tries to control us. But there is one side of us that drives us to the object of our addiction. This has been talked about for centuries now, you know, the angel and the devil in our minds... When we have an urge, we transform into someone else, we transform into the devil - we turn into Mr. Hyde. And we suppress our Dr. Jekyll, we suppress our angel. That's why addictions ruin us - Mr. Hyde tries to destroy Dr. Jekyll. One part of us tries to collapse the other. And we may be no less than vampires - they may be a little bit  more visual, but essentially, everyone of us is a creature who transforms into someone else. 

Like poles repel. Unlike attract. And that is no different in our lives. In astrology, opposite signs are said to form the best matches. Why? Simply because when opposites team up, they increase the power. One fills in the weaknesses of the other. Day brings light, while night brings darkness. Most of us often try to find partners which are similar to us in as many ways as possible. But people who are almost same will soon get bored of each other. But it doesn't mean that they should be completely opposite to each other. Club such people together, and they'll fight all day long... Opposite forces complete each other, and they must complete each other - then only can they achieve harmony. Matter cannot pair with darkness. (Weird, right? Exactly what I'm talking about). Matter pairs with antimatter, and light pairs with darkness. The only reason being that they complete each other.

And that's why everything is important; everyone is important. The wealthy would not be rich without the poor, the fair-complexioned wouldn't be fair without the dark-complexioned people, and moral wouldn't be moral without the immoral people. What we need to understand is that every one is essential. Nature is perfect in the way it is. And only by the complementary existence of opposites can we have things we wish to have - Balance. Harmony. Unison.