Surrealism

I used to enjoy some crazy paintings circulated in chain mails. I once read about Salvador Dali. He is one of the famous surrealists of 20th century. If we go deep into our thoughts, at one point we would find that dream and reality merge together. This is the point, which is captured in surrealistic painting, literature or music.That is my understanding, though.

Surrealist movements originated in Europe (France) after the end of first world war, in 1930s. The beginning of surrealism is interesting, because the era of psychoanalysis had come to a peak in that period (Sigmund Freud died in 1939, if I am right). Both surrealists and psychoanalysts observed the dreams, but from different angles. The interest of surrealists was in representing dreams with its whole mystery, while psychoanalysts considered that dreams-not-interpreted were just like unopened letters. The former was like religion and the latter was like science!

However, the surrealistic ideas raise one fundamental question: what is the guarantee that what we are living now is reality and not just a dream?! Until you wake up, you never know that you are dreaming. Even in Zen, we can find similar concepts like surrealism.

The surrealistic pictures reminded a beautiful poem written by Kavikko Abdul Rahman on a famous painting of Salvador Dali, "Persistence of memory". I read it in a Tamil magazine, Junior Vikatan (~1988). I will try to translate and post it in some other occasion. I have heard that Kalki used to sleep in Thanjavoor temple and he created several scenes in Ponniyin Selvan based on his dreams. Could it be surrealism?!

Secrets

I read in a newspaper Nobel laureate Venkataraman Ramakrishnan's interaction with students and scientists. He says that scientific problems are solved with the help of gossip and sip (coffee, of course). "If you don't gossip about the problem then you are not really interested in it. The problem has to be bugging you when you have a coffee."

Rajinikanth has revealed his secret of stress free life in his interview to Film Street Journal. He doesn't meet anyone after 9 PM. "I sit in front of mirror with candle light, music and whiskey."

Inception

Dream is a fascinating subject. We might have heard the idiom, "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly". Zhuangzi was a Chinese philosopher lived 400 years before our Thiruvalluvar. He dreamed once that he
was a butterfly. In dream he didn't know he was a butterfly. When he woke up he was Zhuangzi. But he was in terrible state of confusion. He didn't know if he was Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming he was Zhuangzi!

Is there anything that distinguishes Zhuangzi and the butterfly? It is an interesting question. Generally when we dream we do not realize that we are dreaming. Once we wake up, we realize it 'was' a dream. Is this 'waking up' the thing that distinguishes reality and the dream? Since we have woken up from some dream we believe that we are now in reality. What if we wake up from this reality too?! Buddha would say that you are now enlightened or 'awaken'. Jesus might say that you have entered into kingdom of heaven!

Have you ever experienced that you sleep in your dream and dream within that dream? When you wake up from that 'second stage dream' you are still in a dream. You have to wake up once again to come into reality or what you believe as reality.

There is one rare kind of dream. Many of us might have encountered once in a while such a dream - sometimes in early morning. It is called 'lucid dream'. It is a dream in which we are fully aware that we are dreaming. In lucid dream, we know that if we wake up from this we will go into reality and we continue into
the dream with this consciousness. Lucid dreams are scientifically proven. If one is skilled in creating lucid dreams he can consciously switch between dream and reality.

Have you ever noticed that the dream ends and we wake up when we die in our dreams? Our death in the dreams wakes us up. Even in dreams we do not know what happens after death! (if we die in reality will we wake up into some other advanced reality?!) Imagine a situation that some one is sedated with some
sleeping drug or goes into a deep sleep due to some physical disorder. He dreams a sequence in which he is killed. However his sleep is so deep or he sedated too much that he cannot physically wake up. Thus he is dead in his dream but cannot wake up from dream. Scientists would say that such a situation would lead him to a paranoid state that when he wakes up he would not be able to distinguish whether it is a reality or a dream. He may confuse reality as a dream and even try to kill himself to wake up from dream, which is of course reality.

One last thing that is not scientifically proved. It is 'dream sharing'. When two persons are dreaming both enter into another reality out of normal physical world. Some people believe that like the physical world the 'dream world' is also common for everyone. You can come across me in your dream, say at 'Madurai beach', and I can also come across you at the same place in my dream. People can actually share their dreams through practice and it is possible in lucid dreams. Trained 'thieves' can intrude into another's dream and steal the information hidden in his subconscious mind. More importantly these intruders can even seed a thought in our subconscious minds. One of my colleagues bets that it is practically possible and he is practicing it. The
moment he said this publically he lost all his girl friends.

Why am I talking all these things about dreams? I watched 'Inception'. I guess nothing more to say about the film. It will enlighten us.

Man and Clay

Sumerian mythology says that the mother goddess Nammu created man from clay. The Chinese books of songs dated around 400 BC say that goddess Nuwa created man from clay.

We must have seen a ram headed god picture in Mummy films and it is called Khnum. Egyptian mythology says that Khnum created man from clay in waters of Nile. Some African tribes believe that goddess Obatala created human bodies from clay and god breathed into them bringing life.

If we think that it was only Jewish/Christian god who created man from clay we are wrong. The only difference is that Christianity and Judaism try to depict the creator as a man while other religions say the creator was a goddess. Male chauvinism? Shouldn't the creator be a woman?

It is not so surprising why all the religions attribute clay to man's origin. Since the sculptors used clay for creating statues people could have imagined that god too created man in that way. Or, was man indeed created from clay? Except some trace quantity of silicon in human body there doesn't seem to be
much connection between both - scientifically. Even in case of silicon processors the days are numbered. Intel CEO Otellini is confident that first non-silicon processor would hit market in 2017.

Does it have at least any philosophical or spiritual meaning? I somehow like the biblical quote used on Ash Wednesdays:" You are dust and unto dust you shall return." Let us come to the first part of the sentence later, but the second part is true. Whether we are buried or cremated, we go to the dust/sand. Sand becomes clay when it is watered. The wet soil paves way for plants to grow and animals to eat them. Man grows and reproduces eating those plants and animals. Therefore, is it not correct to say that man is made of dust? We are born to our mothers. Thus the mother goddess created us from clay! It is a full circle now.