So much of life happens just beyond our usual line of sight. Above the screens we hold, above the paths we walk without thinking, above the distractions that pull us away from the present. Look up, and you might see the way tree branches tangle like old friends. The way the sky shifts from deep blue to burning gold in the span of a few quiet minutes. The way someone, somewhere, is pausing at the same moment as you, noticing the same fleeting beauty. We live so much of our lives looking down, at tasks, at worries, at endless streams of information. We forget that the world is still happening above us, beyond us, in ways we were never meant to control. Clouds move without our permission. Birds take flight whether we see them or not. The moon waxes and wanes, indifferent to our hurried footsteps below. Perhaps the simplest way to feel more alive is to lift our gaze. To catch the movement of the world beyond our own thoughts. To remember that life is not just what is in front of us, but also what has been happening all along, just waiting to be noticed. So, look up. Just for a moment. You might be surprised by what you’ve been missing.
We exist in different forms in the minds of others. To one person, we are the friend who made them laugh when they needed it most. To another, we are the stranger they met once, whose kindness stayed with them. To someone else, we are just a passing face, a background figure in the blur of their memories.No one knows us in our entirety. We are fragments, pieces of stories, glimpses of moments, echoes of conversations. Someone remembers us as we were years ago, frozen in time, unchanged by all that has shaped us since. Another only knows the version of us they see now, unaware of the roads we took to become this person.It is humbling to realize that we are never just one thing. We live in the retellings of others, in the way they recall our words, in the memories we unknowingly leave behind. We do not get to choose how we are remembered, but we do get to choose how we move through this world, what we leave in our wake, the kindness we give, the presence we offer.Somewhere, right now, someone is thinking of you, not as you see yourself, but as you once were to them. And in that way, we are never truly gone. We continue in stories we may never hear, in lives we have touched without realizing, in the quiet places where memory turns us into something eternal.
We are not who we once were. The person you were five years ago, a year ago, even a month ago .. versions of you that existed for a time, then quietly faded as life shaped you into someone new.There are thoughts you used to believe with certainty, now replaced by new understandings. Dreams you once chased that no longer call to you. Fears that once held you back but now seem distant, like echoes of a person you can barely recognize. Growth does not always announce itself; sometimes, it is only when we look back that we realize how much has changed.And yet, we often grieve these past selves, even the ones we worked so hard to outgrow. The innocence we lost, the confidence we once had, the versions of us that existed before heartbreak, before disappointment, before life carved its lessons into us. But perhaps they were never meant to stay. Perhaps they were only stepping stones, necessary for the person we are still becoming.Let them go with gratitude. The past versions of you did their job .. they carried you to this moment. And who you are now will one day become a memory, too. This is not loss; this is transformation.You are allowed to change. You are allowed to evolve. You are allowed to keep becoming someone you have not yet met.
All around us, each moment is filled with extraordinary realities that we simply cannot see. Not because they are truly hidden, but because we have been enveloped in a veil of heedlessness that blinds us from perceiving them. Have you ever really pondered the humble apple before biting into it? Beneath that thin peel is a whole universe of complexity. The peel itself is an exquisitely designed package, crafted to lock in the fruit’s flavor and freshness to perfection. And what about the apple’s color, fragrance, and intricate texture? All springs forth from mere dirt through a process modern science cannot replicate. Or have you contemplated why you can so easily swat a fly, despite it beating its wings hundreds of times per second? The design of its anatomy allows it to hover through the air with impeccable precision and maneuverability.
We are surrounded by such astounding marvels, from the veins coursing through a leaf to the mind-boggling operations of our own cells. Yet we carelessly overlook them, like an audience member at a magic show who misses every astonishing feat happening right before his eyes. This is the spell of heedlessness that affects the majority of us – being so dazed by our inherited lifestyle habits and traditions that we remain blinded to the stark realities unveiling the majesty of Almighty.
But we have been blessed with the sacred gift of our thinking minds, that we may use them to part the veils and truly witness the brilliance surrounding us. To pause, ponder, and be struck with awe by the magnificent signs of the divine’s fabulous artistry everywhere we look. All it takes is making the conscious choice to embrace profound thought. To use the intellectual faculty that is bestowed upon us for its very purpose – as a key to discern and appreciate the hidden wisdom woven into every fiber of this universe. We have to wake up from our slumber of heedlessness. Pausing and deeply reflecting with intention on the marvels we are ordinarily blind to, will render us stunned by what our thinking mind can unveil right before your eyes.
Take a look around you right now. What do you see? A room, a building, trees, streets, the material world that makes up our everyday reality. But that’s just what things look like on the surface. The truth is, underlying all of that, an entire invisible ecosystem of constant transactions is taking place – a bustling, high-stakes marketplace of trades and exchanges happening at the smallest scales.
You see, from a biological perspective, every living cell in your body and all organisms on earth are teeming metropolises of ceaseless commerce. Busy hubs where millions of molecular currencies are traded, resources are imported and exported, energy gets stockpiled and spent. It’s an endless cycle of microscopic negotiations and power brokering playing out through every tissue, microbiome, even within each mitochondrial respiratory center powering the city-state of your being.At any moment, glucose molecules are being exchanged for ATP coins that cellular machinery then spends to accomplish tasks. Proteins are built on molecular assembly lines where information transcribed from DNA production manifests gets bartered for material supplies that keep cells humming along. Waste metabolites accumulate and get shipped out through strictly governed disposal channels.It’s like peering down at a vast, futuristic urban landscape of countless intersecting pathways, factories, refineries, and soil utilities hard at work trading and exchanging resources essential for sustaining the larger living infrastructure. Only this isn’t a man-made megalopolis. This is the covert micro-economy that each multi-trillion cell colony we call our bodies must intricately supervise 24/7 simply to remain operational.And the wheeling and dealing gets even more intricate when you zoom out to the larger ecological scale. Because out there, complex networks of symbiosis and mutualisms form interconnected global supply chains and trading guilds spanning entire bioregions. Delicately balanced channels where lifeforms as diverse as fungi, plants, microbes and animals perpetually trade resources, tokens, and energy in return for services that sustain the whole integrated marketplace of their local environment.
Just think about the breathable atmospheric gases you consume, the products metabolic guilds craft from soil and water, the resources that tree ambassadors trade for our derivative manufacturing wastes like carbon dioxide. It’s the unseen Stock Exchange governing the fundamental swaps that circulate the raw materials and energies powering all life on earth.Look again at the material world from a different lens, and the surfaces of reality reveal themselves as frontiers of nonstop commerce and negotiation happening on scales too far up or down for our limited human senses to directly survey. Everything you see around you emerges from the hidden trade routes and market forces of a ceaselessly churning global economy invisible to the naked eye.
Through this post, I’m taking you through a hidden language we all have around us. Have you ever stopped to watch wisps of smoke swirling up from a campfire or curling off a candle’s flame? Noticed how ocean waves never crash onto the sand the same way twice? Or caught a glimpse of rapidly shifting cloud patterns in the sky?
Most of us observe these fleeting patterns and motions in nature without giving them a second thought. But what if I told you they were actually visible expressions of a complex hidden language, an intricate code that profoundly connects all things?
You see, the natural world speaks in a tongue few of us recognize – the universal language of fluid dynamics. Water, air, smoke, energy itself – all fluids follow a sophisticated molecular choreography too intricate for our eyes to fully decipher. Every ripple, eddy, spiral and vortex carries encoded information about the urges and stresses acting upon that flow. A crashing ocean wave isn’t just water blindly colliding with sand. It’s a three-dimensional script written in turbulent liquid calligraphy, recording in exquisite detail the literal physics of every unseen force and particle interaction involved.
The breaking foam, the patterns in the plume’s dispersal – it’s all data, a visible imprint of how the fluid negotiates with its environment. The same goes for that flickering candle flame performing its hypnotic dance. What you perceive as a quivering blaze is the language of heat describing, in swirling hieroglyphs, its delicate relationship with surrounding gases and the physics governing its intricate motions. Even a drifting storm cloud isn’t just condensed vapor droplets shaped by wind. It’s an ever-shifting poem etched across the sky each moment by atmospheric pressures, temperatures, and dynamics we can’t directly witness. The cloud’s form literally spells out, for those who can comprehend it, the invisible interplay of forces and fluid properties involved. Nature’s calligraphic scriptures are all around us, yet few of us realize we’re surrounded by cryptic texts narrating the deepest workings of the physical world through their elegant, ephemeral motions. All we need to reflect is to, look a little closer. Between every flicker and eddy lies a language written in flowing whispers. Not a co-incidence at all. Just like how you came now to read these lines was not a co-incidence. God bless.
In a world that often celebrates facade over authenticity, being vulnerable opens us to ridicule and judgment. We instinctively armor ourselves, maintaining surface relationships devoid of true depth. Yet it is only when we summon the courage to expose our fragile inner selves that we forge profound bonds transcending the superficial.
To be vulnerable is to exist without pretense, unafraid to reveal our hopes, fears, struggles and imperfections. It requires shedding the ego’s delusions of invulnerability and control. When we admit we do not have all the answers, that we sometimes feel lost or insecure or overwhelmed, we give others permission to do the same.
In these stark moments of confession, we are saying “This is me, with all my flaws and my humanity laid bare. Will you join me in this tender space of mutual truth-telling?” Those who answer that call by meeting us with acceptance, compassion and empathy become kin to our souls.
For within each human psyche, there is a primal yearning to be truly seen and known, a craving for the exquisite intimacy that can only emerge when we dare to be nakedly authentic. As counterintuitive as it may seem, vulnerability is the path to our greatest strength and the truest connections life can offer.
When we understand that our struggles, insecurities and emotional worlds are universally shared, shame’s grip over us begins to loosen. We realize our vulnerabilities are not flaws to be concealed but portals allowing others to relate to us on a visceral level. A warm authenticity becomes the great unifier, transcending artificial barriers of status, identity and ideology.
In truth, the human experience is an inherently vulnerable one. To simply exist is to embrace uncertainty, navigate perpetual beginnings and endings, and find the courage to feel our deepest emotions, even when the path remains shrouded. Each of us beholds an unfathomable universe of experience within that longs to be given voice and heard into existence.
It is vulnerability that reminds us we are never truly alone on this journey called life. At our most exposed and honest, we become mirrors allowing others to gaze upon their own fragility. This shared space of exquisite rawness, devoid of masks or facades, is where the healing salves of empathy and compassion are found in abundance. It is where the life transmission happens most vividly, where humanity’s unconquerable brilliance is plainly revealed.
Writing and the connection achieved by it sometimes have a transformative effect that’s often magical. It’s often how you discover your true tribe.
Illustrated by The Border Of a Mind Studios
“Writing, if nothing else, is a bridge between two people, a bridge made of language. And language belongs to all of us. If I enjoy a poem, that just means I am recognizing within it something of myself, something I must already possess. Therefore, to love a poem is to love a part of myself revealed to me by another person…I really believe that writing is the closest thing we have to true magic. Where else, but in words, can we discover each other out of thin air?”
Vision is so magical if we ponder about its intricacies. A photograph of Netta that I took from Havelock Islands
The title of the post might make you puzzled. But I would like to take you through a small journey of thoughts and discover the secret embodied in the title! It’ll be good if you can be distraction-free for two minutes as you read this, as this is a very important reality that can blow your mind! I value your time. Let’s think together : )
Today, we are adding a slice into our Ponder Series. I read something along these lines about a decade ago through several books that profoundly changed my perspectives on how we perceive the world. If you haven’t read about this theme before, this could possibly be a key that could unlock many secrets of thoughts and perceptions about people and things around you and everything happening to you. Right now, you’d be reading these words on your phone/tablet or PC. If it’s the phone, for example, you’d be now scrolling with your fingers on the phone screen or touching your mouse/touchpad if you’re reading on a computer. Reality for most people is what they can see with their eyes & touch with their hands. You touch your phone now while reading this and believe that it’s real. This is the normal conception of reality that has conquered generations and their views. But there’s a deeper side to it if we ponder deeply. Everything we confront and experience – everything – the chair that you sit on, the bed you sleep on, the window of your room, the buildings near you, roads, cars, people you see, spaces, cafes, your loved ones, the experiences we go through in life, in short everything is perceived through our five senses. We know this well, but have you wondered how this magic really happens! Let’s ponder on how the information of the exterior world reaches you through your senses.
You and me have five sensory faculties – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. If we think about it from a scientific point of view, all these senses work in the same way. For each sensory faculties, stimuli from objects in the external world and taken through these senses and nerves carry them to the sensory centers in the brain. These stimuli that induce these signals include lights (for vision), sounds (for hearing), smells, tastes, textures (for touch). These stimuli reach the brain only as electric signals.
Let’s take our vision as an example. Light rays (photons) emanating from different objects around you reach the retina at the back of your eye system and passing through several stages, they get converted into electrical signals. These signals then reach the brain’s vision centre through the nerves. This colorful and bright three-dimensional imagery that you see is formed at this vision centre, which is only a few cubic centimeters. So, when you hold your phone in your hand, you’re perceiving the “image” of the phone at the back of your brain in a minuscule space. This system of electrical impulses broadly applies to our other senses as well.
“Experiencing” an orange juice through sensory faculties
When you taste a glass of fresh orange juice, cells on your tongue surface transfer the stimuli into electrical signals that we perceive as taste. The aroma of the fresh orange juice near you is transformed into electrical signals by the cells in the epithelium of the nose. When you touch the glass cup, there are special sensors that are lodged beneath the skin surfaces that transform touch impulses and sensations of hardness/softness to electric signals. Similarly, your ear also have a similar mechanism that converts sounds into electricals signals. That’s how you hear the sound of the glass when you place it on the table. You perceive that you are drinking an orange juice when all these senses cohesively and harmoniously work together with these electrical signals for different senses.
Now is the important concept that needs to be thought about. Whether the orange juice exists or not cannot be known by us. The “orange juice” that youknow is a blend or collection of its taste sensed by the tongue, its odour sensed by your nose, the color, and shape captured by your eyes, and only its attributes perceived through these senses is what is accessible to you. You don’t have access to the “original” version outside. It shows the limitation of ours to reach the physical world. Everything around us we are in touch with and our experiences are a compiled effect of different perceptions such as sight, hearing, and touch. All we can do is process the data of electrical impulses in our brain’s sensory centers of our brains. So, instead of the “original” of the matter, we are confronting its “copies” inside our brain. At THIS point, we tend to believe that the copies that we experience are the real matter outside, which is not the case as we just examined 🙂
Orange juice that you drank is only a simulation. Which orange juice is real? The one that is formed by your senses or the real one on the table? It’s no doubt that we are experiencing an aggregate of our perceptions throughout our lives. From every object you touch to anything you experience are perceptions. So whatever you touch, hear, smell and define as “matter”, or what you think as “the world we live in” is nothing else but an interpretation of electrical signals in our brain. The “original” cannot be reached, but only its copy is experienced in your brain! So that means if your olfactory nerve from the nose receptors are disconnected, you cannot feel the sense of smell.
Similar concept shall be extended to the sense of space and distance as well. When you read these words on this page, the distance between you and this page is emptiness perceived in your brain. When you think of stars or moon, you think they appear distant in the sky, but what you’re actuallyseeing is within you, in your vision center. So, as you sit and read this blog post now, you are technically not inside the room you think you are in, but the room is inside you! The body deceives you in thinking that we’re inside it. Like the orange juice we just discussed, your physical body is also a set of images or perceptions formed in your brain!
You may be able to comprehend this better when you think of how you dream. When you dream, you may experience that you’re riding a horse for example, but in reality, you’d realize that you were on the bed when you wake up from your slumber.
That brings us to the conclusion that ouraccess to the external world is very limited. Now you would understand why saints say that the universe is within you! The way we look at our world changes when we understand and comprehend that our soul is experiencing and watching everything on a screen. Everything is inside you. Think about it. Ponder about this magic happening every single moment. Thank you for reading Ponder Series with me 🙂
Some of the chapters from the Ponder Series that you can read on :
I photographed this with Netta from the Andaman Islands. What I like the most about this photograph is how the sun rising is spreading its light across everything. From the soothings waves to the rocks to the pebbles, we see its light on everything. This resonates with a theme that I read recently. On a particular note, the example of sun is provided where the sun encompasses numberless things with its light. It says that a comprehensive outlook is required to behold the sun itself in the totality of its light. For the sun not to be forgotten, its manifestation is displayed on every shining object by its reflection. Further I read that all lustrous objects have a refleciton of sun’s attributes such as its light, heat and the seven colors in its light (From the Words). The sun’s attributes is encompassing all things facing it. The same allegory is extended to divine mercy we find around us in several manifestations and specifically in man’s mirror like essence. From the food on our table, to the clothes we wear to our comforts, there’re manifestations of divine mercy everywhere.
