..“The really magical things are the ones that happen right in front of you. A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a bit more intention, you see it.”
― Vik Muniz
In fact, unraveling this same magic is what keeps our Ponder Series up and running. It’s my humble effort to explore beauty and purpose through awareness and intention. Photography and liberal arts are marvelous brushes to paint these themes.
Around 5 months back or so, I had written on the theme of realizing roots. We talked about trees with their branches spreading through the air and producing fruits & the marvelous miracle of tiny seeds and grains bearing huge trees within them. If we pause and consciously think about it, the roots which are soft when we touch then pierce through hard rocks and dark earth. As the roots pierce the hardest depths, the branches on the top spread in the air bearing fruits and leaves retaining moisture despite the heat outside. Have we wondered about what a miraculous piece of machinery this is? We can see that they’re under a command. A seed in the process of its initial development would require a lot of things for it to flourish well. The right kind of soil, the balance of water, temperature, delicate humidity balances are some of them. The proportion and the correct balance of each of these factors are paramount for the seed to develop. The right mix and proportion reach them. Can an unconscious entity like a seed work consciously for this proportion to be right? That’s a definite no. We see intention, purpose, and design. Almighty has left these beautiful wonders around us as locks that could only be opened by the key of our thoughts and awareness. It’s consciousness and awareness that elevates & humbles us. The provisions in front of us would invoke yearnings and reflection for the seeker.
Part of Ponder Series
Our brain has about 100 billion neurons in them. When you read this blog now, or when you smell the fragrance you wear, when you hear sounds, in short, when you do everything, electrical signals race between these neurons along billions of tiny neuron highways. The messages sent by neurons in your brain is more than the messages sent by all phones in this world. All neurons together in the brain can generate enough electricity to power a low-wattage bulb. Knowing our senses, knowing ourselves, and pondering on the wonders is the key that unlocks many mysteries of this world.
The World is Inside You
Part of Ponder Series
I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer — and what trees and seasons smelled like — how people looked and walked and smelled even. The memory of odors is very rich.
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
There’s something called involuntary memory in us. When we get exposed to a stimulus, that’d trigger a strong memory from your past. For me, it could be the rich aroma of south Indian dosa with thick sambar that takes me to my childhood days and brings the memory of my home. There’re perfumes that bring in memories of Netta. For some people, the baking smell would take them from their rooms through memory travel to a cafe they’ve been in before. Brain regions processing smell, our vivid memories, and emotions are wired similarly.
A scent is a chemical particle that floats in through the nose and into the brain’s olfactory bulbs, where the sensation is first processed into a form that’s readable by the brain. Brain cells then carry that information to a tiny area of the brain called the amygdala, where emotions are processed, and then to the adjoining hippocampus, where learning and memory formation take place.
” Why Do Smells Trigger Strong Memories? ” by Yasemin Saplakoglu, for Live Science
Scents are the only sensations that travel such a direct path to the emotional and memory centers of the brain. All other senses first travel to a brain region called the thalamus, which acts like a “switchboard,” relaying information about the things we see, hear or feel to the rest of the brain, said John McGann, an associate professor in the psychology department of Rutgers University in New Jersey. But scents bypass the thalamus and reach the amygdala and the hippocampus in a “synapse or two,” he said.
That results in an intimate connection between emotions, memories, and scents.
There’s a plan, order, and purpose in the way your brain is wired. How did this sophisticated system come around to you? Are with thinking about it? There’s master craftsmanship in our bodies and how everything is perceived. If we delve deep into the ordinary, it helps to discover the extraordinary miracles in them.
Time for reflection
Every single bit of art you see here, there’s a reflection in my mind, a theme that I contemplate when I work on it with my heart. If you didn’t know, I’m always enraptured about flower petals and the beautiful art they effuse. Remember ornate blossoms and ethereal quality? These marvelous pieces of art that we see all around us yearn for reflection from the beholder. If we open a vault or and old box from a courtyard and discover a painting of a tree or a beautiful flower, we wonder about the painter and hail his mastery in the art. Not in the tiniest speck of possibility can we convince ourselves that the beautiful painting that we saw in the vault came about when somebody threw a paint can into the air and it eventually came about into this masterpiece painting through rain and wind flowing on the paint over years. There’s conscious design, symmetry, and intent in the painter working patiently on the painting and completing it. The work of art definitely leads to its painter. Appreciating the art in its wholeness leads to its artist, his mind, and his signature. In the same token, when we see these beautiful flowers around us, is there a blind curtain on our minds which hesitates us from thinking and wondering how these came about around you and takes your attention. They have a story to tell you. Shouldn’t we be seeking the artist? Awareness is the key to reflection. I’m recollecting what I wrote recently in ornate blossoms on the same theme.
“They are not randomness around us. Neither are they desultory existences around us. They have a purpose in making us ponder about them. They have a story to tell you. They’ve something to show you. They’re locks of thoughts waiting to be unlocked by you. They’re not looking for a monk. They’re looking for me and you.”
Quoted from the piece “Ornate Blossoms“,
When you dream, everything looks real until you exit that dream.
When you’re in the dream, you never know that you’re within a dream.
What makes you so sure that you’re not on a dream right now?
You might wake up from the dream you are in now.
Time for reflection
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.
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 you know 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 actually seeing 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 our access 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 :
> Perceiving Time
> Ornate Blossoms
> Visual Narrative – Ponder Series
> Reflecting on Shadows
> Stumble over Pebbles
> Ethereal Quality | Petals
> Golden Ratio
> Vision – Pondering on the intricacies
> Ruminating on Bird Nests
> Living Embellishments
> Pondering on Birds
> Perceptions
If you are reading this series for the first time, have a look at the intent post.
I couldn’t write for the past few days due to my frame of mind, not in the beautiful space I need to be in, to put my heart into what I do. Today, I’m planning to write about the perception of time and some contemplation on some of my recent thoughts on this theme. Welcome to another slice of our Ponder Series. You won’t be bored with a long read while we explore together on the wonders of time and its perception.
The perception of time and its intricacies are keys to several extraordinary secrets about the world we live in. A baby does not come out in a moment, but takes almost 9 months. A seed could have become a huge oak in a day, but it takes hundreds of years. We don’t eat the fruit on the same day that we plant a tree. Fruits of labor may not be seen right away. All things take time. There are certain things that cannot be fast-tracked. We often wonder about the magic of time and how it’s perceived.
In a wonderful article with regards to time on the brain, George Musser writes,
“It’s not that our memory is a glitchy wetware version of computer flash memory; it’s that the computer metaphor just doesn’t apply. Roediger said we store only bits and pieces of what happened—a smattering of impressions we weave together into feels like a seamless narrative. When we retrieve a memory, we also rewrite it, so that the next time we go to remember it, we don’t retrieve the original memory but the last one we recollected. So, each time we tell a story, we embellish it, while remaining genuinely convinced of the veracity of our memories.”
This is very profound. What we know and perceive as “past” is really a smattering of impressions we weave together as the author articulates it. All the experiences, events happening truly runs as “stories” in our minds and we only have impressions of them as they pass us. When you read an article on my website, for example, that’s a story weaved in your mind when you think about it later. We “perceive” time by usually comparing a “story” or a “moment” with a previously known moment or event if we think about it. When you’re reading this blog on your phone or on your computer screen, just clap your hands once and you’ll hear a sound. If you clap once again, you’ll hear another sound. Now, we call this interval between these two claps “time” by thinking that there’s an interval between them. When you clap the hands for the second time, the first clap sound you heard is only nothing more than a memory that’s formed in your mind, sort of like an imagination. You see, this comparison of moments and events and correlating with each other is what we perceive as time in our lives.
Before reading this post, let’s say you came to the room that you’re in now from a different room and let’s say you sat on the couch/chair or on the bed that you’re in now and once you sit and read what you’re reading now, the images of how you came to the room before opening this website are now only information in your memory. That’s how we perceive time. Hence, the perception of time is heavily tied and if not only tied to the sequence of memories and stories running in our brains. It’s sort of like a movie being loaded with us being the actors in that play. Without these correlations of memories, there wouldn’t be any perception of time. I turned 32 recently. I determine it so because I have my mind being accumulated with memories and events related to those 32 years. If my memories do not exist, then I wouldn’t have any clue of a so-called “preceding period” and would only be having an experience of the single moment in which I’m living. In case if you haven’t thought about it before, pause for a moment and ponder on this reality.
Reels are being played in our brains and stories and perceptions are weaved on and on. That’s a true wonder only for minds who think about them. Deep thought is the key to gratitude. Thank you for reading. I’m planning to write some other chapters on the same theme. It’s actually one of my favorite topic that I can write on and on with a hot cup of tea. Do write your thoughts to me.
Some of the chapters from the Ponder Series that you can read on :
> Ornate Blossoms
> Visual Narrative – Ponder Series
> Reflecting on Shadows
> Stumble over Pebbles
> Ethereal Quality | Petals
> Golden Ratio
> Vision – Pondering on the intricacies
> Ruminating on Bird Nests
> Living Embellishments
> Pondering on Birds
> Perceptions
If you are reading this series for the first time, have a look at the intent post.
Illustrated by: The Border Of a Mind.
There are many intricacies that often stay in the realm of thoughts that is yearning our awe. Think of the trees with their branches spreading through the air and producing fruits. With the ease of them growing and diverging into the air, their roots also spread and diverge through hard rock and earth beneath. Seeds and grains bear huge trees within them. Thinking casually about them takes into a realm of an unexceptional everyday sight. At the same time, pondering deeply lifts this curtain of blindness from our eyes and opens the windows of realization that these are indeed spectacular miracles. There’s kind of a solace on realizing that everything, be it a new leaf forming, an old leaf tumbling down the branches, things happening to us beyond our plans are under a divine command. Realizing bounties is key to a state of remembrance, gratitude, and reflection, the key themes that I’ve thought of today. The illustration you see in inspired from an image in my mind around a cottage garden in Ooty, South India.
Petals are something I’m sort of eccentrically inquisitive about. In some of our earlier writings, we’ve wondered about their ethereal quality and have read on how beautifully they edify a lesson of transience. Here’re some photographs that I look from University of Sharjah gardens last week during an evening stroll. These are jewels we fail to appreciate when we are in the hustle and bustle. I’m not sure about you, but I’m totally to the hilt, blown away by the spectacular art and magnificence in their intricate subtleties. Look at the brilliant layering and the patterns that are a treat for those with eyes to relish them. Before we relegate them to the quotidian normal realm, we can relate on a very small allegory that came to my mind. If we see a painting of a tree or a flower prepared by someone, we definitely know that it is done with intent and meticulous planning. If we are told that somebody threw a bottle of watercolors and brushes randomly into the air and that when it came down, it turned into a perfect painting, that’s totally preposterous and defies sense. Or if someone came along and say that some paint boxes were overturned by wind and storm and they mixed with some rain and in a long period of time changed into a perfect painting, that is so illogical to conceive. Now, if we look at these petals, we see a plan and an order, a conscious design, organized patterns and a beautiful harmony of colors. They bide their time for us to think about them. They are not randomness around us. Neither are they desultory existences around us. They have a purpose in making us ponder about them. They have a story to tell you. They’ve something to show you. They’re locks of thoughts waiting to be unlocked by you. They’re not looking for a monk. They’re looking for me and you.
This write up is a part of Ponder Series of The Border of a Mind Visual Studios that we have been building exhaustively over the past several months. When we think about the world around us and also when we look within, it might seem usual and ordinary. But ponder series, as you might have already guessed, is all about thinking deeply and delving into the details by going beyond the ordinary perceptions. It’s a very humble endeavor towards unlocking extraordinary in the ordinary by opening our eyes of wisdom and insight. Hope you enjoy reading them. God bless friends 🙂
Some of the chapters from the Ponder Series include :
> Visual Narrative – Ponder Series
> Reflecting on Shadows
> Stumble over Pebbles
> Ethereal Quality | Petals
> Golden Ratio
> Vision – Pondering on the intricacies
> Ruminating on Bird Nests
> Living Embellishments
> Pondering on Birds
> Perceptions
