Matters of the Heart.

While preparing for this course, I found myself looking for several answers that I had been questioning myself on; answers to questions that crop up in our minds as we grow through life. Questions of existence, religion, living in harmony, life and death, the human mind… questions that we want answers for, answers that we look for through our journeys, journeys that will only impose upon us more questions, questions that will only be answered through experiences, further experiences which will change our past answers we’ve gotten. Answers too, once gotten, may not be right. We decide them to be right according to what suits us, what we can make sense of, or add sense to. Until life throws us more questions in the form of experiences, to take away the sense we worked to find in life’s strange ways.

Human beings. Culture-bearing primates that have highly developed brains and a result capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning. Millions of discoveries over time, wars, revolutions, movements, centuries of growth…and still here we are, looking for answers for the same fundamental questions, unsatisfied with the answers we’re aware of.

We shall probably never know who we are. What we know of ourselves will always be through the eyes of another, through the eyes of the other humans around us. This is one of man’s greatest weaknesses, a downfall. A dilemma, something we won’t be able to change. We seek ourselves through the eyes of others; peers, enemies, colleagues, parents, children, strangers… Never shall we be able to look at ourselves as a whole, from the outside to know our inside. Never will it be possible.

We are curious animals. Our lives are dialogues between our voices and ourselves. Life is the process of looking in and looking out; a process of learning through experiences. A series of continuous questioning, a quest for the meaning of existence, a desire to be remembered, we live for a sense of basic dignity… and yet we get lost in our own traps, our selfish lives, and our selfish ways. We lose the purpose of life. We forget about humanity, about love and harmony. We look out for ourselves, selfish animals that we are. And yet, who is to say what is right and what isn’t?  

So, I set out to find my dignity in the holy lands of Kashi.

To look for deeper meanings.

To look for the dignity of one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities.

For that deep character that allows it to stay stuck in time.

For the charm that keeps it alive through so many centuries.

The City of Light.

I set out to look at it through my heart and not my eyes.

A land of Salvation; of life and death.

I started off to find myself in Shiva’s most favorite place.

The only region of India where the Ganga flows towards the North.

Varanasi.