A child is born to innocence. A child is drawn towards good. Why then do so many among us go so horribly wrong? What makes some walk the path of darkness while others choose the light? Is it will? Is it destiny? Can we ever hope to understand the force that shapes the soul? To fight bad, one must know bad; one must journey back through time and find that fork in the road, where the good turn one way and the bad turn another....

This is all I have been thinking the last few days... What happened in Mumbai continues to hurt me... it will for a very long time.

It all seems cryptic at the first glance. You step back and look at the whole thing taking in more than what you must. It gets a little overwhelming, but you get used to it after a while. You try to change, but it is the inevitable. You can't. The power is killing you. You are helpless. You submit. You sympathize with the self. Pity, compassion, sympathy seem mere words that no one can relate to. The world now seems a much cruel place and its inhabitants all monsters. The ones who meant most are to be feared. You have no choices. You must not complain. Blame, insignificance and immaturity are synonymous to you. The once cute to be clumsy reaches its apex of irritation. What was once new is the mundane now. But you must not regress, this is what you are to be. This is what you wanted. Your wishes are now true. The regret is simply the twinge of the conscience. You learn to ignore it. Suddenly, you see that's what you are to do. You find your way out. The reverie ends right here and you wish all that you felt never comes true. Your deepest inhibitions to never surface and remain sunk in the deep ocean of emotion !

Written at 1 am while studying for a quantum mechanics and EM test so please take that into consideration before calling me crazy :)

We dream of hope. We dream of change. Of fire, of love, of death. And then it happens. The dream becomes real. And the answer to this quest, this need to solve life's mysteries finally shows itself. Like the glowing light of a new dawn. So much struggle for meaning, for purpose. And in the end, we find it only in each other. Our shared experience of the fantastic. And the mundane. The simple human need to find a kindred, to connect. And to know in our hearts... that we are not alone.

My hearts knows all my innermost secrets
How my dreams have become a beautiful golden hue
My dreams, these dreams are all that I have
These dreams will never be taken away from me........................

Sometimes questions are more powerful than answers. How is this happening? What is this? Why this and not that? Why now? What does it all mean?

Questions! Questions and more questions!!

Evolution is an imperfect process. Morality loses its meaning. The question of good and evil reduced to one simple choice: survive or perish. To survive in this world, we hold close to us those people on whom we depend. We trust in them our hopes, our fears. But what happens when trust is lost? Where do we run when things we believe in vanish before our eyes?

When all seems lost, the future unknowable, our very existence in peril ... All we can do ... is run.

When we embrace what lies within, our potential knows no limit. The future is filled with promise. The present, rife with expectation. But when we deny our instinct, and struggle against our deepest urges... Uncertainty begins. Where does this path lead? When will the changes end? Is this transformation a gift... or a curse? And for those that fear what lies ahead... The most important question of all... Can we ever change what we really are?

There are many ways to define our fragile existence... many ways to give it meaning but it is our memories that shape its purpose and give it context....the private assortment of images, fears, loves, regrets.

For it is the cruel irony of life that we are destined to hold the dark with the light, the good with the evil, success with disappointment. This is what separates us, what makes us human... And in the end, we must fight to hold on to the present....

As Neo reaches for the red pill Morpheus warns Neo "Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

The film as a whole and especially the choosing scene is deeply compelling. Why is the choice between what you believe you know and an unknown 'real' truth so fascinating? How could a choice possibly be made? On the one hand everyone you love and everything that you have built you life upon. One the other the promise only of truth.

The question then is not about pills, but what they stand for in these circumstances. The question is asking us whether reality, truth, is worth pursuing. The blue pill will leave us as we are, in a life consisting of habit, of things we believe we know. We are comfortable, we do not need truth to live. The blue pill symbolises commuting to work every day, or brushing your teeth. The red pill is an unknown quantity. We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don't know what that truth is, or even that the pill will help us to find it. The red pill symbolises risk, doubt and questioning. In order to answer the question, you can gamble your whole life and world on a reality you have never experienced.

Why should we even have to decide whether to pursue truth? The answer in short, is inquisitiveness. Many people throughout human existence have questioned and enquired. Most of them have not been scientists or doctors or philosophers, but simply ordinary people asking 'what if?' or 'why?' Asking these questions ultimately leads us to a choice. Do you continue to ask and investigate, or do you stop and never ask again? This in essence, is the question posed to Neo in the film.

So what are the advantages of taking the blue pill? As one of the characters in the film says, "ignorance is bliss" Essentially, if the truth is unknown, or you believe that you know the truth, what is there to question or worry about?

By accepting what we are told and experience life can be easier. There is the social pressure to 'fit in', which is immensely strong in most cultures. Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution. This aspect has a strong link with politics. People doing well under the current system are not inclined to look favourably on those who question the system. Morpheus says to Neo "You have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."

Another argument on the side of the blue pill is how does anyone know that the status quo is not in fact the truth? The act of simply questioning does not infer a lack of validity on the questioned. Why not assume that your experience is innocent until proven guilty? Just accept everything?

So if the arguments for the blue pill are so numerous, why take the red pill? Why pursue truth even though it may be unpalatable and the journey to it hard? In the film, Neo risks death to escape the virtual reality and discovers a brutal reality from which he cannot return. As he discovers the trouble with asking questions is that the answers are not necessarily what you want to hear.

Given the potential disadvantages of choosing the red pill, the motivation for discovering the truth must then be very strong. The film makes much of this point. Trinity says to Neo "It's the question that drives us, Neo." and Morpheus compares the motivation for Neo's search to "a splinter in your mind - driving you mad." The motivation for answering the question is obviously strong as the answer will help us to find the meaning in our lives.

What we are looking at here is the drive to answer a question, but the key to this is what drove the question in the first place. The asking of questions about our environment our experience and ourselves is fundamental to the human condition. Children ask a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from an early age. It is only with education and socialisation that some people stop asking these questions. However, we remain, as it were, hard-wired to enquire.

This is an inevitable consequence of consciousness. A being with a mind, conscious of itself and its existence, experiencing a reality, needs to organise the data that it receives from its senses. Simply observing and recording does not allow for consciousness. It is what we do with that information that allows us to think. In order to process and store the vast amount of information received, the human brain attempts to identify patterns in the data; looking for the patterns behind what is experienced. This is asking questions of the sensory information, and requires reasoning. By definition a conscious mind seeks to know. Knowing something requires more than just data, but intelligence or reasoning applied to that data. To attempt to obtain knowledge we must therefore question the data our mind receives; thus, consciousness questions.

So the metaphor of the journey to truth that Neo takes is complete. The journey starts with a question, there is a search for the answer and the answer may be reached. This shows us that the journey does not start with Neo choosing between the pills, or with ourselves deciding whether to question. The act of asking the question is itself the starting point as the aim of asking the question is to seek truth and knowledge.

We have established that consciousness is aware and seeks knowledge and that thus the conscious mind must question. To question is to seek the truth and start on the journey to knowledge. Therefore the choice between the pills is surely made for us. The fact that we are conscious appears to require us to take the red pill.

However, this can be simply countered by someone who would prefer to take the blue pill. They may wish to seek the truth in a different way, or in a less mind jarring set of circumstances. They can choose the blue pill and not deny their consciousness, but to stop seeking the truth entirely would be to deny their consciousness.

Thus we are philosophically driven to seek the truth and the act of questioning whether to seek it is in itself seeking the truth. As conscious minds we will always seek the truth. However, the choice over the red or blue pills is not solely a choice between whether to question or not, it is a personal choice on the method of discovering the truth......

Each day I think hard and decide not to be that way..... and then I wake up with a smile on my face and a thought in my mind and I realise things are meant to be exactly the way they are :)

O heart, your insistence is commendable !
Why this obsession, what is its aim?
After all why this keen desire?
How can I explain this restiveness?
How did I end up here?
Why should I stay lost in dreams?
O heart, why do you keep telling me to.......

wrote this earlier today.......... probably the most abstract of my writings

too many questions and just one answer.... but these 7 lines bring a million thoughts in my head.... I call them a chapter in "the book of life"

Just for today I will open my eyes and thank the Universe for one more day
Just for today I will look in the mirror and find one thing I like about myself
Just for today I will smile at a stranger in the traffic
Just for today I will greet someone I don't particularly like - and mean it
Just for today I will sing a song and not care if I am off key or who hears
Just for today I will do something I want to do, no matter what anyone else thinks
Just for today I will give someone a word of affirmation - not because I have to, but because I want to
Just for today I will be grateful for who I have in my life, not what I have
Just for today I will say a sincere thank you if I receive a compliment and not joke it away
Just for today I will do each task to the best of my ability
Just for today I will hug someone
Just for today I will tell someone I love that I love them
Just for today I will appreciate having a job, a bed and food
Just for today I will appreciate the beautiful colours of the sunset
Just for today I will be grateful for one more day that was undeserved, one more day that was lived to the full, one more day to love and be loved, one more day to be me