OrangeGuy: Fear is the projection of a memory from the past
into the future. You cannot be afraid of something you haven’t experienced
before.
Hooham: Why fear is created?
OrangeGuy: Depends on how your mind is designed to work.
Fear is created from pain and ignorance. If you have experienced getting eaten
by a crocodile before, you will feel the fear the next time you approach a
crocodile. If you have listened to so many people talk in fear about something,
you will experience fear when you experience that thing in your life.
Hooham: Can it be changed?
OrangeGuy: Yes, mind can be changed. But not until you are
identifying yourself with the mind.
Hooham: Am I fear or am I fearless?
OrangeGuy: Whether you think you are fear or you think you
are fearless, you are that.
Hooham: So from now on I will believe that I am fearless.
OrangeGuy: Whatever you believe, you become. Whatever you
know, you are.
Almost everyone of us
have listened to this rhyme as a child. In English, the rhyme translates to
“Laddu is round, poodi is round. Fat man’s potbelly is round. Earth is round,
sky is round. The whole cosmos is round round!”
This rhyme was usually
taught to us in the English class, but if it was taught in the mathematics
class, your math teacher would probably tell you that everything that is round,
or circular, carries a mysterious number called “pi.”
Pi is the God of the
mathematical world. It never ends, it lasts forever, and it never changes. Basically,
it is immortal.
Spiritual mystics
sometimes call it the ”Absolute truth” or the “universal constant.”
You may be fascinated
to know that in ancient times, understanding this number wasn’t just curiosity,
but a necessity, especially for astronomers and architects. Greeks and
Egyptians exhausted every method to calculate the full decimal expression of
pi, ultimately surrendering to the fact that it is just eternal, infinite, non-terminating,
and unchangeable.
In math books, pi is
represented by the symbol of two vertical legs supporting a horizontal roof,
like a table, with value represented either as 22 by 7 or 3.14….
These dots after the
decimal represent the never-ending decimal expression of pi, with first two
digits always remaining the same 14. It is also represented by the formula:
circumference of the circle divided by twice the radius or the diameter.
Scientists have spent
centuries decoding the mystery of pi, trying to calculate its complete value by
using strings to measure the circle, sometimes using sophisticated
supercomputers, but they never quite reached the end. Even after trillions of
digits, the number didn’t seem to end.
Pi is not just the God
of the mathematical world, but also the secret hiding in everything that is
shaped like a circle. The Ferry wheel, the merry-go-round, the planetary
orbits, the chapattis your mom makes, even the brightness of stars.
So the next time you
are visiting a temple to worship God, don’t forget to ask the priest why didn’t
they put a sculpture of this fascinating mathematical God pi alongside the
sculptures of other gods and goddesses.
Imagine you work as a ghost investigator and you’ve been
sent to a forest to investigate a ghost who resides in the heart of a secluded
underground cave. You need to travel to the forest, catch the ghost, and report
all the details to your department.
When you arrive in the forest, there are a lot of details
you can report to your department. The trees, the animals and birds, the
flowers, the fragrant breeze, the various sounds, the rocky walls of the cavern,
the bats and bugs; and all. Will you stop by and report these details to your
office or march right into the cave and report the details of the ghost?
Joan Didion’s writing style, also called “Single Observation
and Sparse Prose” bypasses the superfluous or unnecessary details from a piece
of writing and jumps right into the “shimmering” highlight. Joan starts her novels with a shimmering “picture in mind” and
her job is to decipher the grammar and the grammatical structure behind these
images. The technique works on “omission as power.”
As Tom Stevenson writes,
"Subtracting, Not Adding, Is
The Path To A Happier Life."
Didion’s principle works in the same way.
In writing, “single observation” is a stylistic device, but
it can also be looked upon as a “philosophy of perception.” In the same way a wild
animal strips away the prey’s skin, layer by layer, gnawing it down to the
bone, a piece of writing is stripped away of all the adjectives that are not
required or are unnecessary to the story. Didion emphasizes on exposing the
underlying structure of a situation, to make the reader feel its cold, hard
reality underneath.
Didion often described this type of writing as a whirlpool
of vertigo and nausea. The technique commits to structural austerity, raw
honesty, and an uncompromising “form-follows-function” technique while
stripping away too much of flowery descriptions or sentimentality with brutal dispassion
and cold detachment. It’s like focusing a camera so devotedly on one crack in a
road that the crack unfolds the entire city’s map and its backstory. She often
builds the piece around a single, piercing or devastating observation, from a
scene, a dialogue, an object, or any other element.
The Science: The Brain Process
Why does this "less is more" approach hit so hard?
It involves several key neurological and cognitive mechanisms.
It reduces “noise”
The very sad, lonely, and depressed woman sat quietly on the
library bench, apparently trying to read a book.
A sentence like this cluttered with multiple adjectives and
adverbs makes things difficult and noisy for the brain. It overwhelms the brain
with high cognitive load on the language processing centers.
By assimilating a cluttered description into a pointed focus
concentrates the energy of the brain, controls the information, and declares it
quickly rather than elaborating it with long-stretched descriptions. Not that
description is bad, but this is just one of the ways we can experiment with our
writing.
It exercises the brain with “predictive coding”
Since the writing style only enables very sparse, tight, and
specific description of the story, it is left to the reader to fill the gaps in
this description, which makes them an active co-creator of the story, rather
than just being on the other side of it. In the world of science, this process
is called “predictive coding.”
Reaches straight into the subconscious mind
Abstract concepts or sensory details might trigger certain
emotions in a person, but the “single observation” bypasses the world of
thoughts, intellect, and senses, and directly reaches into the depths of the
subconscious mind, making the reader “experience” the coldness or the sadness,
rather than just painting a picture of it. It is the written equivalent of the
psychological concept “emotional distancing.”
