I consciousness

My friend, patient and reader of my blog, Dip Ghosh dropped in to see me the other day. He made a chance remark as to why I write so much on matters concerning the evening of one’s life? This made me laugh and also had me thinking. What is my contact with young people and their lives? [morning of life], except when they come to see me as patients. What I know and hear about their lives is so far removed from my own that writing about it can only be second hand. I am also not well qualified to write about young people even those whom I know. I don’t understand their craze for modern Gizmos, their spending spare time wandering and shopping in the glitzy malls, their way of eating out at fancy places paying unacceptably large sums of money on unacceptable food. When they come as patients I sometimes tell them but their attitude is one of bored listening to an old man who is out of tune with the modern world [this is true]

I have on the other hand firsthand experience of the evening of life. Many of my patients are old and in their sickness and other wise I understand them better. I often wonder how our own I consciousness wanes slowly as we age and becomes hazy because of lack of recognition by others. I am I because others see me as I. When others see me as one who is on his way out, this recognition and feeling of real or contrived importance recedes. But does it die entirely? Sadly it will not and the recognition of its lessening importance is occasionally galling to the ego. When does it do and what happens to it? The development of I consciousness begins early in life when the child begins to understand the body limitations and begins to develop and understand language. The skin cover of the body tells the brain the limitation of the body in relation to the exterior and the senses tell the brain who it is visa vi the external environment. But for all this there must be original something to develop. This is I. When I die what happens this my I? Is it kept in suspended animation? Does it have some sort of structure that we don’t know of? Does it consist of some special form of intelligence which doesn’t need senses to be appreciated? I have no answers to these questions.

The belief that this I consciousness is transferable after death gives some meaning to existence. But truth eludes us and the proliferation of God men and women is a proof to this quest to know. Some glimpse of understanding will come to you if you read the book,’my stroke of insight’

Like it sometime happens, I begin with something and end up with something else . This week end happens to be one of those where in I have been having these recurring thoughts and felt that I should share some of them with you.