Insulated in Society

The following is an extract from "The Doors of perception" by Alduos Huxley. Its claim to fame is in being the philosophical inspiration behind Jim Morisson, Ray Manzarek , Robby Krieger & John Densmore christening themselves as "The Doors"... A commentary which put my thoughts to words so accurately & aptly that I have copy pasted it verbatim.

We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to Permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or "feeling into." Thus, remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can condole with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves (always, of course, in a slightly Pickwickian sense) in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent. The mind is its own place, and the Places inhabited by the insane and the exceptionally gifted are so different from the places where ordinary men and women live, that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten. The things and events to which the symbols refer belong to mutually exclusive realms of experience.

From the editor's desk...after an eternity

Here I am ... back ... yet again :)

a string of peer-blog-revivals & the consequent blogrolling activities have put on an enormous societal pressure on me to return... & adhere to the bold title of this blog <> .. ofcourse, a slight modification is that the small print under the title is now accompanied by an asterix, since the realization has dawned upon me that there could be myriad reasons perpetuating such a long absence. For instance, I had not accounted for eurotrip planning activities, the numerous farewells & the consequent reunions, the actual eurotrip itself, the great recession, the ensuing placement doldrums, major/minor tiffs in human bondages & the carefree bliss of neither-here-nor-there during the out-of-mdi & not-yet-joined-the-job days. I had not considered the enormous toll on time these seemingly rare events would take before putting up that bold declaration. So, I emerge wiser out of all these, & shall make no promises that I can't keep.