Tuesday, 7 July 2020

Calculative and Meditative Thinking


Calculative and Meditative Thinking
Sometimes in the year 2014 in New Delhi, I was listening to a speech delivered by one scholar and social activist, the name of which I can’t remember today. He was speaking on the topic – “Changing human behavior in modern age”.   …….Calculative thinking is taking over the Meditative thinking, where people just gather inestimable information; put them together and use that for specific purpose in search of self benefit. Success-failure, profit-lose are more important than the soul of thought. Aphorism of life is re-scripted and spirituality is replaced by multiplicity of ideas.  Meditative thinking tries to find root to soul and to the body; motivate us to learn from the beginning to end about what and why of the happenings in our surroundings. Meditative thinking gives birth to imagination, then creativity and link road to the future. It is the creativity that binds human beings with the sense of the responsibility and for future. World will be in more chaotic condition because we have lost sense of responsibility to others. World had the history of class struggle between ‘Have and Have Not’ in the past, and today we try to say that that is over. But nothing is over, even in this age also, where Right to Food is a law in all most all countries of the world, there is still such situation prevailing, where a section of people have the right to preserve food, and others have to struggle for having that. Huge gaps of privileged and unprivileged, knowledge seeker and knowledge controllers are creating again new class.  Technology is controlled by wealthy people, chasing achievement of life in their prescribed road map; we lose everything of our foundation …......

Echoes of claps were heard and he was praised by chair person of the function. Such a thought provoking deliberation was outside my interest at that time. For me difference between calculative and meditative thinking was not so important. Because as we know every working people would be naturally calculative in nature and meditative thinking is for creative people and thinker only.  As a listener, I also couldn’t but clap along with others in the hall.

After the elapse of couple of decades, today I am re-connected by the soul of that speech just for a few reasons.  Reasons are : - (i) we have lost interest of reading book, because we need to pay cash for that and it consumes much time to go through. Contrary to that there are writings in net for cheaper price, which are short, precise, informative and useful in life. Meaning, searching of  soul  through the book reading is now old fashioned hobby for us. (ii) We now just try to know the culture as how comfort of technology teaches us, not the tradition. We want to enjoy it not to live in it, extract profit out of that and never try to understand.  (iii) Everything of society including politics and religion, now survives in management and publicity concept, not on any founded ideology or Ism. Organizational war of supremacy and dominance has converted all those to merely a material being from the foundation of thought.  (iv) We have seen the time where sons or daughters have started disowning their moral responsibility towards parents. Parallel to that parents have also lost much hopes from their children in their future life. Reason is that calculation of life disallows such responsibilities just because those are not manageable.  Most drastic change of fact is that calculation of practical life has seriously influenced now the thought process of thinkers and their creativity too. 

Ultimately concluding line of speech is Calculative thinking gives us sense of management with specific burden only, but Meditative thinking gives us about wholeness of life and nature. But after all we are human being; we all are more or less materialistic because, we are living in material world, where the calculation is much needed to win in the competition of life. We shall always opt for the path, which is convenient for the survival of individual life. But following the rowdy race of life, we shouldn’t forget to think about the truth that, the creative thinking is not a product of any factory that can be assembled with machinery. Our study and learning lessons should be a thorough process of finding the root, knowing the present happenings and understanding its future. Materialism shouldn’t be defined within the narrow space of avariciousness only; it also should have space for new imagination for the future. All these can be realized only by persons through in-depth learning processes and experiences of life.



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