Does God play dice? This famous proposition, made by Stephen Hawking in one of his most celebrated papers, has reverberations in sociological spaces too, reverberations that echo; echo that has been so loud and deafening yet so invisible that by now it has lost its valour it used to have, its discourse orientations it used to generate, and has become a trite, a threadbare show of almost philosophical outlets, an irony lived well but understood poorly. Irony because everyone asks this question so many times during her or his stay here yet we seldom take the next step, a step to look beyond, to go the unconventional way to look for genesis and nemesis of life events. We blame everything, God, time, other people, bad luck, circumstances, sometimes us, but we seldom look beyond to read inscriptions of moments encrypted on subtle layers of subconscious. We misread moments, we mislead their proposition, we misguide our senses, we miss string of life and we do all this in the name of being pragmatic. We blame, we react, we overpower, and we are overpowered. When we overpower, which doesn’t happen so often, it is well and good; when we are overpowered, that happens so frequently’ we look to shift responsibility and we look to blame someone for such events and see, what we find most of the time. We blame ‘life’ or ‘God’ and we very conveniently put everything in an abyss never realizing we are escaping the required imminent and soon escapism becomes a way of life for us. Instead of us winning over the moments, moments dictate our moves, pushing us into an illusionary world that paints before us that we are living our individuality but we seldom realize when we lost the ‘philosophy of being individual’.
Does God play dice? It is a common question which everyone asks herself or himself so many times in her or his lifetime. When we ask such questions and when we look for insights, we tend to move to philosophical realms. Here I am not talking about philosophy as a discourse or discipline but it has more to do with philosophical underpinnings of existence and identity and here philosophy becomes an ironical necessity, a necessity we have become habituated to ignore in day-to-day life. If we turn to ‘philosophy of Puritanism, the ‘dicing’ proposition looses its relevance. If we turn to the philosophy incarnation of the day as preached by so called intellectuals and self-made God-reincarnations or even by the academicians, it becomes misleading enough to veer us to the brink of conscience crisis. When we are asked to ‘accept everything as it comes’ and ‘whatever that happens is for good’ and when we start believing in such propositions, not debating what good it brought to us and if there was any good at all in whatever that happened, we start loosing our individuality slipping into the conscience crisis not realizing it in the name of being practical.
"The longest journey is the journey inward." When former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold had said these words, he was repeating this basic need of life. We all follow some values in life which we all justify anyhow and we are right in doing so but to go beyond, we need to turn to pragmatism of conscience and that only could lead to a fine blend of ‘the ways we go across to deal with prompts and hurdles of life’ and ‘optimized scale of conscience, the philosophical element’, so as to fix the ‘dice’ in a poise on the scale of thinking in a way that can achieve a swing state tending to get back to the root of one’s existence whenever it gets disturbed. And this balance, this ‘philosophy of necessity’ cannot be defined, cannot be measured, and cannot be précised universally. It is subjective enough and can only be attuned by individual life preferences and circumstances if one tends to balance the moments in the line of practical and philosophical inputs and practical outcomes. And if philosophy is essentially a way to look back at and understand life, ‘philosophy of necessity’ may lead us to make decisions that not only support our material self but can give us the much needed spiritual base too and mind you when I talk about spiritual self, I intend to reach across. We all have this base of spirituality, but we lack it in practicality of getting along with it, limiting us to mostly rituals and temples and shrine visits, and so excluding it out of our daily routine. If spirituality is akin to exploring deeper of ‘you’ connecting you to your ‘self’ and hence to the ‘light’, it has to be a part of your everyday moments, be it for a while. We need to realize ‘necessity of philosophy’ here to base our decisions on pragmatism and conscience. And no one can teach it. We are the teachers and we are the learners and so either we make it or flunk it. Balancing ‘philosophy’ and ‘necessity’ is a difficult proposition. I find myself struggling to go along with my spiritual self. Fortunately, off late, I have been able to swing the poise to a balancing axle. I hope to continue and survive with this instinct in the long run now.
And I am just a common man in the sea of countless thinking silhouettes like me. This sea of similarity has this uniqueness of sameness. Nature has given us a narrow range of expressions with just seven universal emotional expressions of humans as Psychology tells us and within this narrow range, we have countless thoughts and resulting expressional variants of basic entities. So, somehow, somewhere we cross our ways. But we seldom get affected by some positive attributes of others, focusing largely on pinning what we can find that can be criticized. ‘Cribbing’ is a buzz word in conversations. We wear so many layers that we cannot or do not want to look at positives and we do all this in the name of ‘individuality’. The ‘sameness’ that can be a blessing turns into a moronic proposition then. We do not realize this ‘philosophical necessity’ of the ‘sameness of thought processes’ and so we are not able to sift through to find if something is there to widen our horizon.
“God does not play dice”. It is this bunch of ‘us’ who make life a ‘dicing’ game. Subsistence of life is the practical need but subservience to moments and compromise with conscience in the name of pragmatism make philosophy a bookish term drifting it away from some of its basic tenets which are necessities of life and what we have is the prevalence of cliché expressions like ‘do not preach philosophy please’ and other fashionable expressions of ridiculing honesty and principles. Though by its very definition, philosophy should be treated as a subjective outlet, and therefore no one has any right to interfere in someone else’s life, we all, at some point of time, feel for the ‘philosophy of necessity’ to support our material ‘self’ with the spiritual ‘self’. We may do it knowingly or unknowingly, but we all do it. Life and Philosophy are twins bound by ironical necessity of their interdependence and everyone needs to find a way to reach to her or his ‘philosophy of necessity’.
