“IN SEARCH OF OUR WONDERFUL WORDS”….Creativity through service

The 12^th Chapter (‘Creativity through Service’) of my recent book, “In Search of Our Wonderful Words” starts with the following words of Oscar Wilde.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Later in the chapter I wrote;

Quote

If we really intend that human life becomes rich with some satisfaction and contentment, we cannot afford to be very theoretical in our discussions. There is no dearth of theories. Almost similar things have been found to be right irrespective of time, place and circumstances, and have been said or written in different languages and different forms. Most of us acknowledge and accept them as useful knowledge and even discuss them repeatedly, but when it comes to conducting ourselves according to the theories propagated, we falter. Let us find out why we falter and where we falter. Are the theories that have been evolved for benefit of humanity creative?

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that is creativity.

(Charles Mingus)

How do we complicate things? We think about the things relying on whatever we ‘know’ about them. We ‘think’ that we are intelligent enough to verify the correctness of our own ‘knowledge’. Therefore, we think again to verify our knowledge; once again on the basis of some premises we ourselves have chosen and decided on. The process continues without our realizing that some errors creeping in at any stage have multiplied several times passing from one loop to another. We all know that there are as many opinions and interpretations of a simple thought as there are the numbers of people thinking about it. We ourselves vary our opinions according to the environment, time and circumstances. This amply establishes that our intellect cannot simplify things to the extent that they can be converted into useful action. Yes, we have the intelligence to complicate things, not the one to simplify them. Most of the actions that can serve the humanity well are blocked due to the ‘unwanted activities’ of human intellect.

Unquote

What kind of content it is? Is it religious, philosophical, psychological, political or can it be categorized in some other manner? We categorize things for our convenience and not for drawing mental boundaries. Don’t you think distinction, classification and categorization are obstacles to creativity? I thought about life; yours, someone else’s and mine. I thought about what others thought about life, remaining focused on the target of finding ways to make improvements in ‘our’ lives. I wrote this book with a strong feeling that such ways can be found only if many of us become convinced that our genuine concern for the welfare of all, without distinction and discrimination, holds the key to achieving a reasonable success in this direction.

Writing “In Search of our Wonderful Words” and “Mahatma A Scientist of Intuitively Obvious” was my duty, my Dharma, as an author, in particular, and as a human being, in general. Similarly, informing others about what I wrote is also my duty. Some may categorize this activity as ‘Book Promotion’ but, to me, it is randomly throwing some seeds of thoughts, in the form of words, with a hope that at least a few of them will land on a receptive soil, and some good would occur, sometimes, somewhere.

PROMOD KUMAR SHARMA