Searchers

What are you? This was the question that I was made to confront by my friend, my philosopher, my guide? What am I? Now, every time I did manage to answer that elusive question using the limited repository of information or knowledge that my brain possessed, I could only realize the fallacy that I was living under the shadow of. Each time I uttered a word that could momentarily summarize what am I, I could only discover that I was just using words that are signifiers or better still quantitative signifiers as Jacques Lacan would put it. But is that who I am? A quantitative signifier? A word whose meanings are made by lesser mortals like myself? Call it an existential confusion that people like me live under or call it that elusive search for the true meaning of self ripped from the pages of Advaita - but what is that defines us?

Under the haze of the smoke, what I said was that I am nothing but a human being in flesh and blood. I got a wonderful retort that two of my wonderful and equally existential friends proposed - that you're just using words. You're just using terms that have no meaning by themselves. True. very true, I suppose. And I say I suppose because with that question very single belief that I thought I had about myself was shaken to the core after being asked that question. Not that I was less worried about my own little musings; but that question really did come as a jolt.

Who are we? And if one were to take the words of thinkers like Sartre and Bertrand Russell and also Camus and Kafka very seriously, then it's our actions that define us. Yes, that also seems to be very true; but even if our deeds define us, then what are the bounds or what are the levels on which our existence is defined? Because what we do some how can only be quantified based on the ripples our actions create across our very own universe and also the larger one at that. But if only Advaita was concerned with the realities of our existence, then the very meaning of existence as espoused by the great western thinkers like the ones mentioned above would hold true. Unfortunately, Advaita doesn't restrict itself with the bounds of reality. It transcends the bounds of reality and enters spiritualism. Wonderful word, that is - Spiritualism. In case of spiritualism, what is it that accords you a meaning? What is that defines your construct? If death is where the body dies and vanishes, and all that is left, then it is also true that our deeds accord meaning to our body. A body that leaves and goes. What about the meaning of the soul, then? What about the soul? Is it that the soul defines us? Then how does one attribute meaning to a soul?

Is it a search that I am destined for? The answer sure seems a resounding yes! Am I to emerge with the answer for the same? The answer seems to point me in just one direction - a search.