What is 'other' in me? Something which is not a part of me, someone who is separate and distinct from me? This separateness is often preached in every bit of discourses.
Otherness has a value which starts with the premise of self. Self, which is egotistic, selfish, and individualistic. The dichotomy of self-otherness is the genesis of chaos, violence, hatred, and contempt. In fact, no violence is violence in real sense if it does not affect self. Inflicting injury to others must be injurious to self. Can there be an action which affects the so called others without self? I doubt if any. I doubt if there is self-other dichotomy in existence. The moment people practice "I" v. You, or I v. They, that moment only the very possibility of life as harmony, beauty, and peace looses its fragrance amid chaotic-egotistical tensions. There is no self-other division except in my mind. And this division has resulted into catastrophic strains since ancient to modern time. Violence is not only what do we know in traditional sense. Violence is also sometimes so subtle and soft that we often commit it even without knowing about it.
The principles which must lead us should not come from this Cartesian division of mind-body, body-soul, friend-enemy, self-other, and transcendence-immanence, instead life itself is a collective whole. We never know if we are living, or mother Earth is living? Only a collective imagination is the name of life which deserves the name of life. The "island of life' is illusionary and deceptive. If you believe in premise of self, just look outside yourself and see what are the elements outside you which makes you alive. The tree which offers you fresh oxygen, help in conservation of waters, its fruits which are too dear to them but they offer you, the animals, crops, fire, water, Earth, Sky, Sun, and what not. Do you find any dichotomy in their existence? Do you find any isolation in them. Then, why are we so selfish and isolated? Why are we so near-sighted? Who baffles us? Who makes us uneasy? Why do we accumulate so many things without thinking a minute if it is a burden? Perhaps, we have killed a sense of collective imagination as humans. We heighten humans the highest and the wisest animal on this planet; the best possible creation of nature. In same line of thinking, we are burdened with binary, a doxa, which is a byproduct of mind, which is superimposed to us to our senses so as to write a story of conquest over others in which self is defeated.
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