Thursday, November 13, 2008

Few things that I know about the first few days in a foreign country and that I want to know

Foreign , sound like an alien place to be. And when you have just moved from your own hometown to someplace which is not your hometown , few things changes, as people say. This changes combined with the perception of mind creates a different biological and psychological sphere around us. Good or bad, it takes little or a long time to get used to this sphere. What are the changes we first notice ? Even the changes we first notice depends on our previous experience and current status of mind, which is also an amalgamation of previous biological and psychological experience. But I have to start somewhere. So suppose , I am going outside my home for the first time, alone, such that the previous definition of "we" that I have had has no representative there, nor there are most of the things similar to the thing called "my place", and I am experienced enough to have the prejudices called beauty, tasty , talented, superior blah blah... More precisely, suppose I have enough prejudices (known as common sense or knowledge or feelings or intellect ) to give every thing a order in my mind and my behaviour is dependent on that ordering.
People look different . And in our time skin color , by the help of western propaganda, is a very strong thing to define beauty. So we notice the skin color first. I strongly remember those days , when i used to notice whether a person is fat or slim first. Then we try to give the people of the foreign land a place in our ordering according to our definition of beauty. Sense of beauty is a strong prejudice and it can really affect anyones behaviour. An accepted physically beautiful person holds a good social and economic position irrespective of his/her other qualities. So the first sense we can feel comes from our eyes. And that somehow defines our behaviour towards the foreigners. This sense of beauty is not only dependent on physical beauty , it has strong coupling with economics, academic aspects of the individual or a population. The mistake that all of us make is to try to conclude about some property of the population using the perception of invidual knowledge. Also the other way around can be really dangerous. In first few days, normally we make our perceptions about the population very clear and strong and then we start making assertions about the individuals. And those assertions not only dominates our behaviour towards everyone , it also makes a path for more psychological perversion and corruption.
The best way to live anywhere in this world is to be free from your mind while observing something, as logically either every place is a foreign place for us or every place is our home (same way either everything is beautiful or nothing is). A bad perception is worse than no perception. Mind has to be free so do we have to b e free from our mind. Whne there is an observation, there are no observer, nothing observed, just an observation.

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