Outside in

The singular & the plural

By Shahbaz Ali Khan

Shahbaz, a former Industry relations and PR professional, has spent the past 8 years experimenting with the frontiers of professional competence by insisting on not specializing in anything but thinking, communicating and writing. He tweets at @intensedesigns

I know you are reading this; though you may be the singularity many propose you to be, I sincerely doubt it. You are not a singular phenomenon. You are not a simple being.

You are the manifestation of the multiplicity of our collective imaginations. Benevolent, Hateful, ignorant, deceitful and Kind. The escalation of human thought into clearly demarcated, yet disturbing, multiplicities of definition.

Despite this plurality, know this: There are some of us who do not see you in the plural. We see you in the multiple; the subjective yet finite number of projections you possess are none, alone and in themselves, sufficient to explain who you are.

Nor do they explain what you are. You are not benevolent, for this world has little of that to offer; too little to assume you benevolent in any sense. There is more suffering than joy, more hurt than heal, more pain than happiness and more broken than there is fixed; so if you are present, interfering and overseeing, than surely there is more hate in you than there is love.

Are you the pure control of the human consciousness over its entire thought? Are you the nameless god of the Buddha? A Nirvana of sensory revelation?

Are you present in the quanta-physical world only? Do you reveal yourself under the intense and relentless scrutiny of scientific conquest?

And so I assume you do not partake in the daily ritual of human life. Lest you be a vengeful, angry being; full of treachery and torturous intent.

In the beginning, you made knowledge of You Man’s quest for geographical battle lines. You provided land and its bounty to a few, select men; thus they believed and thus they squabbled over them in your name. Yet you had no part to play in this lest you prefer deceit and death over life and progress.

In time, not your time but ours, Man learnt to rely less on script it assigned to your name. He relied more on his reason, his ability to multiply, in his mind, the numbers upon which rested the balance of the universe. Thus it came to be that most men, myself included, moved away from seeing you in the present and the immediate. We came upon perceiving of you more in the meta-physical and the absent.

So it has come to be that I speak to you; not knowing whether you lurk within the Gluon or the Galaxy. This allows me to know you will read this.

We are not afraid. We know we have enough in us to survive and evolve further. We can make our own worlds. We can conquer new stars. We can understand much of what is out there.

We do not fear You as much as we fear ourselves. Our darkest hours are not spent repenting to the multiplicity of your being, but in the singularity of our circumstances. This is how we know you must be different.

It is how we presume we can equal you one day. We may also, through the complete control of ourselves, be gods in our own rights. We have moved fast and will continue to move faster.

I say to You, watch us now. Watch us reckon with the demise of our host planet. I suspect you will watch us move 10 millennia of time without needing the power of your physical being. I suspect this will be insufficient for getting closer to you.

I therefore am led to believe that you are neither in the depth of the quanta-physical nor in the highest plains of the meta-physical.  I suspect you would not make yourself so ‘easy’ to find.

I hope you are a Banyan tree, with a river that gently flows near it. If this be the case, than I do promise you I shall search from forest to forest till I have found You.