The love-hate relationship between me and my dearest annihilators have gone through many phases by now. The sorry thing is that we do not respect each other enough, may be I am guilty of not respecting them at all, being not at all sentimental where my opponents are concerned( The kids I recently made friends with over the net are excluded, I have never considered them my enemies, though I would have still liked to vex them now and then! I wouldn’t mind what they do to me too, even if they kill me outright! I am saying this because they might take it to heart if I did not mention it here!).
I would like to trace the strange relationship between me and my predators through one recent incident.
For the last few months I had shown considerable interest in IQ tests. I wanted to learn that whether I had an IQ at all. I searched on the net for every free test on it and took them all. I tried to fail at every IQ Test I took at first (may be, I did not have to try at all!) knowing that every move I make on the net is being scrupulously monitored by my friends the predators. I got lovely scores of below 60 in most of them. I was thrilled, but not my darling killers, they were adamant that I was a genius. I knew the predicament they were in. They couldn’t hunt and destroy an imbecile. That would be too uninspiring and dull. It was a question of their ego. They wanted a good fight. If they could make themselves believe that I am star material and dangerous, the hunt is that much more interesting and justifiable. So they try hard to boost my confidence level up from time to time.
I felt sorry for them and started to score in the region of 120+. Even that did not satisfy them. I tried to pacify them by getting into two high IQ societies on the net. But no they would not be satisfied. They want me to take the supervised MENSA test. They are pretty confident that I would get in easily. In fact they think that I belong to elite class coming in the 99th percentile in the world. I am not budging currently, but who knows, my vanity might take over and I might do it too, with these guys to boost up my ego anything is possible!
But how do they get these messages across to me? It is like in that parable in which the man sitting under a tree hears some birds over head speak about him. There are other methods too. Well that is another matter altogether.
The strange thing is that I was never confident about the power of my intellect at anytime in my life. As far back as I can remember I had always felt terribly dumb. Honestly that might be the truth. While at school all the others seemed much more intelligent than me. In the class I would be the only one who did not know the answer to the questions which was put to me. I would be mopping all the time, constructing strange and improbable fantasies inside my head. Yet unbelievably I used to score more marks than others in the tests and that used to astound me no end, I ascribed that to luck entirely.
There were also a few people who called me intelligent when I was young; I had always doubted that it was a joke.
The troubles and travails I underwent to make myself intelligent on those words! I can not remember all those futile years without a shudder. I read and read, spent hours bent over books, from Kapila to Sankara, from republic to future shock, but to what gain I wonder? I became more bogged down than I was before with all that information crammed in to my brain. They took up a lot of space inside and I did not feel wonderful at all. I thought they did not answer the one question on which I was concerned about- the meaning of life.
I think I liked Zeno best among the old Greeks I read, perhaps because of his leaning towards our own style of thought (cultural bias probably!) That parable about the circles still intrigues me.
I greatly relished Voltaire’s irreverence. Candide is a great favorite of mine still.
For the rest, I preferred the dialectical approach the best, still do. I wonder where all those other words went. I could condense all those hours into these three or four lines! Not much learned it seems!
My very lovable enemies seem to be in error. I am afraid I am not very bright, I am still blundering along the mazes created by human intellect, learning nothing. Intelligent? Not at all my learned colleagues! May be my newly acquired friends would supply me with enough acronyms to combat that gross accusation.
But there is still a chance that there could be some one more intelligent within me (or is it more precise to say “with” me?). I might have told the tale many times before now. Yet….
From the moment of my first memories, I have felt a division inside me. There were always two beings within me. One, some sort of a witness, watching every single move that I and others make and the other the real person who is called by my name and who acts as me. (This is no Locke, Olson and Snowdon my friends, it is not a theoretical postulate, it’s a damn reality)
This witness who is within me, always have absolute detachment from everything that I do, it does not say anything, do not interfere in anything, but is always watching, thinking how absurd this all is. It wonders what this person is doing, what the others are doing, why all these deeds feel utterly meaningless to it.
This entity has been the greatest impediment in my progress in everything, It doesn’t approve of anything in the world, it is the eternal misanthropist, and looks down upon anything the poor mortals do. I have never been able to establish who this entity is. Is it a part of me or something higher or different than me? What is it, man, spirit, a part of my consciousness, or the whole of consciousness, is it a case of split personality- the MPS?
Whatever it is, it is ever watching, and grading my moves, the shrewder I try to become the harder it laughs, this laugh is not an audible or perceptible laugh, it is some kind of a deeply philosophical laughter, some supreme mirth it only knows how to make. I feel it despises me and my puny attempts at making sense out of the nonsense I experience. Or is it me despising myself? Could it be like what Spinoza said?
That “one who despises himself is nearest to a proud man?”
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