User talk:Prasoon~enwiki

My Struggle To Become An Individual.

As I look back on my life, one of the most constant and powerful things I have experienced is the desire to be more than I am at the moment. An unwillingness to let my mind remain in the pettiness where it idles. A desire to increase the boundaries of myself. A desire to feel more, learn more, and a desire to grow, improve, purify and expand.

And I interpret this inner push as a meaning that there is always some one thing out there that I want to do or be or have.

Prasoon M.

--PRASOON MUKHERJEE 12:35, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

2nd October 1999.

Master,

It may seem arrogant that I should not have been content to walk in the steps of men much wiser than myself. But I believe much as we resemble one another we are none of us exactly alike, and I have seen no reason why I should not, so far as I could, choose my own course. I have always followed the line of strongest motive and that motive has been an idea of myself that I have gradually evolved.

Most people think little. They accept their presence in the world, and are driven this way and that to satisfy their natural impulses, and when it dwindles they go out like the light of a candle. Their lives are purely instinctive. It May be that theirs is a greater wisdom. But if your consciousness has so far developed that you find certain questions pressing upon you think the old answers wrong, what are you going to do.

--PRASOON MUKHERJEE 12:35, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

18th July 1997

Master,

A bundle of contradiction. That is how you have often described me. Can you tell me exactly what is it? What does contradiction mean? Like so many words, I presume, it can also have two meanings. Contradiction from without and contradiction from within.

The first is the ordinary “not giving in easily, always trying to know the best, trying to get in the last word” and other pleasant and unpleasant qualities for which I am known. But the second nobody knows, and that is my own secret.

Master I have always told you that I have, as it were, a dual personality. One half embodies my exuberant cheerfulness, making fun of every thing, and above all the way I take everything lightly. This includes my not taking offence at a filteration, or a dirty joke. This side is usually lying in wait and pushes away the other, which is much better, deeper and purer.

But Master you surely must have realized that few people know my better half and that’s why most people find me so insufferable.

--PRASOON MUKHERJEE 11:31, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)----

20th September 1997

I have two principal ways of discovering the areas where I fail to see myself.

The first is acknowledging the qualities in others that irritates me. And then trying to justify my reaction.

The second is acknowledging the comments that have made me defensive. And then again trying to justify my reaction.

To discover what irritates me, I merely review my latest encounters. But I have more difficulty recognizing when I am defensive. Sometimes I can identify it by the following syndrome- I answer quickly, I feel an urge to say more than I need to. I explain trying to persuade, and feel impatient when interrupted. I feel frustrated even if I appear to succeed, as if the damage has already been done. I am incapable of taking other people’s comment any way but seriously.

If it is afterwards that my defensiveness surfaces my mental state has this characteristics- I think hurriedly, I think in circles, replaying the scene and endlessly revising my part. But at the same time I feel a strong resistance to stop from implementing a procedure that is not rational, and this is my conscious. It always wins over my mind. And perhaps this is the reason why I am able to write to you all these Master.

--PRASOON MUKHERJEE 11:31, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

6th July 1997

Master,

I have always wondered at the passion many people feel to meet the celebrated. The prestige they acquire by being able to tell their friends that they know the famous, prove only that they are themselves of small account. The celebrated develop a technique to deal with the person they come across. They show the world a mask, often an impressive one, but take care to conceal their real selves. They play the part that is expected from them and with practice they learn to play it very well. But you are stupid if you think that this public performance of theirs correspond with the man within.

I too have been attached, deeply attached to a few people. But I have been interested in men & women in general and not for their own sakes. I have always found myself more comfortable with the obscure than with the famous, for they are more often themselves. They have had no need to create a figure to protect themselves from the world to impress it. They display their oddities because it has never struck them that they are odd.

Master you have often reminded me that I am of no consequence whatever. It would have made little difference if I had never existed. But Master every thing I say here is merely an opinion of my own. And it is also true that I do not scribe to convince anybody from these texts. Nor do I intend to make readers out of this. I do not much care if people agree with me. But of course I think I am right, otherwise I will not write to you.

It is really a wonder that I haven’t dropped al my ideas because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion hypocrisy and false vanity. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart, they are rational. It is only their hunger for impression that makes them irrational.

--PRASOON MUKHERJEE 12:28, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

1st December 1997

Master,

Does it not seem curious that our own offences should seem to us so much less heinous than the offences of others? I suppose the reason is that we know all the circumstances that have occasioned them and so manage to excuse ourselves of what we cannot excuse in others. We generally turn our attention away from our own defects and when we are forced by some events to consider them, find it easy to condone them. All I know is that we are right to do this, for they are a part of us and we must accept the good and the bad in ourselves together.

But when we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity, or discredit us in the eyes of the world. To take a trivial instance, how scornful we are when we catch someone out telling a lie, but who can say that I wouldn’t have told the same under similar circumstances, or for that he has not told one, but may be a hundred?

Master I feel there is not much to choose between people. They are all a hotchpotch of greatness and littleness, of virtues and vices, of nobility and baseness. It is only that some have more strength of character or more opportunity and so in one direction or another give their instincts a freer play. But potentially they are all the same.

For my part I do not think I am better or any worse than most people. And I know that if I set down every action in my life and every thought that has crossed my mind the world would consider me a monster of depravity.

I have made a great many mistakes. I have attempted things that were foreign to my nature, because in my vanity I would not consider myself beaten. I have paid too much attention to the opinion of others. I have sometimes made sacrifices to unworthy objects because I had not the courage to inflict pain. In short I have committed many follies and I have done certain things in my life that I am unable entirely to forget because I have a sensitive conscience. If I had been a catholic I would have delivered myself of them at a confession and after performing the penance imposed received absolution and put them out of my mind forever. But instead throughout, I have had to deal with them as my own common sense suggested. And I do not regret them, for I think it is only because of my these grave faults that I have learnt indulgence in others.

What has chiefly struck me in others is their lack of consistency. I have seldom or to be more proper never seen people all of a piece. I have often asked myself how characteristics seemingly irreconcilable can exist in the same person? I have known crooks who were capable of sacrifices, and very much invidious individuals for whom it was a point of honour to give noble advices. This contrast that I have in people has interested me.

It may be fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me, and even when they do I have learnt at last generally to excuse them. But Master I think I could only be justly blamed if I saw solely people’s faults and were blind to their virtues. I am not conscience that this is the case. There is nothing more beautiful than goodness, and it has pleased me very often to see how much of it there is in person who by common standards would be relentlessly condemned. And it has seemed to me sometimes to shine more brightly in them because it was surrounded by the darkness of sin.

I take the goodness of the good for granted, and am amused when I discover their defects or their vices. I am touched when I see the goodness of the wicked, and I am willing enough to shrug a tolerant shoulder at their wickedness.

Hence to conclude I would say that these observations of mine have led me to believe that, all in all, there is not so much of difference between the good and the bad as the moralist would have us believe.