Rawness of Life.

There is a somewhat elusive feeling that I  sometimes get the opportunity to experience, especially during my travels to places that are engrained with rich cultures and harmony with nature; an experience that I am only starting to scratch the surface in understanding. It is an experience that fills my spirit with fire -  an intense excitement to be a part of the present moment, the nostalgic curiosity of Life from my childhood, seeing magnificence that I could not explain unfold in front of me, a blissful assurance that Beauty is in fact an inherent quality of the substrate that is our existence.  It is an experience that I call the Rawness of Life.

I cannot explain this experience using the language of rationality; I think it sits outside the realm of my intellect. But I can point out exactly the situations that create this feeling within me.

I have experienced the Rawness of Life when I once walked through the souks of Jemaa el Fnaa in Morocco. The humid air was soaked with the exotic blend of flavours and scents from fruits, spices and perfumes; all truly natural scents that I never knew existed before. As I meandered the streets, my body pulsed to the rhythm of ten different drums and Gnawa folk songs sung by various market vendors; the buzz of a thousand people bargaining for the best deal on some trivial household items; the endless honking of productive people stuck in traffic, trying to get quickly to where they need to be, to do what they need to do.

I experience this feeling every time I go back to my motherland, Kerala and  wake up to the melodies of dozens of species of birds, synchronized to the chatter of the crickets in the bushes. I catch a glimpse of squirrels running up the branches, looking for their next meal. A dense school of fish weaving through the canals. Butterflies coasting through the air scattering rays of sunlight onto the beaded grass below. The air is heavy with the scent of damp soil and fresh dung dropped by a herd of cows in the distance. The chants of Hindu prayers play in the distance, praying for Life, while an army of ants line up to feast on a decaying dragon fly on the floor.

Or when I sit lazily at a cafe in Istanbul, listening to the melodious call to prayer being chanted from the mosques in the city . The air filled with the smoky aroma of kebabs being grilled at a nearby shop. I sip my coffee peacefully while two kittens playfully brush against my feet hoping to catch a few crumbs of pastry that may accidentally fall off my plate. On the street ahead of me, I see beggars asking for change;  street vendors greeting each other with generous embraces, people walking by alongside horse-drawn carts; buses with faces glued against the windows. Cars plastered together with duct tape that are likely the only form of maintenance they have ever seen in a decade.

Rawness of Life. It is a form of organized chaos when Life plays out its fantasies un-orchestrated, un-inhibited. Each moment flying by too fast to cherish fully, yet slowed to a crawl in my mind alone. A Tango being performed between all the characters of the scene in front of me with such grace and such passion. Each of them fully immersed in the purpose that drives this very moment.

Why do I find so much Beauty in the Rawness of Life? So much more Beauty experienced in a mere minute than perhaps a lifetime living in the urban sprawl that I call my home. I cannot be alone in this experience; this must be a feeling that is well known to the many wanderers of this world.

I think I find Beauty in this experience that I call the Rawness of Life because each and every instant in these experiences is brimming with Life flowing unconstrained, uncurated. Life, in its various forms, thrives and is allowed to co-exist in harmony with each other. It is not simply a community of humans that have optimized their environment to their wants. Rather, it is a community of all components of Life, allowed to exhibit all the qualities that are in its potential, qualities that we can then value to create Beauty in the moment. I think it is this exhibition of Life's unconstrained and uncurated qualities that I can value that creates my experience of the Rawness of Life, which is itself, an expression of Beauty.

As I have discussed in a previous article, it is the alignment of the values that we hold to the qualities of the Universe and the Objects that arise from it that creates Beauty in our lives . The Universe contains the possibly infinite set of  qualities that we could possibly perceive in our lives and align our values to. The ultimate limit of Beauty, then, would occur when we are able to derive value from all of these universal qualities, the entire set. Said another way, when we are able to become One with these universal qualities. On a more practical level, what this means is , the larger the variety and depth of these qualities  that we expose ourselves to, the greater the potential to create Beauty in our lives.

Exposing ourselves to the Rawness Life allows us to experience a much larger pool of universal qualities that we simply cannot find in our modern, urban lives today. This is because our modern lives subscribe to systems (and moreover, "unnatural systems") that optimize for specific qualities that the system values, narrowing down the field of natural qualities that we, as conscious beings, can value.

Cookie cutter homes and urban sprawls are just one of the many examples of these 'unnatural systems' that I (and many of us, in fact), find to lack much Beauty in. So much so, that we spend money and resources whenever we get a chance to camp out in a tent in the wilderness and specifically seek out experiences of natural ecosystems, even if it means compromising the comfort of the unnatural urban systems that we have submitted to. What's going on here? Why do we crave the need to escape, if given the chance?

Remember, the land that these carefully curated suburban homes and lawns now occupy, once used to be a natural ecosystem, full of the multitude of Universal qualities that I described before. Then with the rise of economic systems that drive monetary growth and the subsequent modes of production being concentrated in urban areas, there arose a need to densely house the labour that would generate value for the economic system. We humans, under service to this new system, came along and stripped the land of most of these qualities by wiping out the natural ecosystem and replacing it with a  system of replicable housing, that promotes the specific values of space efficiency and economic growth - values that the economic systems that we created optimize for. We cut down the forests, only to plant back trees to mark the boundaries of land ownership. We removed the natural foliage, consisting of thousands of species of plants, housing hundreds of species of animals, only to put back grass on our lawns, that we need to ensure is neither too dry, nor too grown-out,  in an effort to maintain an aesthetic that would make us respectable residents of the community and potentially increase our real-estate values. What's happened here is that by replacing a natural system with an unnatural one,  we have stripped our environment of the vast variety of qualities that Life, in its rawest form, has to offer to us, only to promote a few other qualities that our manufactured systems prioritize, qualities so carefully controlled by our own hands.  But we should note that the qualities of this un-natural system and others like it will always be in tension with the natural qualities of Life. This system does not arise from Raw Life, neither does natural life value these systems. That is apparent, because, leave it to entropy, and each and every brick that we carefully lay down to create our clean, organized environment, will be over-run by nature in the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of Time and replace it with natural qualities that it prefers. So, are we at war, then, with the natural order of Life?

This same process of replacing the inherent raw qualities of Life with unnatural qualities of manufactured systems occurs all around us, in our modern day lives. It happens with the food that we eat, through the ultra-processing of natural ingredients to optimize  mass production and profit at the expense of nutritional value. It occurs in the ways that we interact with our neighbours, where the qualities of interpersonal relationships, trust, comradery and play that humans evolved to thrive on have been replaced by the convenience of and addiction to mass digital information that is imposed upon us by technocrats who ultimately only value the generation of more capital, at the expense of increasing loneliness, depression and ideological delusions through the echo chambers that these algorithms shepherd us into. It even happens with the general information and materials that we consume -  information that is mass generated, regardless of its audience or intent and supplied to us, in a sort of "gavage", using algorithmic predictions of what we may want or need; too much information flowing too fast to enable any meaningful absorption or purpose, all served with underlying affiliation and agendas to sell us something. Let's be clear - there is nothing natural about any of this. This is not Life. It is simply a poorly replicated simulation of the true qualities that Life provides for us.

And so, I think I find Beauty in my travels and experiences in the souks of Morocco, the backwaters of Kerala, or the historic streets of Istanbul, precisely because Life flows much more unconstrained, showing off all of its true qualities, impartial to how it will affect me individually. I experience the Rawness of Life when I am simply an observer of the dance that is happening in front of me.

The pursuit of Rawness of Life, in it's core, allows us to experience and value the same qualities that Life values, not simply those of the direct or indirect human systems that we have created. It is important to distinguish between these two conditions. Our inherent natural values are not the same as the values of the systems that we occupy.  And despite the reality that we are quickly losing control and moving towards a world that is increasingly becoming deprived of these raw qualities of Life, the Freedom to choose what we ultimately want to value, is in our hands. We have the Freedom to adopt and sponsor the systems that serve our natural values, in ways that can create so much more Beauty in our lives. It is simply a choice that we have to make.