Dear Mom! Don’t kill my curiosity

Year1998: I am walking down a rain soaked pavement with my mother in an 18th century built Multan cantonment. Out of nowhere I dropped a disturbing question directed to her in a wondrous child-like manner: “Mama this time . . . what was before this time?” Mama replied: “Only God”, I asked again “No, I meant, what was before God?” Mama throws me a look of stun and apprehension but gathers her hesitant expression and replies back “God is eternity, he has been there for an infinite time”, she takes a pause and continues: “and also human mind is not capable of understanding and comprehending the infinity of time”. I am not satisfied with the first half of her answer but as soon as she iterates that human mind is not capable of understanding or comprehending this monstrous task, I accept it with an affirmative childlike acceptance of my mother’s knowledge as the entire ‘truth’ and wisdom beholding the sentence human mind is not capable to understand that.

 In prehistoric times, the human mind was only capable of hunting and gathering for food (hunter gatherers), igniting a fire to keep him warm (cavemen) and learning the course of defense to protect him from harm (soldiers of ancient armies). Over the course of time, humans started thinking, asking questions, acting upon impulses and created experiments to test the limits of their imagination (Greek mythology is filled with examples of such powers of the likes of Icarus and Deadalus whose curiosity and needs lead them to create powerful inventions). Therefore the history of thinking, mind's eye and prowess to explore those ideas into actions evolved over time to the extent that today humans are devising a plan to travel to Mars.

 The aforementioned (brief) background encapsulating the history of thousands of years indeed cannot do justice to what I am about to proceed with but I want you to have the above short frame of reference in mind.

 ----1998, as a six years old kid, my mind was working in the brackets of abstractionism and sheer curiosity. As a student though, I never asked questions like that again. I repeated in my head: human mind is unable to comprehend that, we do not hold that kind of power. So I deleted my plethora of stingy questions and thwarted them around into my subconscious, to be forgotten for years.

 My curiosity and wonder was capped ― Capped further into my adolescent years by a set of social orders, directive authorization and molded by religious and moral conventions and norms. The original child or a tabula rasa got scribbled on by external injunctions and education and at times by circumstances and fate. Carl Sagan reflects on human curiosity in his book Broca’s Brain reflections on the romance of science:

 “My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts (as well as unable to take such a course of action) if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent with both science and religion, and is essential for the welfare of the human species”

 Why is abstractionism important? For people in Pakistan, it is generally restricted to literature, art and music; but is it? A pragmatic person would disagree. It is a mislead notion regarding intelligentsia that, one must be following the hard and fast; stringent rules of present ontology and epistemologies; to frame theories, though without understanding of that knowledge human thinking cannot fully comprehend social or scientific phenomenon, but it is the abstract order of thinking, or disorder-if you will, which finally gives a breakthrough of a theory or a scientific invention. Necessity is the mother of creation; inventions follow experimentations and designs and the objective scientific need is fulfilled. But when it comes to our societies, suppression of curiosity is an impediment to philosophical thinking and a disruption of the way of life.

Murdering of curiosity is annihilation of philosophy, ― how? The ‘self’ loses the curiosity to discover the philosophical understanding behind a phenomenon that leads it to approach and consume subconscious cognitive approach; the approach that orchestrates that effective and meaningful relationship with the available ‘subjects’ (the outer-world).

I wish my mother had said then: “That’s a good question, why don’t you read up on it and find it out?”