When a person is born, he gets classified into a category. The category defines as to what GOD he should follow. It defines what he should do and what principles he should follow. Remember that this category is a conceptualised by man and so it can be argued against/for. (I mean you cannot argue that you are man when you have the traits of a female. That is how NATURE created you and you just cannot argue with this fact.)

I was classified as a hindu when I was born. Being an infant and lacking in rational ability, that fact was accepted by me without any thought. But know I have begun to question the essence of religion.

What is religion ?

What are it’s advantages?

Should a person necessarily follow a religion ?

I could not really understand the importance of religion. I asked my mom and she gave me an unsatisfactorily reply that religion is a set of rules decided by our esteemed ancestors so that the person following the religion may not perform any immoral actions.

This answer was unsatisfactory in that the rules were decided many thousand years ago. Moreover, more often than not, the people who say that they are highly religious and perform those big religious activities are the most immoral in the religion. They earn their bread by immoral means and then perform those big poojas to ‘wash away’ their sins. Thus, the so called religion is inadept in keeping people away from immoral activities. (Even terrorists….)

As to the question of whether a person should follow a religion, it really depends on the person.

Each person should think for himself.  The best way (in my opinion) is to formulate your own ‘rules ‘, values and ethics and then abide by them. Thus, (again in my opinion), it is not necessary for a person to follow a religion.

Me ? Well,  I am proud of having been born in a hindu marathi family. But I have rationally thought about the pros of hinduism. The rules in hinduism have had their age. They have been twisted by certain people to their advantage. I can see no advantage in following those rituals and rules of hinduism.

From amongst other religions, Buddhism seems the most promising (to me). By the way, the monks you see devoting their entire lives to the so called ‘buddhism’ and do not talk to a single female etc etc … are just following  a twisted form of buddhism.  That is not real buddhism. Gautam Buddha never called upon people to sacrifice their normal lives for theses kind of things.

Having said that, I won’t really call myself a Buddhist. I do have certain rules and ethics, that are closer to Buddhism than to any other religion and buddhism does appeal a lot to me, but for now, I follow my own ‘religion’ !

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The views expressed above are really what I think. It should not matter to you what I think. I understand that you may have counter views and I really respect your views.  Do leave a comment with your views.

Moving on,
‘Googling‘  , we find that perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information.
‘Awarness’ and ‘Understanding’ are the keywords that should be highlighted here.

Argh !! I’m kinda sleepy ….. Can’t arrange the sentences properly. Think I’ll just get to the example.

Look at this video.
If you are on a slow network or limited bandwidth, fireup VLC and view any music video.
But the IMPORTANT thing is that you view a video.
If you are in a hurry, watch just 30 secs of the video, but do watch it before reading the part written after the video.
The reason for this is that, your ‘perception’ will change when you read ahead before watching the video.
So, just watch 30-40 secs of the video.

Now that you have finished watching it, change your perception.
View the video again from the ‘perspective’ of :-

• The Fashion incharge

:- Notice what colour, pattern, material their dress is made of. Notice how Hugh Grants dress changes in between different scenes.

• The Choreographer

:- Notice how they move their body, how they dance and what dance steps are performed.

• The musician

:- Notice the different instruments in the background, how they meld into each other, how they reach the climax.

• The Lyricist

:- Notice the lyrics, how the singers modulate their voice, meanings of the lyrics.

• The Scenes

:- Notice the background of the different scenes, the placements of the lights.

Now, after changing your perception multiple times, view the video cycling through all the perceptions.
Does’nt this cycling of perception open up new dimensions to a once simple video ?
<Talking to myself>Hey !! that’s a good title ! ‘Cycling Perceptions’.  </ttm>

Here is another example.
Just a note that this next example makes some people around you , lets say, ‘less beautiful’ , while in others, it highlights their already obvious beauty and in some , it brings forward their hidden beauty. So proceed at your own risk .

Now, get a photograph of someone whom you know well. Try to make it a friend.
Now, notice the following things about the face.

• The eye structure.
• The lips, their structure, color.
• The nose

Notice how elongated/short, wide/narrow it is.

• The hair

Notice the color,pattern of the hair. Notice how it flows around the head.

• etc etc…you get the idea

Some people will be amazed with what they discover. This will be some sort of revelation for them, while others will not be as excited, as they already are aware of the facial structure of humans.

Peoples faces are mainly used to distinguish them from other people.
While we are growing up, the brain establishes the fact that for distinguishing people, we do not need to know their minute facial features(Think about it, you can make out your friend from a long distance. ). The result of this is that it starts to ignore those details.

This explanation also serves as an explanation for the ‘video phenomenon’ mentioned above.

Conclusion :

Perception awareness can cause wonders and can ‘create’ new dimensions to an object.
But ‘cycling perception’ should not be done in excess.
The brain, while growing up starts to filter out the unwanted signals.
This prevents unnecessary information overload.
The trick is to find out objects/tasks where cycling perception causes minimum overload and at the same time is a wonderful experience.

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You can write a comment down below. All comments/feedbacks are appreciated. (Damn, this turned out to be longer than I expected.)

Eg:-To take a bath.

Start state->No Bath.

Goal State-> Bathe.

Intermediate steps->

• 1> Get in the bathroom with the towel.
• 2> Grab Soap. Wash body.
• 3> Dry Body. Get out and put clothes.

The example is at a higher level of abstraction and so omits the smaller steps. So, how would a creative person go about it ? After identifying the above steps, he/she would make changes to them by adding, modifying or simply ignoring some of the intermediatry steps. In almost all cases, the start and the end state remain the same even after path deviation.

There is another interesting result from this observation.

The concept of  “Just do it“.

This may be the tag line of “Nike” and the motto of “Richard Branson”, but there is a significance attached to it with regards to creativity.

“Just Do It” implies ignoring the steps all together and just doing it !

While this might not relate to the example above, an artists activity poses as a suitable illustration. Artists have to be creative in their works.

Before beginning their work, say a painting, they do not think about the intermediate steps. They ‘just Do It’. The end result is what we call creativity.

Thus, Creativity, at its basic level consists of identification of this path and deviating from it. Deviation in the sense of doing that thing differently.

If it’s so straightforward as ‘doing things differently’ why write about it ? I personally think that being aware of what consists creativity helps in implementing it in situations where creativity is not implicit to the task.

This includes mundane daily tasks, or other routine tasks. In the end, being aware helps improve creativity. period.