09-04-2013
Ordinary evolving into Extraordinary
Most men are ordinary. Some are different. They are not perceived as extraordinary. There are moments when he is so understood. It makes people think. Often they refuse their worth. He remains a mystery to others, even to himself. Men are judged by the results of their actions, not as what they are. Sometimes, one’s wider capacities surprise the person himself. Still, it is true. Such events are perceived.How do we understand this phenomenon? Can we understand it at all?
To understand any event, it is better to trace it back, preferably to its origins. We see a Man performing extraordinarily. We see him. We see the event. We usually know what happened. As this is unusual, it catches our attention. The unusual must have an origin. It is chance. Is it something new or is it something we have missed all along? What is it that performed? Could it be energy, or hidden talent, can talent lie hidden from all of us? We trace him to his family. Beyond we are unable to track it. If not in the family, it must be somewhere. People are lost in their inquiry. They settle on some answer. Usually it is luck.
What the world calls luck is what they do not understand. Can we understand this phenomenon? The origin of the person is ultimately the community or the wider society, if not the nation or humanity. How do these come into existence? It is earth’s evolution. We can safely start with the beginning of a society or more conveniently his own community.
The community that comes into existence is a human mass. It is self-contained. It is organized to exist and in that sense it is stationary or stable. We can say it is a mass of men surviving as a collective existence. It has energy enough to exist. Greater energy can be there only by an aspiration to outgrow its present state. That energy creates a stir, a movement. It is a self-multiplying movement as the energy once released tends to increase. It is understood as ever increasing energy. We call it aspiration
Aspiration releases Energy
Such an energy exists. It has no mandate or direction of movement. Energy comes from collective aspiration. Any direction must also come from the collective will. The collective will directs the energy towards its growth. So directed, the social energy becomes social force. The force sees the collective moving. During its long stay the collective acquires a character. It is a character of preservation or growth. It may be of defence or offence. It can even be one of possessiveness. The character is a psychological organisation. Passing through that organisation, the social force becomes SOCIAL POWER.
It is of the magnitude of the collective and therefore enormous. The individual is a unit of the collective and hence has the character of the collective in general and its own character of being a unit. As in the cell of the body we see these two dimensions. As the collective grows in energy, force, organisation, character and power so the individual too grows along the same general lines of energy, force, power acquiring its character as organisations. Yet, it is an individual, meaning it has its own personality. The general endowments here can change into individual endowments. So we now have an Individual, as a Unit of the collective, Having all the endowments of the collective, general as well as particular.
At any given time, as in 1962 when we see Rosa Parks in USA, we find her such an individual endowed with collective energy, usable at the individual level. It was one hundred years after the abolition of slavery by law. Slavery had not yet died in its Spirit, but did not have the force of 1862. When she was asked to respect the law, she responded from the spirit of the times. She had an idea of not obeying the law and honouring the spirit of the Time. She protested using her individual endowments that were by now subconscious of collective dimensions. She was an ordinary woman having an extraordinary inspiration who without her knowing, tapped the extraordinary Energy of the society. She performed extraordinarily.
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