“… we suffer more in imagination than in reality.” 

~Seneca

Have you ever been left strangled between reality and imagination at some point in the course of your life? This has been a constant part of stoicism and their philosophical expositions which they went on to expound much like the Buddha and his Bodhisattvas. Seneca comes to the rescue here, “Seneca does not write as a philosopher who creates or expounds a philosophical theory from the ground up. Rather, he writes within the track of an existing system that he is largely in agreement with.”  A philosopher who was an independent thinker, free man, liberated from the clutches of worldly belongings and stoic from mind. “Follow no one but learn from everyone” we say, but, who initiated this saying in a more grand way? It was none other than Seneca alone when he emphatically reiterates that:  “Surely you can only want me to be like my leaders? Well then, I shall not go where they send me but where they lead”– a defiant statement by the philosopher who wanted to educate the humanity through the “Letters from a stoic”  that humans should not turn out to be like cattle breeds who will blindly follow a man without questioning, much like the Katha Upanishad’s expression of a blind man leading another blind man in a circle of infinite regress- they are rightfully called as “mando” the dull witted and dumbfounded person. Similar to this expression, we come across a psychological tussle that races past the screen of our mind endlessly- the overgeneralization, over exaggeration and overthinking with the philosophy of fear that creates a poignant figure for us. Let us examine it.   

ANALYSIS

Sometimes, we tend to think excessively- everything starts from a thought, it spouts in a endless cycle of if and buts in our mind, we being to revolve in and around that thought, trying to find what could it take to become- what will be the consequences of it- what if fall and fail in my endeavor and what if the things do not end up picturing the way I have drawn it in my mind? A series of questions- which are not necessarily directed towards finding answers and actually working upon it, questions which keep us entangled in our thoughts of failure- it births feelings of temptation, aghast and anxiety of losing. These pertinent ripples cause much distress which becomes developmentally inappropriate for the functioning of a human being. We can’t seem to get away from the horrifying thoughts as contended by Serenus: “as if I were on a boat that doesn’t move forward and is tossed about.”  Such tumultuous and harsh ravages of time-frame only causes a person to feel in a constant despondency, deflected with positivity and decreased in bewilderment by happiness.

A person only accumulates in more of tragic, unfathomable fear and anguish which he nurtures within and the thought becomes like a never ending trail of fearful ideas which have already started to have deep imprints on the life, words and actions of a person. Seneca attempted to explain the premeditation of negative thoughts that possibly hamper our idea of present and color the notion of future. But why were negative thoughts highlighted by Seneca? It is because as he contends: “We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.” The fact that tend to imagine the loss, exaggerate the ideas and anticipate the horrors befalling us prior to the happening of the actual incident in the empirical world- a phenomenon which is downright devoid of actual potency- practical basis, it starts to haunt us to the core of our soul. It starts to destroy us from within, slowly and slowly eating up all that is left within us- bringing us closer to nihilism in its extreme sense and pessimism in its crude sense. As Kevin Walker says in his interpretation of stoics from “Reading the Stoic with Millennials” that: “our disappointments loom large because we have nothing else to focus on.” deep clutches of separation, alienation and Wobegon passivity looms large on a person, only because he or she had primarily imagined it- allowed the seeds of detrimental ideas related to sorrows set in the mind, and thereby allowed the admission and significant exaggeration by holding tightly onto that particular idea- it ended up spreading like a wildfire, ended up consuming all that was inside the human.       

CONCLUSION

“Hence comes grief and melancholy and the thousand fluctuations of an uncertain mind, held in suspense by early hopes and then reduced to sadness once they fail to materialize.” Adding to this, “the human mind is a battleground; tame the negative reflections, conquer the internal judgments, reduce the number of times you compare yourself to others and self-criticisms.” because, as it is said by Aurelius: “External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now”

It is, however, generally believed that the philosophy espoused by stoics were filled with passive ideas and theoretical abstractions which are redundant, useless and downright filled with literature of valueless syllables. They were defamed as people with no legitimate philosophy and self deluders only talk about sorrow and escapism- but a deep analysis of the view withheld by the stoic makes us understand that we are actually looking towards a philosophy which is dedicated to serve the humans by highlighting the psychological, physiological and bodily anatomical issues which are at the core of mind-body dualism which is studied by the scientists and bioethicists till date.  

RESOURCES

https://aureliusfoundation.com/blog/we-suffer-more-in-imagination-than-in-reality-explained-2022-04-01/

https://betterhumans.pub/seneca-was-right-we-suffer-more-in-imagination-than-in-reality-67523e5b6502

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lucius-Annaeus-Seneca-Roman-philosopher-and-statesman

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/seneca/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger

https://dailystoic.com/stoic-quotes/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

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“The creation of Patriarchy”– a book wherein she delves deeper into the society where the ruling dominance is in the hands of a male and how the monstrous attitude of negligence towards costed them with stigmas that are visible even today be it in educational, political or power parity issues with men, In the middle of 21st century, when the world has been reduced to the technical device in our hands, what is the relevance of ideas espoused by Learner’s discussion of “women being deprived to write their own history”- what could be possible reflections over this thought, let us revisit this discussion of depriving women the right of self-determination.

THE DISCUSSION:
In her book, Gerda contends that the women have been rejected, deprived and kept away from making their own history, learning their history or knowing about others history. They have been used only for their reproductive capacities. She continues to add that the men have orchestrated their hegemonic occupation on the concept of “history making” in such a way that:
“…historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced and found significant. They have called this History and claimed universality for it.” This has been made possible because men have selected historical heroes, villains and anti-heroes from the distant past as per their own wish and will. Men have been ruthlessly ignoring the initiatives, occurring, projectiles and predicaments that have been led by, for and through the women. What women has felt, suffered and undergone has been largely left neglected and these so-called historians have turned a blind eye towards their experiences to get the equal opportunity as the experiences encountered by the males to get the chance of being imprinted in the history of the mankind and this has led to the formation of biased, prejudiced and half history of the men.

Learner says that: “As formerly subordinate groups, such as peasants, slaves, proletarians, have risen into positions of power or at least inclusion in the polity, their experiences have become part of the historical record. That is, the experiences of the males of their group; females were, as usual, excluded. The point is that men and women have suffered exclusion and discrimination because of their class. No man has been excluded from the historical record because of his sex, yet all women were.”
She takes the example of Mesopotamian civilization where she contends that since then the women have been rejected to be students, learners and educators; they have been, at best, the supporting actors in the play. Even in the case when we have a history replete with female goddesses, we cannot turn a blind towards the fact that:
“The dethroning of the powerful goddesses and their replacement by a dominant male god occur in most Near Eastern societies following the establishment of a strong and imperialistic kingship. Gradually the function of controlling fertility, formerly entirely held by the goddesses, is symbolized through the symbolic or actual mating of the male god or God-King with the Goddess or her priestess.”

The historians found easy and narrative-appropriate male-gods in the place of female counterparts and replaced them efficiently. It is believed that merely the concept of womanhood has been endangered in the historical context and when we say “all world’s a stage, men and women are merely players” it is to say that “Men have written the play, have directed the show, interpreted the meanings of the action. They have assigned themselves the most interesting, most heroic parts, giving women the supporting roles. As the women become aware of the difference in the way they fit into the play, they ask for more equality in the role assignments.

They upstage the men at times, at other times they pinch-hit for a missing male performer.” the wide array of implications on fronts that have been essential for the development of every human being- but unfortunately, after reading Gerda, it can be inferred that since the Aristotelian times till now, we have kept the women away from the spectrum of human being, either making them the witches, commodities of sexual gratification or the playthings in the hands of the male counterparts. The sod image says about the reality in a blatant yet precise manner to bring about the truth to the central position where it can no longer be sidelined as a passive issue. Because as Learner puts it:
“It takes considerable time for the women to understand that getting “equal” parts will not make them equal, as long as the script, the props, the stage setting, and the direction are firmly held by men. When the women begin to realize that and cluster together between the acts, or even during the performance, to discuss what to do about it, this play comes to an end.”

CONCLUDING REMARKS:
The history of women is the history of mankind, of the universe and abstaining from yielding positions where women historians can make their reasoned claims and providing them with the “meaning making and interpretation” in the context of history and academia will be detrimental loss for the intellectual population and world in general, we tend to believe that women have been devoid of the capacities that could make them stand shoulder to shoulder to a man in reasoned debates just what happened during “Janaka and Sulabha debate” as mentioned by Ruth Vanitha which justifies that even the “enlightened ones” could be blinded by this very prejudicial attitude towards intellectuals who dare to ask, question and challenge the hegemony weaved by men.

As Lerner maintains the same by asserting that: “The women finally, after considerable struggle, win the right of access to equal role assignment, but first they must “qualify.” The terms of their “qualifications” are again set by the men; men are the judges of how women measure up; men grant or deny admission. They give preference to docile women and to those who fit their job-description accurately. Men punish, by ridicule, exclusion, or ostracism, any woman who assumes the right to interpret her own role or— worst of all sins— the right to rewrite the script.”  We have to emphatically reiterate that the history of mankind is the history of women as well, they must not be left isolated, alienated and segregated from academic pages as “Women are essential and central to creating society; they are and always have been actors and agents in history.

Women have “made history,” yet they have been kept from…interpreting history, either their own or that of men. Women have been systematically excluded from the enterprise of creating symbol systems, philosophies, science, and law.” The time is testing our grit and determination to bring a mental, psychological upheaval to make conscious change in the present state-of-affairs- that would be an appropriate meaning of women empowerment and reason for celebrating women’s day and true spirit of viksit bharat @2047. 

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