passion

Passion the superior virtue

“All humanity is passion, without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be
ineffectual”.- Honore De Balzac

“Nothing is serious except passion. The intellect is not a serious thing, and never
has been it is an instrument on which one plays, that is all”- Oscar Wilde

“The roots of rationality are not themselves rational, but more a matter of
intuitive commitment of passion. In the absence of this commitment, thinking is
just a gymnastic routine. We perform with more or less agility”-Prof Liam
Hudson

Passion is indeed, if not everything, at least slightly superior to mere thinking or

intellect as it has the capacity to make waves. It is the folly of this century that it
has allowed itself to be fettered by logical and impersonal intellectualism that has
made dissatisfaction to haunt despite the enormous developments, as excessive
optimism haunted the 18th century and complacency the 19th century. This folly
has prevented a large part of humanity from seeing the importance of passion.
Limitations of intellect and thought have robotized all our normal physical
actions, emotional reactions and psychological perceptions. These limitations
have created a society where a dozen people act or react while millions merely
stand as impotent spectators or indifferent onlookers.

How and why is passion superior to intellectual thinking?

Basically, the individual charged with passion is like the observer in sub-atomic
physics who distorts the nature of that particle observed by the very act of
observation. That is why, the course of history has often been changed or directed
by individuals charged with passion than by any great intellectual giant or
statesman or scientist or thinker. Passionless idealism and intellectual feats are at
best dividual and not individual because they are dependent on two distinct
mental activities of two biological aspects of clear cut brain functions. The left
hemisphere commanding logical thinking and the right taking care of the
imaginative and non-logical works, analysis of the left brain and the synthesis of
the right brain. All intellectual activities are the results of these functions either
separately or in various combinations of these two keeping in tact the close inter-
communication between these two. Whereas in passion, there is a real
manifestation of the individual will, virulence, wisdom and worthiness.
Where there is passion the dividual disappears and intentionality is evident with
total intensity and intense totality, and conscious grasp of relationships and
inter-relatedness of various aspects of life takes place.
On the contrary mere intellectual perception not only suffers from all sorts of
conditionings and indoctrinations, but very often degrades to the level of mere
projection of expectations. For example when you are sitting in a train waiting to
move and when the train in the next tract moves ,you start feeling and perceiving
for a moment, at least a fraction of a second as if your train is moving. If you
watch the very same movement of the train from the station master’s room, you
won’t feel so. It is because when sitting inside your immobile train, you were
waiting to be moved, wanting get moved and expecting to move and therefore you
had such a feeling and perception.

A Swami Vivekananda, a Marx, a Darwin, or a Freud had the passion to make

waves. The manifestation of passion may range from ferventness to ferocity to
fanaticism. Whatever be its manifestation it will leave definitely leave an
unforgettable influence in the course of human life. Passion does make waves. It
may rarely also produce certain negatives characters as Robert Irwin or Adolf
Hitler , but then, as Colin Wilson wrote once ”without conflicts we would be
stagnant like the Shark or the Skylark” -BALAYOGI