There is a difference between what we perceive and what we believe we should be perceiving and both of these are different from what it actually is.
I was doing my daily chores of inflicting physical misery on my body this morning in a park because I am not a gym person, neither am I a dog or a cat person or a gun person nor am I... whatever that is in vogue. I think I am not a persons' person. I don't know if I am even a person. This could well be a dream but that’s a talk for some other time. Sorry got carried away there.
So I was saying that I was in an park which is less popular among the locality people which makes it even more beautiful and desirable. As I was catching my breath (multiple) and wiping off my sweat of my forehead (and other questionable places) I saw a burned out Diwali rocket lying on the grass. It was a big ass rocket, the ones which i wasn't able to incinerate as a kid because my parents couldn't afford such travesty and i thank our subsistence for that. The red head of this exhausted rocket was almost in a decapitated state, holding on to its body by dint of some fibers. I might have looked at it half a dozen times and something in me was not feeling right about it. I could not shake off this feeling. I don't know what it was or why but i wanted to pick it up very badly. There was only one outcome which could follow after this i.e, breaking of the rocket's head and throwing the parts away, back on the grass.
Why was this crookedness bothering me? Why did I want to break it? So that I could have a sense of symmetry?
We were told from the early days to be straight(not particularly pertaining to sexual orientation), to be symmetric. We were told it is right to be straight and wrong to be crooked. But how can we say for sure that what’s crooked is also not right? This is a very debatable idea of perception. This is the matter of our belief or more appropriately our belief system which has been manufactured over eons of civilization and is still being manipulated by various forces.
Whatever doesn't suit our eyes is crooked and hence is not right. If you are strange you better make yourself right or others will do it for you. In the process of transforming you away from this asymmetry we will break you if we have to. This 'breaking of a person' seems to be the most likely outcome without achieving the required transmogrification. May be that’s why I wanted to behead that cockeyed rocked. People will break what they perceive strange even if they are not being affected by it directly. This may very well be because they are hardwired to do that over millions of years of evolution. But, if we believe we are spiritual beings then spiritual evolution must require us to see beyond symmetry. We ought to learn that being strange is not bad but in fact is enthralling, and swaying us(and others) away from our quotidian believes to expand our spiritual experience.
I did finally pick the cockeyed rocket and rotated it thinking all these things and suddenly one of its fiber to which its head was clinging on to its body twitched and broke. It made me stop doing what i wanted to do with it. I didn't care about its symmetry anymore. I made its crookedness a part of my belief system and i let the rocket with its bobbing head slip out of my grip and fall over the carpet of lush green, curly grass.
