-- *Mar*Below is an edited, clarified, and stylistically improved version of your essay, followed by an additional section that presents my own reflections, as you requested. I have preserved your core ideas and philosophical direction while refining structure, flow, and language for readability and academic strength. ------------------------------ What Is Merit?
Merit is ability. At one time, merit was understood as the capacity to feel and relate to nature—to smell, hear, sense, perceive, understand, act, interact, and react in harmony with it, and ultimately to become a part, or limb, of nature itself. One’s ability was measured by one’s progress in becoming nature. Nature was designated as God, and nature—or God—guided learning, imparted wisdom, and established the paradigms of understanding. Education, in this sense, was advancement in living as a limb of nature and in becoming a stronger limb within the stronger body that is nature. Nature consisted not only of what is visible to the eyes, but also of the vast 99.9965% that remains invisible—accessible only through feeling, sensing, and intuition. Merit lay in coordinating the visible with this immense invisible realm, perceiving and understanding their unity, and shaping meaningful paradigms from these lessons. The highest merit was to become the macro body itself, with nature forming the primary anatomy of one’s being. Human internal hormonal communication and nervous signaling were once fused with the climate and rhythms of the surrounding environment. Through this fusion, one could sense future natural events—anticipating earthquakes, tsunamis, rainfall, and other changes in nature. One could also “smell,” sense, and converse with other organisms within the biosphere. In effect, internal hormonal communications merged with those of other living beings, making the biosphere a single, functioning organism—a macro body. The cells within us do not rest unless we render them inactive by replacing their functions with machines. In a similar way, humans once lived within the biosphere as a cell lives within the human body. Nature, the macro body, governed the individual body. This was understood as the Divine process. If, hypothetically, one could see everything down to atoms and subatomic particles, one would no longer see objects but only processes. In such vision, one could not locate oneself as a separate entity. Instead, one would confront reality as a network of interacting processes within nature’s macro body. The very concept of the self would expand into a macro identity. Merit, then, lay in advancing into this macro anatomy and embracing it as the self. Today, however, universities increasingly obstruct this form of real education. Education has become deeply mechanized: machines substitute for human limbs, cognition, and natural processes, rendering both humans and nature partially redundant. Machines learn while humans merely record—and even this recording is often performed by computers. In the modern context, merit is defined as the ability to use machines, or worse, to make oneself redundant before them. To be considered “scientific,” one must train oneself to feel like an outsider to nature, observing it from a distance. This represents a bludgeoned form of rationality—a collective lunacy that is actively promoted by universities. It separates humans from nature and measures merit by technological subjugation rather than holistic understanding. One can only hope that at least one university will regain sanity and establish a “Free Nature Park,” untouched by human interference, where students can once again access genuine merit—natural merit, healed from the distortions of mechanized merit. *— Y. M. Sarma* ------------------------------ Additional Reflections: Rethinking Merit in the Modern World Your essay raises a powerful and necessary challenge to contemporary definitions of merit. While technology and mechanization have undeniably expanded human capability, they have also narrowed the meaning of intelligence, success, and education. Merit today is often reduced to efficiency, productivity, and technological competence, while emotional intelligence, ecological awareness, and embodied understanding are marginalized. However, the problem may not lie solely in machines themselves, but in how uncritically we allow them to replace human perception rather than extend it. A healthier vision of merit might involve integration rather than rejection—where technology supports deeper connection to nature instead of distancing us from it. For example, scientific tools could be used to enhance ecological sensitivity, not suppress it, and education could train students to balance analytical reasoning with intuition, empathy, and ecological responsibility. True merit in the future may depend on our ability to reunite knowledge with wisdom, science with humility, and progress with belonging. Without this reintegration, technological advancement risks becoming a measure not of intelligence, but of alienation—from nature, from one another, and from ourselves. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CACDCHCK-5AX_fW95sYbc0EB0t0FTV%2BzXvSGBizXunoP%2BnEGP_Q%40mail.gmail.com.
