Once, long ago, when I was young, fresh and unspoiled, I wanted to be a model child. Please my parents, be a source of pride and joy to them. They were the reference for my naïve philosophy of life. Then, childhood idealism dissolved into angry adolescence. I rebelled to assert my individuality, and the fight itself became my new anchor.
Free-will takes the title of being the most contentious, unsettled topic of philosophical debate ever. Be it Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius or the armchair philosophers of your weekend drinking circle; everyone, intellectual and commoner alike, has thought about free-will. Casual or deep, informed or uninformed, the arguments on free-will never end.
Hinduism’s caste system is a tragedy of Greek proportions, one which is reviled across the world and rightly so. As the modern Hindu, intellectual and layman alike knows it, society was once divided into five castes: the Brahmins (priests), the Kshatriyas (kings), Vaishyas (businessmen), Shudras (labourers), and the Malecchas (Untouchables).
Yoga is the highest union, the highest that can ever be. Union with what, you may ask? Union with what we have always desired, without realizing. Imagine that you were standing under an exquisite, starry sky, but you didn’t know. You can’t see it. It is invisible because an ugly, thick ceiling blocks your view.
Suffering of all kinds, big or small, grave or mild, exasperates us. It confuses and humbles us, more often than not. Our otherwise brave, strong shoulders droop from the burden of a hard life, which often gets harder, despite our efforts. We often sigh, grudge and acknowledge our lack of control. Why all this pain, we often wonder.
On a depressing, rainy day, when your meticulous and exuberant plan for life is just not working well, when the next raise won’t come, when the business is not taking off, or the fiance’ cancelled the engagement, you are drawn to find solace in these therapeutic quotes. Aren’t you?
We are philosophers and scientists, all of us. Of varying degrees and styles maybe, but surely, because extracting a model for life, from our individual circumstances is our human impulse. We create a model to deal with what happened and what may be coming. A model to launch plans in; realizing and yet not that life is the epitome of uncertainty.
Big science and Big technology – the String theory or the Large Hadron Collider are interesting trivia really, for most of us, as we dash and whirl around, busy in the business of running our lives. It is heartening to know about such soaring heights gained by human intellect, but so what? How does that affect our lives in the here and now in any intimate, personal sort of way?
Humans are the most sophisticated, intelligent species on the planet today, perched atop Darwin’s ‘Tree of Life’. We have beaten all odds, prevailed over countless existential threats to conquer and colonize earth. We have proved ourselves the ‘fittest’ in the game of survival by taming nature to serve us.
The character of modern religion is so contorted that the most logical step up, for the slightly reasonable person, with little loyalty to tradition, is atheism. One cannot hold atheists accountable for their moral perversion of faithlessness. It is a straightforward result of the absurdities of religion itself.
Life, the whole of it, is the epitome of uncertainty. The direct repercussion of uncertainty is fear. Fear is the hallmark of the human condition, its distinctive peculiarity. An unavoidable part of being human. Fear itself is of various levels, of differing hierarchies. Basic survival ones to complex ones of an unfulfilled life, and then many in between; a whole spectrum.
