Category: Philosophy
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Back to Vipassana
My first and only vipassana retreat was in January 2016. The retreat was great and I got back with lot of enthusiasm. I did attempt to get into regular practice once I got back, but soon I realised that I was getting nowhere. So, I stopped my practice entirely in April 2016, a mere three…
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Learning Backwards
Watching my son and a several other kids at Aarohi Open Learning community, I have come to notice a new kind of learning – which I would like to call as “backward learning.” However, before I can actually get to describing it, I would like to first talk about something else first … Forward Learning…
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It’s a city – we will throw dirt on each other …
While driving in the city, I seem to constantly get irritated, worked-up, angry and even shout at other people driving on the roads. I am sure this evokes a sense of understanding and empathy from most people. However, I have recently observed something new: Other people seem to be constantly getting irritated, worked-up, angry and…
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Lifestyle Changes
Sometime in November last year, a few months after I had turned 40, I looked at myself and felt dissatisfied about my health & fitness. I had been dissatisfied for a long time, but it felt like I had reached my threshold by Nov 2021. Nutrition – Lifestyle I signed up for a 3 month…
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It’s not a problem, it’s just what’s so.
Recently I bought “Speaking Being” and started reading it. The book is more like a screenplay of a specific 4 day and 1 evening Forum that was held from 27th December 1988. That particular Forum had 502 participants PLUS 40 Forum Leaders attending as participants PLUS another 100 people participating as observers. The 4 days…
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My son knows how to create his relationships
Yesterday evening, I was working on something. Advay, my 8 year old came by and without giving a damn about the fact that I was occupied with something, he started telling me something and demanded that I pay attention to him. I was super-pissed. In a angry tone I said – “Please give me some…
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What is the meaning of meaning?
Advay (my 8 year old) asks me: “Appa, what is the meaning of meaning?” Having read a lot of philosophy, this question appealed to the philosopher in me. I paused for a while, pondered over the question and tried to grasp the depth of such a question. After spending a while in deep thought I…
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No freedom, only responsibility
The words freedom and responsibility mean different things to different people. When someone says “Sam is free to do xyz“, it could either mean “Sam can choose to do xyz, if he ‘wants’” OR “Sam is not ‘banned’ from doing xyz, so he can potentially do it” OR “Sam can try out xyz ‘for size’…
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Anxiety about unlimited freedom
Tight rope walking is scary because there are no rails to hold on to while walking on the tight rope. So, it causes an obvious anxiety about walking on the rope. Anxiety stems from the fact that, without support, one might fall off to the left OR to the right OR forward OR backward OR…
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Insight
Exploring something new feels like taking two steps forward only to take one step back and not necessarily in the same direction.
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On Authenticity
Each and every one of us has at some point in our lives paused to ponder over questions like “Who am I?”, “What is the meaning of life?”, “What is the nature of reality?”, “What does it mean to exist, to be?” and so on. As we pondered over these questions we came up with answers…
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8 habits of highly authentic people
Pardon my cheap shot at free publicity. I couldn’t resist naming this blog post after Stephen Covey’s magnum opus “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“. It was one of the first “real self help” books I read in my life. Up until then I was mostly reading books on personality development, which taught me…
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being-for-others – a breeding ground for inauthentic relationships
Sartre and others carve a phenomenon called being-for-others, that leaves a human being with an experience of being an object along with other objects in a world of objects, with fixed properties, labels, behaviour etc. Given that people are seldom, if ever, truly alone these days, each person constantly confronts the existence of other people, not simply as…
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Anxiety, Commitment & Healthy Dose of Bad-Faith
Bad-faith, or inauthenticity, is living a lie that we dont have freedom to choose in the face of situations and realities that we encounter in life. Existentialists, Sartre in particular says that as human beings we are condemned to be free. Our fundamental nature, he says, is to be a free transcendence of our facticity, for…
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Projects of Bad Faith – Part #2
According to existentialism, authenticity is living life with willingness that who I am is a free transcendence of my facticity. Therefore, I willingly own-up my facticity and make choices & take action by being fully aware of my freedom to do so. I also take note of the fact that my choices & action lead to consequences that…