Wave Theory

So the past few topics have been along the lines of a new philosophy that helps folks in today's day and time without relying on an “interpreter” to interpret millennia old folklore to retrofit the problems we face today. And all philosophies have different ways for people to be their best versions. Every philosophy calls it with a different name. I don’t want to get into those nomenclatures or call them out to be extremely vague and also super stringent at times. Most of these are supposed to take the practitioner towards “Bliss” or a state of “Transcendence” which is beyond all feelings! The former is too elusive and the latter not possible for someone who lives in the society interacting with hundreds of people. I wanted something that could be used by common people who are going about their normal routine life and want a better experience around them without asking them to abandon anything or indulging in rituals.

The basic observation was that usually people work at their best when they are neither side of extreme emotions. We tend to make bad decisions when we are either too happy, sad, emotional, or angry. That is not to say these emotions are bad, but that making decisions when we are in that state of mind is usually counterproductive. Again, it is very easy for someone to say, don’t let a certain situation get the better of you, but more difficult to actually guide them through it. And that is exactly what the first tenet of the new philosophy should be able to do.

So what could be done? I had been thinking about it for the last year. And finally came up with a system that works really well, at least for me!

I call it the Emotional Wave Theory (for the lack of better name). As mentioned above, the peak operating space for any individual is usually when they aren't dominated by one or more emotions, so that these emotions dictate their perceptions, judgements and decisions. Assume this to be 0 on a sine wave. Everytime you are hit with an emotion due to any circumstance, be it any emotion; happy or sad, good or bad, think of it as moving away from 0 to either side of the sinewave, towards +1 or -1. The goal then, becomes to return back to 0 to be at your peak emotional state again. This theory, again, does not ask you to negate your emotions or sit with them; but to identify that you are misaligned and put efforts in coming back. So, it doesn’t say something like, “you shouldn’t feel emotions” or “bliss is the place to be”, but rather, “all emotions are fine, but you shouldn’t sit with them too long or they will start hindering your daily life”. You should acknowledge your emotion, but also acknowledge that going back to 0 is more important than being either at +1 or -1 states.

The first thing is to tune yourself to realize that you are riding a wave of emotion. This might take time, but this forms the core tenet of this whole theory. Whether you are extremely happy because you got that promotion or sad because you didn’t. We tend to think that happiness should last while sorrow should go away, but that never happens in life. That promotion you toiled for a year or more, would not feel as important in a year when you would start vying for the next role in the ladder! It’s not like you shouldn’t be happy for the promotion, but to remember that you have to turn back from this wave to your 0 where you can start performing your best. Similarly, when you are down and out, it’s okay to feel blue for sometime, but it’s then imperative to remember that staying on this emotional wave will not do you any good and that you need to go back up to 0 and start performing your best again.

Someone would say this is over simplified, but the easiest things can be very hard to achieve! Try telling someone who just achieved one of their life’s biggest milestones to be less happy and see how they react! Or to someone who has lost a loved one to not feel as sad!

One way this can be done is what I'm currently calling the moments method(again for the lack of better terminology). When you are riding the wave of a certain emotion and you realize it, the next thing to do is remembering and internalizing moments from your life that get you back to the 0 state!

When you are overjoyed by your success, you think of moments when you were pushing hard and the sweat and hard work you put in to get here. Or think of moments of contentment, where you had once felt a sense of having just enough in life. And then move back to that zone remembering that's what is required of you to keep moving forward. Similarly, when you are extremely sad, you remember the happy moments in life. Phrases like “This too shall pass” are important motivators to move back to 0 and restart with a calmer state of mind. If you had a fight with a loved one and are seething with anger, this method does not ask you to keep it aside. But mindfully remember that when there's love, arguments and fights can be resolved amicably, and words spoken and decisions taken in anger rarely bode well for anyone.

The end goal is to have a life that goes towards all emotions that come our way, stay there for sometime but ultimately return back to 0. We neither negate nor propagate these emotions for a second longer than needed. For they can hinder our rationale and daily lives. We feel them, be joyous, sad, jealous, angry, etc. and then return back to our 0. The place where we turn to our most optimal performance in our daily life.

Again, this is just one of the many ways you can find your way back to 0; to your peak operating mental level. There could be multiple ways that work for multiple people! I think any philosophy that's trying to show a new way of life should also be flexible enough to let people find their own sub paths, and not create dogmatic and rigid point of views that everyone should follow even if it doesn't work for them.

To this end, the philosophy that I shall be enshrining would, at every stage, leave multiple off-ramps for people to deduce their own paths and merge back to the highway at a later point. This will help with the no interpretation point I mentioned earlier as well. It shows you a couple of ways from point A to point B, and also tells you there could be a few more and that you are free to explore if none of the prescribed ways suit your mental acuity. But the end goal would be point B.

An Introduction

It seriously has been brain wrackingly difficult to move ahead. I was in a constant cycle of formulating deformulating and reformulating my thoughts on this. The question is simple - creating a comprehensive philosophical thought grounded in today's reality, to help those who choose, be free and at peace.

To start off, why did I think there's a need for a new philosophical approach? Well, the schools of thought that I see around, each seems to have multiple shortcomings but still they all claim to be the right ones. Most of them are centuries and millenia old, which hardly aligns with what today's life is. All of them might be completely relevant for their times, but philosophy, I don't think can ever be timeless. People from one time in civilization cannot fathom what would be a thousand years ahead. And that's where we are now. 

I think the new philosophy I'm searching for has to have a few ground rules, based on what I see around me. And those are what I'm trying to formalize today, with justifications. And I might definitely visit them in the future to rejig if required. But for now these are the ones that will have to make do.

First and foremost it absolutely must not have anything to do in any shape of form in any of the existing religions. Any new thought that emerges and is even little aligned to any of the existing religious thoughts, it's gobbled up by it and synthesized into the religious version of it. I do not want this new path to be assimilated or claimed by any existing religious thoughts. It has to stand on its own legs and walk the mile and show it can have it's own identity.

It should also be inclusive, in sense no initiations and no concept of our and theirs. A lot of mess we see now is a direct result of the differences we harbor against each other. Without breaking the barrier of us and them, or I and they, one can never truly be free or peaceful. And it should be freely available for anyone to pick up or drop as and when they choose. 

No concepts of God, rebirth, judgement, karma or any form of gratification that comes after death. So much of the mental inability of people to pick right or wrong themselves is due to their thoughts being bombarded and governed with the achievements of the next life or the punishment of the previous one. A society that tries to be moral simply because it will be rewarded after death or the next life is in its core morally incompetent and corrupt.

It should not be focused at the individual level but should have enough foresight on the collective well-being of a larger society. Philosophical thoughts focusing on salvation/liberation/enlightenment of an individual have not been able to achieve much in the past 5 milleniums. We probably need a school of thought that focuses not just on one but the collective. This way the ruling class cannot absolve itself of issues of the rest. Only then would it be able to make some tangible impact.

Again, this list is not exhaustive yet and I think I will definitely revisit it sometime in the future. The end goal is to make a path for anyone who chooses, to be able to set on a path to free their minds and try to reach peace in their daily lives without being an ascetic. This being a state which isn't at either end of the emotional spectrum. And that they slowly become mentally attuned to be in the same state for any external stimuli, be it pleasurable or otherwise.

A lot of the above pointers might be contradictory for now, but that's the challenge ahead for me. A path that can connect the peace of an individual to that of the collective, probably hasn't been attempted before with success for whatever reasons. Figuring this out might be tedious and impossible even. But what fun is to tread a path thousands before you have already walked to seek a river and not to try and forge a new trail even if it leads to a rivulet!

Hope & Numb

A system so rotten to the core, it breeds contempt. The sheer scale of misery makes the stomach churn.

Constant abuse of the downtrodden while the elites live in their airy palaces with pearly gates and no care for anyone else.

Everyone in charge of keeping a check is part of the grand scheme to keep trampling the unfortunate and making sure the status quo remains.

Some are lifted up to keep a hope alive that things could change when it never will. But without this hope, the whole system created by them would crumble as it’s built upon the dreams and wishes of the very ones that they have kept from ever attaining an ounce of happiness and freedom.

They are forced to live thinking of a better tomorrow, toiling day and night for the supposed betterment of their future generations. But they do not really want them to have any kind of freedom or lasting happiness, because if they do, who will break their backs day after day for a pittance that does not afford them a basic dignity of living. Forget living, they don't even get to have any sort of dignity in death either!

For the rest of us, who do not belong to either stratum, the easier option has always, always, been to ignore this. Out of sight, out of mind, ignorance is bliss and what not! While I do not associate with this mentality, I cannot help but spare a thought for them because once you empathize, it's very difficult to look the other way. And it then becomes extremely difficult to carry on with our daily lives since we then can see the injustice and oppression happening all around us. So, instead, we end up building walls around ourselves, because feeling nothing is a whole lot better than feeling the weight of knowing. That is to say, numbing our senses is far easier than facing the onslaught of seeing things clearly.

Soul..??

Recently I have been reading and listening to a few philosophical thoughts and also self-styled godmen and gurus, and also a few friends and family. The general consensus is to imply that the inherent destination of soul or atma or atman is pure bliss/happiness/peace/moksha/nirvana whatever you want to call it. And we, as humans, should strive towards it. That is our basic objective in life. 

They also in one way or another state that the inherent nature of the soul is never changing throughout different births. And the karmic theory kind of revolves around this absolute truth about the soul.

This made me think, if that's the truth, then, why doesn't the atman seek the same when it's in the body of a lion or a parrot? Why is it only okay with sustainability of the physical body that it inhabits then?

A lot of philosophical thinkers, especially within the Indian tradition, say the soul and body are different entities. One of the greatest shlokas from the Bhagavad Gita also reads - “vāsāṃsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya navānī gṛhṇāti naro'parāṇi | tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇānyanyāni saṃyāti navānī dehī”, loosely translating to - “just as we discard old or soiled clothes for new clothes, so does the soul discards old bodies for new.” Clearly marking a distinction between the body and the soul/atman.

But if the soul were to truly want moksha or whatever, why does it not make the body attain it inherently in any other form of life? Why in all other forms is it perfectly happy just engaging in daily survival and activities that help sustain its current physical form? Is it that the soul itself is lost? If yes, that means the soul is corruptible? But how can something which is supposed to be part of the Brahman or the universal singularity which is supposed to be absolute and pure, be corrupted or lost? That in itself is a contradiction. How can something absolutely pure and incorruptible be formed out of integration of impure and corruptible sub-parts? 

I think the soul, if there is something like that, wants to simply exist. Nothing more, nothing less. That is the reason that survival is the biggest motivator for any living thing that the said soul inhabits. You can say that those are bodily instincts, but then how do these instincts appear? Do bodily instincts exist separately from the consciousness or atman or soul? If, life in itself is nothing, and the soul or atman cannot die, then why does a one day old baby have any survival instinct, that too inherently? The bodily instincts come and go along with our consciousness. And without consciousness most gurus would not be able to define what soul is. So we can deduce that consciousness itself is the essence or proof of a soul or atman. And consciousness is indistinguishable from the drive to persist and survive. Where does it leave the atman or the soul as described by various philosophies then, I wonder?

Between Being and Becoming

Recent experiences got me thinking, why do so many of us live a weird life of constant internal contradictions?

The single point of misery for a lot of people is this blatant unexamined sense of being that they become.

I keep seeing so many posts on social media about being who you are, but inherently those posts try to make you someone you are not! People keep talking about karma and how they are manifesting things. That certain folks would be hit by their karmas since they did something bad to them. In all of this they forget that the universe itself manifests in everything around us, including us. So someone causing pain to you is also in a way the universe! 

I keep seeing so much gap between who people are, what they want to project and what they end up projecting. The constant bargaining that they keep doing with themselves. We throw the term “be your authentic self” around too much. But, no one really talks about what is your authentic self? Ask 10 people the question: Who are you? And I bet 9/10 won't be able to say anything apart from their work or education, or worse nothing at all. 

So much effort is being put into being someone that we forget to be ourselves! 

This constant war that we are waging in our minds, seems to be the cause of the mental exhaustion we feel. The more we work towards being someone, the more we get away from who we are!