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!
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