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Insatiable Craving of Becoming: What Culture does with our Present and Future

Information, idea, and knowledge are treated as power. From Francis Bacon to the era of the emergence of social media, information is revered for its capacity to transform the world. Many spiritual commentators like, Jiddu Krishnamurti, did not appreciate the idea of accumulation. Be it knowledge, information, or wealth, accumulation is nothing but a burden to carry. It is often believed that the great people like to carry burden like what Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Gandhi did. Sometimes, they ignore their own families to treat humanity as a family. Information overload is problem for our age. So, filtering is required to prioritise what is significant and what is not. If I can shift the responsibility to know the world and rehabilitate myself in an "inner retreat of  citadel", what Isaiah Berlin made a remark about German Romanticism, and particularly about Kant, Fichte, and Schelling (See, Berlin, The Two Concepts of Liberty). Martha Nussbaum was, similarly, skeptical about the Buddhist doctrine of inner world, and appreciated a social philosophy or the development of society and institutions more than individuality or psychic development. In Buddhist philosophy there is saying that everything is in flux. There is no certain identity. Dignaga in his great book, (Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti) proclaimed that all the concepts are abstract universals in contrast to the particulars, which are unique and changing. For example, one is referring a cow or the cow, here one is referring the abstract notion of cowness, but every cow is unique and changing. It doesn't have any fixed identity. Language functions in dichotomy. You cannot refer a thing unless it is reduced to abstract generality. Because, the moment you utter a word about something, that thing changes. Word won't be real in signifying the outer world. One can only refer a world residing within the structure of language, which has been a part of cultivated knowledge hitherto. Future cannot be visualized by the cultivated knowledge. It has capacity to encircle consciousness within the four wall of culture. Every culture is all about history and its cultivation. Where is new man in the modern world. Everyone is living and dying for limited purpose; for money and the satisfaction of desires, which seem to be insatiable, endless. All miseries, confusions, choices are taking its birth within the circle of limited knowledge; the prime mover and shaker for an ego-centric world. The mythical status of progress is nothing but commodity and information fetishism. If you examine your anxiety of becoming, it is a total sum of cultivated information, restricting your consciousness to know the purity of "emptiness" (Nagarjuna, Mulamadhyamakakarika). The moment you realize your emptiness, your zero level existence, there is no expectation to carry, no reputation to build. You are lighter than a falling leaf whose direction is unguided by the power of will. That directionless reality is you. If you can realize your self in its "nothingness" (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time), you feel everything around, like little music of nature (Gordon Hempton, Earth's Morning Song).

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