Skip to main content

Introspection and Suffering

True Faith can redeem humanity from immense suffering. Most of the sufferings are attributable to the human's attitude towards or against the situations. Adversity and adaptability are two sides of the same coin. One may take every situation as an opportunity to learn and adapt or may feel dejected and depressed. Good and bad events are all about interpretation. Comprehensive understanding transcends the limit of value judgment, which is essentially a human's attribute. Science and religion claim their respective shares of contribution in understanding the real world. Science often asks "how" question and feels satisfied once a coherent method is achieved. Science has got the status of Biblical authority in deciding truth even though many of its projections turn out to be fiction in due course of time. Any one who questions the structure of science and its rationality is reduced to caricature for his criticism. Criticism is the foundation of science, yet people are not addicted to listen criticism. For me, being scientific means to suspect the narratives and investigate by own reason and senses to reach upon any conclusion. That was the key message of European enlightenment. But science was kidnapped by technicians and its bizzare rationality, which produced many catastrophic technologies, including nuclear bomb. Nagasaki and Hiroshima became an experiment lab of human's insatiable cruelty. Science triumphed, rather technology robbed its soul, and reduced its status to any mythical authority. Being scientific doesn't mean one has to bear a wardrobe of scientific dogma. It means, one has to be alert in knowing what's happening around.


Religions, on the other hand, don't have any method to teach what it means to be faithful towards life and its meaning, especially, "why" question is very significant. Most of the religions are lost in ritualistic practices so much so that meaning of life doesn't get reflected from religious practices. True faith is just like water. It doesn't resist yet it finds its ways. It is the most softest existence yet it carves out  the path by cutting mountains. Most softest is the most powerful, just like femininity. Feminity is the most beautiful aspect of nature. It nurtures plants, animals, organism and provides vitality to life. It doesn't resist any change. Weather moves constantly. Everything is aging perfectly. Each phenomenon is faithful to eternal law. "Nature doesn't hurry yet everything is accomplished" (Lao Tzu). Nature doesn't have any language.of suffering. It is indifferent to the human's language for emotions, passions, and desires. In fact, we have not given enough respect to our inner and outer world and reduced our existence in the mechanics of unconscious drive. We have forgotten the art of feeling, loving, and touching the beauty of harmonic nature. We don't have enough time to be poetic about chirping of birds, dance of trees, hide and seek of clouds, Sun and Moon. We all want to be efficient machine, useful for production at the cost of losing touch with "better angels of our nature" (Abraham Lincoln). Who cares in our world if someone is feeling lonely and sick, as long as he doesn't have any use or efficiency? Introspection is a lost art, whose vitality could be felt and facilitate self-improvement. It's time to reflect upon the meaning and substance of life.

Comments

  1. Aalok Mishra20 May 2021 at 09:01

    Can we examine the nature of suffering, it's substance? Is my suffering a consequence of loss? Do I not suffer because I want something and can not achieve? In other words, is my suffering a symptom of deficiency? If so, one only needs to identify the missing object, and attempt to acquire the same ("make hay while the Sun shines") or find contentment in its absence ("one in hand is better than two in bush"). Every school of social science aims towards either of the two, with politics being the purest application of this deficiency theory. Given the state of political order that is manifest in 21st century, the world population is increasingly suffering from the lack of food, water, shelter on material front and security, credibility and vitality on the other. In a world slip per into the Orwellian whirlpool, "suffering" is normalized, and one's only desire is to avoid suffering (but not eradicate it). That is where almost every living human being is aspiring for, and paradoxically enough, their sufferings increase manifold.

    Or, could it be that the suffering is independent of outer world? That, the suffering is a constituent of one's metaphysics instead of being it's outcome. Like the Platonic idea of geometrical shapes, does one imagine a perfect line in mind and then seeks the material equivalent in the perceived world. This claim needs to be critically examined, but the real question is, what if so?

    Were suffering a result of external agents alone, it wouldn't have been difficult to remedy it, if only in theory. However, an external agent is only a starting point, if at all, to procreate a relationship between the external object and the person that ultimately suffers. The trivia of failed love affair: one loves a person and in case the emotion is not reciprocated, the person suffers. The suffering becomes an instrument of imagining the contours of desire. Suicide is a classic example: when life seems intolerable, a person commits suicide (a more tolerable condition, as imagined).
    Likewise, if suffering is a "natural" instinct, there would have no institution of religion or family or society that aims, in part, to assist humans in dealing with suffering and pain. So what is suffering then?

    In my experience, suffering is an admission of helpless laziness, wherein the cause of suffering is not just the lack of object but it's desire. I'm reminded of Alexander, who upon asking how he felt conquering the world, sighed in vain that he had no means to conquer the other planets as well. This audacity of desire is the keynote wherefrom the elementary economics begin. And as fate would have it, the royal desire of accomplishment created/coerced a world where
    "your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Physical Basis of Conscious Life: A Synthesis of William James's Physiological Psychology

I Introduction: Bridging Physiology and Psychology William James, in his landmark work The Principles of Psychology, provides a foundational framework connecting the brain's physiological mechanisms to the purposive, selective, and unified nature of conscious mental life. This blog analyzes James’s synthesis, which grounds psychological phenomena in the material workings of the nervous system without reducing consciousness to a mere epiphenomenon. We will explore his hierarchical model of the brain, which evolves from simple reflex actions in the lower nerve centers to the complex, deliberative functions of the cerebrum. Key themes include the role of the cerebrum as an organ of foresight and prudence, the physiological mechanism of habit as the process by which experience physically imprints itself upon the brain’s plastic matter, and consciousness's essential function as a “selecting agency” that is causally efficacious in steering the organism toward its own interests. Ultim...
Post a Comment
Read more

Martin Heidegger's Deconstruction of the History of Ontology

I  Introduction In the opening pages of his magnum opus, Being and Time, Martin Heidegger resurrects a question he argues has been buried for millennia, framing his entire project with an epigraph from Plato’s Sophist: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” This is no mere academic exercise but a deliberate reawakening of what Heidegger argues is the most fundamental and, paradoxically, the most forgotten question in the history of Western thought. For Heidegger, a pervasive “forgetfulness of Being” has characterized philosophy since antiquity, where the initial, vibrant inquiry into what it means “to be” solidified into a series of unexamined dogmas. The question was not answered and then set aside; rather, it fell into obscurity, concealed by the very traditions that were supposed to preserve it. This blog argues that Heidegger's critical "dest...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Glory of Belief Industry

Disappearance of questions is the pre-condition of artificial certainty. Therefore, it is profitable investment to establish and sustain the belief industry. This industry produces the efficient Man whose substratum is not the divine soul or mental faculty but a non-thinking mind which militantly conform the group solidarity of the masses. When answers are easily available and generated by the Artificial Intelligence, who will take the pain for thinking and unthinking or deliberating to develop logical capacity or for establishing the paradigm of truth? As Ashis Nandy explains the creative process which requires to meditate with the questions and to remain with the questions for a longer period of time to create and unveil the mask of deception. The artistry in epistemic creativity necessitates the patience caring of the questions. The cultivation and exploration of questions and mitigated skepticism to unravel what is said and unsaid, the expressions and silences. Even so called Dark ...
Post a Comment
Read more