Problem solved.

There is this interesting thing that came to me today. The thought was of replacing the word 'quality' in Pirsig's metaphysics by 'consciousness'. Pirsig says that everything can be called a pattern of quality. I say everything in this world can be called 'consciousness'. There it is. Finally, Pirsig meets Vedanta.
Now if quality of Pirsig is the same as consciousness of Vedanta, then there should be two types of consciousness - static consciousness and dynamic consciousness. Dynamic consciousness is at the cutting edge of the knife. It determines what path consciousness takes.
With this world view I tried hard to figure out what should be our purpose in life. After a while it all got lost in ambiguity. The problem is that when I tried, I could not define what is life in the first place. If the distinction between living and non-living is not clear, then how can we determine what direction life, or for that matter anything should take?
Pirsig and Pyrrho come to my rescue here. I will discuss Pyrrho first. Pyrrho was a skeptic. And I find his concepts more suited to my nature. I think deeply about any issue and even if there is a single proof against an assumption, I will not adopt it. And here lies the problem. Most initial assumptions will always have at least one argument against it. According to skepticism, everything is ambiguous and hence the inability to make that initial assumption is but natural and not one's fault.
And hence, using reason alone, one can never form a metaphysics. And hence I am back to the same conclusion that I made some time back. Dump reason in the bin, when you are working on that first assumption. That first assumption is the 'seed crystal' (the concept of seed crystal is courtsey Prisig) from which the whole metaphysics is derived. And hence assumption ZERO (before the first) is that the 'first assumption' is whatever you like.
An interesting tangent from assumption 'ZERO' is that what you like is dependent on what you are, and what you are is dependent your genes, upbringing, experiences etc etc. Thus though what you like is something you decide, it is mostly predecided. Hence if you do not chose your metaphysics, do not derive your own philosophy, and do not control your own actions, how is it that you are responsible for your actions.
The fact is that the whole concept of 'responsibility' is also a ghost of one's mind. There was no 'responsibility' before humans evolved. And hence, to get bogged down by something that is nothing but a few electrical signals in the mind would be stupid. But stupidity was something which did not exist before humans arrived. Stupidity is relative. An intelligent person considers a lesser intelligent person stupid. If this intelligent person comes across a person more intelligent, he/she will be the stupid.
I will leave the tangent there for now, as tangent is a line and it can go on forever. So I make assumption ZERO because the cosmic play has caused me to do so. You are now in the vicinity of the Bhagwad Gita. From assumption ZERO I derive my first assumption that all there is, is consciousness. Why? Because it like it. Why? Because the cosmic play causes me to do so. Why? No one knows. Go ask the cosmos if you can. But as Vedanta says, it is the sport of the Brahman, the pure consciousness. Which means for no reason whatsoever.
There we go. Now we have a solid base to stand on. Now we can go ahead and embrace Vedanta and the Bhagwad Gita. Now we can look at others, who have differing philosophies, with indifference. It is the same cosmos that has caused them that has caused me. It is the same Brahman that is them that is me. I am them. They are me. There there. Problem solved.

Religion (an old write-up that I forgot to post)

There have been things that have happenned around me lately which have clogged the mind and the ability to think clearly has been lost. The last few days Pradnya has been reading to me a realistic version of Ramayan (my Hindi reading is awful). My thinking is still muddled, but like any new thing, it has made me wonder the relevance of the form of religion we follow today.

It takes me back to the line of thought that I had been following a few months back. There is a concept in computers called 'legacy system'. The following is a description of 'legacy system' by wikipedia.

"A legacy system is an old computer system or application program that continues to be used because the user (typically an organization) does not want to replace or redesign it. Legacy systems are considered to be potentially problematic by many software engineers (for example, see Bisbal et al., 1999) for several reasons. Legacy systems often run on obsolete (and usually slow) hardware, and sometimes spare parts for such computers become increasingly difficult to obtain. These systems are often hard to maintain, improve, and expand because there is a general lack of understanding of the system; the staff who were experts on it have retired or forgotten what they knew about it, and staff who entered the field after it became "legacy" never learned about it in the first place. This can be worsened by lack or loss of documentation. Integration with newer systems may also be difficult because new software may use completely different technologies.

Despite these problems, organizations can have compelling reasons for keeping a legacy system, such as:
The costs of redesigning the system are prohibitive because it is large, monolithic, and/or complex. The system requires close to 100% availability, so it cannot be taken out of service, and the cost of designing a new system with a similar availability level is high. The way the system works is not well understood. Such a situation can occur when the designers of the system have left the organization, and the system has either not been fully documented or such documentation has been lost. The user expects that the system can easily be replaced when this becomes necessary. The system works satisfactorily, and the owner sees no reason for changing it; or in other words, re-learning a new system would have a prohibitive attendant cost in lost time and money, compared to the anticipated appreciable benefits of replacing it (which may be zero). If legacy software runs on only antiquated hardware, the cost of maintaining the system may eventually outweigh the cost of replacing both the software and hardware unless some form of emulation or backward compatibility allows the software to run on new hardware."

I find most religions are 'legacy systems'. Antiquated systems of beliefs and customs, which were perfect for their times and since have long lost their relevance. Our understanding of the world and social structure is akin to the hardware. While there is a need to start from scratch, there has been a huge investment in terms of money, effort and lives on these systems and doing so will make it irrelavent. The difference is that while most people believe that the legacy systems are obsolete and should be replaced and do not because they are compelled to by monetary considerations, most people in the world have not realised that the religious beliefs that they so passionately adhere to are outdated. Many software professionals who have little idea of how the legacy systems work, spend years writing code to somehow make it still useful. This is very similar to people who have tried hard to reinterpret religious texts, stories or even history to reflect the current realm of knowledge.

Immanuel Kant said that the idea of God is important from a moral perspective. He is said to have supported the idea that if there is no proof of the existence of God, we might need to invent one, because the world would be immoral if it did not believe in God and fairness. It is the fear of hell and the desire for heaven that can only make a man moral according to quite a few philosophers.

I hope that the legal systems of the world could suffice for this purpose, but the practitioners of this art are at most times are most immoral.

Back to Pirsig

I have picked up Pirsig again. Lila this time. It is like meeting a good old friend. There is a sense of predictability, but it is not boring.

I think there is something in the concept of friendship. Even the people we hate have good friends. It just proves that we all look for something different. We can not force ourselves to befriend someone. It just comes from within. It is just what we are.

And I like Pirsig. And Swami Parthasarathy of course. I met Swami Parathasarathy a couple of years back in Perth and attended his talks. Wasn't quite impressed with him. But I like his book on Vedanta. Once you get past the preachy style it does present some interesting concepts. And I like these concepts. They make me think. They make me feel better. And hence I am not quite sure whether I would like Pirsig as a person. But his ideas, I do.

I tried reading Amartya Sen. Read 'Argumentative Indian', 'Identity and Violence' and started reading 'The Idea of justice'. The first two were interesting. The third is a bit tiring. The style of writing is very academic. The purpose is to be correct and seem objective. There are many places in the book when you feel 'Ok, is that all what you want to say? You could have said it in lesser words, simpler sentences and an interesting manner'. But that is what academic writing is all about. No wonder academicians scorn at Pirsig.

But Amartya Sen did not make me think or make me feel better. He did not make me write something on my blog. Pirsig did. And I have just read 30 odd pages of Lila.

Today I have decided

Today I have decided
To dream no more....
To not let my mind dwell in the past or future...
To learn to be able to walk away from things that I desire...
To not find faults with people...
To not blame anyone for their actions...
To not let emotions cloud my judgement...
To nurture emotions which help me make the right choices...
To remind myself again that we are all but slaves of our nature...
That key is to free oneself from this nature...
To accept the frailities and fickleness of life...
To replace hate, anger, frustration with indifference...
To act with purpose not expectation...
To trust my judgement, to respect my choices...
Today I have decided to live life...
The way I think it should be...

Beliefs

I was reading an essay by Bertrand Russel and one of the assumptions he destroys is that people who are not very knowledgeable think that they have little idea about the world around them. On the contrary, these very people have a detailed set of beliefs which gives a structure to their world. They have a rain God who causes rain, the sun God which gives light, the moon God which gives light at night etc. etc.

There are people who do not see the pattern that these people see in the world. I guess the more mentally capable have a different structure that defines their world. Their need is much more than mere material. God, Reality, consciousness, Nature, Purpose, Cause and Effect - the list of mental constructions to give more structure to and hence more control on our world for them can go on and on.

And all these constructions are based on our need. There are people in this world, who only need good material things and their mental constructions of the world that they observe very much satisfy that need. So they create a God who takes care of the things around them that they can not control, and all they have to do is to pray once a day. They believe that doing what they do is the right thing, by word of God, at most times spoken by some spritual Guru they worship, and doing it will take them closer to their God. They have assigned moral value to loving their family, city and country, mostly in that order. I often find that a Guru or a teacher should be a facilitator in helping people think. I guess when we believe in whatever the guru says, it becomes the outsourcing of the highest order, where we have allowed someone else to do the thinking for us.

That was a slightly different tangent, but what I want to assert here is that most people will not essentially accept that their life is nothing but a random collection of molecules on a random planet in a random solar system in a random galaxy in the universe. This thought is quite depressing. But rather than 'depression' being the cause many people don't quite know world beyond the work that they do and the society that they live in. So experts might get quite frustrated at why do people who know little about about climate and care less to accept what the experts say about the way we are damaging our environment. After all they are experts and these people are ignorant fools. Shouldn't fools be listening to experts? Hardly do the experts realise that how inconvenient it is to for them to accept what they are saying. I find it quite frustrating talking to a devout people, about the inconsistencies in the their religous books, which were written a few centuries ago, at a time when our awareness of the world was a minute fraction of what it is now. But, the experts should view this problem in a different way as I found out in my interactions with deeply religious people. It is not that the devout do not see the inconsistencies, they do not want to see them.

I often say that every one has the right to be happy. And in their pursuit of happiness they make assumptions about the world and themselves which makes their life worth living and more happy. For example, armymen are often made to believe that they are morally and socially better than any civilian, including the politicians, because they are serving their nation, and it motivates them to even risk their lives. Terrorists are totally convinced about their version of the world where God has chosen them to fight the infidels for Him and if they do eventually die they will be taken care of in heaven. And at times when I find myself quite frustrated with my meaningless life, I often convince myself that there isn't meaning to life anyway and if there are people who think there is, they have only made assumptions and hence what they think is not essentially true. So if I seem to be wasting my life, so is the Prime Minister of India.

But all these beliefs are extremely important, because without them we would not be able take a step in any direction. I can still use skepticism to show that moving in a direction might not be in anyway better than not moving at all, but if disproving everything is good, then we are stuck in a situation where we can disprove the good in the policy of disproving everything. I mean skepticism can be turned on to itself. So what is good is what makes you feel better. If that is the case what right do we have to object to others beliefs. They are after all beliefs that make them feel better. If they are wrong aren't we guilty too?

Another view on Slumdog Millionaire...

I haven't seen the movie but every day I read about a raging debate on its potrayal of India. Most Indians are irritated that the movie shows everything that is worst in India. And what is the chance that it all happens to one person? They say it is not a balanced view. I have a slightly different perspective.
Will start with an excerpt from rediff.com

Shyam Benegal [Images], veteran film maker who is credited as the pioneer of art house cinema in India refuses to take sides and says "I have not seen the film but answering the question from a theoretical point of view, as a foreign director filming in India, Danny would view his surroundings as a foreigner would and that is natural."
"Richard Attenborough made a film on Gandhi in 1982 and it went onto win eight Oscars; I too made a film on Gandhi but it did not get that sort of response. That is because Attenborough could place Gandhi in a cultural context that could be easily understood by a western audience," Benegal says.
"But an Indian film made by an Indian director is different because he brings a completely different perspective to the table, one that might not be well understood by a foreign audience," Benegal told PTI.

Benegal has put it perfectly. We keep complaining about west's potrayal of India but forget movies like 'Purab aur Paschim' or even 'Pardes' which were both immensely successful, and I believe even won awards in India. I haven't heard of an American or a British complaining of these movies showing the western culture in a bad light. Up until Aamir Khan started taking some real actors from the west and giving them some real roles, most goras in Indian films were dumb side-kicks (Remember the 'hawa hawai' song from Mr. India). Tom Alter made a career playing such roles, speaking Hindi in a so called British accent. I also don't hear the Americans or British complaining when our directors make movies 'inspired' from hollywood movies. But the minute some guy uses a part of an Indian song, our fat music director complains. The reason is the west doesn't care about what we think of them.

My point is, why do we care about what they think of us? India churns out more films than hollywood. More people watch Indian films than they watch hollywood films. Indian economy is doing well. Indian army is one of the strongest in the world. Indian cricket board has more money than any other cricket board. Indian cricket team among the top teams. Then, why be defensive? The only thing that our irritation at this western potrayal of India shows is, as my wife would say, our lack of confidence. India is now among dominant forces in the world. It is high time it should start feeling like one.

Love

I wrote this blog some time back, but did not post it. Thought I might as well do it now.

I sometimes find the term 'innocent civilians' naive. I mean, if India is waging a war against the believers of a certain ideology, your Indian identity makes you a participant in the war. It is the taxes you pay that are being spent on the army which is fighting against them and this gives them right to try to kill you. They call it a war of civilisations, I call it a war of ideologies (the difference being people and ideas). Religious freedom vs religious fundatamentalism. Freedom of speech and thought vs adherence to a single ideology. Love of life as we know it vs contempt for it. And we all are soldiers in this war.

Long time back I posted on my blog that reason can not answer everything, and emotion or personal likes and dislikes, are a major determinant of ones decisions. It was a major milestone for me because until then I had been made to believe that reason or intellect is the end all of human thought. I have since not been able to write anything worthwhile.

My point is that one can argue for argument sake about different ideologies and religions to prove which is better. Ultimately the decision we have to make is which ideology appeals to us. Hence our motivation can not stem from the fact that we are right, because that is impossible to prove, but simply from our love for an idea. I love the idea that I get to determine the course of my country by voting. I love the idea of being able to protest and make my voice be heard when my government does something I dont agree with. I love the freedom of thought, expression and belief that a democracy offers me. And love needs no reason. I love my wife and I don't care about proving that she is better than anyone else.

And quite similar to us, the terrorists too love an ideology. The belief that one's life has a purpose which is higher than fulfilling the daily needs of oneself and family, is intoxicating enough to die for. We too need to be intoxicated by our love for our beliefs and rather than be 'innocent civilians' we should all be 'active soldiers', not weilding guns, but armed with our zeal to protect and nourish our idea of a good life. Not by shooting people but by being socially active to make our opinion count. Because, by not having an opinion at all against terrorism or being ambivalent in our views, we are actually being complicit in terrorism. Hence people who died in Mumbai during the three day hiest, were martyrs for one cause or the other.

Seeing the way the whole of India came together after the attacks, and the way different countries are standing behind India, it is heartening to know that people do stand for what they love.