Through an extensive study of the intro sections of Wikipedia pages and watered-down video essays, I have procured enough knowledge to deceive myself into believing that I understand the basics of Existential and Indic philosophies. What follows is an attempt to organize what I understand and fill in the gaps that emerge. The flow of topics will follow roughly the order in which I came across them. (Un)surprisingly, several of my friends also came across these subjects in a similar order. All declarative statements are to be taken as my subjective opinions.
My childhood and early adolescent years were spent being religious. Once I started reading things on my own, and got some encouragement to think independently and question things, skepticism seeped in. After reading some classic non-fiction books and elementary high school physics (it didn’t take a lot to convince me), I became as ardent of an atheist as I was a theist a few short months back. The next few months were spent reading the standard palette of arguments against the existence of any kind of supernatural entity. After a while I realized that this is hopeless. No one can prove or disprove the existence of God, and I settled on being an agnostic who behaved as if there was no God. My love for rationalism went hand-in-hand. I encountered some atheistic Indian schools of thought like Charvak and Ajivika, which gave me some validation. Embracing Nihilism was a natural consequence, since till then the meaning and purpose of my life was being derived from religion.1 Faith, the crutch that I used to deal with typical hardships of life was no longer available, and a replacement was urgently needed. Perhaps, a stronger man would not need a crutch. Perhaps, merely realizing the randomness of outcomes, accepting the lack of agency, staring at the meaninglessness of life would be enough to keep him happy. But I am no Sisyphus. In fact, I think there aren’t many Sisyphi roaming around in this world.
These basic realizations, although they might seem logical and obvious, lack two things which are essential for the meek amongst us to live a blissful life:2 a concrete, well defined purpose; and a robust framework to move towards the said purpose, in a way that isn’t regretted later in life. The underprivileged do not have the luxury for this pursuit: there’s no time for such musings when one’s basic needs aren’t met.3 When you have mouths to feed, acquiring food itself becomes life’s purpose.4 5 A few fortunate ones have these needs met innately, their purpose comes naturally to them—they need not do anything more. Many prefer to not think a lot,6 and discretely cope with the situations they encounter on the go. Unless one’s life takes some wild turns, this is sustainable enough to go through life without much suffering. On top of this, most people I’ve come across also use faith/religion in some way to cope, and often turn to different magnitudes of superstitions in the face of hardships. Rationalists try to find their purpose in arts and sciences. Some find their escape in drugs, by looking for aliens or making an unnatural number of trips to see the Northern Lights. Those of us for whom none of these methods play well, are left rifling through the scriptures.7
But, how does trying to reading philosophy help reduce suffering in day to day life? How does reading abstract ideas about Existentialism, Vedanta or Salvation give us a way to deal with our daily lives and make decisions?
Reading philosophy can act as a type of cognitive therapy that can help regulate distressing emotions by changing evaluative judgements. We learn to identify our belief-patterns that lead to distress and reevaluate/reframe them for good. Further, it gives us a framework to answer and organize central questions about the meaning of life, definition of success, death etc. It helps us straighten our priorities and morals. This leads to less rumination and firmer decision making.8 In simple words, it helps us upgrade our internal model of the world, helps us to decide what matters and what is in our control, and tells us what to do when we suffer. All of this has a trickle-down effect in our day-to-day life. When decisions are made using such stable principles and framework, we cease to suffer from regret regardless of the outcomes.
The fundamental barrier in understanding consciousness and the nature of existence using empiricism has essentially remained unchanged since the time of the Upanishads. Vaisheshika (Indian analog of Atomism) posited, a couple of millennia ago, that all matter must be made up of some fundamental indivisible building block. Of course, there were no tools available to verify such a claim, but even without any tools, the idea of a fundamental building block doesn’t seem too far fetched. However, even if we knew everything about the physical traits of these supposed atoms, how do we reconcile with it the existence of our conscious experience? Fast forward to the current age, we have developed a significant insight into the material world through cutting edge technology and use advanced mathematical to predict and model the behavior of everything from quarks to black holes. Still, the philosophical enquiry about the nature of our existence remain unanswered by science. Be aware that this is not a bug, but a feature of science. Collectively created by some of the most brilliant minds that humanity has to offer over centuries and rooted in empiricism, the scientific method is tailor made to provide reproducible, objectively verifiable answers. It is natural that such a method would fall short when we start inquiring about qualia, which is inherently subjective in nature. You can make a precise map of my brain, know about every particle that it is composed of, track when and how every neuron is fired and figure out how consciousness emerges. You’ll still never know what it feels like when I see the color red. Hence, to make sense of our subjective, we need a slightly different, complementary process. I claim that a subset of Indian philosophies, especially the ideas in Advaita or Buddhism are a good candidate for such an approach. By and large, Advaita does not (or rather, should not) contradict science. If it does, it should be updated. This is precisely the reason that scientists and modern physicists in particular are so much attracted to these eastern thoughts, because not only they’re very compatible, they sometimes make very similar claims, albeit reached through completely different means.
This brings me to my biggest pet peeve, which is people conflating ideas from physics to legitimize the eastern philosophies. A little bit of stretching of the eastern thought could lead to very strong parallels with whatever is trending in pop science. Haphazardly throwing buzzwords from physics into philosophical discourse to sound intelligent, selective mischaracterization of scientific research to vaguely justify non-scientific claims, stretching well established scientific principles and claiming that they were already known to the ancients etc is becoming increasingly common among the self-proclaimed gurus (i.e. charlatans) of our age. It not only dilutes the essence of the philosophy but also repels the curious minds away from it. Energy, vibrations, entanglement, entropy have a very precise meaning and none of it is mentioned in the scriptures.
“Heisenberg’s principle proves that consciousness collapses the wave function.” “Existence of Higgs Boson proves our age old idea of Brahman.” “Nasadiya Sukta already talked about dark matter.”
Having addressed the “why” and the “how”, let us start our discussion.
This is precisely what Nietzsche predicted would happen with the advancement of science. He called this a disease. ↩
Dharma Lecture 1: How Responsibility and Purpose Help With Suffering - YouTube ↩
Asking Hunter-Gatherers Life’s Toughest Questions - YouTube ↩
OSHO: You Have Everything but You Don’t Have Yourself - YouTube ↩
Ishopnishad calls this Atmahana (slaying one’s Atman/Soul). Camus terms this intellectual suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus. ↩
In reality, people don’t fit nicely into these separate well-defined boxes, but use a combination of these approaches. Am I missing any other ways? ↩
Nussbaum, Martha C. “The therapy of desire: Theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics.” (2013): 1-584. ↩