How do you see life? Is it easy or difficult?

That is the all-encompassing question I was posed by my friend Sinduja during a recent chat. The question wasn’t completely out of the blue, because I had just posted this little nugget on Twitter:

One basic choice from which all differences in opinion branch out into their varied flavours, is whether or not we assume life must be easy.

She and I have these occasional discussions of thought and belief, and very often we agree to disagree on things. She was wondering if our disagreements could also be traced back to that basic assumption I had spoken of. So, I attempted to clarify my thoughts on it.

I don’t see life as difficult and full of suffering, but I don’t assume it is meant to be easy either, because I’ve seen that it isn’t always so. You just deal with life as best you can, without killing yourself over it. When you accept that it’s not always convenient, I’ve found that things work out smoother. Having said that, I am often willing to take the difficult road to do something I want to, or to make a choice I believe in. However, many people go through life with the contrary view and steep themselves in their own sense of suffering.

How do differences of opinion arise out of these opposing viewpoints about life?
To explain my take on that, I needed a example to test it on. It just so happened that before we switched to this slightly more weighty topic, there had been some banter about the fact that the world of media and entertainment is full of unfair competition. I made the point that this could be a fact on some level, but most of what you think about it is an opinion, a judgement. If you think life is supposed to be easy and that is the natural way of things, then you assume that life is meant to be fair, and therefore human interactions must be fair. So if there’s anything that’s not completely equilateral about any dealings, that makes it unfair. Based on that train of thought, competition in the media world is horribly unfair and inhuman, and bad for society. It’s certainly a valid opinion.

On the other hand, if you don’t think life must necessarily be easy, then you accept that life is also not always fair, within the human understanding of that concept. Nature is not always fair; Its rules are often cruel and cut-throat, but at the cost of smaller interactions a larger balance is maintained, which might not meet the human measure of fairness. This perceived balance is often hard for people to believe in, because we tend to think in human terms. Nature maintains many balances. Material balances, energy balances, resource balances, are all built into the way natural systems work and fit together, but does it maintain human philosophical balances? Hell no! Because those were invented by us as our own conceptual framework of how things ought to work.

When we think of how things should work and impose this view on something as unfathomable to us as the Universe itself, we’re still thinking of making things easier. If you belong to my school of thought, you can’t be expecting it to be easier. This doesn’t change events, but it does change how you react to them. When you come across an unfairness, you accept that sometimes that’s the way it is. You try to find a way around it rather than wasting the time you would worrying about the fact that it is unfair. This doesn’t mean you need to reduce or curtail your humanity, or ignore the gross injustices that irk you, but in this mode of thinking, where life isn’t obliged to be easy, you are a little more accepting of imperfection.

The fact of the matter is, imperfection by human measures exists, and we are all unfair and imperfect. We like some people more than other people; We’d do more for them than the others. Technically, that’s unfair. We choose to do things that are easier rather than things that are better. That’s unfair. We try to become better and wealthier and more powerful that others. That’s unfair. It’s all unfair. And often in trying to ignore the fact that we ourselves might be imperfect, we rail against the World, life and existence about these imperfections which we guiltily share. Instead, to accept it and work within that framework while still trying to be a decent person makes you behave and believe differently. I don’t know if it’s always better, but it is different.

I have come to realise this difference in attitude over time. I talk to many people of varying ages and backgrounds, and I often disagree or agree with them in small or big ways. I realised that all their complaints, or in my mind excuses, come from the fact that they are expecting, even demanding, that the Universe be fair and life be easy. It’s like it’s their constitutional right from existence. I don’t think that way and hence we differ.

This imperfect, and possibly unjust, view of existence is a hard one to accept. Our moralistic tendencies make us yearn for a perfect Universe built in our imagined perfect image. The human realm works on manufactured rules and we come to expect that everything must work according to those ideals, since there can’t be any greater or superior ideals, both in terms of morality and power or influence. Our Utopia is one in which everyone follows the rules.

Yet, looking at it another way, existence is a sort of Utopia, if you are willing to accept it as such. It is infinite possibilities. But when anything is possible, that includes random things that are bad and you don’t like. This might not fit your view of the perfect World, but your view is based on the starting assumption that it’s all meant to be easy, and so you’re expecting Utopia to be easy. But if you believe it’s natural to have a mix of good and bad, then your definition of Utopia and perfection skews in a different direction.

Ultimately, it’s not about belief. Reality isn’t always good; That’s a fact. You can’t change that by believing everything is good and fair by human standards. Expecting something that is clearly untrue only leads to a lot of disappointments, but accepting the facts allows you to steer around the rough patches with your wits intact, in the least. Our ideas of utopia, morality and perfection are based on an artificial ideal of a stable non-changing system. Such a system would be easy, because the rules would never change and you would always know what to expect. In reality change is inevitable and change is rarely easy.

In practice all of these musings come down to one very simple thing. There is life, the universe and everything out there, right now, outside your window and inside it too. Sometimes random stuff happens. Sometimes it’s bad. When it does, you have a choice of questions to ask yourself. You could ask:

Why did this happen to me?

Or you could wonder:

How do I deal with this now?

I choose to ask the second question, on most occasions. Do you? Because which question you choose to ask yourself, in good times and bad, really comes down to the same thing.

How do you see life? Is it easy or difficult?

Samir

I was quite surprised it had survived over four weeks. No one had been watering it during that time, and yet it had weathered the dry spell. I was sure that with a little care, it would spring back into as much of of bloom as you can expect of a small herb growing in a small pot, indoors in a desert.

Thinking back, I realised that we had done some things to prepare the basil plant for our long absence, and we had cared for it quite well even before the trip was imminent, all of which are sure to have contributed to this survival story.

1] Strengthening the roots

The basil plant was originally bought at a supermarket’s fresh herbs section. It came in a tiny, token pot filled with soft peat and fertilizer, with the plant bursting out into a plastic wrapping.

We’d learnt from experience that the tiny pot would not sustain the plant for long, so at some point Vishal removed the plant from its peat mixture, mixed the peat with some regular soil we had from prior indoor gardening experiments, and re-potted it in a larger pot. All this occurred on spread out newspapers on our living room floor while watching some entertaining television, of course. Plants really appreciate good television.

That was a good move, because after the few days of acclimatisation the plant became much healthier and started to look like an actual living thing, rather than the sterile perfection we brought in from the supermarket. The roots now had more space and more balanced soil to work with. A strong foundation to grown on.

2] Plugging all the leaks

A week before we left on holiday, we decided it was wise to use up all the basil leaves the plant had to offer. The plant had been bought primarily for food rather than as decoration and it would have been a shame for it to go to waste, if it died during our trip. So in the days leading up to the trip, every home-made batch of pasta, sandwiches and salad received a healthy garnish of basil. By the time it was time to leave, the plant was bare, save for the tiny shoots sprouting at its tips.

Plants use some water to grow and survive, but a large percentage of that water is lost to the air through evaporation. Most of that evaporation occurs through the leaves. The leaves are the most vulnerable part of the plant. This is the reason plants in cold climates shed their leaves for winter, and also why plants in deserts often get rid of leaves completely.

By clearing all the leaves from the plant, we reduced the avenues for water loss, so what water was there was used better and lasted longer.

3] Creating a reservoir to fall back on

We didn’t over-water the pot the week before we left. In fact, I don’t think it was watered at all for the last few days. By the last day the soil surface was dry and flaky, which likely resulted in even lesser loss by evaporation.

Ten minutes before we left for the airport, however, I used a jug of water to fill the 2-inch deep plastic box in which the pot sits. The drying soil in the pot would pull in as much as it needed from below, but the surface of the soil would still remain dry enough to not choke the roots of the plant. Also, the soil would always be more efficient at absorbing water than the air would, so little would be wasted.

4] Preparing the right atmosphere

The rest of the water in the jug was used to fill an old one-litre ice-cream tub that also sits on our window sill. It’s filled with water to humidify the air, which can be very useful when you live your life in closed air-conditioned spaces. Dehydration due to the dry air is a very real problem.

On this occasion the ice-cream tub of water was even more useful, because I also drew the full length curtains shut in front of the little window ledge. This created a tiny space between the window and the curtain which would remain well humidified by the water trough. The curtain is hardly an impermeable barrier but even loose divisions are often enough to create a little protected piece of atmosphere. It would have taken at least 10 days by my estimate for that water to fully evaporate, during which time the plant would have enjoyed a well humidified atmosphere in its little room behind the curtain. The effect probably lingered for even longer.

5] Living and learning

You can’t repeat the same actions and expect different results. Which is why this, our second basil plant from the supermarket, was replanted in a larger pot over a television session in the living room. Our first basil plant, survived an onslaught of very hungry aphids from a chrysanthemum plant we got from IKEA a few months ago. The chrysanthemum slowly died away from the aphids, which were probably there when we bought it, but the basil survived. It seems aphids don’t like the taste of basil sap in their diet. Eventually though, that basil plant did wither and die, probably from the lack of space and resources in that tiny supermarket pot of peat.

We learned our lessons, and didn’t waste the left overs from our failures. The chrysanthemum came in a larger pot with some real soil in it, so the chrysanthemum soil was mixed with the peat and our second basil plant found a new and bigger home to grow in. That reuse of old resources and the more balanced soil to grow in probably played a big part in our little fighter surviving the long drought while we were away on vacation.

Three weeks later, the basil plant is still going strong. The tiny leaflets that were a bit shrivelled at the tips have now begun to grow and spread out into the sun. The stalks have taken on a better colour, and there are signs of rejuvenation all around. It will be some time before the plant bears fruit, or in this case usable garnish, again, but the future is hopeful. None of which would have been possible without a little thought and nature’s talent for frugality when she needs it.

Samir

Impatience is a bad thing. When it’s a general impatience, directed at the nebulous World, it appears to be a more socially acceptable frustration, but a true, deep impatience with yourself is a sure sign that you’re slipping.

Impatience with yourself makes you do all sorts of stupid things to break the dead-lock. You take rash decisions and force progress, or at least what you think is progress, in the hope of pushing the cart that is your personal existence forward ever so slightly.

We’ve all been told the cart is going somewhere, that it has a destination and that the destination is awesome. Where and when that destination is imagined to be varies based on the individual’s beliefs. Some are waiting for the pinnacle of achievement to slowly fade in from the mist on the horizon, some are waiting to be swallowed by the approaching darkness at the end of the road, because beyond the darkness is salvation. To them this cart-ride is just one long shopping trip to make sure they are well equipped for the real journey. Some are just waiting for something to happen. Anything.

We wait, sometimes with patience but mostly with a healthy amount of loathing at the sky and the rocks that they would have us delay that ultimate, if elusive, gratification. And then there is the healthy loathing for ourselves, for not being able to push the cart faster. Impatience is a bad thing, and an impatience with yourself will almost certainly cause you to slip.

The fault lies not in the sky and the rocks, but in the silly creatures pushing the ragged cart down the narrow, difficult road, while doing the least fruitful thing they can, waiting. We wait for something we do not really know, we wait for something we couldn’t recognise, yet impatiently we wait. We ignore the path, and the sky, and the trees, the wild grasses dancing like the tide in the breeze, the solidity of the cart in our hands, the intoxicating scent of wet wood and Earth as they meet and part, the refreshing rain on our faces, the fascinating travellers we greet along the way, the bounty of fruit in our cart, the slow rhythmic music of the wheels skipping over the frequent pebbles in the mud.

All that we ignore, and we wait, for our salvation, for our victory, for our deliverance into better times, for our release, never once questioning the sense of the path we have taken, never once consciously choosing another cart to push, never once stopping to enjoy the stars. Instead we blindly push, and drink to forget the pains of walking blindly on uneven ground, and consume to satisfy an un-named craving, and sleep to forget our sorrowful punishments at the hands of the rocks and the sky, and dream. We dream of the sorrow and the suffering of days gone by, and the pleasure and joy that awaits us in some unfathomed future. Then we wake up, we placate the sky with some mutterings to make up for the curses we will hurl at it when the day gets hotter, we kick a few rocks in frustration, and in a half stupor of food and drink and dreams, we push the tottering cart and wait impatiently.

Samir

After my write-up on the philosophy of Hinduism, I got a fair bit of interest from people wanting to know more on the issue. Wendi was preparing to do an ethics presentation on Hinduism and stumbled across my article during her research. She sent me a few questions she had on Hindu beliefs, one of which was about the Hindu take on spiritualism and the afterlife.

More recently, I was chatting with a friend in Mexico who had a similar query. The amount of Spanish literature about India seems to on the rise in recent years, so a curiosity about the culture is a natural side-effect. She wanted to know about the Indian belief in past lives, and my take on it. My replies to both these questions, one academic and one more personal, was broad enough to be of general interest, so I thought I’d share my thoughts here.

The Hindu view on the afterlife is that the essence of life is immortal and cannot be destroyed. As with all things in the Indian belief system, this basic idea can be interpreted and understood on many levels. The very religious view is that the individual soul survives intact and is reborn in another form. The more philosophical interpretation could be that that life energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can only be converted from one form to another. How much of each of those opposing ingredients you wish to put into your own personal afterlife sauce, is entirely up to you.

Rebirth is said to be based on the concept of Karma — a distillation of past actions, behaviour and thought. In the most simplistic way, you could think that your next birth depends on whether you’ve been bad or good. That’s how many understand it, but the philosophical thought is more complex. It considers all of physical life to be a sort of audio-visual-experiential tempering ground for the soul. The soul is born and reborn in various forms and as various things, so as to gain all the experiences it needs to come to a true realisation of the nature of existence, i.e. enlightenment. This is also thought to be based on Karma, but here the process is not considered as one of punishment, but rather of evaluation. The soul decides what experience it requires as a next step in its progress towards enlightenment, and then takes that step.

All generally agree that once enlightenment is reached, the soul is freed from the imperative to be reborn and take physical form. It is then finally one with the ultimate soul/God/the universe/or whatever you want to call it. That’s where the Buddhist concept of Moksha come from. Liberation.

When chatting with my Mexican friend, her questions about what I was describing brought up some interesting contrasts that don’t come up in detached philosophical musings like the one above. I was telling her about the Hindu belief that people, animals, and all life is born and reborn, depending on your thinking and behaviour in your current life. For example, predominantly greedy and inhuman thoughts might lead to a birth as an animal, a creature of instinct. But, nothing is permanent, with each life you learn, hopefully improve, and are born in higher and higher forms until you achieve nirvana &mdash the same enlightenment I described before &mdash you understand how it all works, and you are freed from the cycle.

This was a more ground-level description of what regular people believe, free of philosophical detachment. Her counter-question was interesting. She said that if you´re reborn as an animal, for the animal´s life you would not be aware, as animals don´t think. So how could you behave well to be reborn in human form? Or are you just a human in an animal´s body? That’s a question that would have never occurred to me, but it is a very valid one if you believe that the human soul is unique, which is the basis of all the Abrahamic religions (Catholicism, Judaism, Islam). By contrast, most Eastern religions generally believe in the soul being common and equal across all life. Human beings might largely be more developed souls, but other life has a soul too. This fundamental difference in thinking is part of why there are so many vegetarians in India. It comes from that belief that ending any life too early, and especially an animal one that is closer to the human level of consciousness, is to stop its development prematurely and prolong its time in the cycle.

Of course, there is much commonality in the thinking about the afterlife across all religious thought, even if the details vary. It all comes down to your behaviour in life, with the afterlife serving as reward or punishment. My friend had the same thought about her beliefs and the concepts of heaven and hell. She did, however, detect the abstractness of what I was saying in comparison, so she wondered whether I thought I would be reunited in any way with my loved ones when I died. Now, this is one of those points where what we believe depends on how comfortable we are with the dissolution of ourselves in the larger scheme of things. It’s safe to say the the philosophical stream of Hindu thought thinks of reuniting of souls after death in a more abstract way. That is to say, the specific personalities we take on in life may not survive the transition, but souls that have been close in their lives will recognize each other. Maybe not always thinking of each other as mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, but just as kindred spirits. It comes from believing that the soul or spirit is the real thing, and the person is merely a temporary costume.

I myself am not completely sure of what I believe, because I like to think beyond blind belief. Either way, I look at all the different ways of seeing and interpreting this existence of ours, and I find it all very fascinating. While being part of Life, what life is remains one of the greatest mysteries, not just to the philosopher but even to the most rigorous scientific minds. So it comes as no surprise that the end of life garners so much attention from us. How do we understand the end of something that we can barely begin to explain in the first place? A mystery within a mystery, and perhaps so it shall always remain, no matter what we choose to believe.

Samir

Questions of philosophy vs religion are as old as the human ability to question. Today people wonder about the balance of power and reconciliation between science & religion. It’s a valid issue to think about, but to get a better handle on the subject, it might help to look at the relationship between religion and science’s great-grandfather, philosophy.

My friend Paul always puts interesting questions to me. After tackling truth, this time we were having a conversation about how I reconcile religion and philosophy from an Indian or Hindu perspective. Some interesting points came up, which I have not seen expressed often, so I thought I should share my thoughts here. Indians take much of our own way of thinking for granted, but the fact is, the relationship between religion and philosophy in India has always been quite unique when compared to the West.

There are many levels of religious devoutness in every faith. I do come from a Hindu family, but this is where definitions get complicated because “devout” is a nebulous term when it comes to Hinduism. If you look at the Hindu faith from the eyes of someone from one of the other major religions or the majority of the modern followers, then devout would mean people who are strict followers of the ritual side of the religion. By that measure my family is not devout, although my Dad’s family (at least at the time of his parents) was from that vein of the faith.

The question of reconciling philosophy with Hinduism is a tricky concept to communicate, but I will try. If you have any Hindu friends of the kind who will not look at you strangely if you asked them about religion and philosophy in their culture, they will likely tell you that connecting with philosophy is easier to deal with in Hinduism. But, that “easier” is their particular understanding of their faith. As far as my personal understanding is concerned, in Hinduism, there is no reconciling to be done with philosophy at all. The thing about Hinduism is that at its core it can barely qualify as a faith or religion in the same mould as the other major faiths, especially the Abrahamic religions.

In some forgotten past, Hinduism might have started as simple nature worship but it soon grew into much more, and ultimately into a complex philosophical system. The strange and slightly unique aspect here is that it didn’t do so by discarding its more colourful naturalistic and mythological aspects, but rather by simply building upon them. The idea of philosophy and logic as being this sterile discipline separated from belief, parable, and faith was a Greek concept and not an Indian one.

The term Hindu is actually a descriptive label coined by the Arabs for the people who lived beyond the River Indus. So the very concept of the “religion” of Hinduism is an external imposition which has eventually become accepted by even the “Hindus” themselves. The original name for this philosophy or belief system or whatever you wish to call it, was Sanatana Dharma. Dharma is the same concept as, and the source of, the Buddhist idea of duty, but really that word just does not have an adequate translation in English. It means duty, belief, life, and in its broadest connotation simply “the way”. So Sanatana Dharma would translate to something like “The Ancient Way” or “The Eternal Way”, and even those are gross simplifications.

The Indian culture has always been pluralistically monolithic, if that makes any sense. Let me explain. In India before the coming of the Islamic invasions and Catholicism, we don’t really seem to have had a very strict idea of Religion-A, Religion-B etc. Rather we just had one large body of belief we simply called “Dharma”, which encompassed the vast variety of supporting and conflicting belief systems. They were still all part of the greater Dharma, and the concept of there being many valid paths was one that held great importance.

You can see a similar phenomenon in the sciences. Today the common wisdom is that Yoga is a bunch of bendy exercises from India that are good for you. In the original Sanskrit, it was simply Yog which translates to science or knowledge. This encompassed all scientific knowledge, specifically to do with human beings. One of the multitude of sub-topics in Yog was Hatah Yog meaning the Science of Discipline. That in turn comprised of various systems, one of which were the Asanas, the body positions and exercises that have today become popular as Yoga.

I hope you’re beginning to see what I mean. To try to understand Indian knowledge systems through the lens of Western faiths and philosophies is futile and only leads to misinformation. Sanatana Dharma became “Hinduism” over the millennia, possibly because the Indians kept getting asked by visitors what their religion was, their dharma. They probably didn’t quite understand the question because there was only one Dharma. So the concept of Hindusim took root. Then the Abrahamic religions came and asked them what their religious book was, and they didn’t quite understand that question either. To the ancient Indian, all books were “dharmic”, from the medical volumes of Charak to the love manuals of Vatsayana. So in later times, the Bhagavat Geeta was shoe-horned into the proceedings as our one true book. It is not.

The main thing to understand about Hinduism is that there is no minimum entry requirement, and you can forget what a few extremist zealots might say on the subject today. You don’t have to do anything in particular to be a Hindu. No specific prayers, no rituals, no mandatory temple visits. You cannot really be made a Hindu ala baptism (although in the last 2 centuries a Hindu “conversion” was invented as a counter balance to all the missionaries that went on a converting spree through the length and breadth of the land), nor can you be excommunicated (other than on a purely social level). At its core it is a highly evolved philosophical construct with an almost relativistic, quantum mechanical view of the universe, but at its surface level, you can satisfy yourself by simply paying homage to the Sun and the God of Rain. You can subscribe to either of those belief structures, or the vast range of mediums in between, and you’re still a Hindu, and no one can say otherwise.

Some ancient Indian literature actually tackles this subject. It mentions how some people only have the capacity to worship the creative force as humanised idols, all the way up to understanding the entirety of creation as one singular and differentiated entity, which is beyond the comprehension all but the most adept. The recommendation is to let each one worship, believe, and understand as per their own capacity, and using their own models and metaphors. An elegant system, I think, and one that has resulted in one of the longest continuous and unbroken systems of knowledge and faith in existence. The reason it never broke was because it was always adapting.

I don’t know if I’ve actually answered the original question about reconciling religion and philosophy, but I hope I have created a vague summary of the landscape of traditional Indian thought, a landscape where that question is simply irrelevant. India and everything to do with India is commonly misread and misunderstood by many, because unlike many other cultures you cannot grasp what makes it tick by scrutinising the details. Once you train yourself to see the forest for the trees, while also admiring that line of ants on the earth at your feet, simultaneously, you might begin to start seeing the world through Indian-coloured glasses.

Samir

Since when did everyone expect to get paid to be nice and do the right thing? Look around you, it’s happening as we speak. It’s not new, of course, it’s been going on a for a while. Right from the beginning of time, religion has been promising you good karma, a luxurious after-life with an attached bath, or at least a favourable promotion in the next life as compensation for being nice. That was all fine and good in a slightly abstract way, but the moment doing the right thing started to become worth your while in cold hard cash, we were doomed.

Just a few days ago I was at one of the large hypermarkets in town and saw some examples of this misguided strategy. The shop in question has started charging the customer a small token sum of money for every plastic bag they take at the checkout, to encourage the use of reusable bags. Also, to make it seem like they are doing it purely for the betterment of the environment, they offer you the money for the plastic bags back if you return them for recycling.

Sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface. But think about it. Most people are still going to pay the extra token money for the plastic bag, and consider it a small service charge. Then, very few people are actually going to take the trouble to collect up those specific plastic bags and return them to the shop for recycling. Even if the customer gives in the bags for recycling through other channels, the shop still gets to keep the money for that bag, which while small, is way too much for a single plastic bag produced in the hundreds of thousands. So the shop makes a good profit. Small amounts add up when multiplied by thousands of customers per day. All this rather than switching to more expensive biodegradable bags at their own initial expense, and then charging the customer. That would be really environmentally friendly.

In the same place they also have the system where you need to insert a coin to free a shopping trolley. The coin is returned to you when you deposit the trolley into the correct receptacle in the parking lot. This to prevent people from wandering away with the shopping trolley to carry heavy shopping to their nearby homes. And this is where the flaw in this ‘money saved or given for doing the right thing’ system becomes clear. If you’re living close by, maybe that one lost coin in the shopping trolley is a reasonable service charge to have the convenience of using a trolley to your doorstep, rather than lugging your shopping in many bags, which you also might have paid for.

As soon as you put a monetary value on doing the right thing or being nice, being bad now acquires a cost, which tells the average person that it’s ok to be bad as long as you are willing to bear the cost. It’s ok to use lots of plastic bags when you’re paying for the privilege. It’s ok to kidnap unsupecting shopping trolleys beyond supermarket parking lots when you’re paying for it with a coin. It’s ok to speed dangerously on the highway, as long as you’re willing to pay the fine.

And why not, really? After all, it’s ok to be a polluting industry as long as you are willing to pay for your institutional laziness and irresponsibility with carbon points. How can any of the above examples be considered any different when they are so much more harmless in scale?

Wake up zombie hordes! Being nice or doing the right thing was never meant to be worth your while. You do it because it’s the right thing to do. As soon as you incentivise good behaviour by charging bad behaviour, you are legitimising bad behaviour. When it’s ok to do the wrong thing as long as you pay the price, how can doing the right thing be priceless? And if being nice isn’t priceless to us anymore, then we’re doomed, because even the birds, the animals, and the trees understand that concept, and so much of nature works on that basis. The universe doesn’t do monetary penalties, green incentives, or karma points, it just sees the hand you were dealt and looks at how you dealt with it.

Samir

Is there such a thing as truth? A very complex question if you really think about it, and quite impossible to answer without trying to define what truth is. Ask a random group of friends the question “What is Truth?“, and you will be greeted by a variety of replies ranging from blank stares, to utter confusion, to concerned queries about your love life. After all, the truth is just the truth and that’s all there is to it.

A Question

I have always wanted this site to be a conversation rather than a lecture. I’m happy to say it has worked out quite successfully so far, with many people asking me questions through the comments and the contact form. Mostly it’s practical advice on photography, cameras, design etc., and it’s often something that requires a personal reply. But sometimes it gets more esoteric, and of more universal interest. A few days ago Paul J. Richardson left me this doozy:

Most formulations of shareable “knowledge” since Plato’s original JTB definition, are just knit-pickn refinements – ignoring of course, magical and illogical ones, such as implantation by God(s). How can we avoid circular reference back to knowledge when ‘proving’ (arguing) that truth exists or is possible?

Thanks for the question, Paul. I had to mull over this for quite long before deciding on how to answer it, so here goes.

A Story

A spider sits on a small web in the dark corner of a closet. Instinctively it awaits its prey. While it waits, it starts looking around and trying to make sense of it all. It is not a creature of the light, and is quite accustomed to stunning, killing and devouring any insects that get entangled in its trap without the need of light, but on occasion its world is bathed in brightness. It has found that almost like clockwork, twice in what we know as a 24 hour period, its tiny world is flooded with blinding yellow light from the star above. Immediately, one side of the heavens open and a large creature as tall as the universe appears, and seems to rummage through the heavenly bodies that hang in the sky. The creature’s vast limbs often eclipse the star, and then it goes away, either inserting or removing a heavenly body from the heavens. The fracture in the sky is then repaired, the star goes out, and darkness reigns again in the universe until the next cycle.

The spider in the corner doesn’t quite know what to make of it. It has spoken to some other spiders who have formed a cluster of webs on the other side of the small universe, and they believe this is all based on the laws of physics, the cycle of light and dark, the movement of the the heavenly bodies in and out through the fracture in the sky, and yes, even the creature itself. They have found that the cycle is not completely regular. There are some periods of long darkness when the skies never part, and at other times the fracture appears often and the universe is lit for long periods. They are still trying to come up with a formula which would explain all their observations. They figure once they find that single, all-encompassing formula for explaining it all, they will know the whole truth about existence itself.

The loner spider in the corner is not completely convinced by all this, especially since one half of the other spiders have started to worship their formulas, and the other have begun to worship the creature, while a small group continues to claim there isn’t actually any creature, just natural forces at work. The loner spider has his own theories and he likes to keep them to himself. He’s convinced the sky is alive. He is sure that if he deciphered the working and behaviour of the sky, it will all be clear. He will finally know the ultimate truth.

Jane Smith has different concerns. For one, she never gets a chance to clean her closet. She keeps her coat in there. Every morning she takes the coat from the closet before she goes to work, and puts it back in when he gets back in the evening. She’s always planning to clean the closet over the weekend, but since she rarely opens it during those days, it always slips her mind, and the closet remains untouched. She’s spotted some spiders in there a few times, but they don’t bother her too much. She believes in live-and-let-live and is actually thankful they’re getting rid of some of those insects for her. It must be such a simple life, she thinks, to live on instinct and natural drives alone, and not need to worry about the complications of life and work. No thinking, no questioning, and no wondering about the meaning of it all.

A Truth

My fragment of a story above was meant to put our search for Truth into perspective, and those of you who are masters of reading between the lines of tales have already spotted most of the issues the story of the spider in the closet brings up.

But first, some explanation of the question for those who aren’t familiar with philosophical jargon (I myself am only partially adept at it). Western philosophy is pretty much all based on the fact that the philosopher Plato had too much time on his hands to think of life, the universe, and everything, and he bothered to leave behind written records of what he thought of it all If not for him, this entire field would either be very different or simply not exist in any formal way.

Philosophers have many ways of defining and explaining truth, all of which are confusing, counter-intuitive and contradict each other, while using co-opted terms such as correspondence and coherence. I’m not going to go into that because it doesn’t much matter. Needless to say a lot of the explanation of what truth is has to do with facts. Things that are. You need to know facts to know the truth, which brings us to the question: What is knowledge?

This is where we come back to our good friend Plato. His explanation of knowledge has been the accepted official version for millennia in western philosophy and it is usually referred to as JTB. According to Plato, knowledge is Justified True Belief. He explains further, that for you to know something 3 conditions need to be met:

1. What you know is true
2. You believe it is true
3. You are justified in believing it is true

Have you spotted the problem that Paul is talking about? Truth is related to known facts, i.e. knowledge. But, Knowledge is defined based on what is true. If truth is factual knowledge and knowledge is based on truth, how does that explain anything? It’s a circular reference.

Now we come back to the story of Jane and the spiders and why I wrote it. If you apply Plato’s knowledge formulas to what each of the protagonists of that story think they know, you will find that they will mostly meet all the criteria with flying colours. Yet, the spider in the corner, the other spiders, and Jane, all seem to know a different version of things, and so they have different facts. Since they are all justified in their belief of these facts, they must all be true. But isn’t there supposed to be the one Truth, rather than the multitude? A sort of philosophical monotheism?

The problem is that philosophy hasn’t embraced a now basic fact in science. The universe is relativistic. Our experiences of the universe, our observations of it, and therefore our knowledge of it and truth itself is relative to our senses and our frame of reference. That doesn’t make the things we know less factual, but none of these facts individually can be considered the ultimate truth. You see and feel a solid computer in front of you, and yet for an electron your computer is a vast field of empty spaces it can stroll trough. Does that mean the computer isn’t solid? Well, it’s certainly not liquid! From your frame of reference it is absolutely solid. From another, it is not. For both you and me, and the electron, there can be no ultimate truth if we can’t agree on such basic facts. And we can never agree on basic facts as long as we are trapped within limited frames of reference.

Can Truth exist? Is an Ultimate Truth possible? That was Paul’s actual question and I have to say it is possible in a theoretical thought-experiment sort of way. But as far as I can imagine, it can exist in only one every special situation. We can never see the truth because we exist as a subset of existence as a whole, and so our frame of reference is limited. The same goes for the humble electron and the mighty Milky Way galaxy. We are all trapped in limited frames of reference no matter how vast the differences in scale.

If you want to believe in a personal God, a creator who some how created the universe and all that exists, then you must believe that he/she existed before the universe, which means there is more to existence than the universe. In which case, even such a God might not necessarily know the ultimate Truth. But if existence is the universe, and the universe is so complex as to be sentient in some way beyond our comprehension, and if this sentience is omnipresent in the entirety of itself, then the universe might know the ultimate Truth. The only way I can think of for Truth to exist is for a frame of reference to exist which is all encompassing and cannot itself be observed by anything external, because nothing external exists. Only existence itself being sentient and internally self aware in a way free of all scale, reference, and time can meet this criteria.

So, I would say the ultimate Truth is beyond us. We can strive for it, as we must, we can seek it, as we all should, and we might even touch upon it, glance it with our meager intellects and feel it in some vague way for a fraction of a second. But, I seriously doubt we can ever completely posses the truth. That possibility just doesn’t fit with the facts, or with anything we know and understand. And that at least is a truth, if not the truth.

Samir

The traditional definition of holistic health

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias define holistic health in a variety of ways to encompass different things, depending on how close to scientific and medical orthodoxy the editors stood. It comes down to looking at human health as the health of the whole individual rather than the well-being of parts. The variations come in while defining what makes up a whole individual. Some say it’s the whole physical human being who is so much more than the sum of various biological systems. Some claim it also includes the psychology of the individual. And some go further in wanting to heal the whole being, which involves the body, the mind, and the spirit.

These are all good descriptions, but what I’ve said here is a distillation down from a lot of mumbo-jumbo you will find everywhere. Some of it is good and true, but it’s all description and doesn’t tell you much about the essence of holistic health and why it’s a good or bad thing for you to take it seriously and practice it. When it comes to the less orthodox views of medicine, another term rears its head which must be dealt with, and the question that needs clearing is …

Is holistic health another name for alternative medicine?

Short answer: no. Once again definitions limit us, and this one is even more complicated. The term ‘alternative medicine’ is a pretty bad one, not only does it not describe anything, but even the semi-description it contains only tells you what it’s not. Alternative medicine is simply everything else. Here, of course, we are talking about everything else other than what can officially called Medicine: Allopathy, Western medicine, scientific medicine, modern medicine. You know, people in white coats, syringes, pills and stuff.

Alternative medicine encompasses all manner of wonders and blunders. It is true that many disciplines which fall under the umbrella of alternative medicine do take a more holistic approach to human health. Whether or not you believe in them, systems such as herbalism and homoeopathy take the mental state of the patient as much more of an important diagnostic input than modern medicine usually does. You can look further and find more esoteric arts like transcendental meditation and yoga which go further to consider even the elusive human spirit in their quest for health.

However, alternative therapies are not automatically holistic in their approach. While many encourage the holistic view, most succumb to the the need for human beings to look at everything mechanistically and find one-to-one relationships between health problems and solutions. For this reason, today herbalism and homoeopathy are often practised in a symptomatic way, to cure symptoms rather than curing the whole person and the root causes of disorders, as was their original mandate. So while part of the puzzle, alternative therapies are not equivalent to holistic health.

What it actually means to be holistically healthy

Holism is the belief that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That belief is the basis of holistic health, and we have adequate descriptions of what makes up this whole that must be treated: body, mind, spirit, and whatever lies beyond those pieces of humanity. We have also seen that therapies which integrate some of this holistic view of health do exist, but what is holistic health in practice, and how does one achieve it? That answer would give us some insight into this beyond the definitions.

With the development of scientific thought, we have learnt to divide and subdivide the universe into ever smaller and smaller slices, so that we might understand these pieces in isolation. This is what has lead to the symptomatic treatment of human health as the orthodox way. Systems, organs, tissue, cells, and enzymes can be measures, tested, and found to be within or outside the standard parameters. The psyche, the ego, the id, and above all the spirit are less obliging to our need to observe and measure. This makes holistic health very difficult, if not impossible, to completely outsource to experts.

All our advances in physical medicine have come by relinquishing the individual responsibility of our own health to others. If you want to talk of the whole, mind, and spirit, there is only one ultimate expert in the details of your health: you. There is only one person who can look at the big picture of your health, watch your diet, practice due diligence in what you eat, how you eat it, when you sleep, what you think, and how you feel. It’s all on you.

This can either be a scary though or an empowering one, but if you want to get any real insight into what holistic health actually entails, this is it. Holistic health is about you taking responsibility for your own health. Without that there’s nothing holistic about it. Modern medicine and the many other possible therapies at your disposal are irreplaceable tools in your arsenal, as are nutrition, hygiene and common sense. You can try to describe it in large complex terms all you want but that is what it comes down to. Holistic health is your health in your hands, with the guidance and the help of others. That is how it is meant to be, and that is how it can work well, but only if you take up the mantle as captain of your own well-being.

Samir

A big thank you to Pearl for the writing nudge.

Indians are festival gluttons. That’s not to imply that we all eat too much during festivals (only most of us do, not ALL of us), but rather that we have more commonly celebrated festivals that you can shake a large decorated Christmas tree at. Speaking of Christmas, the Indian equivalent in the realm of noise, public participation, and pornographic commercialisation would have to be Deepawali or Diwali (as it is more commonly referred to in the north of the country). That is what we celebrate today.

Now, as is customary for any writer or speaker introducing the topic of Deepawali to a general audience, I am obliged to incessantly repeat what the festival is about and regale you with a few canned phrases that will enlighten you about the significance of something distilled down from a few thousand years of history and culture. But wait, I needn’t bother because the honorable President, Vice President, Prime Minister, Shadow Prime Minister *cough* big cheese of the ruling party, and probably a miscellaneous collection of other political types have been so kind as to release statements meant for the Indian public that repeatedly tell us what that festival we all seem to be so compelled to celebrate is all about … in one or two redundant sentences. The generally agreed version seems to be that it celebrates the victory of light over darkness, which in turn symbolises the victory of good over evil. Yes, I know. It’s deep. I’m so glad the leaders of our country think it important to educate us on these matters so repeatedly. I am very much expecting to find a multiple choice question about the significance of Diwali on the ballot papers during the next election. After all, how can we be truly Indian without fretting over irrelevant exams?

While the politicians assure me the correct translation of the phrase “victory of good over evil” is “communal harmony”, down south people are celebrating their individuality and the preeminence of their ancient(er) culture by reminding us once again that while they are good sports and wish you a Happy Diwali today (The day of Laxmi Pooja – more on that later), they actually celebrated Deepawali yesterday (Naraka Chaturthi by the Hindu calendar). On that day, eons ago, Krishna killed the evil Narakasura, or maybe it was Kali who killed the evil Narakasura, or maybe it was the Goddess Durga who did the dispatching. No one seems to be quite sure, except about the fact that their version is more righteous than everyone else’s. Not to be out done, people in the North insist on calling Naraka Chaturthi “Choti Diwali” (Mini Diwali). My Diwali is bigger than yours.

Speaking of North India, aka Macho Land, they wouldn’t dream of basing their main festival on the victory of some vengeful superhuman woman over miscellaneous evil guy, so they insist it is the very day that Ram, of Ramayana fame, returned to Ayodhya after his many adventures and misadventures in the wild South. On the television news today I was informed that it all started when the people of Ayodhya lit up the city to welcome home their returning king and to celebrate his victory over the Demon King Ravana. I love it when people make unfortunate translations such as this one and eventually come to believe it themselves.

In the original Indian mythos, life exists in three realms (whether physical or spiritual is up to each person to decipher). Swarga (often translated as Heaven but not really) is the home of a race of super human beings called the Devas (often translated as Gods but not quite), Patala (often translated as Hell but not even close) is the home of the equally super human Asuras (often translated as Demons but not exactly), and Bhoomi (the Earth) is home to both human beings and all manner of other beings included the Rakshasas (also confusingly translated as Demons) who are actually meant to be nature spirits who inhabit the forests and the wilds. You can see the influence of Christian thought here, which made the Devil out of the playful Pan, but for Indians themselves to now consider the Rakshasa King Ravana as a “demon” while celebrating our wonderfully ancient culture (which we know nothing about) is truly sad and hilarious.

To confuse matters between Ram, Ravana, Krishna, Kali, Narkasura et. al., the second day of Diwali is also celebrated as Laxmi Pooja. For those who don’t know, a pooja is a ritual, usually directed at a particular deity. The Goddess Laxmi (pronounced Laksh-me) is the Goddess of wealth. Unfortunately, in our modern “enlightened” times, she has been reduced to the Goddess of riches, a major demotion from wealth, which signified so much more. On the day of Laxmi Pooja, people quite literally pray to and for money. The hardcore followers of the practice go so far as to not make any major purchases on the day, and hence keep the money from symbolically flowing away. Fortunately for the free market economy, they make up for this day of token level-headedness by going on a buying binge on all the days preceding it. Like Eid for the Muslims, or Christmas for the Christians, and Xmas for the cool folk, Diwali is an excuse for the urban Hindu to dig into their collection of fine vintage credit cards and live a life of blind consumption. And then there are the noisy fireworks that I am assured are “tradition” (that warrants a separate discussion).

This is the reality of Deepawali through most of the modern Indian world today. But, I have never considered myself a pessimist. Some where deep down in the dark recesses of the buying public there still exists some kernel of light. For what more do we need Deepawali to celebrate than light itself. We can marvel at the myths and revere the legends all we want, that is a healthy thing as long as we go beyond the fast food versions of the tales. But, do we really need Diwali to mean anything more than a few days in the year when we make night into day with our oil lamps and decorative kandeels(lanterns), our strings of cheap Chinese lights and faux LED oil lamps, and pay homage to the divine photon? It brings light into our lives, life into our universe, and beautiful sunrises over our horizons.

Happy Deepawali

Samir

Assuming this question is speaking in terms of physical eventualities rather than abstract philosophies, let us plot the course of human detritus when it leaves our homes. Let us suppose we are talking of a specific item, a plastic toy of some sort, maybe a little yellow “rubber” duck. So, we’re talking of a soft plastic toy which has outgrown its welcome.

If I were a conscientious person, I might add it to my plastics pile of recycleable wastes. Or I could give it away and it would have a new life as a second-hand toy to some grateful kid who doesn’t have any better … but that route still leads to the eventuality of it being disposed, so let’s stick to the first track. The duck is transported to a sorting plant. If the material in it is deemed salvageable, it is sent to the actual recycling part of the process, and if not it goes back into the garbage fork of this great journey (more on that later).

To be recycled, the plastics are chemically modified, broken down, melted or otherwise changed into a more maleable form of basic material. In this process energy is expended, and some part of our now quite unrecognizable duck wafts out of an industrial chimney somwhere, its complex molecules polluting the evening breeze and creating a stunning many-hued sunset. There they will remain, either rising to new heights to be broken down by the harshness of Sol’s ultraviolet radiation in the upper atmosphere, or by the bombardment of cosmic rays that still manage to pierce through the Earth’s magnetic shield. In the end those broken down molecules and even the heavier original molecules will find themselves washed into soil or sea by precipitation.

But that was merely the story of our dead duck’s ephemeral ghost. The main mass of plastics in the bird will join into the large molten vats to be molded into plastic raw materials for other processes, or become useless debris which is of no industrial use. These wastes will once again find themselves dumped into soil, water, or garbage, for lack of laws preventing the same, or the lack of any truly permament solution to “safely” storing dangerous industrial wastes. The remaining plastics will go on to other uses, and our friendly duck will eventually be a proud constituent in a new low-quality plastic bucket, or a beach ball, or a fake wood substitute in a recycled plastic park bench. There our favourite bird will feel right at home in the water, or be bashed around a lot, or sit around and watch the trees, until it has once again outgrown its usefulness. Then this cycle will start all over again.

If I were a less conscientious person, or the duck was not judged worthy by the recycling Gods, or most of it just didn’t quite make it to the boiling vats, then to the garbage it will go. Garbage is a very strange beast. In most modern cities now, it is first put to a trial by fire where a large portion of it is crushed and burned in those monster garbage trucks that prowl your streets at night and devour the contents of entire industrial-size garbage skips in one gulp. During that process, some of our bird would once again bellow out of the garbage truck as smoke to pollute breezes, decorate sunsets, and generally consort with the wafting ghosts of other dead plastic ducks.

What remains in the truck would finally reach the hell-on-earth that is an urban garbage dump. Here millions of archeological piles of human ignorance stand triumphant over millions of older layers that have been pressed further down into the Earth with time. Eventually better sense, or laziness will prevail and the garbage dump will be covered over and the dumping will move on to another site, leaving the old one open to exciting development work on parking lots, or luxury resorts, which ever happens to be more profitable in the prevailing economic cycle. The melted mass that was our late ducky will still be there, somewhere deep in the earth, and its flesh will melt into the soil and be washed by the rains into the waters. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Water to water.

Maybe in a million years some of the super compressed debris that was once a city dump will be converted by the tectonic forces into some exotic form of super-efficient fossil fuel that we have not yet dreamed of in our philosophy, but more likely it will slowly break up in time, clogging the natural systems for thousands of years to come. What the waters carry away will reach other places and other soils and at some point what’s left of our yellow rubber ducky might actually make it down to some farm of the future. There the crops, not knowing what to make of the weird substance clogging their systems, will dump it into leaves, seeds, and fruit, which will eventually be eaten by you.

Finally all those juvenile tries to gnaw at ducky’s beak will have come to bear fruit. Ducky is with you again, and also on a farm, along with toxicity, cancer, and a few other friends we might not have been introduced to yet. … Or I’m completely wrong and by the time ducky’s molecules are reincarnated in a pumpkin, the human race would have been driven to extinction and the environment would be nursing a nasty hangover, but recovering fast.

Either way, I love a happy ending.

Samir