Why Must Philosophy Have a Passport?
Because sometimes I feel that the metaphysics proposed by Plato and Aristotle, though historically and philosophically significant, does not always feel contextual to the questions I am asking today. Their systems often appear structured, symbolic, and sometimes almost mechanical when placed against the messy reality of contemporary life. Maybe that is unfair. Maybe I have not understood them fully yet. Or maybe philosophy is supposed to make us disagree with philosophers. Imagine Aristotle looking at us and saying, “You have misunderstood my theory.” And all of us replying, “Sir, with due respect, we are trying.” Sometimes I wonder whether Chanakya’s logic may feel more relatable to some of us than Aristotle’s logic. Not because one automatically replaces the other, but because philosophy also has to speak to the world in which we actually live.
And this brings me to another question that has been troubling me: What exactly is Indian philosophy? Whenever someone asks, “What is Indian philosophy?” I feel like asking another question: why do we need to put a passport on philosophy in the first place? Physics is physics. Chemistry is chemistry. We do not usually say, “This is Indian gravity and that is German gravity.” An atom does not stop at the border and ask immigration officers whether it has permission to enter another country. So why do we sometimes speak as if philosophy itself belongs to a nation? Of course, philosophies emerge from cultures, languages, histories, traditions, and geographical contexts. Indian philosophical traditions are not identical to Greek, German, Chinese, or other philosophical traditions. Their questions, concepts, and methods differ. But truth itself does not need a passport. A philosophical idea may be born in India and speak to someone in Germany. An idea developed in Greece may disturb a student sitting in Chennai. Perhaps there is Indian philosophy in the historical sense and Greek philosophy in the historical sense, but philosophy itself, at its deepest level, belongs to no one. The moment we begin asking, “What is reality? Who am I? What is truth? What is consciousness?”, humanity has already entered the conversation.
I have also begun questioning the idea of countries. America, Germany, India....sometimes I wonder whether we have become so attached to maps that we have forgotten that the Earth itself never drew those lines. Look at the planet from space. Can you see the borders? Can you see India written on the land? Can you see Germany or America? No. You see one Earth. The borders exist because human beings drew them, defended them, fought over them, and then created passports to remind us that apparently a human being standing a few kilometres away may belong to another political category. I know this sounds radical. Osho expressed a similar challenge to nationalism and the rigid division of humanity. The provocative dream is simple: What if the whole Earth were home? Imagine burning your passport and declaring, “The whole Earth is mine.” Please do not actually burn your passport...immigration officers may not appreciate your philosophical awakening. But the question remains powerful. Why should my humanity become secondary to my nationality? Why should the accident of where I was born determine the boundaries of my imagination? Political structures may be necessary for practical organisation, but must those structures become walls inside our minds? I do not want to believe that India is more human than Germany, or that America is more human than India. Humanity comes first. Maybe the Earth is not divided. Maybe we are.
Then comes another idea that disturbed me deeply. The statement is not simply, “I do not believe in God.” It is something more radical: “I do not believe in believing. My approach is to know.” That is a very different statement. Knowing and believing are not necessarily the same thing. Belief often begins with acceptance, while inquiry begins with a question. Belief can sometimes say, “This is the answer.” Inquiry asks, “How do I know?” Perhaps doubt is not always the enemy of truth. Sometimes doubt is the beginning of an honest search for it. This idea really made me struggle. If I believe something without examining it, have I discovered truth.....or have I simply inherited an idea? If someone told me something from childhood, repeated it a thousand times, surrounded it with rituals, traditions, authority, fear, and emotional attachment, does repetition automatically make it true? That is a dangerous question because once you start asking it, you cannot easily stop.
And maybe that is why unquestioned belief can sometimes become poisonous to human intelligence....not because every belief is false, but because belief without inquiry can prevent us from thinking. All religions contain beliefs, but perhaps religious inquiry should also have the courage to question, investigate, experience, and examine. I know this is controversial. Honestly, I struggled with it. But perhaps faith that is terrified of questions is not strong faith; perhaps it is simply fear wearing religious clothes. I am not saying religion and science are identical, but I do wonder whether religious inquiry can become more intellectually honest. Can we examine our beliefs rather than merely protect them? Maybe doubt is not the opposite of faith. Maybe indifference is.
Another thought that stayed with me is this: Life is not a problem to be solved. Life is a mystery to be lived. Perhaps only fools think that one final answer will settle everything. Every answer creates another question. Look at the history of philosophy. One philosopher gives an answer. Another philosopher arrives and says, “Interesting. But no.” Then the third philosopher says, “Actually, both of you are wrong.” And thousands of students spend the next several centuries writing assignments about all three. That is philosophy. But maybe that is also life. We want certainty. We want someone to tell us exactly what to do, whom to love, what to become, what God is, and what happens after death. Every time we think we have found the answer, life quietly creates another question. Perhaps that is why we should not live with endless “shoulds” and “should nots.” Maybe we need to become more spontaneous—not careless or irresponsible, but alive, alert, awake, and present.
One line that stayed with me was: “Love never dies through separation, never. If it dies at all, it dies through too much togetherness; never by separation.” We often think that distance destroys love, but perhaps physical proximity does not automatically create love either. Two people can sit next to each other every day and still remain strangers, while two people can be separated by oceans and remain deeply connected. Maybe love does not depend merely on distance. Perhaps it depends on whether two people still have the freedom to breathe. Sometimes we want to possess what we love, and in trying to hold it too tightly, we slowly destroy the freedom that made it beautiful in the first place.
I also reflected deeply on the difference between religion and religiousness. Religion can be an institution, a tradition, a set of doctrines, rituals, authorities, and communities. Religiousness may be something more personal and existential. A person may belong to Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, or another tradition, but the deeper question remains: Are we actually religious in the sense of being inwardly awake? One can belong to a religion without ever looking within. One can perform rituals without transformation. One can know prayers and still remain unkind. One can defend God and never experience silence. Perhaps real religiousness requires standing on one's own feet and looking inward. If God exists, perhaps the question is not only, “Where is God?” Maybe the question is also: Why am I always searching outside?
The real question is perhaps not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death. We spend enormous amounts of energy debating what happens after death.....heaven, hell, rebirth, nothingness, another life.....but sometimes we forget to ask whether we are actually living now. Are we awake? Are we seeing? Are we loving? Are we thinking for ourselves? Are we experiencing life, or merely repeating routines? Wake up, study, eat, scroll, pray, sleep, repeat......and suddenly one day, the funeral comes. What happened in between? Maybe a person can be biologically alive and existentially asleep.
Another challenging thought is that religion is often given to us before we are capable of questioning it. A child is told, “This is your God. This is your religion. These are your people. These are the others.” Slowly, identity enters the mind. Traditions can certainly provide meaning, belonging, moral formation, and community, but the philosophical question remains: At what point does inheritance become understanding? Have I examined what I believe, or have I simply continued believing because everyone around me believes? The moment you begin examining the foundations of your identity, the entire building may start shaking. And perhaps sometimes that shaking is necessary.
Creation itself is sacred. Life is sacred. And if we make a complete mess of our lives, perhaps we should not simply sit there dramatically listening to sad songs and saying, “This is my destiny.” Change. If you are uncertain, find out why. If you are confused, investigate. If you are not thinking, start thinking. Try to make things clear and logical.
Someone once asked a monk, “What is the purpose of becoming a monk?” The answer was simple: To understand who you are when everything else is taken away. No titles, no possessions, no achievements, no followers, no applause, no carefully curated personality....just you. Who are you then? Maybe I have a long journey ahead of me to discover that.
We live through relationships, and perhaps we cannot exist without them. Even the hermit is related. Even the sannyasi is related. Even the monk who disappears into a monastery remains related to the world because he carries the world of his experiences within him. He may leave society physically, but he cannot completely erase every relationship that has shaped his consciousness. Perhaps relationship is life itself. And that is why conflict becomes so tragic. The question is not whether we will disagree....we certainly will. The question is whether we can remain connected even when we disagree.
Then comes the most uncomfortable question: Did God create us, or did we create God? We are told that God is omniscient, perfectly good, generous, loving, and eternal. If God created us in His image, then what does that mean? Are we omniscient? Clearly not. Are we always generous? Please do not ask my roommates. Are we always loving? Also, no. So what does it mean to be made in the image of God? Another possibility arises: perhaps human thought created an image, gave it a name, built rituals and doctrines around it, and then began worshipping what thought itself had created. In that sense, are we sometimes worshipping ourselves and calling it God? That is an uncomfortable philosophical challenge. But asking the question does not automatically settle the answer. Perhaps God exists beyond our concepts. Perhaps our concepts of God are inadequate. Perhaps the greatest danger is not asking whether God exists, but believing that we have completely understood God.
From childhood, we are told, “Concentrate on your book. Do not look outside the window. Stop watching the lizard.” But maybe sometimes, instead of shouting at the child, we should both look at the lizard. Observe it. Understand it. Watch nature. Learn. Perhaps the problem is not distraction. Perhaps the problem is that we do not know how to pay attention. When you truly learn how to pay attention, you can pay attention to the lizard and to the book. You learn a great deal when you are humble. You might be poor......be poor, who cares? Find your own talent and stick to it, even if it does not bring conventional success, because we are going to die anyway. Death does not care about your LinkedIn profile.
One of the deepest ideas I encountered is that the mind cannot formulate the timeless and shape it according to its own convenience. Thought cannot solve every human problem because thought itself can become part of the problem. The mind tries to define everything, control everything, and capture everything inside concepts. But perhaps the timeless cannot be captured like that. Knowledge is important. Education is important. Science is important. Philosophy is important. But wisdom may be something different. Wisdom is not simply accumulated information. You can have ten degrees and still have no idea how to live. You can quote Aristotle and still be rude to the person serving you tea. You can write a thesis on consciousness and remain completely unconscious of the person crying next to you. Perhaps that is why the ending of knowledge can become the beginning of wisdom.
And this brings me back to where I started. Sometimes I genuinely wonder why we spend so much time studying abstract Plato and Aristotle while contemporary and contextual philosophies are speaking directly to the world we are living in. Again, I am not rejecting Plato and Aristotle....please, professors, do not worry, I am still studying. But I am asking for something more. Why should philosophy stop with ancient concepts? Why should metaphysics remain disconnected from contemporary consciousness, politics, identity, suffering, technology, ecology, religion, and actual human experience? Sometimes thinkers like Osho, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Sri Aurobindo, and others feel closer to the questions I am actually struggling with. Sometimes I feel at home reading them. I feel that sense of belonging in the meanings they propose and the truths they attempt to explore. That does not mean they are automatically correct. It simply means that they speak to me.
Sometimes I think philosophers will never be liked by theologians because philosophers challenge too much. Maybe philosophers put theologians' faith at risk. I can honestly say that philosophers often seem to have more freedom to think, and perhaps that is why certain tensions arise in every religious tradition. Theology asks important questions, but philosophy sometimes walks into the room and asks, “But why?” And suddenly everyone becomes uncomfortable. Maybe that is philosophy's greatest danger and also its greatest gift: it refuses to stop questioning.
As Eduardo Galeano wrote, “We live in a world where the funeral matters more than the dead, the wedding more than love and the physical rather than the intellect. We live in the container culture which despises the content.” Perhaps that is exactly where we are. We preserve the container and forget the content. We protect institutions and forget human beings. We defend religion and forget religiousness. We worship knowledge and forget wisdom. We draw borders and forget the Earth. We defend identities and forget humanity. We study philosophers and sometimes forget to think.
So where do I stand? Honestly, I do not completely know. And perhaps that is okay. I am still struggling, still reading, still disagreeing, still doubting, still believing, and sometimes even questioning belief itself. I am still wondering whether philosophy needs a nationality. I am still wondering whether religion and religiousness are the same thing. I am still wondering whether God exists outside thought.....or whether our thoughts are simply too small to understand whatever reality may exist beyond them. I am still wondering why we draw borders on a planet that never asked for them. I am still wondering whether Plato would understand Osho, whether Aristotle would enjoy sitting with Krishnamurti, and whether all of them would eventually argue so much that we would quietly leave the room and go for chai.
But perhaps the point is not to reach a final answer. Perhaps the point is to remain awake....to know rather than merely repeat, to investigate rather than blindly accept, to remain humble before mystery, to live before death, to love without possession, to belong to humanity before belonging to a map, and to remember that philosophy, at its deepest level, may not belong to India, Greece, Germany, America, or anywhere else. Perhaps philosophy begins the moment a human being looks at existence and honestly says, “I do not understand. But I want to know.”
And maybe that is where I am right now.... not at the destination and not with an answer, but somewhere on the road. Asking questions. Sometimes agreeing with Aristotle. Sometimes running toward Krishnamurti. Sometimes sitting with Osho. Sometimes returning to Indian philosophical traditions. Sometimes completely confused. But still thinking. Because maybe confusion is not always the end of philosophy. Sometimes, it is where philosophy begins.
And perhaps the final question is not, “Which philosophy is correct?” Maybe the real question is: Are we courageous enough to think beyond the answers we have inherited? If the whole Earth is our home, humanity our family, life a mystery, and truth something we must continually seek rather than merely possess, then what exactly are we fighting about? Maybe I do not have the answer. But then again, if philosophy has taught me anything, it is this: the moment you think you have the final answer, someone somewhere is probably already writing a philosophy to prove you wrong. Here all I have done is tried to put in Ideas of Indian contemporary philosophers such as Osho, Krishnamurthy and others...
Student of Philosophy - Rohan Brahmane
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