Wisdom comes through Experience - Part 2

 

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