The Subjective Stance

The world is like an impression left by a story says the Yoga Vasistha . This world of ours is deeply impermanent. It is less of a ground than we think – one can try to play the scientific trick of trying to recover an objective world from the fleeting impressions obtained by our senses, but we know that tactic is not going to work. None of these eternal scientific laws are going to help; in the long run we are all dead. More importantly: why cling to this life? Is there something special about this existence that makes one want to continue this for ever and ever? There is no percentage in banking on this world. Here is a thought – we normally think of the fear of death as an affect or emotion, almost instinctual. But, is it not a cognitive attitude as well? Is it not an admission of ignorance, about the true nature of our finiteness? I have been born in a human form: not a dog, not a deva, it is human this time, independent of any beliefs in reincarnation. What is one ...

A sensitive young man is brought up in the lap of luxury. He is the favored child of his father, who doesn't want him to be exposed to the cruel ways of this world. A new father, he goes for a ride with his charioteer, and is exposed to disease and deprivation. What does he do? He goes back home, takes leave of his sleeping wife and child and heads off to the forest, to meditate and to end the cycle of suffering. Six hard years of practice and asceticism later, he strikes gold and is revealed as the Buddha , the Tathagatha, the Enlightened one. Is it just me or does something not compute? Why would a sensitive man, a royal to boot, flee when he sees disease and deprivation? Why not stay and work for the welfare of his subjects? I know that his father was not a king but the tribal chief of a republic but hopefully you get my point. Furthermore, why did Siddhartha leave his family? It's not as if his wife and son were fetters (as Prince Siddhartha was supposed to have uttered whe...

A week or so ago, like countless other people, I saw the new documentary on Walmart . As a movie, it leaves much to be desired, though it is definitely in the top tenth percentile of anti-corporate propaganda. To give him credit, the director did a good job of presenting the facts and after a while, the disap pointments mouthed by one ex-employee after the other begin to feel real. But my concern is not so much with the politics of Walmart but rather the metaphysics behind it. I think that the existential situation when dealing with Walmart and other egregious corporate violaters (or to use an even vaguer term "the system") was well captured centuries ago in the ancient Indian claims about the terrors of Samsara. What do I mean by that? The original conundrum enfolding us in Samsara is the following: the world as we see and experience is filled with suffering, i.e., everything we do causes suffering in some form or the other. Not a link in the chain is free of corruption. Gre...

Sometimes I think that there is more confusion about the nature of time than about anything else. Usually, when people talk about time, they are talking about a representation of time, not time itself. We represent time in so many ways, for example, in the form of clocks or more generally, by replacing time by the occurrence of change or the making of a choice. In the first case, time passes only if things change, so if nothing changed, no time would pass. This has been argued most forcefully in physics by the maverick physicist/historian Julian Barbour, in his excellent book The End of Time. While Barbour might be right about the role of time in physics (since physics cares about dynamics more than anything else, its no surprise that time = change as far as a physicist is concerned), physicists have no ultimate monopoly on the nature of time. Similarly, looking at time in a narrative context, the role of time in stories is deeply tied to action and events, which involves characters m...

It does seem as if interesting things happen in clusters. The last couple of months have been very productive. I have been writing a lot and the more I write, the easier it is for me to write more. Strangely enough, as I pursue my own writing interests, I have been running into people who are writers in the making. These people are complete strangers who start talking to me without any knowledge of my background. Its almost as if I am giving off a "writer" vibe. You could try to explain this phenomena in several ways. For example, you might say that I am more willing to entertain a conversation with a fellow writer, that I frequent places like cafes and bookstores teeming with writer types, that I make friends with people who are interested in literature and their friends are more likely to be writers. All of these explanations are surely part of the story, but they cannot be the whole. I feel that each time I get interested in something, I randomly run into people who share ...

I never understood why theories of evolution (Darwin's theory in particular) are politically explosive. I would have thought that physics presents a far more radical challenge to Creationism. After all, it is: (a) Far more reductive, claiming that we are nothing but a bunch of moving particles. (b) Moves the center of the universe as far away from human beings as can be imagined. So why do creationists get into a tizzy about Darwin and not about Einstein? Perhaps it's because evolution introduces a different conception of time and history into our self understanding, while physics is decidedly a-temporal. Physics does not deal with the question of origins, notwithstanding big bang cosmology and other theories of the birth of the universe. Questions of origins really do not play an important conceptual role in physics, because the laws of physics are the same today as they were when the universe was created. By getting rid of special moments, moments that mean more than other...

It is hard enough to define pornography: "I know it when I see it" according to Judge Potter Stewart . If you thought that was a tough cookie (what do you think of the new Victoria Secret ads on Network TV?), try to define philosophy. "I know it when I define it" says the self reflexive smart alec. He might be right, but he didnt really solve the problem did he? What is philosophy anyway? I remember being pleasantly surprised and then taken aback during my first visit to a Barnes and Noble megastore (in Madison, Wisconsin if you really want to know) and stumbled into the metaphysics section. I was expecting treatises on Plato and Nagarjuna and was instead confronted with rows and rows of brightly colored evocations of previous lives and astral bodies. At that time, I remember turning back, screaming silently and mocking the befuffled masses arrayed around me, but were they right? Who owns metaphysics, thats what I want to know.