Philosophy

A Train Journey Through Philosophy: Summary of Eric Weiner’s ‘Socrates Express’

June 24, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Journalist and author Eric Weiner’s The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers (2020) is a travelogue, memoir, and self-help book all rolled into one. It’s a distillation of the teachings of 14 great philosophers.

The “Express” isn’t just part of a catchy title. Each chapter starts with a wisdom-seeking train journey that Weiner took to locations where past great philosophers lived, worked, and thought (or are studied.) This introductory vignette orients Weiner’s study of these philosophers’ concepts: how to wonder like Socrates, see like Thoreau, listen like Schopenhauer, have no regrets like Nietzsche, fight like Gandhi, grow old like Beauvoir, cope with hardship like Epictetus, and so on.

The insights resonate with a fresh vibrancy for our problems today. Gandhi (on “how to fight”) believed that individuals who resorted to violence did so from a failure of imagination. Gandhi’s most significant fight was the fight to change the way we fight. He taught that a perpetrator of violence, “unwilling to do the hard work of problem-solving, he throws a punch or reaches for a gun.”

Weiner packs just enough background details on the philosophers’ life stories and how their intellectual traditions are rooted in the context of their times. Stoicism, for example, evolved when ancient Greece’s city-states were facing sociopolitical uncertainty.

The slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus distilled Stoicism to its essence with the dictum, “Some things are up to us, and some are not up to us.” Weiner writes, “Most of what happens in our life is not up to us, except our internal reactions to those events. The Stoics have a word for anything that lies beyond our control: “indifferents.” … Their presence doesn’t add one iota to our character or our happiness. They are neither good nor bad. The Stoic, therefore, is “indifferent” to them.”

Indifference, thus, is an empowering philosophy. With outward events, we are less powerful than we think, but with our reactions, we’re much more powerful.

There’s a scene in the movie Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence, played by Peter O’Toole, calmly extinguishes a match between his thumb and forefinger.

A fellow officer tries it himself, and squeals in pain. “Ouch, it damn well hurts,” he says.

“Certainly it hurts,” replies Lawrence.

“Well, what’s the trick, then?”

“The trick,” says Lawrence, “is not minding that it hurts.”

Lawrence’s response was Stoic. Sure, he felt the pain, yet it remained a raw sensory sensation, a reflex. It never metastasized into a full-blown emotion. Lawrence didn’t mind the pain, in the literal sense of the word: he didn’t allow his mind to experience, and amplify, what his body had felt.

Socrates Express won’t be the most exhaustive philosophy book we can access. Moreover, as we read through, it’s helpful to have some prior appreciation for what we’re reading. For philosophers we’ve studied best, Weiner’s prose will reiterate the key findings. (That was Gandhi, Epictetus, Thoreau, Confucius, and Aurelius, for me.) The other chapters will seem comparatively less insightful.

Ultimately, Weiner reminds what we should be really looking for isn’t knowledge but wisdom. The difference, he says, is that, while information is a jumble of facts and knowledge is a more organized clutter of facts, wisdom is something else altogether. Wisdom “untangles the facts, makes sense of them and crucially, suggests how best to use them.” Put succinctly, “knowledge knows. Wisdom sees.”

Weiner’s prose meanders, it ventures down sidetracks, it stops frequently, it staggers, and it distracts. And it never arrives anywhere. And that’s the whole point. “The Socrates Express” begins in wonder—as does philosophy. The journey never ends—the quest for wisdom is ongoing. By the end, if, at Weiner’s prompting, philosophic thought has done its best, the curiosity of the journey has evoked remains.

Recommendation: Read Eric Weiner’s Socrates Express. It’s an engaging reminder that many philosophical systems are not just academic abstractions whose real meaning is lost in the minutiae.

Weiner’s prose invites us to start “questioning not only what we know but who we are, in hopes of eliciting a radical shift in perspective.” Socrates Express is a reminder that philosophy ultimately isn’t a cure-all for our current or future woes. Instead, philosophy is worthwhile because it builds immunity against negligent judgments and unentitled certitude. And it’s as relevant today as it’s ever been.

Mottainai: The Japanese Idea That’s Bringing More Balance to Busy Lives Everywhere

June 7, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

You don’t have to be a Japanophile like me to be familiarized with the notion of Mottainai. Take a brief trip to Japan and observe the culture, and you’ll become acquainted with the expression that’s deeply embedded in the way of life there. Depending on the context, you’ll hear mottainai as either the admonition “don’t waste” or the assertion “too precious to waste,” when, say, you spill rice.

In recent times, conservationists such as Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai have applied that phrase to inspire humankind to reduce, repurpose, reuse, and recycle. “If we are wise like nature, we would practise the mottainai spirit. The earth practises mottainai. It reuses and recycles. We even get recycled when we die. We go back into the soil,” Maathai has said.

What the Japanese Can Teach Us About Cleanliness

Mottainai: What the Japanese Can Teach Us About Cleanliness Over in Japan, tidying up is a bee on the bonnet. Cleanliness is a moral virtue, and cleaning is an act of spiritual practice—indeed, a means to purify the soul. In Shinto, good spirits can dwell in clean environments, and you’ll frequently observe Japanese people cleaning their homes and offices.

Ever since the post-war reconstruction, the Japanese have also encouraged upkeep and conservation. They tend to make the most of limited resources and avoid wastefulness. Their culture dissuades the idea of trashing things.

Moreover, the concept of animism in Shinto encourages reverence for objects—from teapots to katana. There’s even an old Japanese parable about a spirit ghost named “Mottainai Obake” who haunts children who treat things wastefully.

Inner Peace Starts with the Cleanness of Our Inner and Outer World.

Knackered for the physical space, the Japanese are devoted to efficient household goods and gift-giving (albeit with lavish gift-wrapping.) Their zeal for getting organized has led to a cottage industry of clutter counselors and storage experts who’re celebrated in television shows and consumer magazines as out-and-out innovators.

In this cultural context, Nagisa Tatsumi’s 2003 book Suteru Gijyutsu (“The Art of Throwing Away”) caused a national sensation with its bold proposal. Tatsumi challenged the Japanese to rethink their attitude to possessing things and to have the courage and conviction to get rid of all the stuff they really don’t need.

Tatsumi goaded people to let go of the things that are tying them down:

Possessing things is not good in itself. We have to consider whether they’re necessary, whether they’re used. And if something’s unnecessary, we should get rid of it. This is the essence of the Art of Discarding. Once you appreciate that you don’t have to keep what’s unnecessary, you’ll be better able to use what is necessary with proper care.

Tatsumi’s book sold 1 million copies in six months and quickly got translated into Korean and Chinese. Indeed, it was the book that inspired Marie Kondo, the reigning queen of decluttering.

Tatsumi’s Book Inspired the Current Obsession with Decluttering

In Suteru Gijyutsu, Tatsumi cheerfully explores the many psychological snags that make people reluctant to discard things.

Take the “keep it for now” syndrome, such as with the advertising leaflets that used to be inserted in the weekend newspaper. Tatsumi advises, “You think, ‘There may be something on sale that I might find useful. But I am too busy to go through them now. So I am going to keep them for now and look at them later.'” That mindset merely contributes to the piles of garbage.

Recommendation: Skim Suteru Gijyutsu, written in 2003. It was translated as The Art of Throwing Away only in 2017, a year before Tatsumi’s death.

Tatsumi’s message is simple yet profound. She guardedly reminds readers of the stark reality that everything is a waste. No matter what you buy, no matter how much you use it, no matter how much you love it, no matter if you keep it or recycle it or donate it … it’s still waste. It will still end up in a landfill someday. By learning to discard, you will reclaim space, free yourself from “accumulation syndrome,” and pave the way to rediscovering joy and purpose in a less-cluttered life.

Idea for Impact: Take back control, gain space, free yourself from “accumulation syndrome,” and find new joy and purpose in your less-cluttered life Take Tatsumi’s motto to heart: “If you have it, use it. If you don’t use it, don’t have it.”

Three Lessons from Clayton Christensen’s ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’

March 22, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Each term, on the last day of his management class, Harvard strategy professor Clayton M. Christensen had the habit of asking his students to apply the principles of management business to their personal lives.

“Don’t reserve your best business thinking for your career,” he would push them to ask the difficult questions and pursue purpose and meaning in their careers and their personal lives.

Toward the end of his life, after suffering a stroke and contracting cancer, Christensen published a Harvard Business Review article, which he expanded as How Will You Measure Your Life (2012.) This New York Times bestseller struck a chord with many business leaders, especially in favor of Christensen’s reflections on pursuing fulfillment.

Lesson #1: Don’t over-invest in work or under-invest in relationships.

Christensen talks about various motivators at work and encourages you to think about how you want to be remembered. He argues that ultimately your most significant sources of joy in life will be your family and your close friends. Devote time to these relationships, and they’ll enrich your life:

The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life. But you have to be careful. When it seems like everything at home is going well, you will be lulled into believing that you can put your investments in these relationships on the back burner. That would be an enormous mistake. By the time serious problems arise in those relationships, it often is too late to repair them.

Lesson #2: Don’t lose track of the essential things. Allocate resources appropriately.

Christensen recalls some of his business school classmates entered the school with a noble cause—many of them wanted to change the world. But when they graduated with student debt, they took jobs for money to pay off their debts. And that was just going to be a temporary thing. But, over time, they got caught up in their careers, making money and chasing possessions. Their original pursuit of the noble cause petered out and, along the way, they lost track of what was important in their lives.

Christensen encourages building and implementing strategies in your career and your personal life to achieve your goals. The underlying tenet of that success is how you allocate your time, money, and other resources. How you spend these resources will determine your life’s outcomes.

How you allocate your resources is where the rubber meets the road. Real strategy—in companies and in our lives—is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about where we spend our resources. As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.

Lesson #3: “Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.”

Three lessons from Clayton Christensen's 'How Will You Measure Your Life?' Christensen tells a story from his college days when he played university basketball. His team worked hard all season and made it to the finals of some big tournament. The championship game was scheduled on a Sunday. For Christensen, a deeply religious Mormon, playing on the Sabbath (the “seventh day”) was against his religious beliefs.

Christensen did not comply with the coach’s demand to break the Sabbath statute “just this one time” for the big game. Christensen did not want to violate his religious principles. His team won the tournament anyway.

Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed. … Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. However, each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time.

Idea for Impact: Intentionally choose the kind of person you want to become. Commit to that path.

Read Clayton M. Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life (2012.) It’s not a long book—perhaps overly worded in parts—but it’s a intense and thought-provoking book.

Christensen and his co-authors don’t provide answers. Instead they present guiding principles that make you put things in perspective and help you become intentional about building a contented life. The parallels between running a successful business and running life are worthwhile.

People Feel Loved in Different Ways // Summary of Greg Chapman’s The Five Love Languages

February 15, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The ‘Five Love Languages’ is this notion that people express love differently, and people feel loved in different ways. The term was familiarized by Greg Chapman’s The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate (1992.)

Chapman identifies the types of expression and perception as in an interpersonal relationship as the five “love languages:” (1) words of affirmation, (2) quality time, (3) receiving gifts, (4) acts of service, and (5) the physical touch.

The Five Love Languages gives several case studies to show that your sweetie will feel loved when you express love in a language that is natural to her. If love is expressed in a different language, she’s unlikely to receive your message of love.

Each of us has a primary love-language (and often secondary and tertiary ones.) Couples seldom share the same preferences. Learn to speak the language of your sweetie. You may be showing your love regularly, just not in the way your sweetie wants to receive love.
Chapman believes love-language-preferences tend to be fixed throughout our lives.
To help identify your love-language, focus on the way you most frequently express love. Often, what you give is what you need. “We speak and understand best our native language.”
Determining which love-language your sweetie speaks can be challenging. If in doubt, just ask. Try out different ways of expressing your love and be sensitive to what gets a better response.
Be more observant of your partner’s preferences. Get better at reading them—be mindful of how your partner may be showing you love. “People tend to criticize their spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need.”
Even in close relationships, individuals are afraid to ask what they want. They feel vulnerable—or don’t want to appear needy.
All individuals have a “love tank” that needs to be topped up frequently by their loved ones in different ways.
Exploring the love-languages with your sweetie can spark a more in-depth conversation.
Become fluent in all the five love-languages. The framework can also improve and illuminate all kinds of other relationships—with parents, children, friends, and perhaps employees (professionally and platonically, of course.)

Recommendation: Quick-Read through Greg Chapman’s The Five Love Languages. It’s a convenient formulation, and it’s simple, and it’s relatable. You may find the book’s tone a tad preachy and hinting at Evangelical Christian attitudes (Chapman is a Southern Baptist pastor and holds a Ph.D. in adult education.)

Nonetheless, The Five Love Languages is a practical approach. This framework isn’t a cure-all to marital and relationship issues, but it is a stepping-stone toward breaking communication barriers.

Chapman’s guidance is convenient given that most people aren’t comfortable expressing their likes and dislikes. And, in return, they hate struggling to guess their partners’ likes and dislikes.

Idea for Impact: Relationships are a lot of work. Prioritize your loved ones. Doing nothing is not one of the five love-languages.

Marie Kondo is No Cure for Our Wasteful and Over-consuming Culture

February 11, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019) on Netflix

I recently watched Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (2019,) the popular Netflix series featuring the Japanese decluttering evangelist. The show is based on her bestselling manual, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2011.)

In each episode, Kondo cheerfully proclaims, “I love mess!” With certain calm, she calls on various families and goes about clearing their tat-filled homes and bringing order to their chaos. Her trademark sense of minimalistic bliss is informed by Japanese aesthetic and a Zen-sense of orderliness.

Apparently, Marie Kondo isn’t attuned with Christianity.

Interestingly, Kondo has clients kneel on the floor and “ask” their dwelling for “permission” and “cooperation” before they get started. “I’d love for you to picture your vision for your home,” she pleads. “Communicate that to your home.” She encourages saying “thank you” to their piles of clothes as they sort and fold them. She daintily treats inanimate objects as living things and speaks to them. She encourages her show’s audiences to do the same.

That’s Buddhism/Shinto in force. Some flavors of native Japanese spirituality focus on inanimate objects’ sacredness. Several of Kondo’s critics in America have insisted that her methods aren’t compatible with Christianity. Kondo’s rituals of treating objects as if they have feelings, these critics have declared, is to be discouraged because her ways invoke animism, the religious notion that objects possess some sort of spiritual essence.

“Kondo-ing” Has Become a Verb.

With a translator in tow, Marie Kondo never treats her patrons as victims, and that’s exceptionally impressive.

By eschewing a victim mentality, Kondo encourages and empowers people in a way that actually brings about lasting change. Audiences particularly love her advice on organizing wardrobes and storage spaces and routinizing tasks into maintainable systems.

Kondo emphasizes prioritizing joy. She doggedly insists upon keeping only those objects that “spark joy” (she uses the Japanese intransitive verb “tokimeku,” roughly, “to flicker.”) Her “if in doubt, throw it out” commandment has helped millions of people ward off hoarding tendencies.

Kondo has become a cultural sensation, appealing to all sorts of homes bursting with cheap consumer goods. The “Marie Kondo Effect” is directly responsible for increasing donations to thrift stores and charity shops worldwide.

Marie Kondo isn't attuned with Christianity

Keep what sparks joy. Own less stuff. Pursue what’s meaningful.

If you’d like to downsize or declutter without letting go of things you love, take the KonMari method to heart. But don’t go too far. Be careful about shedding items to which you have a deep sentimental connection. Put it into operation earnestly to get rid of clutter. Find joy, significance, and sacrament in simple everyday objects and tasks. Simplifying your priorities and refocus on things that you tend to overlook in the busyness of life.

Only Consume What You Need. Supplement the Konmari method of paring down your belongings with the ongoing strategy for minimizing additional purchases. Buy only those things that will “spark joy” and continue to do so for many years. Never mind that the economy depends upon endless undifferentiated consumption.
Reduce, but Don’t Refresh. If you have a bunch of empty space, be selective in how you fill it up. Cutting down your possessions isn’t an invitation to revert to a situation where decluttering again becomes necessary after a while. Restrain that impulse to acquire the new and the shiny—that’s what overwhelmed Kondo’s clients in the first place.

The real magic of Tidying Up with Marie Kondo is in shedding anxiety, living in the moment, and being your best self. Your happiest moments come when you’re lost to a conversation or an experience. You’ll avoid the helter-skelter of life has the power to deny and neglect what’s most important in your life.

Will the Marie Kondo Effect alleviate haywire consumerism?

The more profound significance of decluttering and minimalism is to help make better choices when making purchases in the future.

And beyond the individual convenience, it would be more productive to build up collective awareness and confront the modern consumption economy. It only presents overwhelming incentives to mass-produce and overconsume superficially appealing items.

Collectively, humanity needs to start questioning whether we should be pursuing growth at all. The economic system we have now can’t sustain forever. Our ecological systems can only sustain so much life. We’ve grown so much as a population, and we’ve started consuming so much that we’re straining the earth’s ability to support us. Hyperconsumerism needs to stop.

Will the Marie Kondo Effect alleviate haywire consumerism?

Idea for Impact: Negligent hyper-consumerism is shameful and embarrassing, even to this “card-carrying” capitalist.

Ironically, after making us get rid of everything, Marie Kondo has started peddling such things as therapeutic tuning fork and crystal ($75,) compost bin ($175,) and food storage container ($60) that are guaranteed to “spark joy.”

At any rate, I hope Marie Kondo and her ilk inspire a collective self-loathing at how much we consume. Utility should be the principal criterion for what we buy and keep.

I urge you to make strides towards more mindful consumption and consciously differentiate wants and needs.

Buy what you need. Buy the best quality stuff you can afford, and keep them for longer. Choose things that can be easily repaired—if possible, repurposed and recycled. Encourage businesses that peddle goods that are manufactured as responsibly and mindfully as possible.

Perspective is a Fabulous Gift. Your Life is Your Contribution.

January 25, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Your Life is Your Contribution: The key to a life well led is to make as big a difference as you can

A dear friend is suffering from serious illness and, over the holidays, had a brush with death.

Thinking about aging and dying forces you to face your own mortality. It’s a dreadful wake-up call. It reminds you that, as the Buddha informed, everything is transient, and nothing is permanent. It reminds you to appreciate and savor each day wisely.

Perspective is really a fabulous gift; it’s something people often achieve too late in life. Alas, it takes something as terrifying as sickness and death to prompt you about what is essential.

Don’t forget how precious it’s to be alive. All you’re promised is this very day. Don’t squander it away by agonizing about all that you don’t have. Instead, embrace all that you do have.

Idea for Impact: Make your unique personal contribution to the world

The key to a life well led is to make as big a difference as you can. The utmost measure of a life well-led is how you use your unique talents to make the most significant difference you can.

Your contribution is your way of being in the world.

Don’t commit the great mistake of postponing until when you’ve achieved your life goals before you can start contributing. You’re all that you need to be today.

Commit each day of your life to make a contribution to the changes you wish to see manifest in the world—to whatever cause it is that stirs us up and gets our passions flowing.

You’ll live in alignment when your actions, however small, accord with your intentions. Take responsibility for your contribution.

Choose Pronoia, Not Paranoia

January 18, 2021 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Pronoia: When the world is conspiring in your favor

Pronoia is a weird, incredible feeling that everyone out there is helping you and cheering you on. The world is showering you with blessings.

Yes, that’s the antithesis of paranoia.

Pronoia is the delusional sentiment that people are conspiring in favor of your well-being, speaking nice things behind your back, and rooting for your benefit. The American astrologer Rob Brezsny has written, “Pronoia is the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of training your senses and intellect, so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.”

Pronoia is a convivial orientation—one exemplified by feelings of hope, trust, confidence, and affection. Choosing to cultivate optimism thus opens up a new identity. You no longer harbor bitterness and misgivings towards others.

Idea for Impact: Embrace the mindset that life is happening for you instead of against you. It’s a fantastic way to experience life!

Treating Triumph and Disaster Just the Same // Book Summary of Pema Chödrön’s ‘The Wisdom of No Escape’

September 24, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Life often seems like a labyrinth, where you imagine that you’ll escape all its tribulations someday, and that’ll be remarkable. Envisioning that future keeps you going, but you’ll never seem to achieve it. Happiness will never come because there’s always another something that will follow the present one. The future just becomes an escape from today’s good and bad.

There’s no better antidote to this hopelessness than Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön’s bestselling first book The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness (1991.) Chödrön’s central argument is that wherever you are and whoever you are, your exact circumstances at the moment are perfect for you—for your unfolding.

You have all that you need at this moment to awaken to your innate goodness and the goodness of the world

You can never escape the insecurities of life. Everything that you’re doing right now is your spiritual path. You don’t have to get somewhere spiritually to justify your worthiness. You’re already perfect. You’re ready enough.

Everything you’re experiencing—good or bad, joy and sorrow—is actually the perfect path for you. All the unpleasantness you are living through derives from struggling against reality.

There’s a kind of basic misunderstanding that we should try to be better than we already are, that we should try to improve ourselves, that we should try to get away from painful things, and that if we could just learn how to get away from the painful things, then we would be happy.

Use whatever is in your circumstances in your life to progress, to become awake, to become more mindful

Pema Chodron Chödrön invites you to be accountable to who you are—and all your human frailties. Embracing all of life as it unfolds is one of the surest ways to live well. “Whatever life you’re in is a vehicle for waking up.”

We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but that it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: humanness.

The Wisdom of No Escape encourages you to step out of your routine pattern of just trying to escape from life’s difficulties, and instead pursue a life of greater openness to adventure and all that life has to offer.

By stepping out of the meaningless scuffle against life’s difficulties, you can open to reality and direct your attention where it’s more likely to make a difference. Mindful awareness can motivate the full force of your presence to your relationships, vocations, and community.

Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. … Meditation is about our emotions and thoughts just as they are right now, in this very moment, in this very room, on this very seat. It’s about not trying to make them go away, not trying to become better than we are, but just seeing clearly with precision and gentleness.

You're all that you need to be today

Idea for Impact: You’re all that you need to be today, but you’re not all that you’re becoming

Chödrön emphasizes that compassion cultivates with an attitude of non-aggression toward the self. “The problem is that the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.”

Prevailing over regret and taking charge of your imperfections with self-kindness is not the same as accepting blindly or making allowances for unwholesome behavior. Awakening is a matter of befriending your flaws rather than getting rid of them—letting your imperfections go than forcefully expelling them.

The key to feeling genuine compassion for others is “making friends with yourself” by developing understanding within yourself—for your own pain. Only to the extent that you can come to develop awareness for your personal problems can you be willing to “be there” for others.

Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will. It’s going to stick around until you learn your lesson, at any rate.

Recommendation: Read Pema Chödrön’s The Wisdom of No Escape (1991.) This short book is an unedited-for-print transcript of one of her retreats from 1989. Despite the long-winded paragraphs, there’s much wisdom about the preciousness of life and enacting your Buddha-nature. “Making friends with ourselves and with our world involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us.”

No One Has a Monopoly on Truth

September 15, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi 1 Comment

The notion of god means different things to different people. Religions vary in identity and function. Almost all religions require their adherents to believe their specific religious doctrines with absolute certainty. These deep-seated beliefs and attitudes then become inflexible and are held with great zeal.

Closed Minds and Closed Hearts: Absolutism is Evil

Beware the Danger of Religious Certainty The self-righteous voices of fanaticism, the cruel voices of indifference and intolerance, and the uninformed voices of hate are revolting. Religious extremists are accountable for a lot of pain and suffering in the world. Crusades, inquisitions, faith-based discrimination and persecution, religious wars, and other forms of sheer hatred of other human beings are attributable to attitudes of hate and narrow-mindedness. Nothing deceives you as much as extreme passion.

The Scottish Anglican cleric Richard Holloway reflects on these concerns in Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt (2014,)

Religions may begin as vehicles of longing for mysteries beyond description, but they end up claiming exclusive descriptive rights to them. They segue the ardor and uncertainty of seeking to the confidence and complacence of possession. They shift from poetry to packaging. Which is what people want. They don’t want to spend years wandering in the wilderness of doubt. They want the promised land of certainty, and religious realists are quick to provide it for them. The erection of infallible systems of belief is a well-understood device to still humanity’s fear of being lost in life’s dark wood without a compass. “Supreme conviction is a self-cure for the infestation of doubts.” That is why David Hume noted that, while errors in philosophy were only ridiculous, errors in religion were dangerous. They were dangerous because when supreme conviction is threatened it turns nasty.

COEXIST: Bumper Sticker Designed by Jerry Jaspar

Idea for Impact: Beware the Danger of Religious Certainty

We, humans, tend to have a profound need for certainty. It’s easy to embrace prepackaged convictions unquestionably and deny doubt. Most people draw their faith as children from their parents and never question their beliefs for the rest of their lives.

Religious certainty can provoke limitedness in the human condition. We always have to concede that we may be mistaken and learn to tolerate others’ attitudes that may actually bother us.

Be a voice for peace. Be a voice for humanity, for open-mindedness, for wisdom, for justice.

An Olympian History of Humanity // Book Summary of Yuval Noah Harari’s ‘Sapiens’

September 10, 2020 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari’s bestselling 464-page Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) retells the 13.5 billion years-long odyssey of human evolution from the Big Bang to the near-future. Harari accounts for how Homo sapiens (the ‘wise man’) overcame the most extraordinary odds and numerous arbitrary inevitabilities to dominate the world the way we do at present.

Harari’s narratives span the cognitive revolution (70,000 years ago,) agricultural revolution (11,000 years,) scientific revolution (500 years,) industrial revolution (250 years,) and information revolution (50 years.) The first of these epochs, the cognitive revolution, coupled with a genetic mutation, was the real game-changer: Homo sapiens didn’t evolve efficiently from stooping apes to standing individuals. There were previously no less than six distinct homines, of which Homo sapiens came out top.

Sapiens argues that what made Homo sapiens special was our ability to develop networks and communities and tell stories, i.e., to organize and build large, connected communities around “shared fictions” or narratives—religion, nationalism, capitalism, trade groups, social institutions, for example. It was only through such intangible beliefs—not biological realities—that Homo sapiens were able to get the better of the physical world.

Homo sapiens’ talent for abstraction set us apart

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: Human Evolution from the Big Bang to the Near-future

Language made it easier to dwell upon abstract matters and flexibly cooperate in ever-larger numbers. Harari’s examples cite how Homo sapiens—from our ancestors all the way up to today—are so willing to create and believe in such conceptual paradigms that have been the key to our success and the key to our problems.

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation—whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe—is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.

Harari’s inquiry is extensive. His scholarship is rigorous, and his interpretation creative. Yes, most of the book restates familiar facts and theories. Harari does an excellent job synthesizing a lot of information. What makes Sapiens exceptional is it gives culture a starring role in the human drama—something that many in science and sociology are hesitant to do, instead preferring to depict culture as transient, nebulous, and “soft.”

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Harari builds on some provocative ideas about Homo sapiens, but sets out his anthropological interpretations with vim and vigor:

The emergence of agriculture—especially livestock farming—is “the greatest crime in history … The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueler with the passing of the centuries.” [Harari has said that he became a committed vegan while writing Sapiens.]
Organized religion is predictably contemptible, “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.” The emergence of religion “was one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind.” But the notion of supernatural being is increasingly inconsequential as humans are acquired divine abilities and relying increasingly upon ourselves for creating life forms and averting death and destruction. Then, “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”
Consumer capitalism is a dreadful prison. “For better or worse, in sickness and in health, the modern economy has been growing like a hormone-soused teenager. It eats up everything it can find and puts on inches faster than you can count.”

Recommendation: Read Harari’s astonishing history of the species, from insignificant apes to rulers of the world

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) is a must-read. It is a brilliantly executed examination of who we are and of our behaviors. Notwithstanding the seeming overstatements and the occasional drift to sensationalism, Sapiens is extremely interesting and thought-provoking. It is written elegantly, in a clear and engaging style, with a skeptic’s eye and irreverent—and sometimes-sarcastic—sensibility.

We are more powerful than ever before…Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one.

Harari is implacably cold and literal, abstaining from political correctness and pro-Western predispositions. Sapiens concludes with spine-tingling predictions about the future. Perhaps as a cliffhanger to his subsequent Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016,) Harari contends that we’re the primary destructive force.

Homo sapiens are sowing the seeds for our own destruction. The forthcoming biotechnological revolution, Harari speculates, may signal the end of sapiens. Bioengineered “amortal cyborgs” may replace us. These post-human organic and inorganic organisms won’t necessarily be immortal but, absent an accident, can live forever. Homo not so sapiens?

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Homo sapiens’ talent for abstraction set us apart

Recommendation: Read Harari’s astonishing history of the species, from insignificant apes to rulers of the world

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