It's a small world after all...

 सुखम समग्रम विज्ञाने विमलेच प्रतिष्ठितं    Sukham samagram vijnane vimalecha pratishtitham "All happiness is rooted in good science," says the Charaka Samhita -- the definitive treatise on Ayurveda, dating back to 8th century BCE. This belies the widely believed notion that science and "scientific temper" came to India from the West.  Every form of scientific practice, rests upon an underlying hermeneutics -- or a way of thinking. The hermeneutics of current day scientific inquiry is greatly influenced by the industrial revolution , which in turn was fuelled by colonial expansion of European powers. I've called this form of inquiry as "machine hermeneutics" and also sometimes called the "clockwork model," where the universe is considered to be a giant, impersonal automaton, driven solely by causality, and indifferent to our existence.  Hermeneutics affect how we interpret our observations and what models we build. As the physicist Werner He...

In the third post in this series on Yoga Psychology, let us visit some of the core concepts of our sense of self and understand some of its nuances. The concepts presented here are not directly from Yoga Sutras. They stem from Vedanta, which in turn form the basis for the psychology of Yoga.  In the first post in this series, we saw how our "sense of self" as an entity is different from our body, thoughts, emotions, and even our hard-coded genetic "nature". We can talk about all of them as if they were objects of inquiry while we, or our "self", is the inquirer.  One of the postulates of Vedanta is that our sense of "Self" can never be the object of inquiry. It is always the inquirer. Just like the eyes can't see themselves, the "Self" cannot see itself. Our eyes can however, see an image of themselves (say in a mirror or a photograph) and realise that this image represents the very eyes which are doing the seeing.  Similarly, we ...

Ask someone from my parents' generation in India, if they have heard of ABBA. If they say yes, then, they would have also likely heard of Boney M and Man Machine. Similarly, someone from my generation, if they grew up reading Archie comics, they would have also likely read Tintin, Asterix, and books from Mir Publishers. Of course, also Amar Chitra Katha.   But, someone analogous from Europe, would have likely heard about ABBA and Asterix/Tintin, but not about Archie or Boney M. Similarly, someone from the US would have either grooved to ABBA or Boney M, but would have likely not heard about Man Machine. And neither of them would have heard of Mir Publishers, let alone Amar Chitra Katha or Chacha Choudhury. So what is happening here? India was and is still a relatively poor country with a large population. In other words it is a vast "resource pool" of "human resources" that is of interest to several forces worldwide. And several kinds of interests wish to exploi...

In the previous post in this series, we saw how our "sense of self" is different from our body, thought, emotions, and even our hard-coded emotional disposition. We can separate ourselves from all of them and inquire about them as if they were separate objects.  We also introduced the model of universal consciousness that is central to Indian thought, and that our self is very much this all-pervasive universal consciousness.  We also talked about "identity" and how our existential self (somewhat analogous to the "Ego" of Freudian model), called our " jivatma " has a lot of energy and cannot but identify with something or the other. A "enlightened" person would hence, manage this energy and carefully curate the set of identity objects to which it would attach to.  In this post, we will talk about the "states of being" of our existential self and what does it take to curate its identity.  The Mandukya upanishad talks about the s...

Over the last several years, I have had a growing interest in Cognitive Science and models of the mind. A chance encounter with some learned scholars, lead me to rediscovering the roots of Indian thought through a completely different hermeneutic framework from the machine hermeneutics that we study in school. I have documented my thoughts in several different ways-- Facebook posts, a series of posts on this blog with the label " Theory of Being ", and a self-published Kindle book by the same name. My dream is to recreate a full-fledged theory of complex systems based on the theory of "being" with tools and methodologies to implement them in practice.  More recently, I stumbled onto the theory of Yoga-- a practice spanning over several centuries, and which was documented and formalised by Maharshi Patanjali who is thought to have lived sometime between 7th to 2nd century BCE. This post is part of a series on my understanding of the human psyche based on the theory...

 One of the common grouse among serious educators today, is the rampant "factory" model of education, that aims not to empower the student to think and act independently, but to create a homogenised pool of skilled labour, ready for consumption by industry.  Despite several leading educators being critical of such an approach to education, the factory model is still very strong, and is the de facto model of formal education. One of the most vocal voices against such a paradigm is the Harvard professor Todd Rose . (Actually a lot of educators are against such a model-- but Professor Rose is from an Ivy League university, so our hope is to latch on to his name to get someone to listen to what we're saying 😅). He runs a research program on the science of "individuality" where each individual is modelled as a complex dynamic system, rather than an "averagian" model that is characteristic of the factory. This TED talk here, explains the motivations behind ...

(Acknowledgment: All images used in this post sourced from Google image search)   As kids, whenever we were difficult, our grandpa used to scold us: "Don't be the dog in the manger!" We didn't know what it meant, at that time. This metaphor, coming from Greek mythology, talks of a dog sitting on a bale of hay and shooing away the cattle that come to graze on the hay. "Dog in the manger" basically refers to someone who blocks others from using some resource, and neither uses it themselves.  This metaphor was made famous (notorious) by Winston Churchill, who used it to justify colonial domination based on a sense of racial superiority:  What Churchill didn't (or didn't want to) realise was that the native communities weren't protecting a "resource"-- but a complex ecosystem of being of which they were a part of, and would have probably gladly accepted others who can enrich this ecosystem harmoniously. Sadly, Churchill was too deluded abou...

In one of the chapters of his book " Savarkar ", author Vikram Sampath talks about the kinds of legends that went around in the Indian population about key figures of the Indian freedom movement.  Mahatma Gandhi for instance, so meticulously planned and executed his strategy of non-cooperation that, the ruling British government could not keep him imprisoned for long. Among the population however, this understanding took on a rather literal form. There were legends of Gandhiji having "supernatural powers" that he could escape from any jail cell within moments of the jailor locking his door!  Similarly, there was an account of a daring escape by Veer Savarkar at the port of Marseilles in France, where he jumped from the window of the ship in which he was imprisoned, and reached the shore. This episode, while resulting in his recapture, also lead to a major diplomatic controversy between Britain and France. Among the population in India, this episode took on dramatic ...

  Once upon a time, philosophers-- men and women alike-- observed systems of interacting elements, and noted that the system as a whole, can be in different "states of being." They also noted that some states of being are more "stable" and "sustain" against perturbations. It is in these sustainable states, we can nurture life. The entire ecosystem of our planet, they noted, is just a sustainable state of being. They called this phenomenon of sustainability against perturbations, as "dharma". Sustainability is not a binary. Some states are more sustainable than others. They also noted that regardless of how sustainable was a state of being, every physical system eventually collapsed. Nothing in this physical world, they noted, is in a state of eternal dharma. This prompted them to embark on a quest for "eternal sustainability" which is called "Sanatana dharma". Physical systems are trivially not eternally sustainable. They henc...