Psychology

Of course, you can use Kant (or anyone other philosopher of your liking) to talk about what experience is. But if you use these thinkers (of the last 1000 years or so) to think about experience, you will be trapped in a set of problems: (a) you will have to talk about sensory input (no matter what technical term you use here), which cognition works on; (b) the world as something that provides …

To begin with, it is a matter of scholarly consensus among Classicists and philosophers that the concept of “Will” was absent from Greek thought and that St. Augustine was the first to develop it. Aristotle, for instance, had the notion of practical cognition and not ‘will’. “Akrasia” can only be loosely translated as “weakness of the will” simply because we do not quite know how to translate it …

About the relationship between scientific knowledge and enlightenment: If every human being can become enlightened (at any time, place or culture), it logically follows that some or another hypothesis about the world cannot be a requirement to become enlightened. People were enlightened (in the past) without possessing knowledge that humankind has today; one can become enlightened without being a …

The religious idea I am talking about in chapter 3 is this: Concrete and abstract characterize human thinking in the different phases of its development. By the time we reach chapter 7, and start thinking in terms of ‘secularization’, I will be talking about secularizing religious themes with respect to the same. Neither the words ‘concrete’ or ‘abstract’, nor the concepts associated with them …

The problem with the advaita tradition today is its lack of intelligibility. ‘Maya’, for instance, does a tremendous lot of explanatory work, but it is hardly clear what it is; multiple concepts like ‘manas’, ‘buddhi’ and ‘chitta’ occur and we do not know how these concepts relate to each other, whether they refer, whether they are a part of psychological theorizing or merely an exercise in …

A few points about ‘self’ and about what I have said and have not. Comment: “Say, Mr. X made 1 run, 2 runs, 3, 4, n, and a total of 50 runs. Now to say “I made 50 runs” is to assume that, Mr. X who made 1 run, 2 run, etc. is linked to each other, and this organism , in this sense, has a unity. This unity is what Balu calls rubbish”. First, I do not call this ‘unity’ rubbish. Second, this is a …

Earlier, I suggested that the psychoanalytical explanations (like the transformation of Linga into a penis as a fertility symbol etc.) not only trivialize and distort but also deny access to our own experience. In this post, I want to highlight one of the consequences of transforming our experiences in this fashion. In at least two different ways, these explanations hinder the emergence of …

In one sense, the title of the piece captures the nature of the tasks facing the contemporary generation, whether in India or in the Diaspora. This generation, unlike many from mine, is confident and self-assured; perhaps, it is proud too about the strength of its culture and traditions. Rightly so. However, personal convictions about the value of our traditions and culture do not automatically …

A science of cultures is not Atmagyaana or Brahmagyaana. Let me also add that I find a quest for happiness a normal human striving. According to the Indian traditions, experience itself is a state of being: anubhava. In my story, so is happiness (or atmasaakshaatkaara). Need one be enlightened in order to speak about enlightenment? Should that be the case, one cannot strive for enlightenment at …

Let us retain the translation of ‘Anu’ as ‘appropriate’ or ‘apt’. Let us emphasize the active dimension of the word ‘Bhava’ to translate it as ‘coming into existence’. (‘Existence’ and ‘being’ are also acceptable translations of the word ‘Bhava’.) Then ‘Anubhava’ would mean an apt way of coming-into-existence. The problem here is this: we can ask the question, coming into existence of what? Of …

The biggest issue is: what is experience? All the Indian traditions have been busy with answering this question. But both posing this question and answering it are themselves experiential, as far as the Indian traditions are concerned. For instance, according to the so-called Buddhist traditions, the structures-in-experience are not given in the experience itself: the impermanence and transience …

If we take our English language use as a reference point, it appears as though we can speak sensibly about experiencing our feelings (‘I experience sadness’), experiencing thoughts (‘I can even now experience my jumbled thoughts when …’), experiencing colour (‘I experience a redness’), experiencing actions (‘I still experience my shaking limbs when I…’) and so on. That is, we can experience the …

1.1. Let us begin with the word “Anubhava”, which we use to translate the English word “experience”. There are two sub-words here: Anu and Bhava. ‘Anu’ can be translated as ‘apt’, or ‘appropriate’, whereas ‘Bhava’ can be rendered as ’existence’ or ‘being’. (The word also has an active dimension of ‘becoming’ as one of its meanings.) So, ‘anubhava’ would mean having an appropriate existence or even …

In this post, I want to reflect on what it means to access and think about experience. Perhaps, not so much on what these words mean but what is entailed by (or what happens when we indulge in) this kind of activity. I think the best way to begin this analysis is by asking the following two questions about an activity familiar to most of us: what do we do when we think about ourselves? Do we do it …