Prologue

an excerpt from what I wrote a couple of years back:

........to begin with, nothing is more infinite than our capacity to fool ourselves or delude ourselves. By this I mean that we take a lot of things for granted, without even knowing if such a thing or matter could indeed exist in the framework it proposes. We grow up in an environment that is full of uncertainties and misconceptions, both about the physical and spiritual realms. Not that our parents are to take the blame, since they always tell us that we will know when we grow up whenever we ask a question about something. So we wait till we grow up, and by that time we have forgotten what the question was. You know how an awfully long time one has to wait to grow up. But it is such questions that we ask in childhood that are the most intriguing and interesting. ‘Why is the sky blue Ma?’, ‘ Why is that the birds can fly and I can’t? ‘ , ‘why can’t I go out to play? , ‘Why is it that I cant hit him when he hits me? ‘ , ‘Where do we go when we die? ‘.‘Do I get to go to heaven?’ All such questions certainly encompass all the fields and knowledge that philosophy provides: aesthetics, ethics, logic and so on. When we grow up, we still want to go to heaven, but we don’t want to die.

Similar questions may arise, but we never try to find out. We push them aside on the basis of a mere technicality ‘ I am not a moralist to answer them’, ‘ I am not a physicist to answer that question’. And, as they say, just because you don’t know doesn’t mean that your kid should not know it. Well, we can always turn out a little bit of an amusing story all the time, like the way our great-great-grand parents told us a lot of things which we now take as a sacred truth, while it may as well be just a joke related by a worried grandpa to his grandson for fear that he may start to ask questions the rest of his friends may not like. But there are times when one has to sit back and really reflect upon what is going on.

Let us imagine that you are in a movie theatre where you’ve been all your life, you were born into the theatre, your parents were born here, and even your grandparents were there, and have been living there, and so on and on, back as far as there were humans and movie theatres. The movie theater is where you are comfortable, it’s cool, there are lot of shadows, no bright lights, just an image on the screen, that is cast day in day out, night and day. And for example imagine that the movies you are seeing is the Simpson’s. It’s not so much that what the Simpson’s represent are totally wrong, but there is something rather misleading about what’s on in the movie theatre, there is a distorted appearance of what reality is. But if you have been born into this movie theatre, you’ve lived there, your parents have lived there, and even you grandparents, and friends and every one lives in the theater, your view of the way the world looks, of what is true and what is false, and what your opinion is would be construed and created by what you see in the theater. What if, someday, for whatever reason, you decide to leave this movie theater and you walk up the isle and walk outside in to the lobby and to the outdoors. Suppose you are going outside on a bright sunny day, you know you cannot see quite well outside as you can see inside, because the sun will hurt your eyes, and there is this slight tendency for you to go back in to the coolness, the darkness, and the shadows of the theater where you are comfortable.

What philosophy does is to get us out of the movie theater. To make us begin to realize that those opinions, and beliefs and those sort of truths that we’ve always held to be sacred are not really truths. They are just there. They are things that our parents had taught us or our state has told us or our churches taught us, so philosophy will attempt to move us out of this movie theater or as Plato calls it in the Apology, the Cave.

So what I have given is an attempt to visualize, what needed to be done in terms of movement from the areas that we think we know, my opinion, into what Plato calls. The Absolute Realm. - the Truth, or Knowledge.

Moving out into the open is what is felt when one attempts to read philosophy or begins to think like one. I used to live in a theatre of my own, and one day I decided to take a walk, and here I am. Not much of a philosopher, yes, but certainly aware that the theatre has been a mental prison all along. But to break out of that prison, you have to know that you are locked up in the first place. A lot of my friends find it hard to believe that there could be such a state of affairs. Of course, they too are not to blame, since there are a lot of groups, people, and the like, claiming that their brand of nonsense is a lot better than the others.’ What I say is the truth, what they say is mere heresy’.

Philosophy can tell that neither group has enough evidence/proof to claim any of these.And there are things that can be known instantly, like the Truth and Knowledge, which is far more sublime than the opinions that we hold onto.

So how do we begin to get rid of such misconceptions and ideas that our put into our heads? First we have to know that we are in the theater, being shown and being controlled by what the state or any other authority prefers us to be shown. Some people in the theater may not know that what is cast is indeed put there by someone. For him it is a fact of life. He does not know that there can be a lot of other movies, that there can be a lot of other stuff that can be projected there. He doesn’t know that there is a life out there, outside the theater. And he is as sure as his existence that what he believes in is the truth, for he does not know anything else. He is not allowed to go out, not forcefully, but by just showing amusing and easy to understand stuff on the screen, much like we are not allowed to read certain books and see some channels on the TV. And there are problems for the people who indeed do take the time out and decide to take a look outside.

It is like seeing a rare book, which you approach curiously and open slowly. With the first words that you read you feel the knowledge hit you, like the time when you walk up to that little crack in the curtains and peer out. The facts in the book hit you as strong as the light from the outside hits your eyes. Some of us would shut our eyes, like some people who close the book and never open it and say “this is not my interest”. It is the easy way out. But it is those who have the courage to face the other side that would take a second chance, and be mesmerized by the light and the colors. He would find a way to get out, even though it is forbidden. When he returns from his walk, he would relate it to his friends and his parents. He would begin to describe the sky and the trees and the birds. But would his friends believe him? No. For they have not seen what he has seen. They would point at the screen and say, ‘ that is what is real, what you saw was all a dream!’. And he gets to, for the first time, make enemies out of his friends. This is not a story I am telling. This is what happened to Galileo when he told that the earth was not the center of the Universe, this is what happened to Socrates when he tried to get the Athenians into asking questions about the nature of life and death and God and so on. They both were condemned by the state and put to death. Einstein faced a similar welcome to his theories, and so does any one else who come up with a new perspective. And we later on realize that this person was indeed right and live on what he or she has told us.

So take a little time and think about life and other such matters that you were intrigued by when you were a child, for your kids certainly will ask them from you, and believe me, they won’t take authority for granted like the way we do.........