In pursuit of a vague concept….sometimes vagueness is bliss…………….

Pursuit of happiness is a satisfying notion for the common people but to the eyes of the philosophers…it is a vague notion…. More clear ideas are “pursuit of truth” that philosophers are engaged in….”pursuits of reality” which scientists are following…. “Pursuit of power” which politicians are engaged in… and “Pursuits of money/success” which businessmen are following….. Pursuits of happiness make all pursuits acceptable…….. and a lot of the people hide behind this beautiful notion …….to cover their pursuits…… that they don’t like to become public or public see them as they are…….. e.g, politicians are sensitive in saying they are in power…..instead they like to say that they are in office for public service…..
Even the concept of happiness itself is a vague concept….Let’s illustrate it this way……People like that their happiness should be synonym with good…. But does really happiness is a synonym to good?…or in other words….Is happiness the same as good? ….. If you are socially active and live among common people… you may have heard that….”Don’t act like a nice guy”….what does it mean?”…. It simply means that by being nice you will accumulate only failures, disappointments and sorrows….all opposite to happiness…. So even among common people who prefer experience over logical analysis or logical constructs….this concept is very clear that Happiness is not the same as good……….
Despite being an vague concept…..”The pursuit of happiness” is a powerful concept that parallel cultures and people happily take it as an alternative to their native cultures which create a barrier in an adopted homeland where people have come from different cultures…..One of my friends asked me, “why do you think we are failed yet in developing a pluralistic society where people could openly accept the existence of each other’s cultures and opinions wholeheartedly?”….My reply was, “because we are failed to bring a concept that parallel the native cultures…so people could find a platform, a foundation that is common to all and all cultures could be accommodated easily”….. I gave the reference of the “pursuit of happiness”….though it is a vague concept ….but its vagueness makes all to own it and doesn’t allow a group of people to specify it for themselves and hence discriminate against others on its basis……

Wittgenstein’s failure VS Buddha’s triumph; The main cause…….

“Language is our world and the limit of the language is the limit of our world”….. Wittgenstein… Believing that most problems of the Philosophy are the result of the miscommunication of language…Wittgenstein thought it is his duty as a logician to do logical analysis of language…. So he tried all his adult life with a crusader’s spirit to fixe (or at least expose) the weaknesses of language…. “Clear communication”….he thought would automatically eliminate most of the philosophical problems…..That’s cool…. But today we see that language is still a happy mess….
I think Wittgenstein wasn’t agreeing the way Buddha come up and taught clear communication…. He must have heard that Buddhas’ clear communication was a clear scheme….that was not stressing on the language but on thinking processes….. I will make this point clear later….At the moment… I just want to say that the mistake and the cause of the failure of Wittgenstein’s logic was wrong diagnosis of problem… He saw the problem in the language while Buddha saw the problem in the thinking process……
So we see Wittgenstein didn’t come up with a scheme for clarification of language…. And he couldn’t present a practical tool of any utility for the people…. On other hand Buddha saw the problems in people’s thinking processes….especially of an untrained mind and found the causes as desires, expectations and perfectionism….that like rivers are flowing incessantly and are unlimited…. He came up in four staged schemes of the….. Observing human conditions…..their diagnosis…. then Prognosis and with….a cure…… It is famously known as Four Noble Truths……..
For those who are not familiar with the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha…. I am giving a brief description taken from pages 30-31 of “The Dhammapada” translated by Eknath Easwaran……
“….. The First Truth, brothers, is the fact of suffering. All desire happiness, sukha; what is good, pleasant, right, permanent, joyful, harmonious, satisfying, at ease. Yet all find that life brings duhkha, just the opposite; frustration, dissatisfaction, incompleteness, suffering, sorrow. Life is change, and change can never satisfy desire. Therefore everything that changes brings suffering.
The Second Truth is the cause of suffering. It is not life that brings sorrow, but the demands we make on life. The cause of duhkha is selfish desire; trishna, the thirst to have what one wants and to get one’s own way. Thinking life can make them happy by bringing what they want, people run after satisfaction of their desires. But they get only unhappiness, because selfishness can only bring sorrow.
“There is no fire like selfish desire, brothers. Not a hundred years of experience can extinguish it, for the more feed it, the more it burns. It demands what experience cannot give; permanent pleasure unmixed with anything unpleasant. But there is no end to such desires; that is the nature of mind. Suffering because life cannot satisfy selfish desire is like suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.
There is a Third Truth, brothers. Any ailment that can be understood can be cured, and suffering that has a cause has also an end. When the fires of selfishness have been extinguished, when the mind is free of selfish desire, what remains is the state of wakefulness, of peace, of joy, of perfect health, called ‘that which is extinguished’; nirvana.
The Fourth Truth, brothers, is that selfishness can be extinguished by following an eightfold path; right understanding, right purpose, right speech, right conduct, right occupation, right effort, right attention, and right meditation. If dharma is a wheel, these eight are its spokes.”……………
Though it is continued into explanation of each spoke of the wheel of dharma but my aim here is not to explain the teachings of Buddha but to compare the approaches…..The reason that I am comparing both approaches is the expose the reasons of the failure of modern philosophy which have created a lapse of more than three quarter of a century in philosophy and other disciplines… Modern philosophers is out of touch with their time because they were obsessed with logic and so called “RATIONALITY”…… and they thought that, the roots of problems is lying in language……. without realizing that language is the ……“experimental field for human creativity”…..
We have already seen that, by coming of text messaging, emails and Social Medias, people have created global expressions for gestures, feelings and actions… For sure one can’t draw logical basis for these expressions…. I think it would go out of the scope of this article if I try to explain….why logicians and Philosophers of language have totally ignored the fact that human brain got two hemispheres……. and the logical thinking is the product of the left hemisphere and language is the product of the both hemispheres… symbols come from right hemisphere of brain…
Mistakes happen and they can be compensated but there is no compensation for arrogance… I tried a humble effort to compare thousands of old approach of Buddha that is still triumphant for their right diagnosis (though we may not agree with the approach as a whole)…. The title of this Philoknol may look very rude for some… but it is how philosophy works………so no waorries ;)

Map of reality…..Check, if yours is upgradable….

What we own are the maps of reality not the reality….
It is said that Hegel was an encyclopedic writer…as well as an encyclopedic reader….. Yet, I like his few philosophical conclusions like….. The ideas evolve by a cycle of ….thesis…antithesis…synthesis…. Truth without content is nothing (gives no information)…. Mind is an abstract of natural world….. Thought is an objective reality…..
Despite being an encyclopedic thinker…Hegel had a clear and coherent set of thinking rules by which he was measuring reality….. And it is what distinct a philosopher from rest as well as from other philosophers…. In fact, the only intentional individualists are philosophers…it doesn’t matter what their constructed ideologies are….They develop their own set of rules…….These set of rules are what we call “map of reality” as philosophers go with these maps in hunts for reality (truth?) (Just as shown in “Pirates of Caribbean”…that pirates’ most valuable assets are maps and compass by which they go to treasures) ….
Of course it is not only Philosophers who have maps…Buddhist monks’ (I will prefer to call thinkers as some people use their meditation techniques but aren’t Buddhist) records of thinking almost parallel those of philosophers in antiquity….as well as finding utility in directing the lives of the people…. Being open end in their thought process…Buddhist meditation techniques have evolved beyond a religion… into a tool of fitness and wellbeing….. It is what it shares with other disciplines…The core of all successful disciplines like Science, Philosophy and arts is being open end in their thinking processes……
By reading the description of a Saint in “The Dhammapada” you may agree with me that the core success of neutrality and widespread acceptance of Buddhist meditation as a tool of wellbeing in all parts of world irrespective of local religions…is lies in their open end thought processes that find their utility everywhere and all the times….. In Dhammapada the Saints are praised as …”Wisdom has stilled their minds, and their thoughts, words, and deeds are filled with peace. Freed from illusion and from personal ties, they have renounced the world of appearance to find reality. Thus they have reached highest”… although monks seek reality beyond appearance but by being involved in an open end thought process their techniques find utility for those who are in love with world of appearance but are suffering from it…..Open end thought processes help them wash their sufferings and reach a peace of mind at their disposal…………..
In above two paragraphs, I provided the examples a philosopher and Buddhist thinkers both of whom use their thinking power to unravel the reality…. The philosopher tries to find reality of appearance and master the nature… and Buddhist thinkers try to find the reality beyond appearance and attain ultimate peace….
So thinking processes are maps of reality….. Reality? Yes, it has unknown depths…the depths depend on the stamina and desire of seekers…to what level they dare to dive deep….
Why I chose Hegel among philosophers? …. I chose him because his thinking process is an open ending one and it is always upgradable…. Philosophers who have constructed closed end thought processes…. have frozen to a particular time….their ideas are not upgradable…. (Like those of existentialist thinkers…etc)
I chose Buddhist thinkers…. because unlike a lot of other school of thoughts… it has an open end thinking mechanism…people who are seeking wisdom or wellbeing find utility in it without agreeing with philosophy of Buddhism…it is more of thinking mechanism like Science… So it is also upgradable….
Hence the conclusion is that…… it doesn’t matter whether you are a philosopher, a thinker or simply one who is interested to have a map to navigate into reality…. Having an open end approach in thinking process will make you able to upgrade over time and …on other hand…by choosing or developing a closed end thinking method will freeze you in your own world view………….

Philosopher VS entrepreneur….

“A lot of people know more philosophy than they realize because it is all around them… It is basically in the culture in which they live and breathe”… Professor Mark Rowland…..It is what a philosopher says about philosophy…..On other hand, Dr. David Cleevely, a technology entrepreneur (You can listen to him at following link; http://sms.csx.cam.ac.uk/media/1122496 )in response to question that…Are entrepreneurs risk takers?.....replies….”They are not risk takers. But actually they have a very serious personality defect…Being an entrepreneur I can confess to it….It is that, they have completely overwhelmingly sense that they can influence events…so it is as if they are presented with a dice…and they always believe they are gonna throw a six simply because of the power of their will…everybody else can see that six can only come up 1 in 6 times…The entrepreneurs think it is going to come up every time they throw the dice…..”
So you can see by yourself very clearly that an entrepreneur doesn’t agree with a philosopher… Entrepreneurs are led by their beliefs in their will power rather than the philosophies filled in the air around them in which they breathe…. The reason that entrepreneurs think very differently from philosophers is that….Philosophers think about reality and try to understand and explain them while entrepreneurs create reality…. Entrepreneurs divide the world into red-ocean (Cutthroat ocean or present reality….in which everybody competes for resources, chances and success…here competition is very tough) and blue-ocean (a reality that has not yet created or come into being…here, there is no competition and the chance for growth is enormous)……. So entrepreneurs are more inclined to create new realities….
It seems that entrepreneurs got the lead…they create and philosophers follow them to understand… Well, not all philosophers agree with that job… They sell thinking hats (You may have heard about Six thinking hats of Dr. Edward De Bono…..if you haven’t yet…you can have a quick look in Wikipedia…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats)….to help them in parallel thinking…. Don’t think that they got only thinking hat for sell…There are other items like Dr. de Bono’s Lateral thinking…. And a long list of different other thinking methodologies like,
Reflective thinking method
Critical thinking method
Creative thinking method
Positive thinking method
Reverse thinking method
Lean thinking method
And so on………….Whatever…. the reality is that, in today’s world…. only ideas matter that sell well…either presented by a philosopher or an entrepreneur….