Why the need for Philosophy

Philosophy as the Greek termed it the love for wisdom(sophia),a much talked about term but mostly considered as abstract and not concrete or useful for some
Philosophy is about the experience of your own life the subjective truth as one evolves every day and transformed by the cold ,brutal harshness of phenomena which is transitory and impermanence
Quest of this life would no doubt be about happiness for almost all, we aspire to be truly happy in whatever actions we do, be it love,making money, or carrying out any activity,the aspiration to success as defined by the world around us makes us feel as if our life is worthy and that judgement would denote as for most as sort of happiness
But what if what one has build in life the source for one happines crashes like sand castles washed apart, swept apart by the tides of adversity, everything you once thought was a given, a thing which will never go away, now suddenly has vanished as if it was a mirage or illusion of sorts ,the happiness which one was used to becomes a pain ,grief and suffering
Those whom one thought were the friends, the love,suddenly become cold ,one is left alone ,wealth disappears, the life of adversity teaches you to ask the question what is happiness if any, is it the quest for success as defined and judged by others necessary
Every day becomes like a constant reminder of what one has failed, a life where hope has been robbed ,your soul reduced to wretchedness and where one feels there is a dead end
Much like the man lost in desert with no where to go ,thirst for love,belonginess , the cravings only makes it more woeful, especially when others around you are living a life of fulfilled expectations
Like a man lost in desert,starved famished and driven to despair by thirst would see oasis around everywhere, a mirage which is just a hope for him to continue , same sort of mirages would let one continue but to what end
Until one realises everything is lost, pushed to the corner of your life, to realise whatever one craved for was source of one misery,like a man who has been knocked to the ground in agony ,perpetual pain and yet hoping someone would spare a look of comfort and empathy at him
And when everything is lost ,when one gets trounced upon by life, a most beautiful woman (in soul, deed and mind) passes by ,shows compassion, nurses you back to life and nourishes you when life had forsaken and abandoned you.
That woman is termed as Sophia or wisdom,which dawns upon you,Sophia which is clad with simplicity, with no excess,pure,immaculate whose companion is penury of material(poverty) but which in itself lacks nothing as those external appearances mean nothing for it judges not the appearances or the form but the substance, the spirit
That is what Philosophy offers,a life of constant struggle and enquiry and hope and love and compassion,when everyone forsakes you, Philosophy would embrace you as the only true friend,which allows you to survive and to be stronger
As Nietzsche said,what doesnt kill you makes you even stronger, thats what adversity does, it is the stepping stone to wisdom, to truth, to a life of philosophy where you evaluate yourself and realise that fictions of life which one thought as some reality was never a given,one becomes a better person ,a wise one
Eventually the journey of life becomes less torturous for Sophia and wisdom is not transitory or illusory as the happiness which one had come to known,but this form of Sophia is permanent, reminder that true happiness eventually is to accept everything as it comes,and to live a life to the best of your virtues,so that even adversity becomes part of happiness or Eudaimonia, to live a life completely and to be equanimous to whatever it may throw on you ,and that is why Philosophy is so important .as its your friend, a true one to help you withstand against the whip of a tyrannical master known as the vagaries of life.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Indo-Muslim Culture in Hyderabad: Old City Neighborhoods in the 19th Century

Hyderabad city’s culture was Indo-Muslim or Mughlai, terms that need definition here. I use Indo-Muslim in preference to Islamic, Indo-Persian, Persianate, or Islamicate. I prefer Indo-Muslim to the other four commonly-used alternatives because, first, Muslim rather than Islamic emphasizes a civilizational and not a religious culture (Islamicate has the same meaning but probably not to the general reader). Certainly Hyderabad was not an Islamic state: the Nizams never tried to impose Islamic law or to convert people.Second, IndoMuslim puts the emphasis on the Indian location, although undeniably the Bahmani sultanate in the Deccan from the mid-fourteenth century, its five successor Deccani sultanates (Bijapuri, Golconda, Bidar, Berar, and Ahmednagar) from the early sixteenth century, and the Nizams, starting as Mughal governors after the conquests of Bijapuri and Golconda by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb in 1686 and 1687, modeled their court culture on that of Persia. I use the term Mug...
Read more

Skull Imagery and Skull Magic in the Yoginī Tantras

The Buddhist tantras constitute a unique class of Buddhist literature. While developing from earlier trends in Buddhist thought and practice, they also constituted a serious challenge to Buddhist identity, largely due to the fact that many of them contain passages that appear to transgress the tenets of Buddhist morality.1 Tantric literature also departed, gradually, from the rhetorical norms of Mahayana Buddhism. While early tantras maintained the rhetorical style of the Mahayana sutras, later tantras, and most notably the Yoginī tantras, radically departed from this style.2 This essay will explore one small facet of the vast array of unusual elements that can be found in this literature, namely, the image of the skull, as well as the use of skulls in tantric ritual. Like other elements, this deployment of skulls in the tantras was disquieting to some, evoking as it does the uncanny atmosphere of the charnel ground. Through this exploration, I will argue that skulls are multifaceted...
Read more

Nature of Patisambhidamagga

The Patisambhidāmagga is insistently practical it expounds the way or path of 'discrimination' in its various a spects and tries to show how understanding can be achieved in an empirical sense instead of theorizing it It talks about what happens and how does "Nana"(knowledge)  happen when someone understand or discriminates the actuality or truth which is real in its aspects as taught by Buddha The theory is of course necessary,the understanding or insight,and is  included in this path,as well as the practice in the limited sense of concentration,the calming Jhana a process to Samatha . The pair ,insight(vipassana) and Calming(Samatha) must therefore be coupled(Yuganandha) and function together ,which are presented as fundamental in Buddhist texts , as even mentioned in Anguttara Nikaya Enlightenment as Ananda said ( which is mentioned in detailed in Yuganandha suttanta in Anguttara Nikaya) ,requires both Samatha and Vipassana  and no one has attained Enlightenment wi...
Read more