Saturday, February 07, 2015

I am an epitome of opposites

In our intellectually egoistic moments we pretend that we have actually transcended these narrow black and white dichotomies and that we don't put people into one or the other category. We like to think that we actually see and appreciate the various grays of the world. We like to tell ourselves (and whoever else will listen) that we don't judge the intention of someone just because the person says or writes something that is ideologically or politically completely opposite to our preferred ideology or politics. 
But that is not generally the truth of ourselves. And the true truth is that we know it. Deep down we know it. We know that we haven't really stopped judging or categorizing people. We know that we still divide the world into black or white. We know that despite all the complex intellectual postmodernism we have consumed we are inwardly still highly fond of simplistic modernistic binaries that are perhaps demonstrative of a deeper truth of the nature of mind, the rough and unrefined instrument we are given to make sense of the world as it exists in its un-evolved existence. 
The mind in its natural state can essentially "accept" only one side of the truth. In order to truly accept all the other possible sides of the truth as equally true, it needs a light from the regions above itself. It needs the assistance of faculties higher than mind. But our un-refined mind refuses to even accept that such light, such faculties are even possible. - See more at: http://letbeautybeyourconstantideal.blogspot.in/#sthash.A4QI6oCr.dpuf

Be happy,
Remain quiet,
Do your work as well as you can,
Keep yourself always open towards me –
This is all that is asked from you.

Students' Prayer: "Make of us the hero warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully the great battle of the future that is to be born, against the past that seeks to endure; so that the new things may manifest and we may be ready and receive them."



Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader Edited by Sachidananda Mohanty, Routledge India, 2008

Reading Hegel: The Introductions by G.W.F. Hegel (Edited and introduced by Aakash Singh and Rimina Mohapatra), re.press 2008

Indian Political Thought: A Reader Edited by Aakash Singh and Silika Mohapatra (Routledge, June 2010)