Post by vkaul1 on Aug 12, 2011 0:30:04 GMT -6
My friend Omkar ( who finished his PhD from stanford in biology) had written the following excerpt with which I concur for the most part and I think Nitai ji, you will as well.
While my heart also wants everything in Gaudiya Vaisnavism to be true, so that I can follow it with one-pointed confidence, my heart also has seen enough of other philosophies to know that there are sincere, pious and scholarly people there... as well. So I have to take a step back and ask what standards and what approach I should use so that I am not biased towards or against any school, not just schools of Vedanta, but any school of any philosophy in the world. That requires training the mind to follow whatever direction logic and philosophy seems to lead to, regardless of whether it's gaudiya dvaita or advaita or Buddhism or Christianity or the myriad Western philosophies. When applied consistently to the study of any religion/philosophy, I have to accept what comes out, even if it goes against the heart, and to keep asking whether an outsider can be convinced by this or that argument to keep myself on the toes.
In the West, where philosophers tried their level best to reach metaphysical conclusions with certainty, and failed, the quest for proving metaphysical truths has more or less been given up. So I always wonder about the basis for the extreme confidence that I see in people like you about a certain metaphysical system being True with a capital T, all the more so because they seem to think that they have the supreme logic which requires them to make no assumptions and require no faith. I would love to have such certainty in my own mind, so that I can follow through my life with one-pointed confidence, than grappling with uncertainties. Western philosophers like Descartes tried that in great detail, to start from scratch and to build up a philosophical system where the postulates are true with total certainty. But such attempts have always turned out to be proven as problematic in the West. This makes me probe and press claims of people like you in a minute way to see if they have some arguments that the rest of the philosophical world has failed to grasp. If what they say is true, then I expect the entire philosophical world to objectively come to a consensus agreeing with it (and if there is no consensus, I expect to see for myself that the ones not accepting dvaitins' conclusions are just biased, and refusing to see the supreme logic), and I expect a revolution to happen in the philosophical community with the revelation of these supremely logical arguments they were so far not aware of, which solves every outstanding problem in philosophy since the days of Plato.
But every time I try to discuss something, nothing of substance comes forth, and I get attacked as not being familiar with the siddhanta etc, even though I have already heard multiple pAThas on such topics.
In some ways, having doubts and uncertainties is good, I think. It makes one more eager to explore the mysteries of existence than to assume that all answers are in one particular sect's book and being satisfied in the illusion that the rest of the world lacks logic. It also becomes possible to appreciate contributions of many different philosophers from different schools, instead of seeing good things in one sect and only faults in other sects. A world with certainty is a world of only two colors - black and white (provably true and provably false propositions). A world of uncertainty is a world with innumerable shades of gray (propositions with different degrees of uncertainty and plausibility). I think the latter world is the one in which we live, even though everyone wants to live in the former world, because the mind wants to have the security of being totally certain, without doubts, absolute conviction.
While my heart also wants everything in Gaudiya Vaisnavism to be true, so that I can follow it with one-pointed confidence, my heart also has seen enough of other philosophies to know that there are sincere, pious and scholarly people there... as well. So I have to take a step back and ask what standards and what approach I should use so that I am not biased towards or against any school, not just schools of Vedanta, but any school of any philosophy in the world. That requires training the mind to follow whatever direction logic and philosophy seems to lead to, regardless of whether it's gaudiya dvaita or advaita or Buddhism or Christianity or the myriad Western philosophies. When applied consistently to the study of any religion/philosophy, I have to accept what comes out, even if it goes against the heart, and to keep asking whether an outsider can be convinced by this or that argument to keep myself on the toes.
In the West, where philosophers tried their level best to reach metaphysical conclusions with certainty, and failed, the quest for proving metaphysical truths has more or less been given up. So I always wonder about the basis for the extreme confidence that I see in people like you about a certain metaphysical system being True with a capital T, all the more so because they seem to think that they have the supreme logic which requires them to make no assumptions and require no faith. I would love to have such certainty in my own mind, so that I can follow through my life with one-pointed confidence, than grappling with uncertainties. Western philosophers like Descartes tried that in great detail, to start from scratch and to build up a philosophical system where the postulates are true with total certainty. But such attempts have always turned out to be proven as problematic in the West. This makes me probe and press claims of people like you in a minute way to see if they have some arguments that the rest of the philosophical world has failed to grasp. If what they say is true, then I expect the entire philosophical world to objectively come to a consensus agreeing with it (and if there is no consensus, I expect to see for myself that the ones not accepting dvaitins' conclusions are just biased, and refusing to see the supreme logic), and I expect a revolution to happen in the philosophical community with the revelation of these supremely logical arguments they were so far not aware of, which solves every outstanding problem in philosophy since the days of Plato.
But every time I try to discuss something, nothing of substance comes forth, and I get attacked as not being familiar with the siddhanta etc, even though I have already heard multiple pAThas on such topics.
In some ways, having doubts and uncertainties is good, I think. It makes one more eager to explore the mysteries of existence than to assume that all answers are in one particular sect's book and being satisfied in the illusion that the rest of the world lacks logic. It also becomes possible to appreciate contributions of many different philosophers from different schools, instead of seeing good things in one sect and only faults in other sects. A world with certainty is a world of only two colors - black and white (provably true and provably false propositions). A world of uncertainty is a world with innumerable shades of gray (propositions with different degrees of uncertainty and plausibility). I think the latter world is the one in which we live, even though everyone wants to live in the former world, because the mind wants to have the security of being totally certain, without doubts, absolute conviction.
