Philosophy is an ability to look at everything that jostle to affect you - events, other people, your feelings, moods and thoughts - as not affecting you, as being a part of your psycho dynamics and yet are not you. It is a hard-and-easy-to-attain ability to detach and see yourself as a separate being from all that is happening around and inside of you.
Hard because it requires constant practice. Easy because it is easy enough to understand and accept. When you are saying my friend, my husband, my feeling, my mood, my body, you might as well say my handbag, my house, my car. Now you know as well as I do your car and all your possessions including the nice shopping bag you sayang to throw away may be extensions of you but they are not you and quite separate from you. You may lose a handbag or break a cup. So what, you're still intact.
Same truth applies to events, people and your interior monologue - feelings, moods and thoughts. They come and go. Most you pass or they come to pass with nary a second thought or glance. Some stay around a bit longer. But none lasts. Whether you leave first or outlast them, it drives home the point the truth that they are separate from you.
Mind you, there's a certain utility in feeling an affinity with events, people, things ... and thoughts. Just like reading a good novel or watching a good movie with which you can identify your own feelings and therefore feel close, so it is with one's life. But at the end of the day, you realize the book is just a book, the movie a movie, and you are still standing apart however close you came to the brink or even cross it into the world of the book and the movie. What you did was to temporarily suspend reality or disbelief and enter into a world of make-belief.
This is the crux of philosophy. The ability to switch from one world, one realm, of reality into another, simultaneously if need be. Two in one, if you like. The ability to feel one with things and yet being strongly aware of your detachment and separation gives you flexibility, versatility, stereo-vision (alright, AJY may prefer to call it Panavision), the ability to see two sides of a coin, as opposed to having tunnel vision or a monolithic view on life.
Philosophy is the last stage in which the learning mind arrives. The growing mind had gone through sensations, perceptions, ego identity, knowledge expansion, settled into comfortable grooves according to received wisdom, belief systems and life's experiences all of which provide data to form an image of the self. But this restless and wandering self - the soul if you like - the ultimate 'I' behind all phenomena with which you can no more say my 'I' and still make sense as you still can saying my self, my feeling, my life, whatever, is the sum total of your consciousness and more, being greater than the sum of its parts.
This 'I' is indestructible and is the one that survives physical death. In one word, it is consciousness or sense of self. The 'I' of the Dung Beetle, as I call it. You may choose to give it your own pet name (wink).
It should be clear from the above drift that neither possession, nor mathematical genius, nor a gift of music, nor good, nor evil (to be fair, as saints and sinners are assigned, they didn't choose to be), nor beliefs can ensure or enhance your final form but that it must be filtered through philosophy, the ability to feel detachment and closeness, sympathy and empathy, objectivity and compassion, simultaneously.
It is the final conduit through which your soul squeezes through to go to the next existential realm.
Note of Appreciation: The above words are a mere dressing up of thoughts triggered by AJY in the course of a dinner in, of all places, Jalan Alor!
Hard because it requires constant practice. Easy because it is easy enough to understand and accept. When you are saying my friend, my husband, my feeling, my mood, my body, you might as well say my handbag, my house, my car. Now you know as well as I do your car and all your possessions including the nice shopping bag you sayang to throw away may be extensions of you but they are not you and quite separate from you. You may lose a handbag or break a cup. So what, you're still intact.
Same truth applies to events, people and your interior monologue - feelings, moods and thoughts. They come and go. Most you pass or they come to pass with nary a second thought or glance. Some stay around a bit longer. But none lasts. Whether you leave first or outlast them, it drives home the point the truth that they are separate from you.
Mind you, there's a certain utility in feeling an affinity with events, people, things ... and thoughts. Just like reading a good novel or watching a good movie with which you can identify your own feelings and therefore feel close, so it is with one's life. But at the end of the day, you realize the book is just a book, the movie a movie, and you are still standing apart however close you came to the brink or even cross it into the world of the book and the movie. What you did was to temporarily suspend reality or disbelief and enter into a world of make-belief.
This is the crux of philosophy. The ability to switch from one world, one realm, of reality into another, simultaneously if need be. Two in one, if you like. The ability to feel one with things and yet being strongly aware of your detachment and separation gives you flexibility, versatility, stereo-vision (alright, AJY may prefer to call it Panavision), the ability to see two sides of a coin, as opposed to having tunnel vision or a monolithic view on life.
Philosophy is the last stage in which the learning mind arrives. The growing mind had gone through sensations, perceptions, ego identity, knowledge expansion, settled into comfortable grooves according to received wisdom, belief systems and life's experiences all of which provide data to form an image of the self. But this restless and wandering self - the soul if you like - the ultimate 'I' behind all phenomena with which you can no more say my 'I' and still make sense as you still can saying my self, my feeling, my life, whatever, is the sum total of your consciousness and more, being greater than the sum of its parts.
This 'I' is indestructible and is the one that survives physical death. In one word, it is consciousness or sense of self. The 'I' of the Dung Beetle, as I call it. You may choose to give it your own pet name (wink).
It should be clear from the above drift that neither possession, nor mathematical genius, nor a gift of music, nor good, nor evil (to be fair, as saints and sinners are assigned, they didn't choose to be), nor beliefs can ensure or enhance your final form but that it must be filtered through philosophy, the ability to feel detachment and closeness, sympathy and empathy, objectivity and compassion, simultaneously.
It is the final conduit through which your soul squeezes through to go to the next existential realm.
Note of Appreciation: The above words are a mere dressing up of thoughts triggered by AJY in the course of a dinner in, of all places, Jalan Alor!
Al Jafree Yusop My friend, you've written it in a way that can be shared with a lot other 'I's. I'm in a constant state of learning from your knowledge and wisdom, heartbreaks and joy. May you have similar experiences with yours truly as well.
5 hours ago · · 1 personLoading...
Nusrat Al-Jafreewhen I'm sad or depressed, the philosophy I have learned seems disappeared from my knowledge...is one of my weaknesses...today I cried whole day since morning for my lost persian cat (the white one) I blamed myself, I blamed my loving husba...nd, I asked the same questions like I was not learning anything through out my life, again and again...I was at war with myself, people, God, for the pain I was suffering...I know exactly why I was behaving that way, it was the pain of loosing what/whom you love dearly, the attachment one clings to...though I understand the philosophy quite well, still, it wasn't easy to make peace with yourself, it wasn't easy to forgive people, it wasn't easy to accept the fact that God doesn't really interfere with our choice and decision.See More
about an hour ago ·
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