Aditya Mukherjee
Cover image courtesy of Benjamin Rau A decade might be a long period of time to make a prediction or take a vow for, but beating old habits always takes time. We go through many different belief and philosophy systems as we are growing up. They are as evolutionary as other parts of us, and they are as prone to becoming frail and weak if not exercised and maintained. They evolve and distort with us as we go through life learning and observing, but the process is not the same for everyone. Most of us are born into a house with rules — religious families — while some are born into a house of logic and guidance.
For the rest of this essay, I’ll be using the words “beliefs” and “philosophies” interchangeably. I know they mean different things, but for an atheist those two are the same. Beliefs and philisophies are reasoned and/or experiential conclusions.
Our first ever set of morals, rules for right and wrong, good and bad are set by our parents. Completely subject to their own biases and personal rules, we start off being molded in their image. One might say that parents only want the best for their children, but the truth is that parents are humans too, flawed, prone to bias and the sense of control like everyone else. But we can universally agree that the net effect of all parents in the world on their kids is definitely positive. I consider my parents to fall under the “house of logic” — they always let me believe what I wanted to, guiding me towards the correct and right if they saw me lose my way. Very few things were forced, but when they were, they were strictly done. My mother is religious, while my father is — I like to believe — mostly agnostic. I have had to visit my share of temples and holy locations, and meet and talk to holy people when I was a child, which on retrospect seems like a small price to pay for my mother’s peace of mind while showing me the other side of the coin.
The next phase in the formation of our beliefs comes from our teachers through primary and middle school. It’s why schools are important, and choosing the right one is more so. It’s not about the knowledge — we get that from books either way. It’s not about interaction either — it’s just a means to an end. What school is really about is beliefs. The first time a child is sent out to fend for himself, to put him1 and the resilience of him as a person to the test. There are clashes between students as well as students and teachers, and these are more often than not a clash of beliefs. Many punishments are born out of challenging authority, and that’s nothing but challenging the administration’s beliefs. In school a child is always outnumbered — he is put up against a collective rather than individuals — and hence he learns to compromise and adjust his beliefs to maintain a certain level of peace. Most of school struggles goes into maintaining this peace — between students and/or students and teachers. I have been in three schools over my entire schooling career; I don’t remember much about the first, but the second and third are still quite fresh. The only way to describe my second school was “narrow-minded”, and on retrospect, all my rebelliousness was due to that narrow-mindedness that I did not want to be a part of. I was subject to more personal bias than I was before, or I have since then. Thankfully my parents saw through it and didn’t punish me everytime the school complained about something.
High school and college is all about individuals. And clashing beliefs with individuals is harder than clashing with people as a group. It’s an easy concept to understand — two warring enemies are easier to fight than one stable enemy. In a collective, people’s beliefs are at war with the other members of the collective as they try to find a common ground between themselves, so you can exploit chinks and weaknesses. But when it comes to individuals, they’re firm in what they believe. And the higher you go in the hierarchy, the more “one man authority”s you run into2. My third school and first college was more about inter-student clashes, and it’s where most of my dislike for people my age comes from. I found adults — and by that, I mean people significantly older than me — to be a lot more receptive as well as logical when it came to discussions. Most, not all, of them seemed to lack the “I’m right” approach that people my age have. And it’s something you cannot talk to, something you cannot discuss or argue with, so every discussion ends with people agreeing to disagree and nobody learns anything new.
While the self discovery and understanding never stops, the earlier parts of our lives are almost completely dedicated to understanding ourselves, while the later years go in to understanding where we fit in with the rest of the world. I believe I’m at this transition phase, and it’s a very uncomfortable thing. It’s kind of like being a piece in a giant jigsaw puzzle, but unlike the puzzles we made as kids, you (a piece) have hundreds of sides, each with very similar and yet different cuts. Everytime you think one side has finally found the correct shape to fit into, another comes along where it fits better. So you either re-orient yourself, or try to re-orient the the rest of the pieces. But one of the two always changes3.
For my 23rd birthday, I briefly wrote about everything that bothers me as a person alive in the year ’11. It wasn’t complaining or ranting. Thinking about it now, I cannot think of a reason for why I wrote it, except for “disappointment”. Disappointment at something I taught myself not to expect from a long time back (or at least, I thought I did), and there was this feeling of frustration which also I’m not too familiar with. As I sat down to think about it, I realised that after 23 years, “peace” still eludes me. I can never answer the question “Are you happy?” with a straight face or a simple answer. Contentment and satisfaction are just words with meanings as ungraspable as a rainbow to a dog.
I have grown stubborn — more so than I was — with an air of superiority that, thankfully for others around, stays trapped in my own head and doesn’t reach my tongue — for now. I have grown angrier at things that I would normally not care about. I used to have a higher standard of caring; I cared about very few things but in a very strong way, but not anymore. Small things get me riled up, and I will be in denial if I say they don’t matter. Simply put, I have lost control of my mind and my spirit. I’ve lost track of what is important, what is right and what is wrong (in the philosophical, not practical, sense), what should change and what shouldn’t — everything that makes us the person we are. It feels like I’ve remained human through sheer muscle memory. I can explain why I do certain things, but they’re more a front to appease other people. Internally, there is very little logic to why I do something, because I don’t know myself if my logic is sound or not. Some would call that being impulsive. I don’t know what to call it.
I don’t know how atheism really works — it’s not like there’s a book — but I’ve always thought that there is room for spiritual development without having to resort to a belief in a higher being; that peace can be obtained without completely surrendering to a God and blaming or crediting him/her/it for whatever happens in our life. But then again, maybe peace is that unattainable pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of our time. Maybe we’ve traded in our peace of mind for progress, and the pursuit of peace and satisfaction goes anti-parallel to success … I don’t know.
Of course, I’m probably wrong and all this is just my cynicism talking. This uncertainty is why there is a need here for a better set of beliefs. A Godless set of beliefs, but a set of beliefs nonetheless. One that should be adopted as a whole and not be cherry picked from. A set of beliefs that will enhance and augment my reasoning and logic, and hopefully lead to a better understanding of how this world works.
In my short research I’ve found that there aren’t many non-idealistic and non-idolistic philosophies. Buddhism has always intrigued me simply because it’s the only one that talks about enlightenment, rather than surrendering oneself to a higher power4. In my very limited understanding, there is no worship to please a god and no hoping for supernatural interventions. There is only learning, about oneself, the world and how they work together. Zen — in the meaning of the word, not the school of thought. And now I’m looking at going deeper and learning from it. Learning leads to understanding. Understanding leads to acceptance. Acceptance leads to peace. At least, that’s what the hope is. It may not be the answer to everything, but I doubt anything can tell me what the answer is. As the people in movies say, “That is for you to figure out.”
Then, maybe I will be at peace with this world and hence, myself. •
By that, I mean mentally rather than physically, since we’re all pretty well protected physically while in school. Although the physical protection starts to crumble as one progresses through grades as well, help is never really too far away if it truly comes down to that. ↩
Which is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. The traditional wisdom is that people as a group tend to be more balanced than they are individually as different members of the group keep each other in check. It’s why we have a board of directors, a house of commons, and so on. But on the other end of the spectrum, and in the positions that really matter, there is always an individual — the CEO, or the prime minister. It’s almost like we’ve resigned to the fact that people work better individually than as a group. ↩
I absolutely love this analogy. Life has been compared to a jigsaw puzzle before, but this is about your beliefs and philosophies compared to the world and other people’s beliefs and philosophies. I think I’ve managed to explain how I think about it fairly well too. What’s an explanation without a good analogy? ↩
God in Buddhism — Wikipedia ↩