I was conducting one of my aromatherapy classes. One of my friends, who is also a spiritually minded person, came at the end of the class to pick her daughter up, who had joined my class. Since the class also discussed the contribution of Indians to the world knowledge pool in every sphere of life, we had created a theme for the post-class discussions. He mentioned that the Indian philosophy talks about coming inside, which means understanding yourself, while the western philosophy talks about going out or understanding others around you. This gave me enough food for thought. I have an opinion that a true fusion of both the philosophies is required. One cannot analyze and learn about himself unless he understands his environment well. Analysis is always about comparisons. Either you compare to your past deeds, or the deeds of the others around you. Right or wrong is a relative judgment.
Actually, the debate started with the point that we Indians do less documentation of our findings, as compared to western countries. For this reason we either loose credit for many things or we end up making claims that we already knew many things in the past which the western people are now trying to teach us back. Many times we feel that things are in our brains, well preserved and can be transferred to the right disciple. In search of the right disciple, a good teacher may sometimes end up waiting for the entire life. Here, documentation comes to the rescue.
So truly speaking, there is no need to talk about clashing philosophies. It is just a matter of picking the right things from every philosophy rather than trying to prove which one is better.
Dr. Sunil Ji Garg
No comments:
Post a Comment