Silence, to the most extreme level, is a good answer at first in order to fill the gap of the harmonious sensual calling of my Universe with the fact that human is just a glimpse of Evil. Totally I can’t receive all the dramas around my social circles, in many ways the identification of flag is needed to be on their priority list. The only need to do is that things you wanted to do, just not for you wanted to be and likewise a flag you wanted to hang on the stage. People are just busy to define who they are, but they actually don’t do anything to prepare for the better of their long-term universality. The regime of irrational sovereignty generates our system of thinking as particular and short-term as it can and brings me to stuck in assumptions that the condition is driven by the process of deskilling our sensorial to life up our inner and honest intuition.
In order to make myself more happier than busy following mainstreamer’s deals, I chose to run away and back to my cave. I don’t need to be popular, all I need is simply: Reading Bhaskar! And yes!, Reading Bhaskar can be seen as a way to answer the calling of my Universe and healing energy from the club of evil.
[To materialise and documenting my reading process, I write a series of review on each chapter of the book I read in every day]
“From East to West: An Odyssey of a Soul” – Roy Bhaskar.
To put an end the dreadful noxious viruses of our humanity today was to questioning the hidden pivotal domination of the Western’s rationality. Not on the terrain of scientific discovery only, but also in our daily action to see the Self, the Soul, the Beings that emerges from our very basic assumptions on reality. The Western philosophy thinkers who have been for decades taking the control to the system of thinking all over the world, now must face the fact that the stratified of being was nothing but occlude the creativity of the Soul. Roy Bhaskar, as an Indian with of course beautiful Soul inside, found its problem especially in how we see and percept the world—the universal externality of human, not just in terms of social, but yet environmental—which scientifically categorized as the problem of ontological subject on philosophy.
Bhaskar reclaims on his book that man is essentially God, and that, he is essentially free and already enlightened.[i] While in the process of searching and learning, freedom and enlightenment which is overlain by extraneous and heteronomous determinations which both occlude and qualify this essential fact.[ii] As having close relation with Mike Robinson, whom he later calls as spiritual teacher, the idea of the Self of man must be interrelationally transcendence to the (universal) Self-realisation, which can be characterised as a transcendental dialectical critical realism.
On the contrary of the Self-realisation, in which Bhaskar strongly against that much, the Self-alienation reflect the wider and deeper crises in the contemporary society. Here he goes to draw a dialectical chain of avidya (ignorance, understood as categorial error), dualism (or split), maya (or illusion), insecurity manifested as fear and desire, and alienation that embodied in the current human’s Being.[iii]
“This results in its wake, when what is split off (alienated), supressed or excluded is nevertheless categorially or axiologically necessary, in denegation, namely the expression or affirmation of what is denied (despite or even in its denial) in what I have called a tina compromise form (see DPF C 2.7),3 and thence to reflexive inconsistency and performative contradiction.[iv]
In de-negation, whatever the expression or affirmation to the particles denied will formulate the tina compromise form which generates the inconsistencies with reflexive in their own natures, yet performative contradiction preserves the general legitimation for the self-alienation. A soul veiled fully by its inconsistencies and contradiction can only be fixed by the practices of Yoga (or union) and re-union to its centre of universal self-realization.
Notes
[i] Ram Roy Bhaskar, From East to West: An Odyssey of a Soul (Critical Realism – Interventions), (London: Routledge, 2000), ix. In some senses, this essentiality—freedom and enlightenment—has a tendency to unmask the human’s expectations which pretend man as ‘social’ subject to disguise their relative opportunistic character.
[ii] Ram Roy Bhaskar, From East to West: An Odyssey of a Soul (Critical Realism – Interventions), (London: Routledge, 2000), ix.
[iii] Ram Roy Bhaskar, From East to West: An Odyssey of a Soul (Critical Realism – Interventions), (London: Routledge, 2000), 2.
[iv] Ram Roy Bhaskar, From East to West: An Odyssey of a Soul (Critical Realism – Interventions), (London: Routledge, 2000), 5.