One of my good friends from Finland called me the other day and after we had talked about stuff for a while, I asked him what he thought of my blog. He was silent for a second and then, in a very Finnishque (who said I can’t invent my own words?), diplomatic way said that sometimes they seem a little preachy. He said that they often begin in a nice way but then all of a sudden in the end there’s the “finger waving part” where I lay down the truth of the matter in a kind of, I guess, patronizing way.
It’s funny how people seem to be put off by certainty. He’s following the same tradition that I am, so my writings don’t turn him off, but I guess he was talking form a so-called normal person’s perspective. I’ve doubted myself my whole life practically and that has enabled me to relate to so many people because I haven’t had a strong sense of self, so I’ve just merged with whoever I’ve been in contact with. But my life has certainly changed, I’ve finally taken this step to say that I really feel I’m doing the right thing with my life and that there are goods and bads, truths and untruths, reality and illusion in our existence. I just don’t have faith in post-modernism, or post-post-modernism and its values anymore. That kind of ultra-relativity just makes me sick to my stomach, although I’m a product of it. Or rather, I was a miserable offspring of that family but I ran and now I’m a happy orphan.
It’s also good to remember, though, that there’s a difference between certainty and intellectual cowardice. I’m not afraid to think. I just have this underlying, unexplainable certainty that the worldview of the bhakti tradition is a true one. It may not be that every story or word in our scriptures is true word-for-word but the approach to reality that this tradition gives is just so charming and it simply makes sense to me. It’s beyond belief. It’s a conviction.
Also, this whole blogging is very much for my own purification, an effort to clarify things in my own head. And it works. I pick a subject I want to write about and then I keep thinking a little about it throughout the day, how to explain it, and I’m trying to honestly evaluate how much I understand about the subject myself. It’s like a hermeneutic circle. It keeps growing by itself. Someone reacts to something I write and that grows on the subject and makes me understand something more about it.
I just write what I’m thinking about and I’m trying to connect my thoughts into some things that happened in my life. This tradition, the philosophy, the lifestyle and its underlying feeling is pretty much all I (at least try to) think about. That’s my perspective on life. It would be easy to say that I’m compromising my intellectual integrity (what a fancy term) by sticking to a ready-made world explanation and that it hinders free thinking, but I have a strong conviction that the wisdom contained in this tradition has not come about only from people’s mental activities in the context of Indian culture and civilization. It’s much deeper and contains eternal truths that just have to be discovered. It’s not that anybody invents any ideas or concepts anyway. This is just an abstract form of excavation.
Keep digging.
I never read your blogs as being preachy. I saw them as self reflection and if they appeared preachy I could only read that as you preaching to yourself.