Ancient Solutions to Human Irrationality: Introduction

After millennia of intellectual hallucinations, open-minded cults, schizophrenic lucidity, and indubitable falsehoods, we finally come to realization that whatever it is that our minds do is far stranger than naive realism would have us believe. Literature attempting to analyze, explain, and purify us of delusions is sprouting up in every field. Terrified by recent history, a modern intellectual is witnessing the statue of the thinker, symbolising the conquest of the mind over the unenlightened, being morphed into a nebulous, distorted, and increasingly layered grounding crisis of humanity. If we have a Zeitgeist, it must be that of lunatic asylum.

The list of logical fallacies, paradoxes, human biases and falsified theories keeps piling up, and yet the current solution boils down to a sign that reads "beware of dog". Fortunately, contrary to cultural elitism, we are not the first to study the limits of knowledge and other intellectual trappings. Eastern philosophy tackled this question thousands of years ago, providing us with quite compelling solutions that may seem alien to the familiar abstractions. I sympathize with the immediate gag reflex a skeptical mind habitually succumbs to upon hearing this word, though I will attempt to show this to be a consequence of the unfortunate hijacking of this elegant philosophy by the spiritualists, therapists, and plain misconceptions. There are hidden gems if only one is willing to "empty the cup," giving an honest attempt to acquire the new language and view the problem differently.

I purposefully refer to it as a language, since our words are wedded to implicit metaphysical, historical, and cultural biases. One must simply attempt to decouple the term as it means to you from what is actually being talked about within the philosophy. It is after all a translation from an ancient culture with all the corresponding difficulties. Moreover as within any other philosophical movement, there is a wide spectrum of quality, sensibility, and variety offered. What I am going to attempt is to show that they too faced the limitation of language, the distortions of perceptions, and the illusive nature of self. In essence, I claim there is plenty of useful epistemology and psychology that is useful precisely because it is radically different.

Let us jump into the issue at hand...(next post)