u/Due-Establishment78

Sometimes when I'm about to do something new, my legs start shaking, my heart races, and there's this huge resistance inside me. In those moments everything feels really hard.

But whenever I listen to AP's sessions, that difficulty shrinks a lot and starts to feel almost normal.

Here's a recent example. A few days ago I had to join a gym. I've studied in a girls' school since 9th, and my college is girls-only too. So when I got there with my grandfather (he came to drop me on the first day) and saw only boys, I froze. Girls do come to that gym, they just weren't there at that time.

I came back saying "I'll start from tomorrow." But first I had to convince myself, and then my grandfather. I was really uncomfortable.

The next day I could have gone, but with a lot of fear. I knew there was a session that day, so I thought, let me listen to it first, and the fear will reduce on its own. And it did. I told my grandfather, "Please let me go 🙏 girls come there too, don't worry!" and somehow convinced him.

When I walked in, the fear from before was shattered into a thousand pieces. Only a few fragments were left, and Acharya Ji's words had made the rest disappear.

I don't know how, but his words go straight to the heart. Sometimes they feel like a taunt on my own dishonesty and free me from my little deceits. Other times they feel like a hand on my back, like someone is there with me, and the fear goes away.

This is just one incident I remember clearly. There have been so many others I can't even count them. Every time something scares me, the sessions either drive the fear away or at least reduce it.

Thank you so much, AP 🙏😍

An empty square.

Long shadows, arcades stretching into the horizon.
A clock, a statue, a mannequin-like figure, placed with no regard for logic.

This is the world of Giorgio de Chirico.

His Metaphysical paintings show a familiar world, though things seem odd. Objects and figures appear in places where they wouldn’t normally be found. His paintings contain little to no narrative, simply a collection of objects, and it is this lack of narrative that I find intriguing.

As soon as we see something, we try to assign meaning to it.

An empty square becomes a road, maybe with people walking on it, without us even realizing it. De Chirico seems to break with this in his Metaphysical paintings. The objects are still familiar, but somehow we start questioning the meaning we have so quickly given them.

If something seems unfamiliar to us, we try to make sense of it through our imagination.

Maybe that is what I find so fascinating about these paintings and this behaviour within us.

Don’t these paintings reflect our lives too? What we expect the world to mean, and what it actually means, may not always be the same

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_de_Chirico

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Giorgio-de-Chirico

What if the biggest contribution of Socrates was not an answer but a question?

For ages, Greek thinkers had been asking about the physical world:

What is everything made of?

What makes it change?

What is its fundamental nature?

But Socrates turned the question around and asked it of the questioner himself.

How should a human being live?

What is virtue?

What is justice?

What is a good life?

And perhaps most unsettling:

What do I actually know?

He also gave the study of philosophy one of its most effective tools: questioning.

What do you mean?

How do you know?

Can you defend that?

Does it hold in all cases?

By questioning people’s assumptions rather than simply giving them answers, he exposed weaknesses in their arguments and made them think about the certainty behind their beliefs.

This became known as the Socratic method.

From Socrates came many different answers

Socrates did not write anything himself, but his influence was enormous. Plato was his student, and Aristotle was Plato’s pupil.

The philosophical Hellenistic schools that followed took the question of how one should live in different directions.

The Cynics challenged wealth, status and social conventions.

The Stoics placed virtue at the centre and said that our well-being should not depend on things outside our control.

The Epicureans wanted tranquility through simple pleasures, friendship and freedom from unnecessary fear.

The Skeptics questioned whether certainty was possible.

Their answers differed radically, but the underlying impulse remained: examine the life you are living and the beliefs you are living by.

I know that I know nothing

The exact sentence was not actually said by Socrates in those words. It is a later summary of an idea expressed in Plato’s Apology.

Socrates questioned politicians, poets and craftsmen and noticed something interesting.

A person could genuinely know something in one particular area and still assume that this made them wise about everything.

A craftsman may know how to make something.

But does that mean he knows what justice is?

Does he know what virtue is?

Does he know what makes a life good?

For Socrates, knowing how to perform a particular skill was not the same as knowing how one ought to live.

His wisdom, therefore, was partly in recognizing the limits of his own knowledge.

And perhaps this is where Socrates becomes relevant to us.

We say:

I know what success is.

I know what a respectable life looks like.

I know what a man or woman should be.

I know what marriage should look like.

I know what will make me happy.

But how much of this have I actually examined?

How much have I simply inherited from family, society, culture, religion and education?

The past can help us understand the present. But if we never examine what we were taught, it can also prevent us from seeing what is actually in front of us.

This is where I found a small but interesting connection with Acharya Prashant’s discussions on Socrates and Indian philosophy. The questioning need not stop at examining what I know.

It can turn toward the one who claims to know.

Who is the knower?

That question reminded me of a deeper Vedantic inquiry: if I can examine my thoughts, beliefs and assumptions, then what exactly am I calling “I”?

Perhaps Socrates’ question does not end with:

What do I know?

It can lead us to an even more uncomfortable one:

How do I know that I know?

Azaadi hi meri dulhan hai.

At the age of 22, Bhagat Singh had already chosen his bride Azaadi.

There is something deeply moving about a young man choosing to give his whole life to an idea he believed in, knowing what it could cost him.

On his Jayanti, I just want to remember Aazad Bhagat Singh the young man who made Azaadi his love, his purpose, and ultimately, his life.

Aazad Bhagat Singh. 1907–1931.

A short video by Acharya Prashant has reminded me of him today on his birth anniversary:

https://youtube.com/shorts/bop48J4uZwo?si=tdyJ9GiorxSiyL_B

Two days ago, women in Iran ran a race without the hijab.

Women running.

In public.

Without permission to cover themselves in a particular way.

And to those who know even a speck about Iran, this was not just a race.

An act of rebellion.

Iranian women have been rebelling against restrictions to their lives and bodies for years.

They have refused to cover themselves and have protested, rallied and been beaten for doing so simply for demanding a choice which, ironically enough, was theirs to begin with.

And I think there is something beautiful about that.

No, rebellion is not a pretty thing.

But freedom is.

What worries me is that the modern world has come so far in science, technology and exploration, and yet, women are still forced to rebel for such a basic thing as the right to decide what they wear.

Why?

Why should a woman have to risk her life and wellbeing to wear the clothes she desires?

Why does what a woman wears matter more to society than what she does with her life?

Are women's bodies a public spectacle?

And what does that say about a society that it needs rules and regulations to control the bodies of women?

A strong culture should not tremble at the sight of an unveiled woman.

A woman is much more than what she wears.

She could be a scientist, a mother, a teacher, an artist, an astronaut, a poet or just a human-being trying to live freely.

Yet society continues to give her an image:

This is what a good woman looks like.

This is how a good woman behaves.

This is how a good woman dresses.

And gradually, society does not even have to control her from the outside.

She begins controlling herself.

And that is where the real problem begins.

Because oppression does not survive only from an act of force.

It survives through conditioning.

The fear of being judged.

The fear of losing respect.

The fear of being rejected.

The fear of no longer being a 'good' woman.

Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

We are taught what a woman should be and then we spend our lives guarding that image.

So rebellion is not only just removing a piece of cloth.

The real rebellion is questioning the one who says:

"I must dress this way or else I will not be accepted."

And this is where freedom becomes problematic.

Because we all want it, but how many of us are willing to lose approval for it?

How many of us are willing to face insult and rejection and discomfort and uncertainty?

As long as there is something within us that we desperately want to protect, we are still vulnerable.

If my identity as a 'good' woman is more important to me than the truth, someone just has to threaten that identity.

So yes.

Women should have the freedom to choose what they wear.

But perhaps the real freedom is, in fact, to stop living by an image of what a woman is supposed to be.

A woman's body is her own.

But freedom is not just letting her do whatever she wants with that body.

It is becoming fearless enough to live without constantly asking society for approval.

And that is possibly where the rebelliousness of these women are so great.

They are not just rebelling against a piece of clothing, but the conditioning behind it.

And that rebellion is so much greater than just Iran.

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