In today's world, when I look around, I find too much noise, the noise of intellectualism. Intellectualism which is not how it’s supposed to be, but rather a performance of it. Nowadays, I see this kind of intellectualism everywhere.

Almost every third person is an intellectual today. I find a great amount of amaze in me when I observe this change in society, and it’s not too old, this change has occurred in recent times. Before, it wasn’t the case. Before, people were simple, not in the sense of being uneducated, but in being sincere about what they know and what they dont.

Knowledge was something sacred, something earned through experience and rigorous pursuit of understanding things. In the past, an intellectual was someone who had dedicated a great amount of time and energy to learn and study with genuine curiosity and dedication about things.

Today, being an intellectual has become a fashion. It’s not knowledge that people seek nowadays, it’s the appearance of it. people don’t want to ‘be’ wise, they just want to ‘look’ wise. It has become a ‘theatre of intellect’, where everybody is acting to look intellectual.

People have all kinds of opinions about figures like Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Savarkar, and many more, without even reading a single page of a book about them or even books written by them. Similarly, you’ll find someone talking about Vedānta and the Upanishads, calling themselves so called knowers of Indian philosophy, but in reality, they know nothing. Literally nothing more than the last reel they watched about it, or the half remembered podcasts. They are like dominos, just ask them one straight forward question about what they are talking about, and watch them fall apart in pieces. They know nothing, still they choose to speak about it.

The most shocking ones to me are the people who talk about history and philosophy in a tone as if they’ve already done a Phd on it. Everybody has become an ‘expert of philosophy’ nowadays. They are not interested in genuinely understanding anything new, they just want to appear aware of the topic. They won’t even take the time to study it properly. Rather they’ll collect some fast-food information from a podcast or a video about philosophy, just so they can drop few words when the topic comes up and it’s not even just general knowledge, they react as if they know everything.

On a topic like philosophy, I don’t understand how people speak with such audacity. I have been myself reading Indian philosophy for the past 3 years, and even I speak like, ‘Today I learned this,’ or ‘Today I got to know that,’ as if I’m dying to share what I learnt, You will find a spark of curiosity in the eyes of those who genuinely care about these things when they speak, and on the other hand you’ll see arrogance and a sense of pride in those who are the ‘performers of intellect.’

They talk about Vedānta, but they don’t know what Adhyāsa is, what Vivarta means, or what Upādhi is in Shankara’s Advaita Vedānta. They speak about terms like Brahman, Ātman, or Maya as if merely knowing these terms grants them a certificate of being a knower of Vedānta. But the moment you ask them about the subtlety of superimposition, or how the world is a vivarta of Brahman, or how upādhis creates the illusion of multiplicity, they fall apart, just like dominoes do.

Similarly, they talk about Buddhism and claim how Buddhism had overpowered Hindu dharma and was originated in protest of the caste system, but they don’t know who Nāgārjuna is, what śūnyatā means, or what Nāgārjuna’s argument for the emptiness of all phenomena is, or what Madhyamaka philosphy is all about. Forget about these terms, they don’t even know that there are types of Buddhism, Mahāyāna, Vajrayāna, and Theravāda and even more minor ones.

Because this is not something you’ll easily find on any podcasts or reels, this you’ll only know when you are genuinely curious about these things and your motivation is to know, and not to show.

I tried to think about the problem behind this and why people behave this way, and the only explanation I came up with is that the recognition you receive when people listen to you speak about these topics leads to a dopamine rush, and most people want to feel it, they love it. But whatever the reason behind it, it is sad to see a generation of people who just want to know surface level things so that they can show that they know, rather than truly understand or simply observe the greatness we, as a civilization, have discovered, developed, and written about in those philosophical concepts, arguments, and debates, all in the pursuit of that one goal, to know.(as much as we can)

Today, I see that depth and true understanding of things have been replaced by surface level information. It’s a sad to see that people are more interested in sounding knowledgeable than in truly knowing.

— Śaivārtha

‘Who am I’ has never been a question of great importance or curiosity for me. Rather, I always thought about ‘what am I?’ Thou, meaning exactly the same, I couldn’t settle for ‘who,’ but ‘what.’

For me, ‘who am I,’ limits the possibility. It is confining me to someone or to a limited definition of myself or a personality. When I say, ‘who am I,’ I’m already rejecting the idea of me being a pebble, or a leaf, or a mountain, or something else, not ‘someone.’

Why I’m not able to settle for ‘Who am I’ is solely because, someday if I were ever to discover ‘who’ I am, then from that very moment that knowing would fix itself as my identity, and from that moment onward, I would be bound to it in my own mind. But if I remain curious about ‘What am I’, even if I come to know it someday, I could never be able to reduce myself to it. Rather, I would rest in peace with it, ‘unconfined’.

Heidegger’s ‘Seinsfrage’, or the question of Being, directs attention to existence itself rather than to a fixed personal identity. By asking “What am I?” or “what does it mean to be” instead of “who am I?”, one opens the mind to possibility. Which makes me think of life as Divenire, a process of becoming that never ends, where I realize and understand the Reality gradually rather than being confined to a single definition.

Similarly, when I read Kshemarāja’s Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam, I realize that all limitations, such as body, mind, and ego, are merely apparent adjuncts, and I shouldn’t confine myself to them.

Also, while in a process of divenire, I know very well that, according to Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam, there is nothing ‘to become’, it is already my nature as the infinite consciousness, Śiva. But until I myself reach that conclusion, I will not identify with the answer, and that is why I consider life as a process to become (Divenire), led by the fundamental inquiry, whether through the ‘question of being (Seinsfrage)’, ‘neti-neti’, or ‘Pratyabhijñā’ as a means of knowing, rather than confining oneself to a fixed identity.

Therefore, when I ask myself,‘what am I’, it sparks the very idea of knowing myself in me, and in the journey of it, I may understand Reality, and the very existence, maybe someday, I may realize what I was searching for. what I was trying to become. what I was, am, and will be, if I will. someday.

— Śaivārtha.

read it here.