Science, Psychology, Philosophy and the Language of Expression

Science, Psychology, Philosophy and the Language of Expression
Confessions
I must make frank confessions even before I delve into above tenets. 

In the field of medicine, we were hopelessly inadequate in our training when we were graduated. To cover our inadequacy we have a system called internship for one year. I will state one incident when I was a medical student (there are many) to illustrate the point of inadequacy in communication. We were doing our orthopedic rotation appointment and one day the consultant asked me to examine a little baby of under, one year. I took little time (I had some paediatric experience by then) to get on with the job. The surgeon with his impatience interrupted me and told me why you don’t offer him a cigarette. 

This was annoying to me say the least. 

I felt how inadequate he was (he had three children) as a father let alone a consultant. 

The consultant was crude in his examination. 

Both mother and baby ended up in crying. 

The class wound up soon with the baby crying hell out of the clinic. 

I was happy to leave the clinic with a lesson in my head. 

I have to learn communicating skills to communicate with a baby who has no grasp of the language.

We were NOT taught communication skills. 

I learned them when I was in UK. 

Earlier incident taught me a good lesson. That is, learn by gestures and observations and be patient with the young ones. 

After all, patients have patience to wait in long queues.

My Upbringing
It is relevant to jot down briefly my progress in various fields including science and the freedom of thinking. 

I was never brought up in rigid atmosphere at home or school. 

In any case, I was gifted with the ability, courage and stamina to stand to any oppression. 

Even though, I was born as a Buddhist, I was sent to a Christian School for my primary education. 

My mother used to make me to recite Buddhist verses (which I did not understand) before going to bed but one day I abruptly stopped that habit without any consequences. 

Under my mother’s care, I found this newfound freedom a blessing. 

Everything blossomed from that point. 

Everything I did turned all right including sports. In school, we were taught from a book with Bible stories (not Bible) and a daily dose of an alien story. Now that I found freedom from my mother, I used to ask relevant (budding philosopher) questions from the Catholic master which he could not answer. 

Then one fine day he threw me out of the class with anger. I achieved my goal and freedom. 

Unfortunately, for the teacher (I left a legacy of budding philosophers in the class) my friends followed me and continued to ask more questions. They wanted to join me outside the class with vigour. He sent few of the others out of the class and soon the Rector got to know what was going on. He (Rector) one day came to our class and he also had a barrage of questions including my own questions. 

He was stunned by our pure innocence and courage. 

He had no option but to send us all out and that was to play until that class was over. 

We spent playing while our catholic friends had to toil in the class.

We won our first freedom by being young philosophers and I became an instant leader in the class. 

Nobody challenged my leadership qualities until I left the school years later.

I was free of any bounden duty for Buddhism or Christianity from my early days.

I never stopped asking questions to clear my doubts. 

I was ready for science education in the school in the city and even science teachers found me annoying but they never chased me out of the class.

This was the time when the rational movement was prospering in Ceylon. 

We had a talk and a discussion from an eminent rationalist. He was very forceful in his arguments and one of my friends who wanted to ask a question from him came to me. 

Just to show off!

I told him, asked him whether he was sure of his father. 

 

Which he did, in a trembling voice. 

The talker paused for a while then said, I am not sure of my father but I am sure of my mother.

Then I got up and asked him how can he be a rationalist?

He did not have an answer. 

Everybody in the audience except me spontaneously started hooting and that was the end of the talk. 

I was only 14 years old then.

My first philosophical question at the right time toned me for years to come and also to any outcome of hooting. 

I was immune to hooting by the time I entered the university.

In the medical school, of course I did not have any difficulty except for lectures on psychology.  

I wanted to tear some psychological concepts apart but our teacher was a patient listener and never indulged in those doctrines. 

He taught us that in psychology what one needs is to allow the patient to express his or her own inner feeling without interruptions and that itself is a remedy. One does not need to do anything else most of the time. 

This was very useful and I generally apply this to our politicians with great comfort to them barring sometimes my inner health.

Ordination of the young
I am a believer that very young people should not be ordained in any Ministry including Sasana unless they are ready intellectually. One reason for this is to avoid misfits getting into any religious ministry. 

The other reason is that Buddhism (Sasana) is for the higher intellect and anybody with lower intellect would not progress far in Dhamma. 

The third reason is freedom to think and mature in one’s own accord without the rigidity of a religious system. 

That was what I was blessed as a young one. 

I enjoyed that freedom and I want everybody else to enjoy the same freedom without uprooting one’s social upbringing.

Philosophy
My definition of philosophy is the ability to ask the right question at the right time lest one asks the right question in the wrong time one would be beheaded. A good philosopher should be able to reframe the original question and ask it in a better way than its original tenet. It is the ability to ask the right question which would have a domino effect of producing better questions.

That is the beauty of philosophy.

Philosophers are not expected to provide answers to their questions within compartments. 

However, this was not the case in western philosophy until recently. 

Since the Church has hijacked the original scope of philosophical arguments into their own sphere. 

By putting a close lid and by preventing the tradition of questioning, the Church hindered both science and philosophy.

I want to act as a philosopher and ask a few questions. My answers are however with a scientific tone without moral implications. 

My questions and my short answers are given below.

I believe the questions are appropriate in time and are not hypothetical.

It should be understood that the philosopher’s job is to ask the appropriate question at an appropriate time. He (philosopher) has the freedom to pose more questions based on the answers he gets but one should not expect the philosopher to come home with fixed ready made answers. He has the freedom of choice but the scientist has to give clear-cut answers or bear his ignorance without hiding behind jargon of words. The scientist does not have the freedom of choice which the philosopher enjoys very much. In fact, most of the time the philosopher asks the questions for fun knowing very well that there are no free answers available.

That is the fun of philosophy.

Psychology
Where does the psychologist fit in this scenario?

Unfortunately, psychologists seem to be everywhere where the scientist has failed to answer a particular question with clarity. 

A psychologist can get away with flimsy answers since he has a plethora of jargon words he has coined for his own confusion and non-psychologists consumption.

Throughout history, uncertainty and fear were the key reasons for the origin of the religion. Even though, in the west, for a time the religion was able withstand the onslaught from the free thinkers, which they called heretics, it was not able to counteract the freedom of inquiry and the advancement of science and its discoveries. 

Especially, the theory of evolution and the origin of the Universe were big thorns in the flesh of orthodox religions.

Unfortunately, the science could not provide all the answers and this is where the relatively unscientific discipline like psychology could creep in and fill the vacuum with jargon. 

With time, they managed to change the name to Behavioural Science instead of psychology, to catch the trends of the time.

This was a disaster as I see it.

The vacuum created by the nonbelievers who jumped this bandwagon without a proper evaluation to see whether there are scientific qualities in psychology was an aberration in the modern history. What is lost to science was the gain for these pseudo-psychologists. 

If one look at a dictionary of psychology it has more jargon words than religion. The mathematics and physics have less number of jargon words.

This is where we stand today.

Science
Fortunately for science, discoveries were made one after the other and it has become a scientific tradition to disprove others theories and evolve new ones. 

The time was right for a change and the science had the freedom (not choice) to explore every concept old and new.

I think a verse would do more justice to science than its description in words.

Just as there are

Many notions

To the origin of the Universe

There are many misconceptions

To the meaning of Science

Which literally means

Acquisition of knowledge

The first of the

Many misconceptions

And the foremost of it is

That science is infallible

And the second that originates

From the first is

That is the only explanation

And science has all the answers

And from that,

Derive the notion

That all interpretations

Are logical, complete, concrete and final

None of the above statements is true

In scientific sense

And that is the beauty

Of science

Which is expanding

Challenging

And changing

All the time

As for science, since it is evolving let it discover whether the Dhamma has a meaning or not and whether it has an application or not for the present moment. Until, then we do not need to be bombarded with scientific connotations in Dhamma.

Language of Expression
Why man has many languages instead of one is another philosophical question I would like to pose. 

But that won’t solve our problem. 

This is what the eminent modern philosopher Wittgenstein called the “Language Games” and “Machine Gone Idling” are relevant. 

If Pali is taken out (uprooting) of its original home, which is Dhamma, the meanings, conventions and expressions are lost. This is what Wittgenstein says by his expressions of language games and language goes on a holiday. 

A machine gone idling (Wittgenstein’s expression) is what has happened to Pali today due to its wrong rendering.

Dhamma
The Dhamma is not a philosophy, as it is understood by the modern philosopher.

The Dhamma asks the questions and provides answers and a prescription to the misery of suffering. 

It cannot be labeled as a philosophy.

The Dhamma is not a branch of psychology. 

Even though, Dhamma analyses the Mind in detail in Abhidhamma this analysis is for a particular purpose. 

That is for emancipation from Sansara.

Dhamma does not categorize ails in the mind to many disease entities like anxiety, depression, psychosis and the lot but it has one whole category called Ignorance, from which all the others ailments descends. 

The salvation from this ailment is the Wisdom of understanding the Dhamma.

So talking about psychology is redundant for a wayfarer.

If meditation has, some application in stilling the mind of impurities be that be so. Using it as a therapeutic tool for other endeavours is a misappropriation. Then, the meditation practice is in the wrong hands. In Buddhism, it is focused on one focus and one focus alone. 

It is the emancipation from suffering.

This is why I propose that Dhamma should divorce itself from modern jargon of science, psychology and philosophy. 

Dhamma has its own language and one should not allow it to be hijacked by any modern language for convenience. 

I have of course used English as a native language knowing very well that English is limited with vocabulary to express Dhamma in its pristine form and correct context.

Philosophical Questions
1. What has the UNO done for world peace in last 50 years?

Very little

2. What has the WHO done for health in last 50years?

Very little

3. What has Church done to uplift the spiritual well being of its congregation?

Very little

4. What has the Buddhism done for world peace?

Very little

5. What have the modern day philosophers done for the freedom of expression?

Practically nothing

6. What has the modern education done for one’s independent existence or employment capability?

Nothing

My answers would initiate a plethora of publications from UNO to WHO to Church to our Education Department to defend their stand and how bad the world would be without these three institutions. 

 

They have no intentions of accountability, flexibility or transparency on these issues.

They go on to say that, there are no alternative ways to deal with the current problems.

Then I have one all encompassing question.

Is the money well spent?

No sane person in any of these three institutions would answer this question clearly fearing that bearing free the corruption in these institutions is a sure recipe for his or her expulsion from the elite congregation.

The status quo will remain until the next world war is looming round the corner. 

 

That is of course a nuclear war. 

 

Then we will have very little time to remedy or rectify the present anomalies.

Now is the time to act and now is the time to ask the right questions and be proactive.