FN. Ramsharma. JHTK

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What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other — that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?” he argued

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Philosophy is bad because it pollutes our thought soup

And this is a main part of why philosophy is bad. Philosophy is bad because you think thoughts that you think are your own thoughts, and you think you’re in charge of those thoughts, and you’re figuring things out.

But the reality is, our thoughts are almost entirely drawn from the soup in our culture of thoughts that people have had before. And all we’re doing is repeating them. We think we’re thinking thoughts, but actually the thoughts are just happening, and they’re ones that we’ve picked up.

And the ones that are about meaning, purpose, value, ethics, the traditional subjects of philosophy: these are thoughts that somebody had twenty-five hundred years ago, who was completely out to lunch and wrong about everything, but they slipped into the culture, and they’ve been repeated, for millennia, with slight variations; and then they come up in awareness, and we think they’re our thoughts.

And we’re thinking bad thoughts that don’t actually make any sense, and we don’t notice because we don’t see how thinking works!

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