More random travelling thoughts and reflections

· It is funny to see how some characteristics pass in the family from generation to generation. Seeing how the way my dad acts is so similar sometimes to the way my grandfather does makes me question a lot the way I myself act.

· My grandfather has an interesting way to understand every place we are travelling in. When we get to a new city and meet a new guide, the first thing he does is asking him the same series of questions – about the politics in that place, about his own family etc. Sometimes I can really sense that the guide doesn’t really know that answer and he just invent something. However, my grandfather takes is quite seriously and forms his point of view of that place according to it. A just show how nothing is really set and it’s all dependent on different point of views.

· Being with my parents again made me understand how independent and responsible for ourselves we are in muwci (forgetting all our discussions about rules and all that stuff about campus. When you look at it simply we ARE responsible to ourselves, having no parents around). It is nice forgetting all that and being a kid again, although both have their pluses and minuses.

· It is so different travelling with guides everywhere. It is true you get to know much more about the history of the places and the people. However, I still feel like I am learning more travelling on my own with friends, exploring places by ourselves. You get the feeling of the place better this way, and I find it even more important.

· I can’t understand that passion for shopping, which attacks me also sometimes. Why do we have (well, some of us) this need to buy all those pretty stuff we see? I know that I really don’t need anything, and I’ve been trying to work on that – ignoring the urge to buy and buy. It has been working quite well for me, but some of the people I was travelling with just couldn’t stop buying everything.

What Is Real?

I’m travelling in India with my family these days. We are crossing Rajastan with a small bus only for us, and I get to see India from a whole new point of view – top end hotels, comfortable beds, private car, expensive restaurants, tour guides and more. You got the idea. Anyways, weather I like it or not is a matter for another post, but right now I wanted to talk about something that came to my mind a few times already throughout this trip (which has only began…)

In Judpur’s big market our guide stopped next to an ordinary looking shop. He said we should see it, so we entered. Immediately a selling person appeared and started talking about the store. Apparently it has 8 floors. We started climbing and stopped in the third floor (I have no idea if it actually has 8…). The guy started talking and showing us fabrics, bed covers scarves etc. When we said we are from Israel he immediately gave us the names of three of the big clothing companies and said that the shop sells them fabrics. As he introduced the stuff he talked about the biggest names in the fashion industry all over the world and said those are items that they make for them. Introducing one particularly amazing item he told us the Richard Gir was there and he loved it so much that he bought 100 pieces of it. From the moment he started talking I started being suspicious about every word. When the Richard Gir part came up I already doubted him confidently enough, probably because I am a bit experienced with this kind of salesman that you can find in many places all over India. But then he took out a notebook and showed us a picture of Gir in the store, and a lot of articles about this particular shop in newspapers from all over the world. Then I started to doubt myself.

My point is – how do we decide what is real and what s not? How do we know when someone is lying to us? Of course we can sometimes feel it, but still we cannot really be sure.

In that particular case the pictures and articles made me believe. However, afterwards I thought about it and it is not that hard to fake that stuff.

We use our background and past experience in this kind of cases. My mom has been in the fashion industry for years, so she could check the fabrics and the designs and tell if they are of good quality. I had my experience with Indian salesmen from the past two years. But it is still not enough sometimes.

And maybe it doesn’t really matter after all. You can buy a ‘real pashmina’ in 200 rupees and believe it is actually real and be happy with it. When we talk about this kind of matters it might not be so crucial after all. However, we talk a lot in campus about matters of sources of information, the internet, and what you can or cannot trust – maters in which this issue can be much more crucial.

And, like always – I don’t have any conclusion. Only wondering…

MUWCI life

My parents and one of my sisters will arrive here in a few hours. I cannot sit still because of the excitement. I’m excited first of all because I miss them, of course; and second of all, and that is probably the major reason, because I’ll get to show them muwci: the campus, my friends, my classes, the activities than I’m taking part in, my house, my housemates, my room….

This is exciting because I always find it hard to explain how life in here is like, and moreover, because I believe that this place changed me a lot, and actually shaped my personality (identity?) to a large extent in the past one and a half years.

Writing my philosophy IA on the subject of identity I encountered once again different ideas on ‘who we are’ and what makes us who we are. Between all the body theories and mind theories I felt that one important notion was absent – the effect of the people around us and the environment we live in on our identity.

It might be because the discussion is more about ‘what is the self’ rather than ‘what affects the self’. However, I feel that you cannot completely separate those two notions.

First of all, the society we are brought up in (our country, closer community, family etc…) has a tremendous effect on what we will grow up to be like. Very basic qualities of our personality are stated, I believe, in respond to the environment in which you grew up and later on in the changing environments we live our lives within.

I guess this is why many people who studied here find it hard afterwards to go back home, since they find that they have changed while the people who stayed behind have not.

***

Later addition:

I actually found it quite hard to explain how this place rally functions even when my family was there. I guess it takes more than a week, or maybe more patience than I have J…

Questions About Religion.

*

I’m trying to understand why people believe in God.

I’ve been to Ajenta and Ellora caves and seen the incredible work that had been done over history in worship of different gods. Making those caves was a painstaking work. Was all that energy coming from the belief in god?

Visiting Varanasi also gave me some kind of a shock. There are people living in the most holy part of the city. It’s a belief that if you die in this part, you will be blessed (or something like that, excuse me for the non exact terms). People just stay inside this part their whole life, not going out, being afraid to die in a place outside the wholly part. How do people limit themselves to such an extent?

I find it hard to believe in something I don’t have any proof for its existence. I can understand the comfort person find in believing in hard times, but is that comfort enough?

It probably sounds arrogant from a certain point of view. It is not my intention. Just thoughts that have been going through my mind lately. I can’t really make an attempt to answer these questions at this point. Hope I’ll be able to some day (?).

*This post is not meant to hurt anyone. I’m asking questions and raising points I’m curious about, and would love to hear any opinion.

who you really are?

Some events that happened lately with people that I considered myself close to made me wonder.

It doesn’t matter how much you trust someone, how sure you are that you know him and that you know he’s telling the truth – you can still end up being wrong.

How much do we actually know the people around us, even those we consider our closest friends? After all, we create an image in our minds, based on our experience with that person. But this image is still of our own creation, our own observations and reflections upon simple and complex things, behaviors, etc.

Didn’t it happen to you that one single thing that your friend did suddenly made it clear to you that he might not be at all what you though him to be?

The problem is to try and understand what is real and genuine, and also what projections we make in our mind when getting to know someone.

Or maybe there isn’t at all any separation between the image of the person we create in our mind and the person himself. Or maybe the image we have actually affect the person himself

However you look at it, it makes all our relationship scarily fragile. Philosophy seriously mess up with your mind :)...

democracy, army and other thoughts

While most of the people around here are deeply concerned with predicted grades, SATs and university applications, I have quite a different issue on my mind.

I have written about the whole army issue before. It’s a big part of all us Israeli’s life as you have probably noticed, so excuse me for writing so much about it. Anyway, I have already shared the fact that I decided not to serve in the army.

I have discussed in one of the previous posts weather this decision is completely mine or not, so for know I’m just going to refer to it as my own decision.

Anyways, it is quite hard to explain a decision like that, which is so into a specific context. Being in Israel you live the politics. It’s all around you, so you don’t have much choice really. You have to be very ignorant in order not to have any opinion about at least the main things that are going on. However, sometimes those opinions happen to be very strong and one might say distinct. So strong, that if you really believe in those opinions, they prevent you from obeying a law of the very same country who created them.

I can’t join the army because I can’t just suddenly cooperate with all the things I’ve stood against for the last few years of my life. Even if it won’t be a direct cooperation, even if I only have to make coffee to some people in the office, even if I only need to wear those uniforms – I would still be part of the whole machine. And seeing the end product of this machine, which creates a disaster after another, I cannot take any part.

It’s funny. If I send a letter to the army explaining why I won’t serve in the army, I will be called for an interview with a panel of people we will have to decide whether my conscience is ‘real’. How can someone decide what my conscience let me or doesn’t let me do? Is it something you can uncover that easily? I frankly don’t think so. I think it is such a complex thing, that I myself cannot completely understand, then how will a random group of people (which aren’t even psychologists or anything of that kind) can understand it from a one hour interview understand?

I am aware of the fact that if each person who doesn’t like a law would decide not to obey it, won’t, there will be a huge mess. If I won’t go to the army, I won’t really escape the law. I will do it in a legal way (some people may say it is immoral, but it is still legal). After reading Mill’s article regarding the whole idea of activeness, I think that if we all just obey rules blindly it won’t be a democracy anymore. People have to express their opinions, in active ways (no – a talkback on the internet is NOT being active), and in extreme cases like this, take an action – which might have to be against the law. I think the point of being active is having the chance to change thisng you disagree with.

The arguments for and against this idea can fill a whole book. I would love to have a conversation about it in class or with anyone who is interested.

"It's all in your mind!"

The last project week I've joined the group going to Varanasi to work with the NGO "Alice Project". Alice Project runs a school in Sarnath, a town 10 km away from the city, which has a very distinct philosophy behind it.

"Alice Project is a research project for the education of children and teachers.It is based on the integration of our inner and outer worlds, the transcendence of borders we artificially create, and the awakening and nurturing of the understanding of self.
The methods used tap the most powerful potential we possess - the potential to be wise and kind." (Alice Project website)

The experience was wonderful. First, I got to know many new people that although I've leaved with them for the last few months we never had the chance to talk and actually get to know each other. I think we fall into our 'safe area' of friend in muwci too easily. There is something so comfortable in just being with the few people you already know so well. However, every time I go out of my ‘safe zone’ and spend time with new people I enjoy it so much.

But that is not actually what I wanted to talk about. We spent our project week mostly in the school, interacting with the students, observing classes and talking to teachers and the founder and director of the place – Valentino. We attended his ‘daily teaching of Valentino’s philosophy for older students’ and also had the chance of talking to him personally, trying to challenge his ideas.

“Our mind thinks and creates. Whatever we see, hear, smell, touch, imagine is but a product of our mind. The products of our mind cannot be considered as really existing. Indeed, they exist only as mental outputs and cannot be found beyond the mind itself.” (Valentino’s writing)

It’s at once very easy and very hard to agree with this idea. We know that everything we see, for example, was processed in our brain (it is biologically proven). But to get from that to the conclusion that nothing outside our mind actually exist is a bit hard to understand. How is it, then, that if I stand with a group of people in a certain place and we all look at the same place, we will all see a tree? The image of the tree might be different in every person’s mind, but we can still converse between us and talk about the tree. Yes, you may say that the whole bunch of people and the conversation between us is also in my mind. I don’t think I can actually prove that it isn’t so, but it is just too scary to actually believe in it, isn’t it? Does it mean that I’m the only person to exist? Or, wait, no – I’m also a creation of my own mind… then what actually does exist?

I can understand the importance of introducing a philosophy like this to those students, whose lives are not easy at all. Valentino uses this idea to convince them that all the suffering they are going through is only a creating of their mind, If so, it is their own choice weather to suffer of not.

Furthermore, he is trying to convince them that most of the subjects they learn at school – math, science, etc. are… well, crap. He states that none of those things will lead them to happiness. He criticized the western idea of getting good grades, a job and money as the way to happiness. He argues that getting money only makes people want more and more money, and thus they will never reach true happiness. The only way to reach happiness is to understand your own mind/soul – through meditation and god. Here comes into the whole picture the idea of religion, which I still didn’t quite understand how it fits in. But I guess I can keep the issue of religion for another post, because I have a lot of thoughts about the subject.

The school was certainly a fascinating place. We could all observe the difference in the students in compare to other government school we observed and any school we saw before in India and in our home countries. I’m still not quite sure what, of all the special aspects of the school, create this difference. It is certainly a place I would love to visit again and investigate more.