Dear J,
I am reading the news about the botany class and the Ayurveda class. I feel that it is necessary for a common man to understand these fields. They are useful in daily life. But will they help a thinker? Wouldn’t learning them be an additional burden for someone who is involved in the field of thought and has been working hard to achieve something in it? For example, today I am involved in literature and philosophy. In what way are these fields of science important to me?
Rajan Guru
Dear Rajan,
Any field of knowledge has its own way of knowing and valuing nature and the cosmos. It must have a philosophical perspective for that way of knowing. Introducing that philosophical perspective will be a huge opening for anyone practicing philosophy or literature. His philosophical and literary vision will find new fields and expand itself.
For example, Lokamadevi’s botany class has Aristotle’s methodology, namely classification, differentiation, synthesis, and creating tables. Its vision is to see this universe as millions of units and subunits that expand one within another. Ayurveda, as practiced by Sunil Krishnan, sees the universe as a single phenomenon. It values the human body as a part of nature. The two are different from each other.
Just knowing these principles is simple, but knowing them as a field of practice is a completely different experience. Knowledge is a very simple idea or data. Its practice provides the true vision of that knowledge.
Moreover, the information and messages received from different fields of knowledge keep becoming metaphors and images within us. Philosophy and literature can imbibe images from such different fields. They can function only through such images and metaphors.
Jeyamohan
